Love's Pursuit (17 page)

24

WE MET UP WITH the captain that night as we walked from the road toward the house.

He blew a ring of smoke in our direction. It quivered as an apparition in the moon’s light before he pushed away from the house and came to fall into step beside us. Beside me. “And how was it, the market?”

“ ’Twas filled with merchants.”

“There were no consumers of fire? No one chasing after greased pigs?”

In truth, I did not know. Perhaps there had been. It seemed a pity not to have enjoyed the journey more. Who knew when I might next go? And then I remembered one thing. “I met there a Mistress Miller who had been married to one of the selectmen of that town.”

He received that information as if it meant nothing to him.

“Newly married. She said that she had come on a boat that was meant for Virginia.”

“A Mistress Miller?” He shook his head.

“She was . . .” How did one describe, exactly, how she was? “She wore . . . she had many . . . ribbons. And bright, fair hair. With curls.

She would have been called something else when you met her.”

His eyebrow had lifted and his eyes twinkled. “Something else indeed! You remember to me Mistress Howard.” He
tsk
ed. “That such a sad fate has befallen her.”

Father had already walked on past us toward his shop. We trailed along after him behind the cart.

“What sad fate?”

“Hmm? Oh. To have married one of you. One of those dour men. She was such a girl for laughter and for teasing. I cannot imagine it.”

“We are not all dour and grim.”

“Perhaps not.” He stopped to look at me. There was hesitation writ in his eyes, but finally, he seemed to have come to some decision. “Can you not call me Daniel?”

“Daniel?”

“ ’Tis my given name. My Christian name.”

I frowned. “I do not think so.”

“You do not like it?”

“ ’Tis not that. ’Tis simply that I would only call a brother by his Christian name.”

“Well, that would not do! Please, say no more. I withdraw my request completely.”

We had caught up to Father and so I did not complete my thought. But had I done so, I would have said this: that I would call only a brother by his Christian name. A brother or a husband. But Daniel? That was a name I truly would have liked to have said. And that thought did not surprise me as much as it should have.

The next morning after breakfast had been eaten and the men sent out to their tasks, Mother stopped Mary and me from taking up our work by placing her hand on my arm. “Your father is to take me to my parents’ in two days’ time. ’Tis time for the weaning of the child and perhaps I can be of some help to my mother. Her constitution is not what it once was.”

There was a pricking at work in my stomach. And not only because it was she who would soon see Grandfather and not I. “But Simeon—”

“Do not fear your marriage, Susannah. Just because he was not of us does not mean he is a bad man.”

Nay. It did not.

“All that is needed is time to know him. Your father and I married with only my father’s recommendation and ten words shared between us. Your father asked me, ‘Was I willing, Susannah Morris?’ and I replied, ‘I am willing, John Phillips.’ And now we are weaning our sixth child.”

I knew the story of their courtship. I had heard it at least a dozen times. And the phrase “are you willing” passed often between my parents even now. But there was one thing about their marriage that she had never told me. And it was the one thing I desperately needed to know. “But are you . . . happy?”

“I am very content. As my own father knew I would be. He knows things, does your grandfather. God speaks to him. And knowing that, when he came to me about John Phillips, what else was there to say?”

Perhaps she was right. My trepidation could have everything to do with timing. It might not have anything to do with the man.

How could it? Not when half the girls in the town wished to be wed to him. Mary among them.

Although perhaps that was not so great a recommendation.

“There is much to be done while I am gone. I know you will be about the doing of it. And I know you will look after my sweet babe. There will be time enough for brewing small beer, dipping candles, and making soap when I return . . . before you are married.

’Tis only for a week.”

Mary and I shared a glance. We were both of an age that we could still remember the weaning of Nathaniel . . . and of a sister and a brother who had come after. Weaning was not a pleasant time.But it had to be done, and what mother could long withstand the cries of a babe?

“Will Father tarry in Boston?”

“Nay. There is too much to be done here.”

