Louisa and the Crystal Gazer (15 page)

Who was jealous of whom? And what did it have to do with Mrs. Percy, murdered in her preparation room? Shadows leaped about the dark attic as my candle stubs flickered; a sudden gust from the ill-fitting window snuffed them both, and I sat in the dark with snowflakes landing on my face and hands like the cold touch of an invisible presence. I shivered with more than cold and quickly relit the candles. What a strange time we live in, I thought, when grown people sit in the dark and frighten one another with ghost stories. As if there weren’t enough in reality to make us cower: slavery and bank failures, the homeless. How lucky I was to have my health, the means of earning a living, and my family. This year, though I was parted from them, we would have gifts for one another.

I chewed my pen again, this time daydreaming about several winters before, when Father had been traveling and the Alcott brood and Marmee had spent a long winter night before the fire, talking about the Christmas to come.

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” I had grumbled, for we were even poorer than usual then, and Anna and Lizzie and Abby had complained as well, until Marmee came home, wet and cold and exhausted but beaming with joy because she had a letter from Father in her pocket.

“Our burdens are here, our road is before us, and the longing for goodness and happiness is the guide that leads us through many troubles,” Marmee had said.

Sighing, I put away my paper and capped the inkwell,
then made my way down the narrow attic stars. I kissed Lizzie on the forehead and went to sleep.

M
ORNING CAME EARLY
for me, well before dawn, for I had several errands to do that day, and had determined to finish at least one more of the reverend’s shirts before stepping out of the house.

“Louy? Up so early?” said Lizzie, rubbing her eyes and stepping into the sewing room. “What time is it?” She had wrapped a blanket about her shoulders and looked very young.

“Not yet six,” I said. “Go back to bed and sleep some more, two more hours at least.”

“Ummm,” she murmured. No one but Lizzie murmurs in the notes of a Chopin étude, I thought, smiling and threading my needle with grim determination. By nine o’clock I had finished the shirt and my bowl of porridge, and was ready for the first errand of the day. Mrs. Dahlia O’Connor, a friend of Mother’s, would still be drowsy, but she was a sharp creature and I would be at a slight advantage if I caught her off guard.

She lived on the other side of Beacon Hill, where clusters of somewhat desperate-looking ramshackle houses provided shelter for Boston’s free blacks, the day servants and laundrywomen, and the increasing numbers of Irish immigrants. On this side of the hill, slop buckets were emptied in the street, not in private privies in the back, and simply walking could be a hazardous business if one did not check the placement of each step. Unemployed young men loitered on corners, and streetwalking women finally done with the night’s work made
their exhausted way to the single, often shared room they called home. Just on the other side of the hill were the old mansions and old names and old blood of Boston; the contrast always seemed a parable to me, that nothing but a mound of soil separated the classes, the newcomers from the old comers, in life as in death. How fragile, secure reader, is estate and esteem!

“Mrs. O’Connor be abed,” said the girl who opened the door at number seventy-two. She eyed me in an unfriendly manner. “Did that Mrs. Wilkinson send you?”

“No. I’ll go straight up,” I said. “We’re old friends.” This was only half-true. Marmee had found work for Mrs. O’Connor on several occasions, and I hoped that Marmee’s good actions would assure me at least a wary welcome.

“Miss Louisa! Something wrong with your mama?” was the first thing Mrs. O’Connor said, sitting up in bed, her eyes wide with alarm, when I opened her door at the top of three flights of stairs and went in.

“No, she is well,” I said. “But I am in great need of a favor. Will you help me?”

Mrs. O’Connor put on a ragged bed jacket and straightened her sleeping cap over her unnaturally red hair. She pulled a fraying rope at the side of the bed, and I heard a bell chime somewhere in the depths of the boardinghouse.

“Can’t do no cooking for you,” she said. “Mrs. Wilkinson is giving a ball and has hired everyone this side of the Great Divide. I’m making the breads and cakes.” Mrs. O’Connor looked pleased with herself. “I can be a few more minutes late, though. I’ll just stick the yeast dough closer to the fire to make it rise faster, so we can have a nice chat. What ails you
that Mother O’Connor can help with?” Her brogue was thick and warm and her smile, when she gave it, huge, but Mrs. O’Connor was nobody’s fool, and I knew I must tread lightly, for once offended she never forgave.

