The Den

by Abi Maxwell

  “You do not have to ever be like them,” she repeated to her children, each and every one of them.

  * * *

  —

  When the new mill owner took up his post, her husband spoke often of him. John Smith. A common enough name. Still it put a little fear in her. What if he’d kept that envelope with her husband’s address all this time and only now come all this way just to find her? Stupid thoughts, really. But then one day she led her boys through the woods to Mr. Bartlett’s, and when they came out from over the stone wall she saw a figure across the field, strolling up the road.

  “Who is that?” she asked her middle child, for he knew more people than any of them did. It was his nature—he liked to traipse around through town and to call in on neighbors unexpectedly. Even as a very young boy he had liked to do so, and he’d always asked so many questions of people—where they had come from and what they worked at, what they enjoyed eating, what they enjoyed reading. The questions struck her as remarkably polite, though she knew he didn’t mean it that way, or any way in particular.

  “John Smith,” he said plainly. Elspeth watched the man strut toward his new home. That broad stretch of shoulder, that prominent chin, its downward tuck—was she remembering correctly? She became terrified with the thought. Had he crossed an entire ocean in order to take her? (And would she let him? No. No, no, no.) Was he here to expose her? Or was this some wild, unlucky chance? She couldn’t sleep at night with all her fear.

  She went to Mr. Bartlett. “The man,” she said. “The new mill owner.”

  “Trash,” he said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “He will ruin this village.”

  “I’m afraid I know him,” she said. “From before. From Scotland. More than I ought to have, if you know my meaning.”

  “Watch out for him,” he said simply to her. And then, with a bit of a laugh, because at that point none of it had seemed so serious at all, “He wants to rule the world.”

  * * *

  —

  Well, she had to know if it was really him. She had to see him again to find out. Week after week she thought this, and at the start of December she decided it was time to reclaim her life. She bundled up and headed into town alone, told her boys she was just going for a stroll. Her plan was to stop in at the mill under the pretense that she had a message for her husband.

  In all her time here, she had been inside that mill only once, and it hadn’t been so very long ago. Just before the new owner had arrived. She had remarked to her husband that the boys would like to see the machinery, so he had arranged a visit. They had stood on the first floor, the machines roaring around them, peering down into the wheelpit, watching the two wheels turn. Her husband’s face had lit up when he pointed to the fly ball governor. His lips had begun to move and she’d understood that he was explaining the mechanism to them, but they could not hear him. Still, his face—for a moment Elspeth remembered the young man she had married. She had forgotten how much he loved this machinery. There he was, every evening, asking question after question to her of the books she read, of the thoughts she had, and she’d never even asked him for a single detail of his work. She grabbed his hand then, gave it three quick squeezes.

  On this day, though, when she walked alone to the mill to try to glimpse this new John Smith, she didn’t make it in. In fact, she didn’t even make it across the bridge into town before being overcome with nerves and turning right back around. Not the second or third time, either.

  She had even asked her husband more about the man, and he had simply remarked that John Smith was very efficient.

  “What else?” she had said.

  “Big ideas. He wants to change the way things run.”

  “You’ve said. Boardinghouses, a foundry. What does it really mean? When would this actually take place?”

  “It’s all so complex.”

  “Well, what does it all mean?” she had asked.

  Her husband had looked at her then. He’d put his arms around her waist and pulled her in and said, “I think it’s all going to be good for us.” By which, of course, he’d meant that they would have more money to fix up the house, to clear out the land, to finally let some sunshine through their windows.

  * * *

  —

  Over the years, she had schooled all of her children. All of them were now old enough to have some place at the mill—some twenty-five children worked there already—but she wouldn’t have it for hers. She had told her husband so, and to her surprise he told her that was fine. “I want them to be scholars,” she had said. “I want them to use their minds.”

  The children had all gone mornings to the schoolhouse in town, but she had also done as her mother had and taught them at the kitchen table in the evenings. Thanks to the neighbor’s collection, she had taught every single one of them to love books. She had taught them many things, but the books had seemed like her greatest accomplishment. In the beginning, she hadn’t the slightest idea how to teach someone to read, but then she had just gone along and done it and it turned out that she was quite good at it. So good, in fact, that other children had come to her, too. How do you do it? other mothers had asked, as though she had some sort of method or trick. She had been unable to answer the question. But in all her parenting, she thought that perhaps her favorite moment had been when the boys discovered that they could open a book and enter it entirely on their own. To suddenly be able to fit through such a passage! If she could remember for the rest of her life one single moment with each of her boys, one single expression, it would be that. For it had been a moment—with all three of them it had—a single second when the gears in their minds turned and clicked into place and the entire world unfolded infinitely before them.

  Finally by mid-December Elspeth abandoned the idea of stopping in at the mill and instead she made her way up the hill to his house and then straight up his porch stairs. It was early evening, not long after the mill bell had rung. She had told her husband what she was doing and he’d thought it wise. A housewarming gift. She trembled as she trekked to his house, a basket of freshly baked sticky buns hung on her arm.

