by Anya Seton
Hesper’s triumphant announcement in the Hearth and Eagle kitchen was not strictly true. Evan had not asked her to marry him on that sunlit afternoon by Castle Rock. He had said that he loved her and he had asked her to go away with him, but the assumption of marriage had been Hesper’s, after which he had been silent for a long time, staring out over the ocean.
Then he had said, “Yes. I suppose so. You must have marriage. You’re not the kind of woman for anything else, are you, my dear?”
He took her hand in his looking down at the long slender fingers. They were roughened by housework but their fineness of line to the slightly tapered tips and the oval nails always gave him pleasure. They were the hands of a voluptuous and forceful woman yet they had a clinging quality. The fingers closed around his own hand now with childish trustfulness.
Evan sighed and turned again to contemplation of the sea. “Hesper, there’s something I want to make you understand—if I can. I love you—your body. I’m a man and I want you. But there’s nothing in the world I can be sure of still wanting a week, a month, a year from now—save my work. It’s the only thing can hold me.”
“Oh I understand that—” she cried. “And I’ll help you. I'll go anywhere with you, I’ll never complain. I’ll keep out of the way when you don’t want me, I’ll pose for you—”
Evan shook his head, as he kissed her eager upturned face, his eyes over her shoulder rested on the easel. Ever since his desire for her had got in the way, the painting had been bad. Today he had not been able to work at all. The unfinished picture glared at him with accusation. Hesper’s figure had gone wooden like an oversized puppet. The flesh tones were pasty. The oncoming wave behind her had thinned to a curl of green tissue paper. She saw his expression and for a frightened moment thought it directed at her, then she understood a little.
“It’ll come right when we’re married, darling—” she cried. “I know it will. Though I think it’s fine now. The colors are so pretty.”
Evan wrenched his eyes from the canvas, his nostrils tightened and a harsh look came into his eyes, then suddenly he laughed, pulled her over against him, burying his face in her full rounded throat.
The wedding was set for the following week in the parlor of the Hearth and Eagle. The Reverend Allen, their pastor from the Old North, was to officiate, and there were to be no guests except Peg-Leg and Aunt Mattie Dolliber.
“Hole and corner” business, Susan thought angrily many times during that week. Hesper seemed to have no mind or wishes of her own, and showed nothing but an indecent desire for haste. Susan’s dislike of her future son-in-law mounted daily.
He had refused to summon his family or even acquaint them with the news. He had objected to a church wedding, saying that he had no use for churches and even less for community gatherings.
“No use for weddings either, I’ll be bound,” Susan had snapped, and Evan had smilingly agreed, with the silky insolence which she found impossible to answer. “You understand me quite well, Mrs. Honeywood. The marriage is entirely to please Hesper. I doubt—” he added, “that I’ll be able to do much else to please her, poor girl.”
“Aye—you never spoke truer. I’ll be blosted if I know what she wants with you! You’ve nothing in your heart but your brushes and your tubes and your grummets of charcoal.”
The derisive light faded from Evan’s face. “Perhaps,” he said. “I wish Hesper saw as clear as you.” Suddenly he looked worried and boyish.
“I’m not in love with you,” Susan muttered, but in that moment she liked him better than at any other time.
Roger was pleased with the marriage, except for the pain it gave him to lose Hesper. But he was moved by her obvious blooming—and he approved of Evan. He discharged his paternal responsibilities by catechizing Evan on his family, then writing to the minister at Amherst. The combined information was satisfactory.
Mrs. Redlake had been a New Bedford Robinson, daughter of a whaling captain and descendant of well-known Welsh and Lincolnshire lines. Mr. Redlake, though an outlander from Pennsylvania, came from good Quaker stock, was well to do and highly respected in Amherst.
A Marbleheader would have been better, of course, but there was excellent precedent for this match.
“It’s not unlike the romance of Agnes Surriage,” said Roger at supper on the wedding eve, pushing back his plate and beaming at Hesper and Evan with gentle benevolence.
