Her Loving Husband's Curse (22 page)

“We should take her home,” Sarah said.

They headed around the green lawn of Salem Common, deserted in the night, then continued around Washington Square North to Essex Street to Bentley Street to Derby Street then home.

Sarah followed James into Grace’s room where he gently removed the baby’s shoes and jacket. Sarah took the clips from Grace’s gold curls and laid her down on her back. She kissed the top of the curls, and James kissed the cherubic cheeks. Grace didn’t stir.

“She sleeps as well as her father,” Sarah said. “Nothing wakes her.”

“A baby who sleeps well is a good thing.”

They slipped into the great room. Sarah looked out the window into the darkness of the waning night. She yawned, it was after one a.m., and James kissed her lips. “You should go to sleep,” he said. “It’s late.”

“What did you want to show me?”

“Of course you remembered.”

He took the antique-looking key from his keychain and unlocked the bottom right drawer of his seventeenth century desk. Sarah peeked over his shoulder while he flipped through some files and saw the timeworn papers with his old-fashioned, calligraphy-style handwriting.

“Is that where you keep letters for your girlfriend?” she teased.

James grinned. “Yes. These are letters for my girlfriend.” He found what he was looking for—a newspaper clipping—and handed it to Sarah. “Read this,” he said.

It gives me pleasure to announce that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation.

The consequences of a speedy removal will be important to the United States, to individual States, and to the Indians themselves. It will place a civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by savage hunters. It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.

Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers; but what do they do more than our ancestors did or than our children are now doing? To better their condition in an unknown land, our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects. Does Humanity weep at these painful separations from everything, animate and inanimate, with which the young heart has become entwined? Far from it. It is rather a source of joy that our country affords scope where our young population may range unconstrained in body or in mind, developing the power and facilities of man in their highest perfection. Can it be cruel in this Government when, by events which it cannot control, the Indian is made discontented in his ancient home to purchase his lands, to give him a new and extensive territory, to pay the expense of his removal, and support him a year in his new abode?

And is it supposed that the wandering savage has a stronger attachment to his home than the settled, civilized Christian? Is it more afflicting to him to leave the graves of his fathers than it is to our brothers and children? The policy of the General Government toward the red man is not only liberal, but generous. He is unwilling to submit to the laws of the States and mingle with their population. To save him from this alternative, or perhaps utter annihilation, the General Government kindly offers him a new home, and proposes to pay the whole expense of his removal and settlement.

Andrew Jackson

President

United States of America

Sarah read the name a second time to be sure she saw it correctly. “The President of the United States wrote this?” she said. James nodded. “Our President would never say anything like this. Would he?”

James shook his head. “I don’t know if we’ve come as far as we think we have, honey.” He took Sarah into his arms and held her close a long time, resting his chin on top of her hair, inhaling deeply and basking in the sweetness of strawberries and cream, running his fingers through her curls. She yawned again, and James kissed her forehead. “You should go to bed,” he said.

Sarah nodded, too tired to argue. She left James staring out the window, as though he were watching for a torch-bearing mob waving pitchforks, screaming and flashing their fists. She stopped in Grace’s room where the baby slept without a care in the world. She sat in the rocking chair and closed her eyes, swaying back and forth. She breathed out deeply, then stilled her breath, concentrating, slowly in, slowly out. She wanted to pray, but she didn’t know how. She was born in Boston to lapsed Catholic parents. She wasn’t raised in the church. She never went to services. Did she believe in God? She wasn’t sure. In her entire life, all thirty-three years of it, she had never thought much about Him, whoever He was. She never considered angels or miracles. She never even considered the reality of past lives—that is, until she learned of her own. When she found James, he became her miracle. That she was his wife Lizzie reborn—to Sarah, that was simply the means through which she found her end—James. She waited, eyes still closed, for the prayer to come. If you need a favor from someone you hardly know, what do you say? How do you ask? But she was desperate. She needed to think there was help out there somewhere. After all, how did she find her way back to James, and how did Grace find her way back to them?

She remembered her life as Elizabeth. In the seventeenth century, you believed in God, and heaven help you should you forget Him for a moment. The Bible was ingrained into your DNA, and everything you did from dawn until dusk was for the Church. Your entire life, from the moment you awoke until you closed your eyes at night, was geared toward following the Bible’s word, to do whatever you could to win His favor and hope he would send you to Heaven for the ultimate reward. But life was different now, and it wasn’t so easy to believe.

Sarah stared at her daughter, her rose-like cheeks, her angelic face, her tiny bud-like lips, her fists clenched as if she were keeping her innocence tight to her, and she fell asleep with her head against the rocking chair dreaming of a quiet life with her husband and daughter by her side, hoping the words to pray with would come soon.

CHAPTER 17

James carried Sarah from the rocking chair near Grace’s crib into their bedroom, and now she was sleeping in their bed. He looked out the window, wondering what Sarah saw when she stared outside with such intensity. He meant to ask her, but she had gone into Grace’s room and fallen asleep, and she needed the rest. He felt antsy suddenly, his muscles tightened, his senses alert. He opened the front door, stepped outside, looked up and down the deserted road and heard nothing. He walked to the end of the block, turned toward the bay, looking toward the horizon where the dark water met the line of lightless sky. He wanted to see farther than the horizon, out into the future, where he would still be there with his wife and daughter. He didn’t want attention. He didn’t need recognition. He didn’t need anyone but Sarah and Grace to know his name. But he was nearly three hundred and fifty years old, and he knew nothing stayed the same, no matter how much you wanted it to.

