Wild Yearning

by Penelope Williamson

  Delia turned and met his eyes. She drew in a deep breath. “I’ll be honest with ye, Nat. I know all there is t’ workin’ in a grog shop, but I never set foot on a farm afore I left Boston. I ’spect someone’s goin’ t’ have t’ teach me how t’ do most everythin’.”

  Nat’s eyes wavered and his mouth turned down sourly. “I can’t pretend I’m not disappointed, Delia. Well, you must know the reason I sought a wife was to relieve me of the burden of caring for the girls and the house, and to have the extra pair of hands in the fields. It wasn’t … I have no use for a woman otherwise.”

  Delia wasn’t sure what he meant by that remark. No use for a woman otherwise? She felt empty, so very, very alone. “Perhaps ye can teach me the things I’ll need t’ know,” she said, hating the note of desperation in her voice. “I’m a fast learner.”

  “Perhaps.” Nat stopped the whirling wheel with the heel of his hand. “But I can’t teach you women’s things.”

  “Oh, Elizabeth Hooker’s a prodigiously good spinner, or so Caleb says. Maybe she’ll be agreeable t’ teachin’ me.”

  They looked at each other in strained silence. Then Nat cleared his throat. “It’s not much, but would you care to see the rest of the house? The girls sleep in the loft and Mary and I—” He cut himself off and a dark flush suffused his face. “That is, the b-bedstead’s in the inner room.”

  The doorway to the inner room was between the hearth and the linter. It was only large enough to hold the bedstead, a calfskin chest, and a small pine dresser. But it had its own fireplace, which shared a chimney stack with the hearth in the keeping room. The bed was painted a fanciful red, and the sight of it made Delia nervous. Nat, she noticed, held his whole head stiff so he wouldn’t accidently look at it.

  This room, too, had a small, narrow window, and Delia stepped up to it. She leaned her palms against the wooden frame, which was sanded smooth and felt warm from the sun. A noon mark had been cut into the sill to indicate the time of day, and she ran her finger along it.

  She saw Meg weeding among the regularly spaced hills of corn with their entwining bean vines. From time to time the girl would pause to glance back at the house, a mixture of anger and fear on her face. Tildy sat in the dirt at the end of one of the corn rows, playing with her doll Gretchen. Delia could hear her chirping voice singing: “Lucky Locket, lost her pocket …”

  Nat cleared his throat. “I’d like to be told the truth now, Delia. About Boston and the life you led back there.”

  She turned away from the window, facing him. “My da was a toper an’ I worked in a grog shop t’ support him an’ myself. Since I was fourteen. I might’ve done some things ye don’t approve of, but I never sold my body. Not once. I’m no whore, nor never was I.”

  He stared hard into her face, his brow wrinkled. “I think I believe you,” he finally acknowledged. “As for myself, I’m a good provider in spite of my gimp leg. And I’m an abstemious man by nature.” He waved at the window. “You’ve seen the place and I believe we now understand what’s expected of each other, so I see no reason not to go through with it, if you’re still agreeable.”

  “Are ye sayin’ ye feel inclined to marry me?”

  Nat nodded, his expression serious. “Aye, I’m so inclined. Delia McQuaid, will you consent to being my wife?”

  For a moment Delia simply stood there, unable to move, unable to speak, for this wasn’t how it should be. So cold, so meaningless. A voice in her heart cried out, Oh, Ty, Ty, why isn’t it you? so loudly that for a moment Delia thought the words had come bursting out of her mouth.

  She couldn’t marry Nat, not when her heart, her soul, belonged to another man. But Ty didn’t love her. And although Nat didn’t love her either, he did at least need her, and his daughters needed her. Especially Meg, poor hurt, frightened Meg. They needed her and she had never been needed before— except by her da, who only wanted money from her to buy the drink.

  There were other considerations, too. Now that she was here in Merrymeeting, how was she going to support herself? There were no grog shops to offer her a job. Ty had said he would send her back to Boston if she and Nat didn’t suit, but what was waiting for her there? A drunken, abusive father, a wretched existence that would inevitably have led to whoredom.

  But in Merrymeeting … Already she loved it here. She would be a married woman, a respectable woman. She would have a home and a family, a man to care for who would in turn take care of her. She could never have what she wanted most, Ty’s love, but she could have Merrymeeting and the new life it represented.

