by Anya Seton
“Mama—what are you doing?” Henry shrilled, running after her, for she had left his room and already reached the landing.
“Go back—” she said. “Stay in your room.” But he saw she had no awareness of him; he darted into his room for his slippers, put them on, and clad only in his nightshirt, scurried after her down the stairs. He was a little frightened by her face, chalk-white and her eyes fixed and angry, looking like the picture of the terrible Egyptian queen in his Bible, but he had also an impulse to be near her, and he wanted to see the fire.
He slid out the front door behind her, and down the drive to Pleasant Street where she turned toward the town. On the street’s firmer surface her steps accelerated almost to a run, and Henry, panting, finally tugged at her arm. “I didn’t know you could walk so fast—” he said plaintively. “I didn’t know you could walk much at all. You’re always in bed.”
By the light of the half-moon overhead, he saw her lips move in a bitter smile. She stopped a moment. “Henry—you shouldn’t have come. Go back!”
He shook his head. “I want to stay with you.”
She made an impatient sound, and began to run again. “All right, but I can’t look out for you. Papa’s in danger. You’ll have to rely on yourself.” He accepted this as fair, and was silent.
They crossed the railroad tracks near the little Devereux depot and now they were joined on the road by other hurrying figures. Hesper’s breath came harshly through her nostrils, her heart hammered against her ribs, but she did not feel her body. Her feet moved of themselves, sure and fast.
As they neared the town, the glare ahead of them grew lurid, and the air resounded with a dull roaring. The church bells clanged incessantly. Then from behind them up the road they heard quicker, sharper bells, and the approaching thunder of horses’ hooves. Hesper and Henry ran for the side of the road with the dozen other men and women who were heading toward the fire. “Gorm—” cried a man, near Hesper. “They’ve telegraphed for the Salem steamers, fire must be bad.” Salem’s red fire engines streaked by, and the sparks from metal horseshoes flew up to meet the sparks that drifted down out of the sky.
They hurried on and reached the juncture with Washington Street, and here they were stopped by a volunteer fireman, who flourished a long pole. “You can’t go no fur-rther down Pleasant. Tur-rn bock—all on ye!” And he waved the old leather buckets with which he was trying to wet down the corners of the nearest houses.
The crowd hung back, gaping, all but Hesper. Ahead of them the left side of Pleasant Street was a mass of roaring flames.
“What buildings are afire?” cried Hesper, grabbing the fireman’s arm. He started to shake her off, then looked again.
“Why, Hesper-r—is it you?”
She did not recognize Willy Bowen, mate on the Ceres and long ago friend of Johnnie’s. “What buildings?” she cried again, shaking his arm.
“Morblehead Hotel, an’ the feed store, an’ ye can see for yourself, Glover Engine House’s caught, though they got the steamer out, but the Brick Pond water’s already biling hot and useless.”
“Is Porterman’s burning?” she cried with anguish.
“I dunno. I think it started there first in the back, but the east wind’s pushed the fire this way—wind’s shifting though—”
She shoved him aside, and ran down the flaming street. Henry tried to follow her, but Willy Bowen stretched out his foot, tripped him and seized him by the back of his nightshirt. “Oh no ye don’t, my lad! You stay here. D’you want to be fried to a crisp? Here, missis, you hold him." He thrust Henry towards a goggle-eyed woman. But Henry no longer struggled, he stood quiet by the young woman, staring with all his eyes after his mother.
Hesper clung to the houses on the right-hand side of the street whichhad not yet caught. Across the street the four burning buildings sent out a blast of furnace heat that seared her throat and eyeballs.
She held her breath, shut her eyes, and ran through the worst to the corner of School Street. Here the fire engines were clustered, Marblehead’s old hand tubs, its steamer, the General Glover, and Salem’s newly arrived steamers. The hoses writhed across the street, on the hand tubs the crews of men pumped up and down frantically; but even as she stumbled amongst the engines, there was a cry of despair while flame and smoke sprang from Pope’s Block across the way. The fire had jumped Pleasant Street.
She cared nothing for that, she saw only that School Street was not yet in flames, and though the smoke was so dense that she could hardly see its outlines, the front at least of Amos’ factory was not burning.
She ran toward it past one of the Salem steamers which was playing a thin stream of water on the smoldering Rechabite building. She ran to the foot of the outside stairs which led up to Amos’ private entrance, when a rough hand fell on her shoulder.
“Jesus, Mrs. Porterman! What in the name o’ God are you doin’? The factory’s on fire!”
She looked up into Johnson’s soot-streaked, haggard face. He too held a bucketful of water with which he had run from the nearest pump.
“Where’s Amos?” she cried. “Have you seen Amos?”
“No!” he shouted, staring. “Ain’t he with you?” He dashed the bucket of water at the building, crying to the nearest firemen—“Turn your hoses here, boys, for God’s sake!” But the Salem firemen were cursing the feeble water supply and did not hear.
“Amos is in there!” Hesper cried, pointing at the factory. “I know he is. Hurry, you fool, we’ve got to hurry!” And she started again up the stairs.
