Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [122]
Susanna was shaken by these revelations, but her guard was still up. So Miss Fox put the spirits to work in different ways. First, Susanna felt a table vibrate under her hands as if it had a life of its own. Then, at Kate Fox’s suggestion, she stood by a door in such a way that she could see both its sides, and felt similar vibrations in the door. Miss Fox took Susanna out to the garden, where a few Michaelmas daisies still glowed mauve in the late afternoon light. Susanna felt strange vibrations under her feet, in the stone path and in the earth. “Are you still unbelieving?” the medium inquired. Susanna was torn between her eagerness to believe and intelligent scepticism. “I think these knocks are made by your spirit and not by the dead,” she finally told her visitor. Kate Fox was determined to convince this well-known Canadian writer, who could be such a useful supporter. “You attribute more power to me than I possess,” she insisted. “Would you believe if you heard that piano, closed as it is, play a tune?” The piano was not played by invisible fingers that afternoon. But Susanna convinced Kate Fox to postpone her trip and come back for the evening two days later, when John would be present.
To a casual observer, it appeared to be a charming scene of mid-Victorian domesticity: the oil lamp on top of the upright piano glowed, and Kate Fox’s long dark hair glinted in its light, while Susanna’s eyes sparkled with interest. Jane, the maid, stood demurely by the door, in case she was needed. John Moodie picked up his flute, and suddenly, while Susanna and Kate were standing by the piano’s closed lid, they heard its strings play the accompanying melody. “Now it is certain that she could not have got within the case of the piano,” Susanna mused.
When John stopped playing, the piano notes softly died away. John and Susanna looked at each other with wonder. Jane was open-mouthed. John turned to the slim young woman between them and asked the spirits to tell him what was engraved on the inside of a mourning ring, enclosing a curl of his grandmother’s hair, that he always wore. As Kate stood gracefully listening, they all heard the spirits’ obedient raps. The number of raps correctly identified the dates of his grandmother’s birth and death. John himself had to take the ring off to check the spirits’ accuracy, since he had forgotten the dates himself. “I thought I would puzzle them,” Susanna later wrote to Bentley, “and asked for them to rap out my father’s name, [and] the date of his birth and death.” She thought it was a trick question because there were so many eights in the answer: Thomas Strickland had been born on December 8 and died on May 18, 1818. Without a pause the spirits rapped out the right name, dates and even the cause of death.
Susanna was intrigued—but unconvinced. Perhaps she suspected that Kate Fox had either been lucky or had been able to pick up clues to the correct answers from her audience’s body language. Perhaps the answers given by the spirits were more open to interpretation than Susanna’s account, in her letter to her publisher, suggested. Susanna rationalized the phenomenon by deciding that Kate Fox was simply a clairvoyant. She certainly didn’t think her parlour tricks had much to do with Christianity. A few weeks later, she discovered how to produce raps and knockings identical to those that Kate had produced: “I can make the same raps, with my great toes, ancles [sic], wrist joints and elbows.” Her maid Jane, who had watched Kate Fox carefully, turned out to be an