We saw them off two days later. The child, though wrapped in Mary’s arms, was already wailing as they left. Things would get worse before they got better. It was the way of babes and their growing. Two days to take Mother to her home and two days to return. We would be without Father for less than one week, even if our grandparents persuaded him to stay an extra day. But ’tis Mother’s absence that we feared. Even if she only stayed one week, it would take another four days for Father to fetch her home. We would be left to manage the house for nearly three weeks on our own.

The first four days went well enough. It was the morning after Father’s return that Simeon Wright knocked upon our door. “I’ve come to speak to you of Susannah.” All eyes lifted from our breakfast.

Father gestured him to sit.

Simeon Wright shook his head, stood planted in the door.

“Aye?”

“I would have the day of our marriage determined.”

Father’s brow lifted. “Would you, now?”

“ ’Tis what I’ve come to say.”

“Well . . .” Father wiped at his lips with a napkin. “No marriage will take place without her mother. I need her here to manage the house.”

“And so she shall. But why can the date not be decided?”

“It can be. Upon Goodwife Phillips’s return.”

Simeon Wright frowned. And then he shrugged. “Upon Goody Phillips’s return, then. But I warn you: I will not wait one day more than I must.”

Had he said it with any ardor, with any passion, it might have changed my thoughts toward him. As it was, he said it with all of the interest of a merchant trading at market, coming to claim something for which he’d already paid.

“ ’Tis not my intention to hold up a marriage. I simply have need of all of my children while their mother is gone.”

After he had left, Mary pushed away from the table and busied herself with the child.

The day before Father was meant to fetch Mother, a heavy north wind began to blow. By evening it had brought snow. Father paced by the fires after dinner, opening the door once or twice to assay the accumulation. The swirl of falling flakes spun my eyes dizzy each time he opened it. Morning proved his worries well founded.The feeble light revealed that no one would be going east until the spring.

The previous year after the first heavy snow, a man new to Stoneybrooke had braved the drifts. He had insisted the road to Newham had been engraved upon his memory. But the fallen snow must have masked what his mind’s eye knew, for he had never returned. And after the spring melt he was found, his body huddled into a hollow in the common, not one mile from where he had first started out.

I peered round Father’s shoulder. The snow that had fallen looked to have reached my hip. It was early for such snows, but now the roads were impassable. It was as if what we had known had passed away in our sleep. We had awakened to something strange. Something new. The world had been reduced to the space of the village.And only that much if the road could be broken out between the houses.

“ ’Tis God’s good and perfect will. Perhaps your grandmother has need of your mother for a while longer.” With that pronouncement, Father took the spade from the corner and handed the hoe to Nathaniel. But before our brother could follow Father into the day to clear a path to the necessary, the captain took the tool from Nathaniel and set out behind Father himself.

Mary, Nathaniel, and I stood in the door, watching. I felt very small. Very frightened. Very young. Our mother was lost to us. Perhaps for the entire winter.

I was to be our mother in her place.

The house seemed suddenly too big, the work too hard. I took a breath. And then another. Perhaps our misfortune was a blessing in disguise. If my mother could not be present, then I could not be married.

My father had given his word.

And Simeon Wright had given his.

Father and the captain chopped a path to the necessary and another to the barn. Once they had done that, they hitched the pair of oxen to a harrow. Halting the oxen by the door, they called for Nathaniel to come stand atop it, next to the captain, to weight it. With the snap of Father’s whip, the oxen moved off, breaking a path to link us to the road.

I bundled the child in a blanket, and Mary and I came out of the house to watch them work.

Once they had broken through to the road, we waited there, all of us, until a shout from the top of Wright’s hill informed us that all to our right had been broken out. Eventually they reached us, a harrow and a team of twelve oxen. Father unhitched his own pair from our harrow and joined them to the others. Off they went, from house to house, each man adding his own team to the group.

