The Shore (17 page)

When spring came and her body was mostly healed, one of the granddaughters smuggled her chest and papers out of the house and brought it to her, and her interest in life returned; if only the girl could have brought her children as well. They thought her dead, and dead she wished to remain for the moment,
at least to the gentry of the island. The poor knew how to keep a secret, knew that their loyalty would be better invested in a healer than a rich man, and they were all perhaps a bit frightened of her, believed that, somehow, she had died and come back to life.

She had no plan at that point. She had come to respect and love Nittawasew in the time that she had spent flat on her back in the woman's lodge, but the privacy of the marsh appealed to her, after so many years of sharing a house with men that she despised. As her petticoats frayed and she grew better at scavenging wild food and spotting useful plants with her remaining eye she felt her selfness increase. She passed the time quietly, losing track of the days, sitting cross-legged at her doorway at high tide dangling a line for the fish and crabs that never seemed to fill her, digging roots, lying for long hours stretched on her mat, pipe clenched in her teeth, counting the breaths as the pain in her bones ebbed and swelled. Her arms ached for her children in the night. Still, she had not decided what to do, had thought that she would have more time to determine a course of action.

Now, with the mosquitoes slipping through the cracks in her hut walls and the incessant rustle of the wind in the reeds and her searing anger at the man who was not her husband, she wished for something to distract her. The pipe was almost empty, the crusting ash giving nothing but a dry, papery taste. She sat up and knocked it out against the floor so that the detritus sifted through the cracks in the floorboards, cleaned it carefully with a bit of twig, then fished a small percussion-cap box from her skirt pocket, filled half with moist, local tobacco and half with
fat sage-colored buds, and began shredding a fragrant bud into the lid so she could have a pipe while she went searching for ramsons. No sense wasting away the entire day, no matter the heat. There were things to be done.

Stiffly, she took up the gathering basket, wrapped herself against the mosquitoes, strapped the broad, flat oval marsh shoes that hung from the frame outside her doorway to her bare feet, and ducked out into the sun. In the light she could see the dirt ingrained into her skin, and her hair hung heavy and thick about her face; she couldn't remember ever having been this dirty before. Her father had given her the limp, Calley had told her, by knocking her down the front stairs when she was small. The woman had interposed herself that time, gathered her up and taken her away to the kitchen and pushed the heavy sideboard against the door, then carefully forced her partially dislocated thighbone back into the hip socket while she screamed. After that he had been more careful with her, no matter how angry he was.

Absently she tracked through the marsh, skirts tucked high, the black mud oozing silkily up through the gaps in her woven shoes and between her bare toes. If her father could see her now…Andrew had never spoken it directly, but she knew he despised her for her wildness, even though it was the quality that had made him trust her in the first place. He was softer at core, more timid than her father, less brutal not from kindness but from an inherent callowness that he would never rise above. Calley had been right: there was nothing worse than sleeping with the enemy.

She passed onto solid ground, into the trees, unstrapped her shoes, and wiped her feet clean on pine needles. Her pipe had
gone out, and she stopped to relight it, then began to cast about in the undergrowth. Glossy green leaves; it was too late in the spring for flowers. She bent down and took a leaf between her fingers, crushed the springy greenness, and lifted it to her nose. It did not give off the strong scent of ramson, but instead the smell was innocuous, vegetal. She studied the flowerless stalks a moment.
Convallaria majalis.
Lily of the valley. She considered the little plant, then carefully dug up six, roots and leaves, and bundled them into her gathering basket.

Back in her hut, she crushed the leaves and roots carefully in her cooking pot, and covered them with fresh water. As they steeped, she considered the concoction. It would be more than enough, she knew, though it was a comparatively gentle poison. Thoughtfully, she sorted through the cloth bags and sealed bottles in her chest. It had always been hers, and when she was small she'd put her dolls to bed in it, or hidden away the silver paper from candies, when she had them. When her grandfather's books caught her interest, she had turned out the trash she had gathered into it and begun squirreling away herbs, sewing her own pouches for the dry ones, kidnapping bottles from the kitchen for the tinctures. Calley had encouraged her, taught her all that she knew of healing, of brewing, of the half-magic that couldn't quite be called medicine, but that worked nonetheless.