  There was one final consideration she didn’t want to admit, not even to herself. Ty’s cabin was right up the river, so there would be a chance that she would see his face sometime every day. All she had to do was walk up the river … and he would be there.

  “Aye, Nathaniel Parkes,” Delia said, and if the smile she gave him was not completely real, only she knew it. “I consent t’ being yer wife.”

  Nat let out his breath in a loud, sad sigh. “That’s settled then. I suppose the town will expect some sort of frolic so the sooner it’s done, the sooner we can get on with more important things. We’ll have the haying to do in a couple of weeks and there won’t be time for frivolities then.”

  “No, I suppose not…”

  “I’d best ask the new reverend to tack the marriage banns on the meetinghouse door right away. And I’ll pay Jack Tyson— he’s a fisherman, when he’s not trapping—to take his sloop down to Wells and bring back the magistrate to do the officiating.”

  Delia nodded, swallowing around the lump in her throat. Inside, she felt cold and numb. She’d hardly expected Nat to fall in love with her, but she’d have liked him to feel at least something. He approached the matter of their marriage as if he were acquiring a bonded servant and she expected him at any moment to produce indenture papers, asking her to sign away her life to him. But then ye are, she thought. Ye are in a way signin’ yer life to this man.

  “Ye’re not overly fond of the rum, are ye?” she asked in a sudden fit of panic.

  Nat had already turned toward the door, but he stopped to answer her in his deliberate way. “I told you I’m abstemious by nature. I never touch the devil’s brew.”

  Delia released a fluttery breath. “How long d’ ye think it’ll take—the banns and such?”

  He shrugged his rangy shoulders. “No more than ten days, I should think.”

  Ten days. Delia’s eyes drifted over Nat’s shoulder, to the bed in the corner. Ten days.

  Later, after dinner, when Nat went outside to hitch the mare up to the cart so that he could take Delia back to the manor house, Delia spotted Tildy’s hornbook on the settle by the hearth and asked the little girl if she could borrow it during the coming week.

  “You can take it,” Meg answered for her sister, a sneer on her face. “I bet you don’t know how to read or write, do you? Tildy’s only three, but already she knows all her letters, don’t you, Tildy?”

  Tildy looked up at Delia with wide-open eyes. “Sort of.”

  “She’s going to be starting on the primer next,” Meg said, then added when she noticed the color suffusing Delia’s cheeks, “My ma could read and write everything and she taught me, and now I’m teaching Tildy and I don’t see why Papa has to marry you. We don’t need you and you don’t know anything anyway.”

  Delia said nothing, but she took the hornbook with her. She thought of the shelves of books and folios she had seen in Anne Bishop’s “library.” Perhaps Anne would be willing to teach her how to read and write. She told herself she wanted to be a better wife and mother. But she knew she was lying to herself.

  She wanted to impress Dr. Tyler Savitch. And maybe she wanted to show him just what sort of woman he was letting slip through those magic hands.

  A noisy crowd was gathered before the manor house on the edge of the village green when Nat and Delia drove up. Delia immediately spotted Ty standing on the steps that led to the Bishops’ front door. H
e was shouting something, and several people were yelling back at him.

  Anne Bishop stood on the porch behind Ty, leaning against the wall with her arms folded across her flat chest. Delia skirted the edge of the crowd and ran up the steps.

  Ty spared a glance for her, but he called out to someone in the crowd. “You there, Agnes Cartwright, are you going to stand by and watch your five little ones get the smallpox just because you’re too damn stubborn to see sense!”

  “What’s happening?” Delia asked Anne. “Why is everyone so angry?”

  “Oh, Doc’s come up with some foolish notion that injecting cowpox pus into a person can keep him from getting the smallpox.”

  Delia remembered Ty talking with his grandfather about the famous Cotton Mather’s experiments. There had been a word for it, she remembered … “But they’re a-doin’ that back in Boston now,” she said.

  Anne snorted. “As if giving a body one disease can keep him from getting another one.”

  She had said the latter loud enough for Ty to hear and he did. He whirled around to growl at her, “You haven’t been listening to a bloody word I’ve said.”

  “My ears never do work right when somebody shouts into ’em.”

