The Book of Speculation: A Novel

*

Peabody watched Amos leave the wagon and run toward the woods. He gazed in the direction the young man traveled and his eyes widened. Between fog, lightning, and moonlight, the girl looked utterly impossible. Had he not been a skeptical man well versed in fantastical embellishment, he would have thought her a wood sprite. He observed Amos running and could not help but smile. 20th May 1796. Hudson, past Croton. Spring lightning storm brings excellent potential and a woman of unsurpassed, most ethereal beauty. He snuffed the candle he’d been working by and stood by the door to the wagon in hopeful observation. “Yes, dear boy, bring her to us.”

*

From her doorway, Madame Ryzhkova saw the girl’s pallid complexion, the ink-dark hair, that she was soaked to the bone. The storm was dry and the river lay in the other direction. Through the dirt, her skin shimmered as if made of water. No woman, no girl, looked as such. The girl was something Ryzhkova had not seen in long years, not since her father had gone missing. She’d left everything she’d known to flee from it. She would not say its name. To name such things was to give them power, and yet it was impossible to stop her mind from whispering.





5

JULY 2ND


Finding information on Verona Bonn has proven something of a snipe hunt. I started in the simple places, ancestry websites, public records, filling the time between book requests and cataloging with casual queries. But beyond a newspaper clipping of a svelte woman balanced on a diving platform, not much turns up. The deeper hunting lies locked beyond paywalls or affiliations with institutions. At the moment I don’t have the cash lying around for a casual foray into genealogy. Like Mom, my grandmother seems to have worked under different names. Verona Bonn must have been her last incarnation, leaving little clue as to why someone would scrawl her name in the back of a very old book, a problematic book.

Save for the book, Peabody’s Portable Magic and Miracles has no record of existing, and I found no evidence of contemporaneous traveling troupes. Hermelius Peabody’s particular breed of entertainment was frowned upon during the Revolution all the way until 1792, when John Bill Ricketts set up an arena in Philadelphia. Yet from what I can tell, Peabody performed, traveled, and profited as early as 1774.

Worse, the names in it are real.

*

A printout of a scanned newspaper page, the Catskill Recorder, July 26th, 1816, sits on my desk. It took three days of searching to find it, but now I’ve read it enough times that when I close my eyes the words float in negative.

24 July 1816. Bess Visser, entertainer, found drowned in the Hudson River ferry crossing at Fishkill, presumed to have tragically taken her own life. The lady is reported to have been distraught, suffered from bouts of sleeplessness and mania. She is survived by a daughter, Clara, age four.

July 24th, and not simply a drowning, a suicide, like my mother. The coincidence is too much. When my search for Clara Visser came up empty, I turned back to the book. There, in the back, just before the wash of ink, I found Clara Petrova.

It’s this that has me calling Martin Churchwarry again.

“I thought you’d like to know what I’ve found.”

“Fantastic. Was the book your grandmother’s then?”

“No, nothing so direct. I did find other names in it, though, someone named Bess Visser and her daughter, Clara. My mother knew Bess’s name, so there’s a connection somehow. I can’t imagine it’s a common name.” Something in me holds back about the dates of their suicides. It feels too personal to share. I offer this instead: “In a way I think you did give me a little piece of my family.”

I can almost hear him smiling. “That’s kind of you to say, Simon. Thank you. I’m just glad to know the book has found a good home.”

“It’s fascinating, honestly. I’d like to show it to my sister. The tarot sketches that are in it—my sister reads cards. My mother did as well. I wish I knew something more about them. The sketches are interesting. Different somehow.” I think about Enola, how uncommunicative she can be, and I can’t imagine her telling me anything. “You wouldn’t happen to have any good texts on tarot, would you?”