Magdalena knew only confusion in that moment, and then she saw Maud walking onto the stage and staring up at the theater’s stormy ceiling. Maud clapped her hands four times, then three. The noise instantly echoed: four sounds and then three, all subdued in keeping with the softness of Maud’s clapping. Maud clapped twice more, then once, and the source of the noise responded in precise kind.
“What are you doing?” Magdalena asked.
“I’m having a conversation with the noise,” said Maud.
People in the audience began to clap their hands, but the noise would not echo them. When audience clapping subsided, Maud looked toward the nearest ceiling and wall from which the noise seemed to come, and said, “Are you a human being making these noises? If you are, then rap once.”
No rap followed.
“Then are you a spirit? If so, rap twice.”
Instantly two raps were heard, along with gasps from the audience and the swift exodus of the timid and the incurious. But most of the audience stayed, fully as transfixed by Maud’s performance as was Magdalena, who atavistically blessed herself.
“Good Lord, Maudie, what’s going on?”
“How many letters in my first name?” Maud asked the wall.
Four raps followed, and Magdalena immediately told the audience, “That’s true. Her name is Maud.”
“How old am I?” asked Maud, and thirteen raps followed.
“Correct again,” said Magdalena.
“Now, how old is La Última?”
“No, no,” said Magdalena, but there followed then a rapid series of raps like the long roll of a drum (forty-one in all) and the audience exploded with laughter. At this Magdalena shook the front of her skirt, exposing her saucy response to mockery, and won applause from the crowd. But from the wings came another response: the hisses and wild fulminations of the theater manager, demanding a resumption of music and dance. Nonplussed by the condition of life around her, Magdalena gestured her agreement. Maud shrugged, nodded to the audience, and walked off the stage. The orchestra resumed the music of the Spider Dance, but before Magdalena could begin, a thunderclap descended with more power than at first, swaying the chandelier in a dangerous arc and scattering the audience beneath it. The thunder clapped a second time, then a third, and more of the timid folk took their exit. Only when Maud walked back onstage and clapped three times at the noise did it clap thrice in return. Lento. Politely lento.
Thus began the spiritualistic career of Maud Fallon.
Throngs came to the theater on subsequent nights to hear the indoor thunder, but after three nights of only pregnant silence the crowds dwindled and the accusation of humbug again attached itself to Magdalena. She cancelled all performances and reluctantly retreated to Obadiah’s lakefront sanctuary.
Four days after the first onset, the noise returned, this time at morning in Obadiah’s plant-ridden conservatory-breakfast room. Maud paused in the midst of her shirred eggs and told the noise to mind its manners and not interrupt her and her aunt’s breakfast.
The noise desisted but returned at midafternoon, sliding an empty chair across the porch and thumping lightly on its wooden back. Maud spoke to it in French and Spanish, and the noise responded in a way Maud found unintelligible. The following day the noise returned while Maud was in the kitchen talking to the cook and the scullery maid. She told it to go away and stop bothering people, and it exploded with a thunderbolt that broke four teacups.
Word of all this spread through Saratoga and crowds converged on the Griswold property, cluttering the road and carriageway, many asking to see Maud in action. Obadiah posted servants outside to deflect the crowds. He also invited the mayor, the constable, two bankers, four judges, the head of the women’s auxiliary of the county orphan asylum, and asked them to help define the nature of this visitation.
It was at this point that Quinn arrived at the mansion. Having left his traveling bag at Mrs. Trim’s rooming house on Phila Street, he hired a cab to take him to Obadiah’s home, his first expenditure of money from the Dirck annuity. He arrived quite the young gentleman, thinking of himself for the first time as a journalist of independent mind and means, in debt to no man, woman, or relative, and full ready to carry out the task at hand, the nature of which eluded him utterly.
To the servant who answered his knock he said he was a friend of Magdalena and Maud. The servant summoned John McGee to establish Quinn’s validity, which John did with a middling smile and a lifted brow.
“Damned if it isn’t Danny me boy.”
“I’m no boy of yours, and that’s the truth of forever,” said Quinn.
“Does he know Madame Colón?” the servant asked.
“He does. She knew him in Albany. We all knew him when he had no hat.”
At this Quinn doffed his hat and the servant made way for him to step inside. The servant took him to Obadiah in the library, where Quinn introduced himself as an emissary from the newspaper of Calvin Potts. Obadiah instantly recruited him as a witness to the proceedings upcoming with Maud the wondrous, who could converse with the insubstantial air.
“Do you believe she can do that?” inquired Obadiah.
“I believe she can do anything she sets her mind to,” said Quinn. “I believe she has the magic.”
“The magic?”
“Yes, sir. The magic.”
Here is what Maud was thinking as she entered Obadiah Griswold’s drawing room to face eleven witnesses, including one woman who would make a body search of her prior to her planned conversation with the voluble dead.
First came the vision of Daniel Quinn, whom she saw as soon as she entered the room, he sitting there with a broad grin on his young face, wearing well-tailored clothes, new boots, and waving his new hat at her, the ninny, as if she hadn’t seen him the instant she walked into the room. She nodded her awareness of his presence but refrained from smiling, for when one converses with the dead, one must observe proper decorum.
Second, she had the moving image of a tall, emaciated man riding a horse across an open field. Here is what she was seeing: When the man becomes aware of the two carriages coming rapidly along the road he is nearing, he leaps down from his mount and, at a run, climbs a slight incline. He halts in the center of the road so that the deadly onrush of horses and vehicles will run him over.
Third was her thought on the cause of this image, which was a mystery, for it was neither memory nor dream, but a fully developed panorama, even to the brightness of the sun and the brilliant green of the hills behind the oncoming carriages. It arrived in her brain in all fullness at the moment she saw Quinn enter the drawing room of the mansion. Quinn was none of the men in the image.
Maud nodded at Quinn and turned her mind to her inquisitors, who all looked to her to be believers in the plausibility of conversing with a spirit. Maud felt lost in such a world of belief. Her classics teacher in Madrid had spoken of enantiodromia, the ancient Greek concept of running in contrary ways: believing in the unbelievable, for instance. Maud could not so believe. She believed in noise but not in spirits. Dead is dead, she believed. Noise came from the living. Minds were as noisy as the howling of a terrifying windstorm. Minds made noise: the collision of minds — hers, Magdalena’s, Quinn’s across the room, the ninny. I love him and his mind.