  “Why, hello,” he said.

  Oh. Red hair, greenish eyes, not him, not him at all. How could she have thought it would have been? All this time and all this fear and now to find she was disappointed.

  “You are too kind,” he said. “Come in.”

  “My husband,” she said straightaway. “He works for you. I have three boys. I heard you were alone.”

  “You are too good,” he had said.

  And she certainly was, to him. Next she made and delivered a Christmas meal. Six rolls, plus a ham from the very pig she and her boys had raised on her neighbor’s property. Four oranges despite the fact that he was rich and she and her boys would have devoured those fruits with the greatest pleasure imaginable.

  “Are you trying to buy your husband a better job, little lady?” Mr. John Smith asked just then. A smirk, a short jolt of a laugh.

  And really, what was she playing at?

  Just harmless excitement, she knew that, but she also knew better than that. She knew she was a woman; she knew what behaviors would and would not be tolerated.

  * * *

  —

  A week after she delivered that meal, her husband announced that they were invited to a holiday party at the mill owner’s house.

  “All the workers will be there?” she asked. “In his home?”

  “He’s different,” Thomas said. “I told you. He’ll run things differently.”

  “And the children?”

  “Dress them well and bring them along.”

  The party was held on a Saturday. Mr. Smith drew them in and straightaway he brought them through the crowd of people and up the stairs, saying he liked to give every guest a tour of the entire house. In t
he upstairs hallway he pointed to a rope that hung down from the ceiling. “Trapdoor to the attic,” he said, and winked at the boys. “Save that for another time.” Then he led them through his bedroom to a balcony, which, incorrectly—though Elspeth knew better than to correct him—he called a widow’s walk. They stood there together in the cold night air, listening to the sounds below, and he said, “Isn’t it wonderful?” and Elspeth and her family all said yes, yes, it surely was.

  Back in the living room, Elspeth looked around at the fine wallpaper, at the strong furniture that he must have had shipped in. And the food! She didn’t know who had made it, but it was endless, and the lanterns, too. He had lanterns on every table. It was lovely, really, but then the strangest feeling came over her. Her eyes rested on all the workers and the children as though they were one moving sea. Everyone was dressed in their finest, everyone was smiling. She listened to the hum of their voices, yet she felt as though before her all of it had drifted into some other realm, leaving her behind. It was as though the people and their sounds were on one plane, and she on another, and even if she were to touch them she would not actually connect with them, not even with her own children.

  Air.

  She looked quickly around the party, then darted back up those stairs, through John Smith’s bedroom and back to the balcony. It was a clear night and she stood there leaning over the edge, gazing upward at the stars. She didn’t hear him approach. Suddenly, though, his voice was in her ear.

  “Enjoying the night?” he said. Had John Smith followed her here, or had he simply happened to find her? She realized as she stood there that there was still a piece of cheese in her mouth, and it was much too large to chew politely. A daughter of a high-up millworker was playing the piano below, a Christmas song Elspeth recognized but never had learned the words to.

  Finally she finished chewing and she breathed deeply and she came back to herself just a little bit. She said, “Why is it that only the girls learn?”

  Clearly she was referring to the piano; clearly he understood that. But he said, “Is there something you would like to learn?”

  “I don’t know your meaning,” she said quickly. She did, though. She knew it right through. It was a good scene. She would write it down: the party below them something separate, the house and guests inside a snow globe. Or they themselves inside one, just the two of them. The moon full (which was not the truth, it was only about halfway there, but she would write it that way) and shockingly round and close. It would be snowing thick, perfect downy flakes. She would hold her hand out off the porch and catch one and show it to him.

  She would write her sister about him, too. Maybe.

  He said, “I get so tired.”

  That was it. With that comment, the fantasy passed. Right away she realized. Her husband—there was a man who got tired. This man, his big paycheck, his childless, warm house besides—she’d liked him better before he’d opened up to her.

  She said, “I’m sure you do.”

  In the coming days, she would go over and over that phrase. She would lose sleep over it. She would say it aloud when no one was listening, say it in a thousand different tones. I’m sure you do. I’m sure you do. I’m sure you do. Had her meaning been so obvious?

  He said, “You watch yourself, missy.”

  No one had ever called her that before. Of course, that too could be taken a few different ways. Missy. He could still be flirting. She could just giggle in return.

  She did.

  He said, “A hundred men could do what your husband does. A woman could. I’ve eighteen women do already.”

  She didn’t know enough about her husband’s work to know if that was true or not, but she feared it was. Her husband had never been called a machinist, always just a mill hand. She knew he worked the throstle, but now she found herself deeply ashamed to not know exactly what that meant. She turned away from him. She would head back into the party, would sit in a corner with her ankles crossed and her hands on her lap, and she wouldn’t say a thing until it was time to leave. And then only, “Children, come along.”

  “You think you’re something,” he said to her before she made it in.

  Was that so obvious, too? She did think she was something. She thought she was ages smarter than he was, ages smarter than most of the men around here, in fact. She would have liked to say so. Instead, only, “It’s a fine party.”