The two young people looked up, Hesper smiling and happy as she always was now, and Evan interested. Susan flared up at once. “No more like than a mackerel and a lobster. Sir Henry was a lord, and Agnes was a maidservant, and to her everlasting shame she run away with him without a wedding.”
“Well, they got married in the end, my dear—” said Roger. “And it all began at an inn. The Fountain Inn, over by Bailey’s Head oil Orne Street,” he explained to Evan, certain of his attention to any bit of Marblehead lore, “it burned down years ago, but back when Sir Henry Frankland fell in love with little Agnes it was the chiefest inn here. Our place was closed at the time. That was in 1742, and my great-grandfather, Moses, was prospering.”
“A real love story?” asked Evan smiling.
Hesper looked across at him quickly, her heart contracting. Had she imagined a faint stressing of “real”? I mustn’t be a fretting fool, she thought. We’re being married tomorrow. He loves me. He said so. He’s different from other people. But I don’t know much about men. Only Father and Johnnie—A warm soft pain washed through her and receded. If this had been her wedding eve with Johnnie. We’d have been dancing, she thought, with astonishment, there’d have been people everywhere, bunches of flowers and maybe white streamers. There’d be a fiddler in the taproom. Half of Marblehead would be here. Johnnie had so many friends. We’d’ve danced most the night and been married in church in the morning. Then we’d have danced some more, and afterwards we’d have sailed off to Boston on Johnnie’s ship, like we planned so many times. Then after a while we’d have come back here—
She looked around the kitchen in sudden revulsion. Thank God I won’t be coming back here. I hate it.
She and Evan were going away. Not by boat; by train. And going to New York right after the ceremony. This was Evan’s decision, he wished to return to New York. He didn’t want to finish her picture by Castle Rock, he didn’t want to go on painting the sea. He wouldn’t talk about the picture at all. And that was wonderful, because all week he’d been entirely hers.
She sent Evan across the table a look of passionate love and gratitude. He responded to it, meeting her eyes with a somber intentness that made her heart beat fast and a shiver run through her flesh.
Tomorrow night, she thought, and so strong was the delicious panic that she murmured an excuse and left the table. She went out into the summer night hoping that Evan would follow her. But she waited under the chestnut tree for a while and he did not, so she walked slowly through the gate and down the street. It was soothing to be in motion outdoors and she had a desire to take final leave of Marblehead. Maybe, she thought with triumph, I’ll never see it again. Ma and Pa can visit me. And she walked past the houses on Orne Street looking through the unshaded windows at those inside and feeling sorry for them. Nellie Bowen with her parcel of brats and her stupid bewhiskered husband. Damaris Orne, swollen with her first baby, anxiously hotting up coffee against Tom’s return from the fire house where he spent most of his time. Did I ever really envy them? thought Hesper.
The streets were deserted, everyone was at supper, she walked rapidly up the hill by “The Old Brig” and the site of the Fountain Inn, feeling weightless and unreal. Ahead of her against the paling greenish sky loomed the Burial Hill and its surmounting shaft. How many times had she been dragged up those steep steps to bend her young unwilling gaze on the family tombstones and the Memorial shaft?
Now that she was leaving them, Hesper felt at last an interest. They must be included in the farewell.
She went first to the monument for drowned se
amen, who had been lost off the Grand Banks in the great gale of 1846. Tom and Willy amongst them. She stood looking at the monument in the waning light and trying to remember her brothers. But she could not.
She wandered down the slope on a familiar path to a cluster of slate stones. The Honeywood plot. Isaac, John, Moses, Thomas, and their wives. All lavishly decorated with skulls and scythes and angels. Her father had told her that Mark and Phebe must be there too, near by, but their softer stones had long since crumbled. The latest stone of all was of granite adorned with a weeping willow. Sarah Hathaway Honeywood 1754–1848. That was Gran. What a one she was for telling me stories of the past, thought Hesper. She knelt down beside a richly carved tombstone, one which she had spelled out often as a child.
“Melissa Honeywood, wife of Moses Honeywood. Died July 6, 1732, aged 17 years,” and the epitaph.
O Careless youth, as you pass by
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you must be
Prepare for Death and follow me.
