The Hearth and Eagle

by Anya Seton

  She opened the taproom door, and was annoyed by the cracked jangle of the bell. Ma should have a girl to answer the door, she should in any case give up the taproom. Undignified. The very word “taproom” had a raffish, outmoded flavor—and with half of Marblehead gone temperance already—but Ma was bull-headed always. Hesper perceived however that there was nobody in the dark taproom, nor in the kitchen either. After a minute, Susan appeared from the parlor, and found her daughter and son-in-law standing uncertainly in the entry.

  “Well, I’ll be gormed—” she said, advancing towards them across the floorboards. “If it ant Hes and Amos. I didn’t hear the carriage.” Her still-keen eyes glanced through the window. “But I see it’s there.” She surveyed Hesper, noting the modish hat, the best embroidered mantle and the parasol. “So you’ve perked up enough to venture out, have you!”

  Of course Ma would use that tone. Never had a day’s illness in her life. Seventy she was now, and still the picture of stout health.

  “I’m feeling better—” said Hesper coldly. “We came to see if you and Pa would like to drive over to the Point o’ Neck and watch the regatta.”

  “Oh—” answered her mother after a moment. “Aye, the regatta. ’Twas kindly meant of you both. But Roger he’s still ailing, his heart’s not so good, he’s resting upstairs—and I’ve company.”

  “We’ll be getting on—we won’t disturb you then—” said Hesper quickly, hurt by her mother’s attitude. Susan had been standing with her back to the parlor door in an unmistakably defensive manner, and far from showing gratitude for this long-delayed visit, the Porterman appearance seemed to be an embarrassment.

  Susan had no difficulty in reading her daughter’s thoughts. Her heavy shoulders hunched themselves under the black alpaca, she moved from the door, and the puckers around her mouth flattened into a grim smile.

  “It’s naught but Peg-Leg and Tamsen Peach—” she said, “and now you’re here you’d best come in and greet them.”

  Hesper glanced at Amos, and she saw that although the reason for her mother’s hesitance was now quite clear to her, Amos was neither •enlightened nor interested.

  Peg-Leg Dolliber, of course, was Hesper’s uncle, and he had been exceedingly outspoken in his opinion of Hesper’s two scandalous marriages; egged on by Mattie, he had loudly averred amongst the tight circle of old Marbleheaders that he for one washed his hands of the ■dom-fool gur-rl, and preferred to forget she was blood kin.

  The prospect of meeting Tamsen Peach was even more disquieting. It was not only that Mrs. Peach had been Johnnie’s mother, and that Hesper had always an uneasy impression that Tamsen looked upon Hesper’s subsequent loves as a betrayal, but also, rightly or wrongly, Hesper knew that all the Peach connection attributed Lem Peach’s death from consumption to Amos’s tyrannical factory system.

  “No—” said Hesper sharply. “We’ll be getting on, Ma.” She arranged the fringes of her mantle, and slipped her hand through Amos’s arm. He patted it, and turning to go was startled by the change in Mrs. Honeywood. The old woman drew herself up until she seemed taller than her daughter, her broad fat face assumed the sternness of a Buddha.

  “I said—you’d best come in and greet them, Hes!” she said, weighting each word. “You can’t go on hiding all your life, my girl.”

  Amos felt Hesper stiffen, heard her sharp, catching breath. “Oh come now—Mrs. Honeywood—” he said with a small awkward laugh—“that’s a peculiar thing to say. If Hessie doesn’t want to meet those folks, I don’t know why she should. I don’t want her upset.” He saw with alarm that Hesper’s face was flaming red, and she pushed his protective arm aside.

  “Who are those old folks to upset me—” she said through her teeth—“Ma making a stupid pother about nothing, as usual.”

  She shoved past her mother, burst open the parlor door, and swept in. The two people on either side the fireplace looked up in surprise.

  “Good day, Mrs. Peach. Good day, Uncle Noah,” she flung at them, standing in front of the center table and glancing down at them with an angry defiance. Her mother’s guests passed from a shared astonishment into two divergent reactions.