Behind them ran a string of boys, Nathaniel among them, ostensibly shoveling away at the drifts but throwing more snowballs than shovelfuls of snow. Just as Mary and I turned to go back into the house, a shout drew our attention. Simeon Wright appeared in a narrow sleigh pulled by a prancing horse. He was seated between an Ellys girl and a Baxter girl. They slid by, the girls smiling and giggling, Simeon seemingly indifferent to their foolishness.

Mary looked at me, a question in her eyes.

I spun on a heel, pretending I had not seen them. For how was I to know why Simeon Wright, betrothed to me, would parade around town with two other girls in his sleigh? How was I to know why he wished to shame me? To mock me? And why he had bothered to publish our banns when he so clearly desired others’ company to my own?

I turned away from the spectacle and went back inside.

There were things we had held off doing, Mary and I, thinking Mother would soon be returning. That day, we started about the doing of them.

There was small beer to make and candles to dip. There was flax to be spun and meat to be salted. As if that were not enough, there were the myriad daily tasks required so that all of us might be clothed and fed and sheltered in comfort. And then, there was the child.

He still would not eat or drink as easily as I would have liked.

A stubborn mite, I knew he would not spurn us so well once hunger began to gnaw at his belly, but with such a great belly as he had, there was time needed for desperation to do its work.

That forenoon, Father arranged for a day-girl to come starting the following morn. Just to lend a hand, he told me. If he had feared my sensibilities, he need not have worried. They were not very tender, and I was after all the help I could get.

That night while Nathaniel tried to persuade the child from whimpering to smiling, the men sat on a bench in front of the fires while Mary and I picked through their hairs with combs. It would not have done for Mary to comb the captain’s and so, as Mother’s task, it was left to me.

It did not seem right, his being a man unmarried and a stranger, but I took a breath, took up the comb, and then parted that lovely hair straight down the middle. It was so thick, so heavy, it ran like water through my fingers. I imagined that it must feel like silk. For what other sensation could be so extravagant, so luxurious, so bordering on decadence?

I combed and parted, parted and combed, catching lice between my fingers and crushing nits between my nails.

Beneath my probing, the captain shifted.

It made me conscious of my hands woven through his hairs, my fingers kneading his scalp. I had not touched any man thus. Ever.

“Do you need me . . . want me . . . to turn?” His voice seemed somehow strange, stifled, as if it took great effort for the words to reach his throat.

“Nay.” I added speed and precision to my work. And as I did it, I tried to talk reason into my thoughts. Why should his head signify anything different than Father’s or Nathaniel’s? Or John’s? Had I not imagined myself doing exactly this when I had imagined myself married to John? It was something any goodwife would do. And yet . . . I was no man’s wife. Not yet. But still the captain’s welfare had been given over to my care. And had his voice not sounded rather faint? As if his head had been stopped up? “Do you feel the coming of winter in your head? I could make a plaster for you.”

“Nay! Do not leave me.”

He had perhaps spoken overloud, for I saw Father glance over at us.

“Least . . . not until the work is done.” The captain must have seen him as well.

“In truth, your hairs are so long and they have entrapped so many . . .”

Father grunted. “Do as you must.” He rose then, Mary having finished with him, and gave his seat to Nathaniel.

And so I continued combing and parting, parting and combing, catching lice between my fingers and crushing nits between my nails. Imagining myself a goodwife. A goodwife to . . . some man other than Simeon Wright.

25

AS I WAS MEASURING out mother dough into a bowl one morning, Mary bumped into me in passing.

The bowl struck the floor and broke.

“Sorry.”

Clearly, she was not. It was not the first time she had done it.And my arms and legs were marked with bruises where she had kicked out at me in the night. The Holy Scriptures said the same fault must be forgiven seventy times seven times. But our savior could not have known that I would be pummeled in the process.“If you cannot be civil—”

“I said I was sorry.”

“Stop punishing me for Simeon Wright’s mistake! He is the one who spoke. He is the one who published our banns. It was a
mistake
. And I am the one who will live with it for the rest of my life!”

She looked at me long and hard. And then she spoke. “If you knew anything about Simeon at all, you would know it was not a mistake.”