This had used to frighten Hesper, but now Melissa and the three-day-old baby buried with her intensified the joy of deep, singing life.
I’m through with all of you, she whispered to them. I’m going out, free, away from you, with Evan. The slender gray stones seemed to gather themselves into an acquiescent stillness. The night breeze was rising and blew across Gerry’s Island to the Burial Hill. Hesper stretched tall, leaning against the wind. Across the harbor on the Neck the lighthouse took up its measured blinking. Below her in the town the huddled houses sprang one by one into an amber glow. Two skiffs rowed homeward into Little Harbor, she heard the clinking of the rowlocks and smelled the pungent odor of cod from the fish flakes on shore.
She turned toward the south and straining her eyes in the dusk made out the high-hipped and peaked roof line, the two jutting chimneys of the Hearth and Eagle. Was Evan still inside listening to her father’s ramblings, sparring with her mother? Why didn’t he follow me? she thought. She walked more soberly down the lower slope of the hill and back along Orne Street. As she turned the corner onto Franklin, she saw a very tall figure walking ahead of her.
Mr. Porterman again. Once she would have avoided him, but since his last visit her hostility had vanished. Amos Porterman, and indeed everybody in Marblehead, had receded to shadowy unimportance.
She came up beside him, smiling and saying—“Why, hello—were you coming to call?”
Amos stopped dead, tongue-tied as a boy, at the sudden sight of her, close beside him and smiling and friendly as she had never been.
He nodded, and snatched off his hat, holding it clumsily against his broad chest.
She put her head on one side, looking up at him through her lashes. “I do believe you’re sweet on Ma—calling so often!”
“Hesper!” He gaped at her unbelieving. After a moment he gave a grunt of laughter. “You’re a mighty different girl from what I thought.”
Her smile faded. “I am different,” she said. “I’m happy.”
He dropped his lids for a moment, and turned his head away. She began to walk and he kept step with her.
“Are you really going to marry that—going to marry Redlake tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” he said very low. “You ought to marry a different kind of man—one who’d take care of you—who’d understand you—”
“Fiddle—” she said quickly and flippantly, straining to see through the windows of the Inn—no light upstairs in his room, he must be waiting in the kitchen—“Besides, no kind of man has asked me till Evan.”
Amos drew a sharp breath and stopped again, by the picket fence in the shadow of the horse chestnut tree. He put his hand on her arm.
“There’s one asking you now—Hesper.”
Her head jerked back and her mouth dropped open. “What?” she cried—choking on a hysterical laugh. The light flickered through the leaves onto his big square face, and the flaxen white hair above it, and his eyes were looking down at her with a yearning and bitter sadness.
“Yes, I suppose it’s funny—but I mean it—” he said harshly, and he put his hands behind his back. She shut her mouth and swallowed, sorry that she had hurt him, and still dumbfounded.
“But what about Charity—?” she said, picking the most obvious of the many questions. She was excited and flattered and extremely curious. Underneath there was a beat of triumph. She’d tell Evan—no one else, that wouldn’t be kind—but Evan—he’d see—not come to him valueless....
“I can’t marry Charity,” said Amos. “I’ve known that quite a while.” He did not want to think of Charity—the increasing boredom, shame that he’d let her dangle so long—
“I love you—” he said with difficulty, twisting his hat in his hand like any gawky yokel, feeling like a fool. “I don’t wonder you laughed. I guess I didn’t know it myself—until—” Until when? The night she’d come in sparkling with that Redlake ? The night he’d met them on the wharf? but it seemed to him now he’d always loved her.
“I didn’t really laugh—Mr. Porterman,” she said gently, “it’s just I was so surprised, I never thought of you that—”
“Oh, I know,” he interrupted—“You never liked me even.” He put his hand on the gate and pushed it open for her. “Don’t look so worried. I know unwanted love’s a damn nuisance. Forget it, Hesper. I didn’t mean to speak.”