  Delia giggled and Ty turned his scowl onto her. “Where’ve you been all bloody day?”

  “With Nat. Lookin’ at his farm. Ye can do it t’ me, Ty. I don’t mind.”

  Ty’s eyebrows went up and he smiled suddenly. “That’s a rather suggestive remark, brat. Do what to you?”

  She gestured at the physician’s bag on the railing beside him. “The experiment with the cowpox. Maybe when everyone else sees I’ve survived it, they’ll agree t’ be lettin’ ye do it t’ them.”

  Ty didn’t hesitate. He opened the bag and took out his set of lancet blades and a vial of something wrapped in linen whose contents Delia didn’t want to think about. The crowd had gone abruptly silent.

  “Give me your arm, please,” Ty said. The anger had left him. He spoke softly to her now, and his touch as he lifted her arm was gentle. Foolish tears tickled her eyes and she had to look away from him.

  “I suppose it is better if you don’t watch,” he teased. “You aren’t the fainting type, are you?”

  “Not bloody likely.”

  “I’m going to have to puncture your arm a little.” “I won’t holler.”

  He grunted. “Good. I doubt my reputation could stand it if you were to let out with one of those God-awful yowls of yours.”

  “I sure hope you know what you’re doing,” Anne Bishop said.

  “’Course he knows,” Delia retorted. She turned to look at Ty, her faith in him showing plainly on her face.

  The inoculation took only a minute, the crowd watching intently. Delia didn’t even wince. Afterward, Ty wrapped a piece of linen around the small puncture wound in her arm.

  “You’ll actually get a very mild form of the cowpox disease so you might feel a bit of a fever in a couple of days,” he said. “And the scrape I made on your arm will fester some. Anne, why don’t you take her inside now and brew her a cup of sassafras tea?”

  Anne sniffed. “You and sassafras tea. You’d think it was a magic elixir the way you’re always prescribing it for just about every ill imaginable.”

  Ty smiled. “It is a magic elixir.” He stared down at Delia, then caressed her cheek. “Delia, I … never mind. Just … thank you.”

  She gave him a lopsided grin. “ ’Twas nothin’, Ty.” She raised her voice so all could hear. “An’ if I’m not dead by the end of the week, ye can be sure I’ll be shoutin’ yer success all over Merrymeeting.”

  While Ty had been inoculating Delia against smallpox on the front porch of Anne Bishop’s manor house, Nat had been waiting patiently for an opportunity to get Ty alone. He caught the doctor half an hour later, walking across the green toward the new parsonage.

  “I want you to tell it to me straight, Dr. Ty. Back in Boston, where you found her, was Delia a whore?”

  Ty paused and shifted his physician’s bag from one hand to the other. He didn’t know how he was able to meet Nat’s eyes, but he did. “No, she wasn’t. I know for a fact she wasn’t,” he said, grateful that he was able to give Nat the truth.

  Nat’s eyes clinched shut. “She told me as much and I believed her, but then I got to thinking … I could never bring a whore into my Mary’s house, and there are my girls to think of. So I had to be sure.”

  For a moment Ty felt an unexpected sense of relief so strong it made him smile. “Nat, as I told Delia back in Boston, if you two should decide you don’t suit—”

  “No, no. It isn’t that.” Nat sighed and pushed a hand through his yellow hair. His clear gray eyes grew suddenly solemn, like a winter sky clouding over. “It’s just that when I saw her getting off that schooner yesterday … she was so darn different than what I’d expected. I think I foolishly hoped deep inside myself that the woman you would bring back to be wife to me would be m-my M-Mary in the flesh.”

  “Nat—”

  “Ah, Doc, it’s not your fault. Or the poor girl’s either. How can I blame her for not being Mary? I think yesterday was the first time I finally admitted to myself that Mary is dead. She’s dead, Ty.” His voice caught on a sob. “But it’s just so blasted hard. God, I miss her so much …”

  Ty said nothing. There was such anguish in Nat Parkes’s eyes. For a moment Ty’s mind was overwhelmed with his own stark memory of his mother lying on a bed of furs, her life’s blood pooling around her, Assacumbuit—that proud, indomitable warrior—kneeling above her while the tears flowed in silent rivers down his chiseled cheeks. Ty had watched while his Indian father had wailed the mourning song and rent his flesh with his hunting knife, his blood dripping off his bronze chest to splash onto the still, white skin of his dead wife’s face…

  Ty wrenched his mind back to the present by an act of will, but he thought immediately of the woman on Cape Elizabeth, great with child and too damn small to be likely to survive the birthing of it, and her husband near beside himself with fear. A man would have to be a fool to love a woman so much that he risked such pain at the losing of her. Especially when every time he even acted on that love, he chanced planting the seed that could kill her.

