“A lovely child,” Miss d’Espereaux murmured. “Worthy of heaven, but she will remain in the material sphere a full life’s course, I sense it. Please, everyone, be very still.” She slowly circled the room, gazing around her, her body moving like a dowser’s branch. At different points, she paused before a tall mahogany wardrobe, then before a plain deal dresser, her gaze fixed on the unblinking eyes of a small boy china doll seated on its surface. At last, she lingered before a small oval mirror on the wall, into which she stared as if seeking those same changeless eyes in the glass. Then she began to move again, almost gliding, past the wooden doll house with its eerily darkened little rooms, past the shut closet containing the child’s dresses and shoes, past a table with a cracked porcelain basin on it, and finally past the simple needlework on the wall opposite the child’s bed that announced in red stitches the biblical phrase, “He shall gather the lambs with his arms.”
Edney’s pulse quickened. She yearned to see with the younger woman’s eyes, she held her breath and put a hand to the child inside, asking without words for it to be calm.
Suddenly Miss d’Espereaux froze, her body rigid, her chin raised so that the white of her throat appeared to spread. In the middle of the room, with her eyes fixed on the open window in which the curtains billowed gently, she waited. Minutes passed.
Finally, she turned slowly, as if following the flight of a bird. Now she looked at a portion of wall just beyond Edney’s shoulder. Louisa moaned and twisted her head on the pillow, then fell silent. Several more minutes passed. Miss d’Espereaux did not even blink. Her lips were slightly parted. At last she spoke, but only to the air. “Yes, I understand,” she said, and her voice was different, more of a monotone than the usual trill. She approached the bed. For a painfully long period, she stood there, her spine seeming to tighten as if with screws. Then she began to breathe out slowly and evenly, through pursed lips.
“It’s all right, ma’am,” Edney heard from behind her. “It’s only the start of the insufflations. Lizzie always uses them on the sick cases.”
“Sir, you must be silent,” Ambrose Richardson said in a low voice.
The other man bristled. “You’d think I’d never been to a healing before. I know I need to be quiet. But the lady here was getting kind of upset.”
He meant Mary. Edney glanced at her, saw that she was trembling, her eyes widening like a frightened horse’s. But Edney felt no such terror, only an ever-increasing wonder. Even as Miss d’Espereaux bent to Louisa and began to breathe on her bare arms, a cloth placed between the young woman’s lips and the child’s skin, Edney remained calm. But Mary did not.
“Oh, what is she doing? Mr. Richardson, can this be proper?”
Francis Collins spoke up forcefully. “Oh, it’s as proper as the Sabbath, ma’am. The insufflations always come before the curing passes. It’s all very proper procedure. There’s no harm in it. Why, I’d almost welcome the fever just to have it done to myself and that’s the honest truth.”
“Will you or will you not hold your tongue?”
But Edney did not look away to witness Ambrose Richardson’s temper. She was, instead, entirely absorbed by Miss d’Espereaux’s powers of concentration. The young woman had breathed her way up Louisa’s arm to her shoulder, and now drew back. She folded the cloth and placed it to one side on the bedsheet. Her face was rapt, slightly dewed with effort: the light in her eyes had a candle-flickering quickness. Amazed, Edney stared as the young woman slowly drew the palms of her hands over Louisa’s face, just above the skin. Then, suddenly, she put her hands together and shook them, a look of distaste on her features.
In a voice barely hushed, Collins said, “That’s the bad magnetics she’s shaking out. See. It’s like washing the dirt off your hands, that’s all.”
Miss d’Espereaux’s touch again hovered an inch from Louisa’s brow, then passed all the way down her body to her feet. Again, the young woman clasped her hands and shook them. Then she picked up the cloth once more. This time, she very discreetly spat onto the cloth and placed it over one of the crimson spots at Louisa’s throat.
Mary gasped. Edney noticed out of the corner of her eye that Ambrose Richardson had stepped to the side of her sister-in-law. He bent his white head to hers.
Miss d’Espereaux’s hand passes resumed; it was as if she were covering the child in fine silk. Long moments passed. The room filled with dusk. From outside came the crying of gulls and the lowing of cattle, the life of the ordinary day nearing its end. The creamy colour of Miss d’Espereaux’s throat darkened. Her eyes lost their quickness. When she spat on the cloth again and prepared to lower it, the sound assailed Edney’s ears as if a drunkard had hawked in a gutter. Edney couldn’t move. Something had changed, but she did not possess the strength to stop the young woman’s ministrations. All at once, the room was dark. Mary made soft protesting sounds, almost like whimpers. When Francis Collins began to reassure her, Ambrose Richardson hissed, “Enough!”
Suddenly Miss d’Espereaux stiffened.
“No, no, no!” she cried and put her hands over her face.
In the darkness Edney thought the young woman was striking herself.
“It was well, but there is evil here, a terrible evil.”
“What?” Francis Collins exclaimed. “Liz, what are you saying? That’s not the usual…”
“Damn it, man!” snapped Ambrose Richardson. “Have you no sense?”
“Look here, colonel, I’ve had about all I’m going to take from you. Can’t you tell you’re only wasting your time? Liz, I’m done putting up with this one. Do you hear? I wouldn’t care if he was missing both his arms.”
But Miss d’Espereaux had risen from the bed. Her voice was strange, shrill, her eyes glassy. “Mother! Mother!”
Edney clutched at her stomach. The cry seemed to come from inside her. The dark swirled and then rushed into her eyes. Alone at the foot of her daughter’s bed, she fell.
“Watch it!” a man yelled.
Edney heard herself hit the floor. On her knees, she listened to her heartbeat running fast over the bare planks, louder and louder.
“Mother, oh, Mother,” Miss d’Espereaux whimpered and slumped almost without sound or contact to the floor a few feet away from Edney.
“Lizzie! What is it? For the love of God, girl!”
Edney sensed bodies rushing toward her. A lamp sizzled on, the light burned across the floor and ceiling. Miss d’Espereaux’s horror-stricken face, the beauty shocked out of it, roiled below, as if risen from a current. Then the faces of the men plunged down from above. The footsteps came closer until they reached Edney’s heart. Just as the door burst open, she closed her eyes and let Mary support her weight.
IV
Anson paid the Indian for his rowing services, then climbed out of the skiff onto the small wharf and looked toward Dare’s operations. His cannery was oddly quiet in the mellow mid-morning sunlight. Only the constant keening of gulls—a sound that at Chilukthan seemed as continuous as the noise of the cannery workings—reminded Anson of the particular slaughter occurring along the river. But there were visual triggers too: a few square-bottomed skiffs pulled up on the dike, some Indian children running silently in the distance, a listing scow on the near bank. Yet, compared with Chilukthan, Crescent Slough seemed almost abandoned. Of course, the fishing hadn’t ended; doubtless many of the skiffs Anson had seen on the river, their occupants hunched over in the sterns, picking fish out of the nets, worked for Dare. His cannery would likely explode into life as the fresh catch came in.