She found it, never used and fallen to the bottom of the chest: a small, sealed vial of dried Quaker buttons. She wasn't certain when she had gathered them, perhaps during her adolescence, when death was most on her mind. They didn't give a gentle death, but a certain one.

As the sun touched the tree line, Medora gathered up her
bottles and basket and set out. It was a long walk for a woman with a bad hip. She went slowly, the basket bouncing with every step, liquid sloshing in the bottle.

The sky was changing color by the time she approached the lodge, but even so she had to stand for a moment inside the door to allow her eyes to adjust to the dimness. She quickly picked out Nittawasew, her pipe in her mouth, the smoke blending with the thin trail from the firepit in the middle of the room, and went to kneel in front of her.

“Grandmother.” Medora did not speak Algonquin, did not know the proper respects to offer, but did as best she could and hoped that it was good enough. Belatedly, she realized that she had come without a gift, and felt guilty.

“You haven't simply come for a visit, have you?”

“No, Grandmother, I haven't,” she admitted with embarrassment. “I was told today that my husband plans to put me off—I am going to take my revenge. I wanted to say goodbye, in case I don't come back.”

Nittawasew said nothing, gave no indication that she was listening besides cocking an eyebrow and exhaling a thin streamer of smoke. It was this immovability that Medora had tried to project whenever someone came to see her; it was also the quality that most unnerved her.

“And I wanted to say thank you, for what you've done for me.”

“Revenge isn't going to get you what you want,” Nittawasew said finally, slowly, as Medora was gathering her feet beneath her to stand up.

“But revenge is what I want,” Medora answered.

“Revenge is what everyone thinks they want, but it's a bitter dish. Listen to me, find some other way.”

“There is no other way. I'm sorry.”

Medora left quickly, ashamed, conscious of the older woman's eyes on her back, of her silent disapproval.

Nittawasew waited until she heard the rustle of the marsh shoes through the grass, then motioned to the clutch of young people on the other side of the fire. One of her grandsons—or nephews, she couldn't keep them straight—detached himself from the group of talking cousins and came to her. Grandson, she remembered now. His name was Thomas; his mother had married a white man. Not a boy for many years, but still unmarried. It was always difficult for the storm bringers to find wives.

“Follow her. Keep her from doing anything foolish. I've brought her back from the edge of death once, I'm not going to go to all of that trouble again.”

Her home loomed darkly against the star-shot sky, and she stopped to rest for a moment. There was silence except for the rustle of trees in the wind, and the distant throb of breakers crashing on the barrier islands. She considered. Not her home, anymore, just another rich man's house. Gingerly, she entered by the cellar door, which was never locked, passed silently through the rooms and up the stairs. They did not keep dogs, and now she was glad of Andrew's aversion to them.

She passed through the heavy shadows to the nursery. Their beds lay side by side, but Ruth had slipped in with James, as she always did, her chubby toddler body wedged in almost underneath
his. She stood and watched them, motionless in sleep. She wanted to catch them up, bundle them to her, eat them whole the way she playfully threatened to when they were younger. Maybe there was another way…No. She would not become her mother, watching at the window. There was no other way.

Gently, she woke James, and he started and clung to her.

“Hush, hush, baby. I'm here.”

He did not question her presence, her existence, the horrible scars. He mumbled at her, rubbed his face against her chest, and fell back asleep with his arms around her neck.

She could not do it.

She had wanted to leave Andrew childless, to end his line once and for all. But she could not. They were hers.