Her words were edged with bitterness, anger, and . . . shame?

“What do you know of him?”

“More than . . . ” She pressed her lips together. Shook her head.

I left off collecting pieces of the bowl and rose to my feet. “What do you know of Simeon Wright?”

“Only that he is pledged to my sister.” She spat out that last word as if she hated the sound of it. “ ’Tis enough.”

“I cannot help it if you imagined some flirtation with him. I cannot help it that he offered for me. I cannot help it that I was made to accept.”

“You can help nothing at all.” She sped toward the door, grabbed her cloak, and left.

Thomas came back into the house as I was readying to leave it. I had taken my cloak from the peg and was tying it beneath my chin.

“Where do you go?”

“To the Phillips’s.”

Surprise lit his eyes. And . . . delight? “I am glad you go to see them. You should be about more often.”

I went about when I had to. I went to the meetinghouse with Thomas of a Sabbath and I went to the fields in the forenoon of a summer’s day. I had tried to fall into the easy habit of the other women. Into a borrowing of this or a sharing of that. But I never knew what to say. Or what to do. And did they know me, I was certain they would never wish for me to darken their doorstep with my shame.

“Greet them for me.”

I nodded and slipped out the door.

I was going to the Phillips’s, but it was not as Thomas thought. Though I was going to see Susannah, I was also going to warn her. She seemed confused. Bewildered. As if all that had happened was somehow a simple mistake. A mistake that she could set right by following through with the marriage.

Perhaps she could.

But I knew that it would cost far more than she knew.

Just a short while later, Mary came back in the house at a near run.

She slammed the door behind her and pulled the latch string in.

“What—?”

“Hush!”

“Why?”

“ ’Tis Small-hope.”

“What of her?”

“She is coming down the road as if a demon chased her, and it looks as if she intends to stop here.”

It might have been an inconvenience to entertain her, but there was no need to be rude. “Open the door and put the latch string back out.”

“Nay.”

“And why not?” Mother would never have put up with Mary’s foolishness.

“She is . . . odd. And ’tis uncanny how she can just . . . appear.

Out of nowhere.”

“She is . . .” What was she? “Just . . .” What? “ . . . different. ’Tis an opportunity here to be a friend to the friendless.”

“Let some other household do it. If she truly wants a friend, she has Thomas. And ’tis time for her to be about the bearing of a babe.”

“Mary!”

“They have been wed these three years.” She stood close to the oiled paper of the window, then withdrew as a shadow passed in front of it. On the tips of her toes, she walked across the room to stand next to me. Hissed in my ear. “And if her womb is cursed, there must be some reason for it.”

When I reached the Phillips’s, I realized the latch string had been pulled in. That was odd. Had I not just seen it, blowing about in the wind? Had not Mary just run into the house?

What could . . . why would . . . ?

Knowledge brought a flush of red to my skin: They did not wish to receive me.

I stood there for one moment, staring at the door, wishing I might let myself inside. My message was too important, the danger too great for Susannah not to hear it.

But I was not wanted.

I was never wanted. Small-hope. Small hope of ever truly finding a place for myself here. Of ever really becoming part of the town. Pulling my cloak tighter around me, I hunched my shoulders against the wind and started back the way I had come.

“How could you—”

“Hush! She might still be out there.”

I
wanted
her to be out there. I put Mary’s hand aside and crossed to the door, pulled it open wide.

There was nothing there but the wind. It blew a few snowflakes in across the doorstep. Looking down, I could see where Small-hope had stood. Her shoes had pressed an outline into the snow.

Of a sudden, I knew a strange desolation.

Running down the path, I called out her name. As I reached the road, I could see her in the distance, her slight form wrapped in her russet colored moth-eaten cloak.

“Small-hope!”

She gave no sign that she could hear me.

The next week the weather began to warm. The sun came out of a day and began to melt the snow. Drifts that had been shoulderhigh soon shrunk to the height of my waist. Three days more, maybe four, and the roads might be judged clear.