He stepped close to the bank of the bay, breathing in the salt of the low-tide sea, needing to feel human for a moment. There were times when he found such peace in the seaside, but tonight the nerve-filled worries kept him itchy. He walked towards Pickering Wharf, wishing Olivia were there, wanting to hear her motherly voice tell him everything was going to be all right. She was a psychic, after all—she would know. He thought of calling her, but he didn’t want to wake her. She had been with Jocelyn most of the night, he knew. He walked toward the street and stopped near the U. S. Custom House, the stately Federal-style brick building with white trim and matching Corinthian columns, the wide stairs leading up to the door. He remembered how Nathaniel Hawthorne worked in that building from 1847 to 1849. In fact, Hawthorne had written
The Scarlet Letter
there, even using a tour of the Custom House itself as an introduction to the sad story of Hester Prynne and her mark of sin. James had been rereading
The Scarlet Letter
and
The House of the Seven Gables
for the Hawthorne seminar he was going to teach next autumn. He thought of the local tributes to Salem’s favorite son, its touch of literary genius, and he was looking forward to introducing his students to Hawthorne’s work. He headed back toward his own wooden gabled house, stopping outside, watching it as though he had never seen it before. The house seemed pensive, he thought, contemplative, considering something too big for words.

James opened the green front door and stopped. He heard the footsteps running, running, then pausing, then running again. The sound continued for a minute, and his senses screamed when he realized the footsteps turned down his street. He spun around, ready to pounce. Suddenly, Levon Jackson turned the corner, his eyes scanning the houses until he saw the wooden gabled one. He stopped when he saw James.

“Doctor Wentworth!” Levon hunched over, his hands on his knees, panting for breath.

James ran to him. “What is it, Levon?”

Levon tried to talk, but his empty lungs failed him. He straightened himself and took James by the shoulders, shaking him as if trying to wake him. He was wide-eyed, Levon, crazed-looking, so unlike his usual friendly self. James felt a jolt like static when Levon’s wide eyes settled on him.

“You have to go, Doctor Wentworth,” Levon said, his words barely audible over gasps for air. “Grab your wife and baby and go.” James stared into Levon’s worried face. “They’re coming to take her. Your daughter. My mom got a call from Child Services saying they needed to take Grace away.”

“Why, Levon?”

“Because of what they’re saying about you. You need to go, Doctor Wentworth. In case they come to take your baby.”

“They’re going to take Grace?” Sarah said. “James?”

James saw her there, her hands on her face, the tears in her eyes. He took his weeping wife into his arms. “No one is taking her,” he said.

James reached out to shake his student’s hand, but he stopped himself, afraid of the repercussions if Levon knew the truth, especially now. Levon clasped James’s shoulder with a firm grip.

“It doesn’t matter what you are, Doctor Wentworth. I know who you are.”

“It doesn’t matter to you that I might be a vampire? Last year you said vampires were villains.”

“I was wrong.” Levon started at a noise in the street. “You better go, Doctor Wentworth.”

“Thank you, Levon.”

Levon smiled, a flash of white brilliance. “Any time, Doctor Wentworth.” And then he ran away.

When James turned around he saw Sarah with Grace in her arms, two large canvas duffle bags and the meowing black cat in her carrier on the ground by the door.

“I packed the bags last week,” she said. “We even have a place to go.”

“We do?”

“Olivia’s cousins in Maine. Olivia said we could go there if we needed to get away.”

James stopped, certain he heard footsteps nearby. He half-expected to see Levon turn the corner again, but there was no one. In his mind’s eye he saw a crowd storming the wooden gabled house, an angry, seething mob ready to burn down the place, ready to drag Sarah and Grace away and decapitate and quarter him. But there was no one there. Then he thought he heard a car driving toward them. He took Grace from Sarah’s arms and brought her to the Explorer by the curb, strapped her into her safety seat, and helped Sarah in. He grabbed the bags and the cat and put them into the back of the car. He stopped, listened, and knew for certain he heard a car accelerating in the distance. He ran back to the gabled house, turned out the lights, locked the door, and drove away, checking his rearview mirror, expecting to see flashing red lights behind him.

“Are they coming?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t know, honey, but I heard a car and I don’t want to take any chances.”

Sarah nodded. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the high back of the car seat. She opened the window, shivered, then closed it again while the Salem sights passed by in a blur. James was driving fast along the narrow, deserted streets. Everyone else was safe in their dark homes, warm in their soft beds, with their families, which was where they should have been too, James thought bitterly. He searched everywhere, looking for anyone who might notice them, straining to see the flashing lights, but they weren’t there.

Damn you, Hempel, he thought. This is all because of you.

He drove down Derby Street, past the Custom House he had been looking at moments before. He sped past Pickering Wharf and the Salem Waterfront Hotel, down Hawthorne Boulevard to Charter Street, past the Salem Witch Village and the Witch Trials Memorial and the Old Burying Point. He turned right down Route 114, past Lappin Park, where he nearly kissed Sarah when they walked the Salem streets together that first time. Sarah was so nervous about him then, as she should have been. After all, he did jump out at her from the shadows the first time he saw her. He turned left down Bridge Street, back to Route 114 where he could take Route 128 toward Danvers and Peabody, where they could head towards Olivia’s cousins in Maine.