She settled between them, feet hanging off the end of the bed, and gathered them to her. They curled instinctively against her, settled their heads on her chest, nestled into her and clung. She stroked their backs for a moment, felt the softness of their breathing, and then gently disentangled herself and stood up. She would have her revenge, but she would not hurt them to get it.

She tucked them back in, smoothed their hair away from their faces, then took up her basket again.

His bedroom was across the hall. She paused before the massive door and placed her basket on the carpet. How often had she listened to him talk about family, honor, his name, while she sat before the fire or lay in the bed in that room? He knew the money was hers; all he had left to take pride in was his bloodline. If it meant so much to him that he would break faith with her, then she would deprive him of the means for continuing it. Perhaps it would be better to leave him with his children,
reminders that he did not have and never would have pure descendants.

A breeze touched her as she opened the door, and she stole over to the bed, shivering. Their bed. He was always hot in his sleep, and he lay naked across it, arms and legs flung out as though he had never shared it with her. Ridiculous in his nudity, snoring and defenseless. The knife was in her hand; she could just kill him. But it would be better for him to live with the memory of what he had lost. If she could be fast enough. If.

She played out the motions in her mind, watching him from the corner of the bed like a snake. It would be like gutting a fish, like cutting Mercury. It would be cleaner, and easier: he couldn't kick or trample her, couldn't smell her fear like a horse could, didn't know what was coming. Before she realized she was ready, she sprang. Soft in her hand, one quick moment, and it was done.

He started up, screaming, gushing, but she had them in her hand. Too late, she realized he might bleed to death, or go into shock, that he was a man, not a horse. Never mind, she had them. She stumbled back from the bed, dropped the knife, and ran. His screams followed her from the house.

The boat was there at the end of the dock, the small one that Andrew used to hunt ducks in the marsh. It rocked beneath her as she stepped into it, and in the first minutes she felt as though it and she were hovering in midair, though she paddled as hard as she could. When she looked back she could see the faint lights of the house, diminishing and flickering through the branches of the trees. She wondered for a moment what would happen in the morning, when someone came to her hut looking for a cure for toothache or earache or a cock that wouldn't stiffen when it
was wanted, wondered if they would find her chest, what they would do with it. Probably bring it to Andrew, if she guessed right. What he would do with it she didn't bother thinking about, and for a moment she wished that she'd sunk it in the mud herself, rather than let him touch the one thing that in her whole life had ever truly been hers.

The velvet mud slipped by beneath her, by the yard and then by the mile, until the grasses turned to sand and marsh to brackish stream. She was on the barrier islands now, nothing before her except for the wide, wide ocean, and she drove the nose of the boat into the sand and stepped out. The wind off the water was cold, but the soft curves of the dunes retained the day's heat, and reflected it back into the soles of her feet, and then into her back as she lay down in the hollow between two gently rising hills.

Slowly she plucked at the folds of her skirt, drew out the bottle of dried Quaker buttons, picked at the seal with her ragged fingernails before finally prying it off with her teeth. She looked at the mound of seeds behind the glass, considered, then fished out her pipe and tobacco tin. It would make the journey easier.

For a moment she lay there, watching the stars turn above her, tasting the soft bitterness of the pipe, enjoying the sharp burn in her lungs. As her eyes began to close on their own she thought she could feel her children on either side of her, their heads nestled beneath her breasts, their fingers buried deep in the folds of her tattered skirt. Her fingers found the bottle beside her, and she shook three of the seeds into her palm. They felt like riverwashed pebbles; she rolled them around, enjoying their smoothness. She would see her mother again soon, just as soon as she finished her pipe.

There were footsteps on the sand, the soft sound of the grains grating on each other as they were compacted almost beyond the edge of hearing. She slipped one of the seeds into her mouth, but did not bite down; if someone was coming she wanted to know who it was.

A face appeared upside down above her, and for a moment she thought that the poison had already worked, that she was seeing her mother as she had been on that last night, a dark face and long black hair.

“Give them to me.”

Not a woman, but a man. She clutched the seeds, but still did not bite.