  Peg-Leg shifted his wooden stump, took his unlit pipe out of his mouth, put his mug of rum flip down on the hearth tiles by his chair, and exploded into cackles of laughter. “Jesus—” he choked. “Look wot the tide washed in! If it ain’t the high and mighty Mrs. Par-rtermon, fancy bunnit, sunshade ’n all!”

  Tamsen Peach said nothing for a moment. She had never been a pretty woman, but she had known deep love from husband and from her brood of children, and now at fifty-five her faded little face shone with a calm fulfillment. Suffering, poverty, and loss had left no bitterness, though they had extinguished all the laughter of her girlhood. She had never felt hostility toward Hesper, but she had never felt affection either, even during the betrothal to Johnnie. The girl had always been too self-contained, too deeply immersed in the egotism of youth to awaken response in a mother’s jealous heart. And there had been that, too, Tamsen had long ago recognized that she had been a little jealous of Johnnie’s love for Hesper. She looked at Hesper now, and saw her condition as Peg-Leg had not, saw the flushed defiance for the bravado it was, and she spoke softly. “Good arternoon, Hessie—’tis foine to see ye once again. And Mr. Par-rtermon—too,” she added, nodding to Amos who had entered with Susan and now stood uncomfortably by the door. Her gentle brown eyes expressed no judgment of him either. It was true Lem’s cough and the night sweats had got worse after he contracted to send all the output of his little shoe shop to Porterman’s factory, but Tamsen had never been one to blame. If it hadn’t been Porterman’s it would have had to be another factory, and maybe it was the shoe shops themselves bred the consumption, stooping all day long over the bench, and breathing in the chalk and smoke.

  Amos did not recognize Mrs. Peach—the town was full of Peaches, nor did he connect her with Hesper’s youthful love affair, of which indeed he knew very little. He bowed vaguely to her, and to Peg-Leg whom he knew to be one of Hesper’s hard-bitten, shell-backed relations, sat down on the edge of a chair indicated by Susan, and waited impatiently for Hes to finish off this unwelcome interruption to the day’s outing.

  This she seemed in no hurry to do. That curious flash of temper left her as suddenly as it had come; she sat down beside Dolliber on the sofa, and accepted from her mother a glass of dandelion wine. Soon the room thickened with Marblehead gutturals, even Hesper, whose speech was, like her father’s and most of the younger generation, nearly free from the burr and the peculiar transposition of o and a sounds, fell into a way of talking that he had not heard from her in years.

  The truth was that Hesper, having met friendliness from Tamsen, and no worse than ridicule from Peg-Leg, had felt a great relief and a desire to make amends. She asked after her uncle’s garden, sure method of restoring his temper. Peg-Leg was growing larkspur and cinnamon roses—“the Gawd-dom biggest roses in Morblehead.” He’d had to give up dory fishing at last on account of his rheumatics, but he wouldn’t sell his old dory, he’d put her in the front yard and filled her with earth, and grew simples in her, marjoram and rosemary, and mustard and wormwood and pennyroyal. The salt and the fish gurry that had sunk into the dory’s hull seemed to flavor the herbs and make them grow bigger than anyone else’s.

  “Have you tansy, Peg-Leg?” inquired Susan. “Mine is scanty this season, and I’d take it kindly could I have some to give Hessie.”

  Tamsen nodded gravely; tansy tea was well known to promote easy labor.

  “Aye—” answered Peg-Leg, “Oi have some. So that’s the way the wind blows.” He surveyed his niece with a kinder look, drained off his rum flip, and clamped his tough old gums on the pipestem.

  “Come, Hes,” muttered Amos fidgeting. “We’ll miss the race altogether.”

  She turned to him hastily, murmuring apology. She had quite forgotten the race, unaccountably soothed and sustained by chatter she perceived t
o be boring to Amos.

  “I should think you’d want to watch it too—” said Amos politely to Peg-Leg, “you being such a sailor, and it’s a fine day.”

  Peg-Leg snorted. “ ’Tis naught to me which one o’ them fancy boats beats fir-rst to Morblehead Rock, and ’tis not a foine day.”

  “Why, there’s not a cloud in the sky—”

  The old seaman gave him a look of amused contempt. “Weather breeder—it’ll star-rm afore mar-rnin’.”

