* * *
Head bowed, I slunk out of the Goodrich house. Mama’s expression fueled my shame all the way home. And as the week passed, whenever I recollected my rudeness and how readily Mr. Long and my mother had corrected it, the shame flared.
It was sufficiently excruciating to compel me to avoid everyone. I skulked outside as often as possible. The banking-up season had begun, and the minute I realized Papa was shouldering the sides of the house with proper insulation, I seized the opportunity to help, wrangled armfuls of cornstalks across the yard, and arranged them around the house’s foundation, mounding the cover particularly high on the north side to keep out the worst of the wind and cold. And since the steady sting of shame quickened my labor, I finished in no time and offered to insulate the barn as well.
Shoveling cow dung along its sides was probably a fitting punishment for someone like me. Of course, what I really needed to do was apologize, particularly to my mother. That I also owed Mrs. Goodrich and her eldest daughter apologies was too painful and impossible to consider.
That week, remorse stuck in my throat and stayed there, every time Mama and I found ourselves alone. It also stopped up my windpipe and choked me when Mr. Long visited the farm and when I saw him at meeting.
Gone was the banter. Extinguished were the titillating glances and laden remarks. He didn’t look judgmental—just uncomfortable.
As for me, I still smarted. Even after I recovered from my mortification, I persisted in feeling teased. Exactly what (and whom) did Mr. Long desire? It infuriated me that I was in this loathsome position of wait-and-see. How lucky to be the man—to dictate action, to shape the future. If I’d held the power, I would have frankly confronted Mr. Long: Do you love me, Daniel? Yes or no?
CHAPTER TEN
Christmas passed, but my heavy thoughts prevented me from joining in on the holiday cheer. Where did I stand with Daniel? With Gid and his pioneer plans? I didn’t know. Nothing was clear.
As I nursed my woes, problems developed elsewhere, ones I had noticed but failed to address. Then, one winter afternoon, the troubles burst like horrid blisters. It was the first Tuesday in January. Rachel and I hogged the house with our spinning. Papa had bought Mama a superior wool wheel for Christmas, and my friend and I were making use of the new wheel and the old one, side by side. We matched our spinning, moving in unison back and forth by the machines, manipulating the thread in rhythm with the turning, singing at the pace of our measured footwork, while the great wheels hummed, fast and low.
Grace, her nose red with another cold and her small frame hidden under a mountain of blankets, sat in Mama’s rocker by the fire and watched our performance with pleasure. Whenever Rachel and I finished a ballad, she clapped, sniffled into her handkerchief, and ordered, “Encore!”
The day marked my happiest in a long time, though it wasn’t without poignancy. Rachel and her two cousins were leaving in less than a week to embark on their frontier journey. I’d miss her. Our singing didn’t just help me forget the catastrophe at the Goodrich house, now more than a month past; as always, it made labor—even the most tedious chore—fun. I was very conscious of the gracefulness of our joint spinning, how our gliding steps, advancing and retreating, might have been the orchestrations of an ancient dance. We partnered our instruments with an ease born of practice, our left hands controlling the yarn while our right hands mastered the wheels.
At the end of a sorrowful duet mourning the death of Sweetie Abigail, Grace sneezed and said hoarsely, “Do ‘American Taxation’ next.”
I looped the yarn and eyed her skeptically. With the wheel’s soft wail, spinning lent itself to more plaintive songs. “Are you sure? It’s not a very touching tune.”
She blew her nose. “I like it.”
Rachel laughed and started: “‘While I rehearse my story, Americans give ear; of Britain’s fading glory, you presently shall hear. I’ll give a true relation—attend to what I say—concerning the taxation of North America. Oh—’”
I was just joining in on the chorus when the door opened and cut short our music.
In a wind-whipped cloud of snow and with the thuds of stomping boots, Mama, the Welds brothers, Matthew, Papa, and Gideon entered the house. Despite the flurry of their entrance, none of them spoke. My mother, red-eyed and drawn, greeted Rachel, Grace, and me with a nod instead of her habitual smile. Her mouth made a thin line across her face.
The door closed. A few seconds later it opened again, and Betsy sidled in, her eyes wide, her mouth puckered in round amazement, the very picture of intrigue.
