What constraint of Flesh or decorum renders them, I would inquire, so u niformly Saccharine, Mrs Cropper? Is there in our sad Age no wholesome Wrath, divine or human? As for me, I strangely hunger tohear - not assurances of Peace and Sanctification - but the True HumanVoice - of wounds - and woe - and Pain - that I might share it - if it might be - as I should share it - as I wouldshare All - withthose I loved - in my earthly Life
But I run on - maybe incomprehensibly. I have a Desire. I will not tell you what it is, for I am adamant I shall tell none - until -I have - the Substance of it.
A crumb, Mrs Cropper, of living dust, in my hand. A crumb. So far denied…
Your friend, in thought,
C. LaMotte
Cropper decided that this letter showed strong symptoms of derangement. He left its interpretation aside for the moment. It gave him a pang of pure hunting pleasure. He was on the scent. It was in the house of Miss Olivia Judge, at a seance of Mrs Lees, that Randolph Henry Ash had carried out what he had once, in a letter to Ruskin, called "my Gaza exploit," a name by which the episode was generally known in scholarly circles since Cropper, in The Great Ventriloquist, had used it as a chapter heading. In fact this letter was Ash's only reference to the episode, which had presumably given rise to his poem Mummy Possest. Cropper took down his copy of The Great Ventriloquist and looked up his reference:
I do not think you should allow yourself to be taken in by theseghouls and goblins who play with our most sacred fears and hopes,in the desire, often enough simply to enliven the humdrum witha frisson, or to compose, conduct and orchestrate as it were thevulnerable passions of the bereaved and the desperate. I do notdeny that human and inhuman things are maybe made manifestat such times-tricksy little goblins may walk and tap and tremble inkwells-men and women in the dark may hallucinate, asis well known in the case of the sick or the wounded. We haveall, my dear friend, an infinite capacity to be deceived by desire, to hear what we long to hear, to see what we incessantly form to our own eye or ear as gone and lost-this is a near-universal human feeling-easy to play upon, as it is most highly-strung and unstable.
I was at a seance, a week back, where I made myself unpopular to the point of hissing and scratching-by catching at a floating wreath which dropped wet drops on my brow, and finding I was clutching the hand of the medium-one Mrs Hella Lees, who, when not transported, is a sombre enough Roman-looking matron, with a pallid face and dark shadows under liquid blackish eyes-but who can twist and howl and thrash with her arms when the spirits lay hold on her, greatly facilitating the withdrawal of a few fingers from the precautionary hands that clasp hers on the table. We sat in the dark-moony light through the curtains, a glow in the hearth from a dying fire-and saw much the usual things, I suppose, hands appearing (with long trailing muslinish drapes over their joins) above the far edge of the table, a fall of hothouse flowers from the air, the shuffling advance of an armchair from a corner, and the patting of our knees and ankles by somethingu/fe/r)' and certainly warm. And winds in our hair and floating phosphorous lights, you may imagine.
I am convinced as I may be that we are all being practised upon-I will not say by a simple fraud-but by someone who lives by such practising. So I put up my arms, and fished and pulled, and down came the house of cards, as far as I am concerned, with a veritable clattering to the ground of travelling fire-irons and thudding of books and tablelegs and dissonant chords on the concealed accordions and clack of the tongue of the handbell-all, I have no doubt, connected to the person of Mrs Lees by a Lilliputian cat's-cradle of invisible threads. I have been much abused, since, for my Gaza exploit, and indeed called to task for a kind of mental destruction of spirit-matter and sensitive souls. A great bull in a china shop, I felt myself to be, amongst all the floating gauze and tinkling cymbals and soft perfumes. But if it were so, if the departed spirits were called back-what good does it do? Were we meant to spend our days sitting and peering into the edge of the shadows? Much is said of the experiences of Sophia Cotterell, who is said to have held her dead baby on her knee for a quarter of an hour whilst its hands patted its father's cheeks. If this is fraud, playing on a mother's harrowed feelings, it is wickedness indeed. But if it is not -and if the soft loading of the knee be not a goblin or a product of the imagination-does it not still make us tremble with a kind of sick distaste, to see such frenzied dwelling in the dark…?
In any case, here was trickery…
Cropper thought fast. What if LaMotte, who seemed to be at the house of Olivia Judge, had also been present at the Gaza Exploit? An account of this seance existed also in The ShadowyPortal, the autobiographical reminiscences of Mrs Lees. As was her custom, Mrs Lees had protected the names of her clients and the private nature of the messages they had received. There had been twelve people at the seance, of whom three had retired into an inner room to receive particular communications, as the spirit guides had instructed through Mrs Lees. It was clear from Priscilla Cropper's correspondence that Olivia Judge, an active promoter of many good causes, had at that time housed a group of female searchers after enlightenment, in her house in Twickenham. Priscilla Cropper had been in regular communion with Mrs Judge, who sent her regular accounts of the marvels evinced by Mrs Lees, as well as of the progress of other good causes, meetings, for spiritual healing and Fourierist doctrine, the emancipation of women and the proscription of strong drink.
The group in Twickenham was known as the Vestal Lights, a name that Cropper thought to be an affectionate term used among its members, rather than anything more formal. It might be that Christabel LaMotte had joined the Vestal Lights. Cropper was catching up on the biography of LaMotte, hampered by lack of access to the Lincoln papers, and by an incapacity to read the Lacanian riddles in which feminist speculations were couched. He was at this stage unaware of the lost year of LaMotte's life, and not fully apprised of the circumstances of the death of Blanche Glover. He went to the London Library, at the top of which is an excellent shelf of spiritualist writings, and asked for The Shadowy Portal, which was out to another reader. He tried the British Library, whose copy had been, he was informed by a polite note, destroyed by enemy action. He sent off to Harmony City for a microfilm, and waited.
James Blackadder, with none of Cropper's gusto, was picking his way through the London Library's Shadowy Portal. He too had begun in total ignorance of the movements of Christabel LaMotte, and lacked Cropper's certain knowledge of any connection between LaMotte and Hella Lees in 1861. But he had picked up an earlier reference to Mrs Lees in a letter Sir George had tried to intrigue him with, and he was engaged in a thorough rereading of Ash's known work and life round the crucial months of 1859. He had read an article on Actiniae, or sea anemones, without enlightenment, and had noticed an absence of information about Ash in early i860. He had reread Mummy Possest, which he had always thought anomalous in its hostility to its female protagonist and by extension to women in general. He asked himself now if this hitherto unexplained burst of bitterness was connected to the poet's feelings about Christabel LaMotte. Or, of course, his wife.