  “Aye—” said Susan suddenly, “and there’s worse than storm in the air. Did you hear the ‘screechin’ woman’ last night?” She looked at her brother and Tamsen, and she asked the question as casually as one speaks of any disagreeable manifestation of nature—“Did you hear it hailing last night?” But Peg-Leg and Tamsen both started, frowned, and considered the statement distastefully.

  “Did ye, Susan?” said Peg-Leg. “She’s out o’ season. But mebbe ’twas boys imitatin’ her screeches. Oi had a tur-rn at thot meself, sixty years ago.”

  Susan shook her head. “ ’Twasn’t boys. I heard her plain screeching, ‘Ha’ mercy! Ha’ mercy! Oh Lord Jesus=save me!’ Like she always does. There’s bad luck coming.”

  Hesper knew she should laugh; Amos’s expression of bewildered annoyance was funny in itself, her mother’s belief in a shrieking ghost was funny, but she could not laugh.

  “What in the name of heaven is the screechin’ woman?” Amos demanded. The three old Marbleheaders turned and looked at him somberly. They had forgotten him.

  “Furriners don’t hear her,” said Peg-Leg in a grumpy voice, and he clamped his jaws again on his pipestem.

  “It’s an old legend,” explained Hesper hurriedly. “A couple of hundred years ago a high-born English lady was captured by pirates and forced ashore here at Marblehead. The pirates murdered her just up the street in Oakum Bay. Some people,” she glanced at her mother’s impassive face, “some people think they can still hear her screams for mercy.”

  “She screeches—” said Susan, calmly, filling Peg-Leg’s mug from a pitcher. “Sometimes on the night she was slaughtered, and sometimes when there’s evil coming to Marblehead.”

  “That’s roight,” agreed Tamsen. “Oi hear-rd her in ’73 two days before the town was strick with the smallpox, and so did many another.”

  Amos stood up abruptly, ignoring Mrs. Peach and addressing his mother-in-law. “I am surprised at a sensible woman like you, talking like that.” It pained him to have to revise his long-held respect for Mrs. Honeywood, pained him the more as this nonsense somehow reflected on Hesper. He had always soothed the disquiet occasioned by her father’s undeniable whimsies and fantasies by the reflection that she took after her robustly practical mother. Susan still further disquieted him by smiling tolerantly and saying, “You sound like Roger. He was grouty with me for saying I heard her, but he heard her too, despite his deafness. I could tell by the jump he gave and the look on his face. But he wouldn’t own to it.”

  “Of course not—” snapped Amos, reversing his usual position. “He’s a sensible, well-educated man.”

  Susan sat still with her fat mottled hands clasped on her ample lap. “Funny thing about Roger—” she said, in a saddened almost gentle voice. “He hankers after the past, sets such a store by past things—but when the past really comes through to him like it does sometimes—he’s afeared, and he won’t listen and he won’t see.”

  Maybe that’s true—thought Hesper. Her mother’s words gave her a strange shock. The past comes through, not only the evil in the past likethe screechin’ woman—but good too—like Arbella’s letter—the past always there, flowing beside us as we journey, like a river hidden by mist. It seemed to her for one second that she was close to both her parents, understanding their viewpoints, which were not opposed, as she had always thought, but the two sides of the same shield.

  She hurried upstairs to see her father, but she found him fast asleep, propped up against the headboard of the old spool bed in her parents’ room. His spectacles had slipped down his nose, the inky pen had fallen to the counterpane, and across his lap there lay open and half covered with his scratchy writing—the second volume of the “Memorabilia.” She kissed the top of his head where the pink scalp showed through the white hair. She took off his glasses, and eased the pillows under his head. He stirred and smiled a little, but his deafness prevented him from hearing her. Last she put the pen on the oak chest by the bed, and lifting the heavy volume off his lap, she glanced at the page he had been writing. First there were several lines in parenthesis. “(This incident refers to April, 1814, when the British frigates Tenedos and Endymion had been three days pursuing our Constitution which took refuge in Marblehead Harbor and was thereby saved, by Fort Sewall’s doughty cannon. I saw this myself, being a lad of eight, and great was my perturbation, since my father, Thomas Honeywood, was a seaman on the Constitution and amongst those Marbleheaders who piloted her to safety.)”

  And he had written one stanza.