A sullen din followed: quiet exchanges, the whisper of coats shed and then hung, the clank of the teakettle, the scraping of chairs across the floor. Only the Welds brothers failed to contribute to the activity. They stood silently by the entrance, their expressions decidedly uncomfortable. Robert ran a hand under the scarf at his neck and asked gruffly, “Ready, Rachel?”
“Just about.”
While she and I slid the wheels against the wall and safeguarded the yarn in the wool basket on the shelf, Mama urged Grace out of the rocker and nudged her in the direction of the loft. My little sister’s blankets trailed behind her like a princess’s train. She sniffled and coughed her way up the ladder.
Betsy collected the damp boots and mittens by the door. Under the guise of arranging them on the hearth to dry by the fire, she shot me an urgent look and whispered, “Matthew’s in hot water. The Welds boys know a bit about it. They wandered into the barn when Papa was dealing Matt an awful scold, then—”
“Betsy.”
She bit her lip at the sound of Papa’s voice.
He eyed her in exasperation. “I need you to go to the toolshed and look for the snowshoes I left there. Not the ash plank ones but the hickory splint pair I made last year.”
“Now?”
“Immediately.”
She struggled to keep the scowl off her face, trudged to the door, shrugged on her coat, and cast a final glance of hungry curiosity over the stiff inhabitants, her eyes lingering on Matthew. She huffed on her way out of the house.
Papa shut the door tightly behind her but picked up where she’d left off in gazing at Matthew, who sat slumped at the table, his head in his hands. It was a hard stare with enough disgust in it to startle me. A mild-mannered person by nature, my father had never, at least to my knowledge, looked so fiercely ill-tempered.
While Rachel laced her boots, Mama pasted a polite smile on her face and walked toward the Welds brothers. “Are you sure you won’t take some tea with us?”
“No, no. Thank you. We ought to get back before it gets too late.” Robert glanced at the window, still vibrant with afternoon light. Probably realizing the inanity of this excuse, he blushed and dropped his gaze to the floor.
Mama didn’t attempt to persuade them. She nodded slowly. “We’ll join the party seeing you off Saturday morning.” To Rachel, who was tying on her hat, she smiled tremulously. Real affection flitted across her face. “I understand your cousins are escorting you to the Genesee Valley. I pray you make a happy home with the Lintons. We’ll miss you here.”
Rachel and Mama exchanged a few words of parting. Matthew remained, still as a statue, slumped in his chair. My father continued to observe him with displeasure. Gideon stood by the fire, warming his hands and similarly frowning, for once apparently too distracted to try to wheedle a conversation out of Rachel and get in her good graces, despite the little time he had to do so before she left Middleton.
When I caught my favorite brother’s gaze, I raised my eyebrows. What was going on?
He shook his head.
Not until our three friends parted did Papa speak again.
He strode to the fire and delivered his words to the flames. “Your silence bothers me more than anything, Matthew. Given your propensity for gambling, I suspected you in the theft. But Daniel shouldn’t have been the one to verify it.”
Matthew’s hands fell from his head to the table with the force
of two angry slaps.
Mama jumped. Then she turned and, with her back to us, went about cutting salt pork and situating the slices in the skillet.
I didn’t belong in this conversation yet was reluctant to leave unless ordered to do so. Dreadful awareness, not idle curiosity, arrested me. For months now I’d kept secret the incident of the purse exchange outside the meetinghouse, though I’d often wondered if it was information my father deserved to know.
And now there was this. Theft. My misguided discretion dismayed me. Obviously, I should have told.
I waited with trepidation to learn what new sordid situation Matthew had devised. Apparently, it involved Daniel Long. My parents didn’t seem to notice me, so I took down the yarns and began nervously organizing them.
“You’re right,” Matthew finally answered. “He shouldn’t have. This is none of Daniel Long’s business.”
“You made it his business when you borrowed from him.”
“Just so he could sport me enough blunt to recover—”
Papa barked a harsh laugh. “At the card tables? No one recovers there.” His mouth twisted. “And don’t use your cant with me. I’m not Isaac Rush.” He spat the gamester’s name.