  No, actually, the terrible truth, she had also said this: “That’s right. I do.” She said it, and then she looked right at him, right into his eyes. A challenge. He laughed in her face.

  Her only hope, at the end of it, was that he was the sort of drinker who wouldn’t remember in the morning. That night she asked her husband, “Was it whiskey?” but he didn’t even know, he had drunk only the cider from Mr. Bartlett that they’d brought along. Unsure what to make of what had happened, for nearly a week she fiddled around the house, anxious over what to do. Even her boys asked her if she wasn’t feeling all right. But then, finally, after her husband’s full week’s work, she calmed. Decided it was nothing.

  Until, on Monday night: “Mr. Smith says I’m to take three days off. Says I’m not needed.”

  She set right to work after that. In her mind she asked her sister what she ought to do, and on her own she decided that the thing to do was show him that she was nothing more than a woman in a house. She made the rolls, she made the roast. She packaged it all up in the basket and went to deliver it.

  “Still trying to buy your husband a better job?”

  He brushed his hand against her cheek when he said that. At first she thought he meant with the food. Buy a job by offering food and kindness. It wasn’t until she was on the way home that she realized he was talking about another kind of comfort. How could she have been such a fool?

  * * *

  —

  At night she thought:

  Would he really try to do it?

  How far would I go?

  Could I do it?

  What if I don’t?

  What if I do?

  What if he made me?

  Is there a way, in all of this, to get back to my own country?

  And then back to the beginning of all the questions.

  * * *

  —

  On January 7, 1852, Mr. Bartlett reminded her of the date. The lunar eclipse! She had written to her sister months in advance to tell her of the event, but now she had nearly missed it with all her worry. She spent the afternoon preparing a picnic. Even her husband would come along. They gathered blankets and layered on all their clothes and stocked the fire and finally at eight o’clock the five of them set out into the cold, the snow creaking beneath their steps. The shadow had already begun to appear on the moon’s edge. Their neighbor was in the field waiting with tea and cookies. They huddled up next to him and sank back in the snow, awed as their world shrank and the shadow grew. Elspeth would hold that feeling in the days to come, that sure knowledge that she could leave her body, that she could rise right up and meet her sister—who, somewhere, shared this very same moment and vision—and that in this way the two of them could float, held together by nothing but that vast sky.

  * * *

  —

  The temperature hadn’t yet plunged on the day she decided to quit letting her foolish mind get away from her, to quit imagining that any one thing John Smith said or did signified any other, and to just grab the courage to deliver another meal and make it all all right and be done with it. Turkey, squash, rolls, an apple pie. She packed it up and on the way through the woods she practiced her speech. It was difficult for me, when I first arrived. And you without a wife! My husband and I would like to help you in any way we might. She knocked.

  “Elspeth!”

  “Hello, sir.”

  “Do come in. You haven’t brought more food for me, have you?
You spoil me, dear Elspeth.”

  “It was difficult for me, when I first arrived in this land. And you without a wife!”

  He cut her off then. Or his look did. A strange passage of transparent cold ran through him as clearly as if all the lights of the world had been put out. He said, “I’ve just been going through some things. Won’t you follow me upstairs? I’ve got the oddest old vase, Elspeth. It was my mother’s. It’s just up in the attic, I’ve stored all my extra things there, and just now I’m wondering how old the vase is.”

  Had he ever spoken so much? Or so freely? She couldn’t seem to remember. “Forgive me,” she said. “I’m sure I know nothing about that sort of thing, Mr. Smith.”

  “But you’ll come up, won’t you?”

  “There’s enough here for a few meals at least, I should think. If you need more, please do call on us.”

  “The vase is from France, I think. Fifteenth century? Sixteenth? I hear you like to school the children. Surely in all your reading you have studied some history.”

  “I’m afraid I know nothing about artifacts, sir.”

  “But you’ll come up, Elspeth,” he said, and so, finally, she did. She went up the stairs before him, and when he directed her to pull the attic staircase down she did, and then she went up those stairs, too. She herself pushed the trapdoor open because he told her to. She stepped in and he followed her and then he dropped the door back down. Freezing up here, and dark. No boxes, no vase. When he pushed her down she fell easily, because she knew it was coming. That day, she could have not even gone inside his house in the first place. That was the worst of it, at least for a while. She could have just knocked on the door and left the basket and disappeared.

  On the cold floor, she let it happen. Or that’s how it seems to her, in retrospect. Because why did she just lie there, practically motionless? Why didn’t she kick, scream, punch? She did bite him, at least, and hard, right on the shoulder. But what else could she do? She was too afraid to do anything else. Her husband, his job. Also, her life. Her boys who needed her. She should have known before. Mr. Bartlett had warned her. She should have known. He pulled that skirt right up over her body. When he discovered that underneath the skirt she wore her husband’s long john suit, he let out a vicious laugh. When the laugh was over he made a little joke of her dressing like a man and then he tore the wool right open.