“I have some questions about Mrs. Agatha Percy,” I said, pulling a chair over to the side of her bed, since she showed little inclination to rise. I couldn’t blame her. There was no fire in the room, and crystals of ice shone inside the curtainless windows; I kept my coat on, and my muffler.

Mrs. O’Connor let out a laugh that was more like a snort, and snapped her fingers. “That biddy!” she exclaimed with great disgust. “Louisa, my girl, don’t waste your dimes on that old girl. She’s a fraud through and through.”

“That is a harsh judgment,” I said.

Mrs. O’Connor snorted again like a horse that has a pebble wedged between shoe and sensitive foot. “Did she use a crystal ball? Yes? That proves it. No self-respecting ghost would show up in a ball. They die to be free, not to be captured in a body once again. You see, Louisa, only frauds—and newcomer frauds at that—use the ball. Your Mrs. Percy learned her ‘art’ [another snort, dear reader] at the theater in one of those plays, perhaps ‘The Ghost of Windham Falls.’ That was making the rounds again a couple of years ago, I think, and wherever it plays a whole stew of crystal gazers rises up like weeds in the pumpkin patch. No, the only spirits Mrs. Percy talks with come from a bottle.”

That had been Constable Cobban’s assessment as well, but I did not mention that to Mrs. O’Connor, who had no great fondness for the law.

There was a loud rap at the door, and a disheveled girl came in carrying a tray. “Tea,” she said. “I’ll leave it here. I don’t come in no further.” She put the tray on the floor, caught the penny that Mrs. O’Connor tossed her, and slammed the door shut again.

“Shall I pour?” I asked.

“Do, sweetie,” said Mrs. O’Connor. “And tell me more about Mrs. Percy.”

I poured tea and picked black specks out of the sugar jar before sweetening our cups. “She wrote messages from the spirits,” I said. “And a trumpet came down from the ceiling.”

“One of the messages was from a dead father,” Mrs. O’Connor said. “There’s always a message from a dead father in such rooms and circumstances.”

“This was a little more specific,” I said. “The message was from my friend’s dead father, and the message was that she should marry.”

“This is serious, then. Your Mrs. Percy may be a fraud, but she is no amateur. She is a prep artist. Pass a bit of that bread over, Louisa, with jam, please. Help yourself, dear. Plenty for two.” But there wasn’t plenty, so I spread thin yellow preserves on the stale crust and gave it to Mrs. O’Connor.

“What is a prep artist?” I asked.

“She would have paid off a servant in your friend’s household to discover what the private conversations were, and the gossip—what woman is in the family way, what husband is cheating. All the sordid details.” Mrs. O’Connor smacked her lips with pleasure. “And she would have paid someone else to scour the cemeteries. You paid more than a dime, Louisa.
Such creatures charge more to cover their expenses. Unlike women like me, who have no such expenses.”

Reader, have I not mentioned that Mrs. O’Connor spoke with the dead? In fact, it was her preferred occupation, except that when the spirits spoke through Mrs. O’Connor they spoke in somewhat foul language and without any discretion, and so her clientele was ephemeral at best. The strange thing about Mrs. O’Connor was that her “spirits” were almost always correct. Once, Mrs. O’Connor channeled Marmee’s mother, who told her where a lost brooch could be found, and there it was, wedged between the stone wall and the pickle jar in Uncle Benjamin’s cellar, just as the spirit had said.

“You said she would scour the cemeteries?” I asked.

“Tombstones. Best source of information. Most common trick.” Mrs. O’Connor pulled a long face and deepened her normally shrill voice. “I see a woman, elderly, seventy-eight years old, looking down at you and worrying. She is speaking. I can just hear her…oh, she’s saying, ‘The way is narrow but the reward is great to he who perseveres.’ Then the target—that’s the customer, my dear—the target jumps up in joy and shouts, ‘Mother! Mother! That’s what you always used to say to us!’ And all that, Louisa, my girl, is just from one tombstone, no gossip added.”

“I see. More tea?”

“No, thanks. My day must begin, though this visit has been lovely. Are you going back to see this Mrs. Percy creature?”

“I can’t, Mrs. O’Connor. She has passed over.”

“Dead?” asked Mrs. O’Connor with perhaps more glee than was suitable. “Can you give me the names of your circle, Louisa? I’ll send them my card.”

Why not? I thought, and wrote down on a scrap of paper the names: Miss Amelia Snodgrass, Mr. Phineas T. Barnum, Mr. and Mrs. Ezra Deeds, Mr. William Phips. I omitted Sylvia’s name. She’d already received too many messages from the dead.