Matthew’s hands made fists on the table. “Plenty of men find their amusements in town.”
“Cruel, pernicious amusements … expensive games and cockfighting,” Mama said. She shook her head. “Wasteful.”
Matthew began an angry retort that Papa cut off with a sharp “Watch your tone with your mother.”
“I’m twenty years old, yet she treats me like a lad.”
“You act like one. If I’d known how often you took advantage of your free time on the farm to skip to the tavern and throw dice in hazard, I would have kept you occupied doing chores alongside Betsy and Grace.”
The insult drew Matthew to a rigid posture in his chair. “I don’t go for hazard. I play faro with perfectly respectable gentlemen, like Mr. Goodrich, Dr. Davis, and Mr. Underwood.”
“I don’t care if the prince regent of England sat at the card table with you. The fact is you’re not in their positions. Perhaps they have spare money to lose. Perhaps they can afford to plunge heavily, write vowels to pay up later, and talk all that nonsense about bad luck turning. Besides pin money, you have no coins to wager, not that belong just to you.” Papa sighed and more gently continued, “Farmers don’t make much money. You know that, Matthew. We raise our livestock and grow our food and take care of our own needs. If there are a few things we can’t manage, we trade with friends or bring our molasses, butter, and eggs to the store for exchange.”
Yes, the molasses and butter that Mama, my sisters, and I made and the eggs we collected—not to mention the feathers we gathered and the candles we dipped. I glowered at Matthew, increasingly irritated with his nonchalant high-handedness. How little he valued our labor.
Papa crouched by the fire and, with the poker, shifted a burning log, stirring into the air a spray of red sparks. “Money’s hard to come by. It took us three years to save that amount. Three years squandered.”
Matthew’s head had returned to his hands. He mumbled sulkily, “I planned to restore it—even add to it. It’s not like I wanted to lose. And I didn’t take it all.”
“No. I had just enough to buy your mother the new wheel.” He rubbed his brow. “Do you know how I felt when I pulled out the chest from under my bed two days before Christmas and found most of the savings gone? Sick. Physically ill.” He groaned. “I didn’t want to think about one of my own children stealing. Decided to put off confronting you until after the holidays, hoping you’d come forward on your own accord, confess, and apologize. It never crossed my mind the situation could get worse”—his laugh was brief and bitter—“until Daniel visited this morning and admitted you’ve been going to him off and on, begging for help in paying off your gaming debts.…” Disappointment crossed his face. “Oh, Matthew. How could you?”
A sob escaped Mama. Shakily strewing the chopped apples into a bowl, she shook her head again.
The sound seemed to penetrate Matthew in a way Papa’s words hadn’t. His own face briefly crumpled, and his voice was unsteady when he said, “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll pay it all back.”
“When? How? I wanted to purchase a new ox this spring at auction.”
Perhaps it was unfortunate that Matthew happened to glance at Gideon in that moment and become aware of his younger brother’s presence, or that Gideon didn’t bother to hide his condemnation, for Matthew’s expression soured again and he said, “Ask Gideon to cover the costs. He’s squirreling all sorts of cash away. Who knows for what?”
Gideon folded his arms. “I suppose I should be grateful you didn’t discover where I hide it.”
Matthew snarled. “All I’m saying is I’m not the only person in this house with secrets.”
Papa straightened, swiped his hands on his legs, and shot both sons a weary look. “After a year of furious whispering with Robert and Ed? Not much of a secret. I imagine he’s saving to follow his pals in their pioneering.”
Flabbergasted, I stared at Papa. When I recovered sufficiently, I turned to my brothers and found them still agape.
Under different circumstances, I would have laughed at this: the eldest and youngest brothers—so opposite in physique and nature—abruptly sharing dumbfounded faces as alike as twins’.
But Matthew’s deception, not to mention his defensiveness, sickened me and killed any impetus for humor. Who did he think he was, risking the farm, the whole family, for his entertainment? What a selfish fool.
Father’s perceptiveness, however, did surprise me. And I grew even more surprised when Mama bestowed on Gid a small smile, somehow understanding, sad, and approving all at once.
“You’re a hard worker,” she said to him. “It makes sense you’d want to try your hand at keeping your own farm.”