  No, no, Ty thought, his resolution hardening. Better not to love so deeply, better not to care so much, than to suffer having the few things that come to matter to you in this life snatched away from you.

  “I don’t want you to think I don’t appreciate what you did, Dr. Ty, bringing that girl all the way up here,” Nat was saying earnestly. “Although she’s a mite young and I wish she were less … well, rough and ignorant. I know you did the best for me that you could,” he added hastily. “It’s just that Delia’s so different than my Mary. Mary was as solid, as easy to understand as this earth.” He kicked a tuft of marsh grass with the toe of his boot. “But Delia is like a will o’ the wisp. She’s constantly surprising me and it makes me…” He let out a shaky laugh, rubbing a big hand over his mouth. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I can handle her.”

  “Maybe you ought to postpone the marriage,” Ty said, the odd sense of relief he had felt earlier returning. “Give yourselves a chance to get to know each other better.”

  Nat shook his head, wiping out Ty’s strange relief with one gesture. “There’s no time for that. I got to get my hay in and the garden’s choked with weeds. Anyway, we wouldn’t be the first to marry ignorant of each other’s ways and peculiarities.” He clapped his hand on Ty’s shoulder, giving it a hard squeeze. “No, as long as you swear she’s no whore, then there’s no reason to wait. In fact, I’m on my way to see the Reverend Hooker now, to have him post the banns.”

  Ty stood in the middle of the Merrymeeting green and watched Nathaniel Parkes drive away in his cart. He gave a short, bitter laugh. Two days ago she had said she loved him. Now she was agreeing to marry another man, and wasn’t that just typical of a woman. They all felt compelled to be married, and it did
n’t matter a hoot who the man was as long as he had a strong back and was on the young side of sixty.

  Still, Delia sure as hell could have waited a while longer before saying yes to Nat Parkes, at least long enough for him to decide … to decide what? Did he—no, by God, he didn’t love her. It was only her body he craved. She wanted a husband and the last thing in this world he wanted was a wife. What he wanted was simple enough. He wanted her to share his bed for one sweet summer. One sweet summer, that was all. No marriage, no babies, no love everlasting.

  He turned and, looking back toward the manor house, thought he saw a curtain move in one of the upstairs windows. He was sure it was Delia.

  Damn you, Delia, he cried out to her silently. Why won’t you let me go?

  Delia’s dark head was bent over a slate that rested on her thighs, and the chalk squeaked across the stone as she wrote. Anne Bishop paused within the doorway of the veranda to look at the girl, a smile softening the harsh lines of her face.

  After a moment, she came to stand behind Delia, peering over her shoulder. Delia held the slate out so they both could see it better. “I’ve been writing my name,” she said. “And yours and the colonel’s as well.”

  “And Tyler Savitch’s too, I see.”

  Bright color flooded Delia’s cheeks and she hurriedly wiped the slate clean with a wet rag. When she finished, she turned on the bench and smiled. “It’s kind of you, Anne, to teach me my letters.”

  For the past week and a half, Delia had been taking care to articulate her words properly, lapsing back into her old patterns of speech only when she became nervous or excited or angry. Anne felt a fierce pride at the rapid progress of her pupil; Delia McQuaid was a tavern wench no longer.

  “I’ll have you reading Pilgrim’s Progress by the end of the month,” Anne said, meaning it. The girl truly was as smart as the crack of a rifle. And Tyler Savitch was a fool.

  Anne walked around to the front of the veranda and looked out at the enamel blue bay. “It’ll soon be time for you to get dressed. Your Nat was here a while ago, making more of a nuisance of himself than a wet pup. I told him no less than three times yesterday that he wasn’t to come around here until a half hour before the ceremony.”