  Old Ironsides, fleeing from pursuers

  Shelters in our harbor still.

  Adds one more glory to our story,

  “Marblehead is Marblehead, has been and always will.”

  Hesper’s eyes filled with tears. She shut the volume gently, marking the place with the pen, and she stole out of the room.

  Amos and Hesper left the Inn, re-entered the carriage, and drove over to the Neck across the causeway at Riverhead Beach. When they reached the squat white lighthouse on the Point they found a crowd of people crowded around its base. Though Marblehead youngsters were perched amongst the rocks, and the Portermans recognized a few acquaintances like the Browns and the Harrises, the crowd consisted mostly of strangers, the summer cottagers on the Neck, and excursionists who had not wished to remain on the steamers.

  Amos drifted off to speak to Mr. Harris, and Hesper sat alone in the carriage beneath her sunshade and watched the distant white yachts sail in past the stake boat off Marblehead Rock. Near the carriage there stood a young couple from Lynn. The man wore a blue-and-white-striped jacket with gold buttons, and a blue cap with a shiny visor and an anchor embroidered above it. He had a spyglass, and he informed his lady of the progress of the race, in a loud, confident voice. That was Halcyon coming first, followed by Magic. The young man was a trifle dejected, because he’d bet Ned two dollars on Latona, but Latona had run into trouble past Halfway Rock, and parted her port main shrouds, so she was out of the race.

  Hesper sat and perforce listened, but the sun poured very hot from out that cloudless sky, the violet haze on the horizon shimmered before her aching eyes, and the depression which had lifted from her that morning returned again. Pretty boats with pretty names, a charming spectacle to watch as one watched colored lantern slides of romantic scenery. But Marblehead was more than a convenient screen on which to project an alien spectacle, no matter how charming.

  She felt a sudden fierce resentment, jealous for the harbor as it had been once, teeming with the bankers and the riggers and the coalers and the ballast lighters. It was ours then, she thought, the sea and the town were united in purpose, integrated with each other. She looked out toward the fairy yachts, slipping now one by one into the harbor, their sails half furled and strings of rose and green lanterns festooned between their masts. From the Boston steamer there floated the delicious and sensuous strains of the Blue Danube.

  Get out—she cried to them all, go away, with your waltzes and your fairy lanterns and your make-believe races. You don’t belong here. And like the cat’s-paw of wind that skimmed across the harbor, something whispered in her heart—“And do you belong here, either? Isn’t your life, too, a pretty colored lantern slide?” But she scarcely heard the whisper, before it was gone. Amos came back, and they drove home together through the dusk. He was concerned because she looked very tired, and indeed she felt drained and empty. Her head ached now in earnest and she longed with singlehearted yearning for the moment when she might again slip between h
er cool lavender-scented sheets, and sip the sugared lemonade that Annie would have waiting.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE STORM prophesied by Peg-Leg duly arrived in the night and it blew and rained all Saturday and most of Sunday. Hesper spent those days in bed. She and Amos thought it wise to rest after the fatigue of the expedition; neither was there any particular reason for getting up, even on Sunday, for it had been years since she had gone to church. Amos was no churchgoer. Right after their marriage they had gone to the Old North, but they had not enjoyed the buzz of whispers that accompanied their appearance, and once it became apparent to Amos that the effort would produce neither social nor financial results, they gave it up.

  Except that Hesper ate her meals off a tray sloppily prepared by Annie, Sunday plodded by much like all other Sundays. She read Henry a Bible story, then questioned him on it. She leafed through a couple of Ladies’ Magazines, she played a hand or two of euchre with Amos. After dinner she napped and dreamed about the baby, seeing it as a rosy, laughing little girl. They were on a ship together, she and her little girl, the ship was Johnnie’s old Diana, but it looked like one of the Boston yachtsman’s schooners, and it was bound for a soft southern country far away where they were to live in a little white temple amongst a grove of flowered trees.

  She awoke from this dream, and lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain until Amos came in from a trip to the stables, and coming to the bedside asked affectionately how she was feeling.

  “All right—” she said, smiling up at him. “I was dreaming of the baby.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, taking her hand in his. “You’re not too worried, Pussie—about, well—your ordeal? It’s awful that women have to go through those things.”