Colonel Bloodworth laughed, and Opal was encouraged by the sound of it.
“Rubbish. All women gossip,” said Tuttle. “Why, Bertie was just—”
“She drinks milk all day to fortify the child,” Bremen said. “You’ve had to double your dairy deliveries. Perhaps you should keep a cow in your drawing room, next to that portrait of your first wife you insist on keeping hung there.”
Now nobody laughed. Nobody said anything—not Opal, not Tuttle, not the other men. Opal could hear the city noises outside her window: Horns. Hooves. Shouting. The domestics returning home for supper after a day of work.
“It’s true then,” said Bloodworth, finally. “The spirit has told us something only you could know. You’ve said so yourself.” He made a note in his journal, then tucked it back into his pocket.
Tuttle now pulled a box up from the floor—the one he’d arrived with. “This,” he said. Between the bells was a piston and crown that, when pushed, caused the bells to simultaneously ring. Tuttle demonstrated now. “You want to clear your name, yes? I’m talking to you directly, Ms. Doucet. You want to prove you did not incite a riot?”
“A strike,” Opal said.
Tuttle set the contraption on the table.
“You want to prove you can talk to ghosts? The test is simple. You’ll channel a spirit to ring this bell,” Jenkins explained.
“Telepathically,” Tuttle said.
Jenkins, who brought with him some baling twine, now stood, then began trussing her arms and legs to her chair, ensuring she could not reach the box.
“Gentlemen, is this necessary?” Opal asked. Perspiration slicked her underarms, the back of her neck. She was forced to sit at an angle that cramped her ribs. “I am not a physical medium.”
The twine, intended for hay or kindling, dug into her skin when she moved, so she tried her best to remain still, unfazed. When Madame de Fleur performed, her hands were often tied, and somehow she’d always found a way to unbind herself. Opal wriggled her wrists.
“One of my workers reports she heard rapping in the cafeteria as you led a séance. Do you not consider that a physical feat?” Tuttle asked.
She assumed the worker in question was Amanda Mahooney. After all she’d done to help the girl—but Opal didn’t have the luxury of wounded feelings at present.
“Just one ring of the bell,” said Jenkins. “One tiny ding-ding. Now that can’t be difficult for a woman of your abilities, especially considering the circumstances. See, it’s easy.” He tapped the bell.
Opal was testing the restraints, wiggling her wrists to see if she could free her hand, but it was no use. Already, she began imagining different constraints, prison—or worse. “How do I know the bell is not rigged?” Opal asked. “Perhaps it’s mechanically unsound or has been intentionally jammed or…”
Ding. Ding. Tuttle rang the bell, again and again. It sounded like an unanswered telephone. “Would you like to ring it yourself?” he asked. “Just to familiarize yourself with how it works?” She stretched her finger and Tuttle brought the box to her bound hands. Ding. Ding.
Silence settled in the room. Opal couldn’t move. She made fists. She could feel heat radiating from them. The room grew too hot, and she felt a tingling sensation in her feet that crept its way up her body. The restraints were tight. Her midsection felt like it’d been hollowed out and building mud set inside to fill the hole. She couldn’t think for a moment, could only feel the hardness of the chair press into her hind quarters, could only feel the burning from the twine digging into her wrists. She closed her eyes to focus, and she tried to imagine the bell, what it looked like, what it sounded like. Imagination is the first step toward freedom. She thought of Jagr—of thetable bell he kept near his desk that he’d ring—that excruciating ding, ding—when he wished for his midday meal.
“Shame on you, Tuttle,” Opal said after some time, for she couldn’t just sit there. She needed to do something. Her voice was Bremen’s again. “Destroying three generations of my family’s work. Selling the factory? And for what? Your silly ambition?”
“Ring the bell and we’re done,” said Jenkins.
Now, Opal looked straight at Colonel Bloodworth, who looked back at her, unflinching. They locked eyes—a standoff, a gentle deadlock, as though one were daring the other to look away first. A subtle movement of his neck told her he’d swallowed.
“Enough of this chatter,” said Tuttle. “The bell.”
“If you’re so interested in bells, go to church.”
Jenkins stifled a laugh. Even the Colonel looked amused. “The lady’s getting clever,” Tuttle said. “I give her that.”
Opal stared at the box, at the bells atop it. The silence pressed into her ears; she could hear a thumping. Her stomach rumbled. Her baby kicked—surely a sign of some sort. She tried to shift in her seat, but could not. How willingly these men would hand her over to Jagr, if they knew.
She couldn’t have that—not when she was so close. These days, Opal spent almost every evening in the laboratory compounding powders and filling capsules, then delivering crates of her cures to Dowd’s Drugs to be shelved, sold, and taken by women across the city. Jagr believed a cure often resided in the mere act of doing something curative. A placebo. Once, during the Spanish-American War, soldiers were injected with saline when medics ran out of morphine, and the saline eased their pain.
In just a few weeks she’d have enough money to leave for France, and this evening would collapse onto paper, into a story she’d write about to Madame de Fleur. They may even laugh about it, eventually. But how to get to the other side of this moment so she could look back on it in amused hindsight?
She closed her eyes again and tried to imagine herself pushing the lever, tried to hear the sound of the bell in her mind. She remembered what Madame de Fleur had told her: Listening is a choice. She dinged the bell over and over in her imagination, tried to conjure the way the tip of her finger had felt on the piston when Tuttle had brought the bell to her hands, but nothing, no sound in the room except the quick breaths of the men waiting.
“Well?” Tuttle said after some moments of silence. “Are we quite finished? Do we have enough to charge the woman, Jenkins?” All eyes were on Opal, who tried to affect dignity, bound there to her chair. The pressure squeezed her head. Her condition. Now, her whole body acted against her will. Her body’s weight rocked the chair. Thump, thump, thump, like the clopping noise she’d heard that first night she’d watched Madame de Fleur perform. Now she felt far away from herself again, able to observe herself from the outside. She could see her hands bound with twine, her body shaking. Outside her body, she couldn’t register fear. No, instead a calmness overtook her. Her mind focused. She noticed a subtle movement from across the table—she’d grown accustomed to observing shifts in the dark. She began to hum loudly, buzz like a bee, like a swarm of bees intent on seeking exit.