“Mr. Barnum? Himself? Oh, happy day,” said Mrs. O’Connor when I handed her the piece of paper. “I see me now in the American Museum, greeting my clientele in a room with red curtains and gas lamps! Sometimes I see the future, you know.” Mrs. O’Connor clapped her hands with joy. “Did I ever tell you how I saw Mesmer hypnotize the queen of France? He himself had to disappear first.”

Since Mesmer had died some years before, I assumed Mrs. O’Connor was describing one of her “dreams” or “visits” in which the dead revealed things to her. “You’ll have to tell me some other day,” I said. “I have one last question, if you don’t mind, and I’ll let you get about your day’s business. What can you tell me of Amelia Snodgrass?” As a cook for the finer houses in Boston, Mrs. O’Connor had access to more information and gossip than a hundred constables could obtain, perhaps more than Pinkerton himself.

She had a most flexible face, capable of dozens of expressions, the kind of face that would have done well for her onstage. Now Mrs. O’Connor’s bright eyes grew narrow and her mouth twisted; she looked sly. “That one,” she purred. “How I’d like to get her in my séance room. I’d tell her a thing
or two. Her and her airs, and everyone belowstairs knows about those carryings-on.”

Impatient reader! Before she could speak a further word, the door exploded open and a maidservant stood there, wet with snow and pink in the face with rage! She was from a good house; I could tell from her clothes and the thickness of her boots.

“Missus says you are to come now,” muttered the girl. “I left my own biscuits browning in the oven, and if they burn because of your laziness I’ll…I’ll…I’ll pull out your dyed hair, I will. I’ll put ground glass in your damn raisin cakes! You and that new Chinee cook, between the two of you I’ll lose my mind!”

It’s rare for a woman of Mrs. O’Connor’s girth to move with such alacrity, but in less than three seconds she had risen from bed, pulled a day dress over her chemise, and begun to button boots over the stockings in which she had slept.

“Got to move, dear girl,” she said. “As for that Amelia creature, I’ll give you one warning: Things are never as they appear, but especially with women like her! Ask about the necklace and what really happened. Ask about the friend what aren’t no gentleman.”

Tucking Mrs. O’Connor’s words and advice into a corner of my thoughts for later consideration, I turned to the glowering, red-faced woman who loomed in the doorway, waiting. “Did you say there is a new Chinese cook?” I asked.

“There is,” she muttered. “Can’t fold a napkin decently, but at least she don’t sit in bed till noon swilling gin!” That last was directed at Mrs. O’Connor.

“It were tea, my fine woman, and if you abuse me further
I’ll quit, I will, and then what will your mistress do for the buns and scones?” Mrs. O’Connor answered.

“I will accompany you,” I said. Mrs. Wilkinson’s maid did not look pleased, but neither did she protest.

The Wilkinson home was one of the new mansions on Commonwealth Avenue, built in the newly revived Greek style with tall pillars, whitewashed, and with enough rooms for an army of people, not simply a family. But then, Mrs. Wilkinson was one of those matrons who desire a spacious, luxurious home and a maid for every room. Entry to this fashionable home presented a difficulty, since Mrs. O’Connor would be required to use the side entrance and I the front. Yet I did not wish to offend that good lady who had proven so helpful, so I broke yet another rule and went in by the servants’ entrance, arm in arm with Mrs. O’Connor.

There was a row in the back rooms when we entered. The lady of the house, Mrs. Wilkinson herself, was shouting at a frightened young girl. “On the left!” Mrs. Wilkinson screeched. “Serve from the left, take from the right. Cannot you keep it straight? How can you serve at the buffet if you can’t even handle a simple breakfast table?”

I cleared my throat.

“Are you the florist’s assistant?” she asked, turning and looking me up and down. The maid fled.

“I am not, Mrs. Wilkinson. I am Miss Louisa Alcott.”

She looked at me askance and then, remembering her manners, uttered some niceties about my father, with whom she had a superficial acquaintanceship. The year before, Mr. Wilkinson had had Father give several “conversations” in their best parlor, and since then the Wilkinsons had called
themselves “Friends of the Philosopher” and made much show of giving yearly donations to certain charities.

“But you have come in through the servants’ entrance!” declared Mrs. Wilkinson, confused.

To her apparent disapproval, I asked if I might speak with her new Chinese cook.

“To what purpose, Miss Alcott?” she asked, now worried that I planned to steal her employee.