Father might leave.

Mother might return.

In three weeks time, I could be wed.

I had counted on a three-month reprieve. Now I had not even half that.

Several days later after dinner, Father made an announcement.

“Tomorrow I go for Mother.”

My hopes sank to my toes and poured out upon the ground.

He looked toward me. “I must not delay. Not while the weather is so favorable.”

“Nay, Father. You must not delay.” I knew that he must go.

“ ’Tis not that . . . well . . . hmph.” He dropped his chin to his chest. Left it there for a moment. “What else can I do?”

Nothing. There was nothing that anyone could do.

He opened the Bible and began to read. It was from the book of Psalms. “ ‘The Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him, in those that hope in his mercy . . . He giveth snow like wool: he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes. He casteth forth his ice like morsels: who can stand before his cold?’ ”

Who indeed? And had I not already profited from God’s snow and hoarfrost and ice? Why then should I hope to profit any longer?

I went to bed that night, dull of heart and tired of hoping.

But in the morning, I woke to a world gone white once more with snow. Father would go nowhere this day, nor this week, perhaps not even this month. And neither would Mother.

Some several days later, after the road had been broken out once more, I set Mary to work with the day-girl, showing the girl where the pigs were kept and where the chickens made their roosts. Not long after, I heard the door scratch the floor and looked up, surprised they had accomplished their tasks so quickly. But it was not the girls; it was Simeon Wright.

He had not knocked but had come through the door as if he owned the place. And then he sat down at the table.

“Good day to you, Simeon Wright.”

He fixed his pale eyes on me in reply.

“Is there aught that I can do for you?”

“Nay.”

I sent a prayer to heaven that the girls would come back soon, for I had no wish to entertain him on my own. I went on with my work for some moments, sliding the pressing iron back and forth across Father’s shirt. But Simeon Wright’s constant stare unnerved me. I cast an eye toward him as I was drawing the iron back toward me and it ran right into my other hand.

Abandoning the iron, I slipped the burnt finger into my mouth. Then I rummaged through the cupboard to find an unguent to smear atop it. Fumbling with the top of first one pot, then another, I finally found the right jar.

Mary came in through the door with the day-girl behind her, saw Simeon sitting at the table, and went right back out, nearly barreling over the poor mite in her haste.

It was only after I had applied the cream to the wound that I realized I had left the iron atop the shirt. I rushed to pick it up and found the shadow of its base imprinted upon the material. Permanently.

Now Father had only one shirt left: the one he was wearing.

From the table, Simeon spoke. “Have you naught to eat?”

I looked up from the burnt shirt. Blinked.

“ ’Tis noon. Or nearly.”

Nearly? It would be noon in . . . about one hour. I could not understand what it was that he was asking. It was our habit to eat a bit past the noon hour. About the time that Father came in from his shop.

“At Wright’s hill, we eat at noon.”

“And here, we eat a bit later. I could offer you something, but if you insist upon having it now, ’tis only a biscuit and some cheese that I could serve you.” The pottage had just come to a simmer over the fire. As I looked toward it, I realized I needed to place the pudding atop it to steam.

Simeon rose to his feet and came toward me, staring at me with great intensity. “When you are mistress of Wright’s hill, you will see that I am served. Well. At noon.”

I moved to place some distance between us. “It will be my pleasure to do so. When I am mistress of Wright’s hill.” As I stood there calculating how many more steps back I could take until I trod into the fires, the door opened once more and the captain came through it. Relief turned my knees to water.

The captain’s glance took us in. Settled on the space between us. Looked back toward the parlor. Up to the loft. “Have you no one to help you?”

“Nay.” And bless him for noticing.

He came to my side in two quick steps. Taking the iron from me, he set it on the hearth. After pouring the dying embers from the iron’s heater, he refilled it and then set the iron in it once more.“Do you need the pot moved? The fires stirred?”

Simeon moved off away from us and returned to the table, mumbling about women’s work.