Matthew’s mouth closed with a snap. His astonishment gave way to a jealous glare. “More like try his hand at catching Rachel.”
Gideon scowled. With a sniff, he turned and said to Papa, “I’ll put off my plans, if you need the money for the cattle. It wouldn’t take me many months to recover.”
Papa patted his shoulder but shook his head, while Matthew made a mocking face and loudly scraped his chair across the floor in his impatience to stand. “No, I’ll raise the blunt.” When Papa’s expression turned suspicious, Matthew added with an angry blush, “Not that way. I work hard, too, you know. And if I can’t make enough by auction time, I’ll—well, I’ll work something out.”
“I won’t have you going to Daniel again,” Papa said. “You’re already beholden to him.”
He grunted. “Fine. He wouldn’t mind, though. The man’s practically my brother.” With a toss of his head, he indicated me. “Everyone knows he and Harry will make a go of it one of these days. And once they’re married, his farm’s as good as mine.” He flashed me a humorless smile, then said to Papa, “Dare say he’d give you an ox or two in exchange for our little wasp nest here.”
Papa grimaced. “Don’t be so vulgar.”
My anger came to a boil. I surged to my feet and clenched my hands. This angst, it had been simmering in me for quite a while, long before the occasion of these revelations, even before my humiliation on Sled Day. It needed only Matthew’s arrogance—his privileged maleness—to make my ire explode into words. “If you think I’ll marry anyone for your sake, you’re mistaken.”
“Why not?” He gave me a dismissive look. “You ought to feel grateful Daniel wants you. And you’re going to have to marry someone anyway. That’s what girls do. Even headstrong hoydens like you.”
In a furious hiss, I clarified, “It’s not my job to make your life easier. Haven’t you had it easy enough, playing your high-stakes games with the family’s meager resources, acting like a dandy instead of what you are, a poor farmer? What bacon-brained plan will you take into your cockloft next? Perhaps a new look to complete your posturing—some
shiny boots, a quizzing glass, a starched cravat?” I barked a mirthless laugh. “Wouldn’t those make you a pretty picture at the card table? Well, Sir Matthew, you won’t be betting me.”
The others stared, astonished.
My face felt hot, and a sound akin to a rain-glutted waterfall filled my ears. I stomped toward the door. “You’ll likely gamble away the farm one day. It’s a shame you’re the oldest and so terribly stupid. I wish I’d been born a boy.” Furiously, and with words I hadn’t known I’d buried, with a sentiment kept secret even from my conscious self, I snatched my cape off the hook, glared at the confounded faces of my family, and finished, “This isn’t Matthew’s land. This isn’t even the Winters’ land. This is Knowles land.” I stamped my foot. “And it should have been mine!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I whipped around to escape and stormed straight into Daniel Long. For a second, in my disorienting rage, I mistook his hard stomach for the door and patted it nonsensically, as if to find the latch.
He took my trembling hand in his and murmured, “Harriet?”
I tore myself free. “Leave me alone.” Burning and shaking, I stumbled past Luke, who stood just outside, slack-mouthed and bug-eyed. “What are you looking at?” I muttered, and marched across the dead kitchen garden.
Behind me I heard Mr. Long say, “No, stay here, Gideon. I’ll talk to her.”
A scarce snow threaded the air. Without acknowledging the man who strode steadily, unhurriedly, in my wake—the man who was my neighbor and sometimes friend and supposed suitor—I forged past the barn, where the cows mooed and Mitten barked like an audience mourning my temper, then over a stubbly field, and around the pond, frozen and snow-dusted.
As I clumsily scaled the stone fence, my skirt caught in my boot heel so that I had to teeter at the top while awkwardly unraveling myself, rending the flounce’s hem in the process. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Mr. Long get closer. My pulse quickened. I hurried over the rocky barrier, hem trailing, and continued my attempt at a dignified walk. Do not bolt like a naughty urchin; do not give Mr. Long or anyone else the satisfaction of seeing you turn fugitive and run away; do not admit to being wrong. In this situation, I wanted very much—indeed, desperately—to feel that my outburst was justifiable, if not particularly laudable.
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