She gave him an uncertain apologetic smile. The scene, the sudden shift of relationship, seemed to her unreal. Impossible to believe in Mr. Porterman as a lover—or in anyone but Evan. At the thought of him a dark and tender fire ran through her veins, she walked quickly through the gate and up the path to the kitchen door. Amos followed because he couldn’t help himself. Only a few more minutes. Tomorrow she’d be gone.
There was nobody in the kitchen except Susan, who stood at the table stirring the bride cake in a huge wooden bowl.
Hesper said, “Here’s Mr. Porterman—” in a thickened voice, and waited until her mother had greeted him, then she edged up close to Susan and said very low—“Where’s Evan?”
Susan compressed her lips, glancing toward the visitor. She beat at the cake with vicious stabs, but pity for her daughter subdued the sharpness of her answer. “He’s gone up to his room, and locked himself in with a bottle of my best Medford rum.”
The girl winced, the faint rose whipped by the breeze and Amos’s startling proposal drained from her cheeks. Her eyes slid unseeing over her mother and Amos, who turned and looked out of the window pretending that he had not heard. She moved across the boards to the stair door. “I guess I’ll go to bed too—” she said. “It’s sensible. We’ve a long journey tomorrow.” The door shut behind her.
Amos and Susan heard the slow ascending footsteps as the stairs creaked. Their eyes met for a moment, and Susan saw plain the meaning of his expression. So that’s how it is, she thought—that poor fool girl, but she’s made her bed now, she’ll have to lie in it. She poured another cupful of floured raisins into the bride cake, moistened the batter with rum.
There was a moment’s silence in the old kitchen, filled by the banjo clock’s unhurried tick, then Amos rushed into speech. “I stopped by to leave a wedding gift for the bride. Nothing fancy, though it might be useful.” He fished a bundle from his pocket and put it on the table beside the mixing bowl. He ripped open the wrapping to disclose a pair of thin sateen slippers, and a pair of black kid button shoes.
“That’s mortal kind of you, Mr. Porterman. She needs ’em.”
“I think they’ll fit her—” he said tonelessly. “I’m a pretty good judge of size.”
“You’re a good judge of everything.” She tilted the bowl. The muscles in her stout forearm lumped as she beat the heavy batter.
“Well—good-bye,” said Amos, moving past the table toward the door. “I hope she’ll—she’ll be happy.”
“Happy,” repeated Susan with contempt. “A woman can do wi
thout happiness. But she can’t get along without two other things. Not a woman like Hes. She must have self-respect, and she must belong somewheres.”
Amos gave a tired sigh—entirely unconscious, nor had he any idea how well Susan understood him, until she looked up from the bowl, with sympathy plain in her eyes. She shook her head, and hunched her shoulders. “I’m right sorry—Mr. Porterman,” she said. “There’s naught so blind as a desiring woman.” She went to the oak dresser to find the big cake tin, while Amos flushed and muttered something. He went out to walk heavily back to the Marblehead Hotel.
CHAPTER 11
HESPER AND EVAN spent their wedding night in Boston at the Parker House. The brief wedding itself, the hurried farewells, the strangeness of the train trip to Boston, the incredible bustle and noise of the city, the magnificence of the hotel lobby, and then the first sight of their cheap attic room—all these were blurred for Hesper by nervous excitement. It sustained her on the surface of the crowding new impressions, and enabled her to minimize Evan’s attitude.
He was, throughout the wedding day, charming and detached. He made no reference to his disappearance the night before, nor did he show any overt effects from the bottle of rum which Susan had found empty on his dresser. During the services he gave his responses promptly and rather in the manner of an adult reciting nursery rhymes for children.
On the train this had also been his attitude as he pointed out to Hesper the sights along the way.
When the disdainful bellboy had shut the door on them in their hotel bedroom, Hesper looked at the sticky yellow varnished door, the single hissing gas jet, the lumpy brass bed and her excitement left her, to be replaced by a dreary dismay.
What am I doing here so far from home with this man who is a stranger? she thought, thus echoing the initial honeymoon panic of most brides through the ages.
Evan lowered the gas jet and sat down on the bed. “This room is ugly and smells abominable,” he said. “Sorry I can’t afford a better one.” But he said it without much interest.