“Mrs. Porterman, come back! You’re crazy. The place’s on fire, I tell you. He wouldn’t be in there.”
Hesper reached the top of the stairs, and twisted the knob, throwing her shoulder against the door. It would not yield. She looked wildly back at Johnson’s blank face. She saw him clutch at her again, thinking her truly crazed, and she raised her head and screamed “Help!” at the top of her lungs.
The Salem firemen turned, saw her, and came running. They swept Johnson ahead of them up the stairs. “Break it in—” she shouted, pointing to the door.
The men lunged together and Johnson with them. The door cracked and gave. They stumbled into the dark smoke-filled room; through the open door the glare lit up a figure prone on the floor by the desk.
“My God—” whispered Johnson. “She’s right.” The three men seized the limp figure, and coughing and choking they carried it down the stairs and across the street to a clear space by the railroad tracks.
“He’ll be all right, ma’am,” said one of the firemen. “He’s breathing. Just overcome by smoke. Let him lay quiet a bit, but you better get him out of here soon. Christ—” he said, turning to his companion, “look at that depot roof, that’s caught too. There won’t be nothing left of this town.”
The two men started off running, back to their hose.
Amos stirred and moaned, as Hesper and Johnson knelt beside him. The foreman muttered, “Thank God, he’s cornin’ to. We’ll have to walk him out of here, unless I find someone else to help carry him.” He was now dazed, he had ceased thinking or wondering. Across the street he saw the flames beginning to lick through north windows of the factory. That would be in the stitching room, he thought, just about by them new boxes of fancy buttons.
“Yes, he’s coming to—” said Hesper. “But he couldn’t walk like this. Have you a knife?”
“Knife?” repeated Johnson, pulling his hypnotized gaze from the burning factory. He stared at the crouching woman, her hair, dark in the red glare around them, streamed down her shoulders to the ground beside her husband. Her green overdress was torn, and her left shoulder showed white through the rent. But her cheeks and hands were blackened like a minstrel show, he thought vaguely.
“Have you got a knife?” she shouted with a vehemence that penetrated Johnson’s daze. He fumbled in his pockets, and brought out a small clasp knife.
“Cut these—” she said through her teeth. Then he saw that she was
rolling up the bottom of Porterman’s trousers. He looked down and said “Sweet Jesus—” very softly.
Amos’s ankles were bound together by a solid band, made from turn after turn of fine, unbreakable fishing line. Johnson sawed through the lines with his knife, and the ankles fell apart limply.
Hesper started chafing them. “The wrists too,” she cried. A spark fell on her skirt and she brushed it off impatiently.
Johnson muttered while he cut through the wrist bonds. “But who done this? Who would have done such a terrible thing?”
Hesper said nothing. Amos stirred again, lifted his head a little, and opened his eyes. She slipped her arm around his neck, holding his head against her breast. “You’re all right, dear—” she said in a low, clear voice. “Amos, do you hear me? You’re all right.”
His body gave a convulsive shudder, and his head jerked back, pressing painfully against her breasts. He looked up at her. “Hessie?” he whispered. “What are you doing here? Your face is dirty.”
“I know,” she said. “Now I want you to stand up, see if you can walk.”
She moved from him, stumbling awkwardly to her own feet, regained her balance at once, and bent to take one of his arms, while Johnson pulled up on the other. Amos stood up swaying, leaning on Hesper’s shoulder.
As they stood there, one of the Salem firemen raced toward them. “My God, ain’t you out o’ here yet?” he shouted. “Get back. Quick!”
They obeyed him without thought, Hesper and Johnson pulling Amos with them, and their ears were deafened by a tremendous roar and crash.
A hundred yards away across School Street, there shot up a geyser of flame and burning brands and sparks. The entire north wall of Porterman’s had fallen in.
“My factory?” said Amos in the same startled questioning tone he had used to Hesper.
“There’s plenty more burning than your factory,” said the fireman. “We got the Lynn steamer now, but she don’t do no good neither.” He vanished again into the smoke.
“Come,” said Hesper to Johnson. “This way. Help me with him across the tracks until we get to Elm Street.” Her voice was calm and controlled. Amos obeyed it mechanically, limping a little but walking between them without support. He had as yet no memory of what had happened. The roaring and crackling and the crashing of walls behind them, the lurid red glare, the heat, the smoke that swirled around them and cleared again before puffs of wind, all came through to his oxygen-starved brain as meaningless confusion, in which Hesper’s voice was the only security.
“Where’re you goin’?” asked Johnson, as they picked their way over the tracks where some of the ties were already smoldering.
“Home,” she said.
“But you’re goin’ the wrong direction.”
“No. I mean my home.”
They turned down Sewall to Elm Street, and here the fire had not yet reached, though the sky was filled with flying sparks and small glowing embers borne by the shifting wind to sections as far away as Barnegat.
And now Hesper stopped, and glancing at Amos who stopped when she did and stood silent, his head lowered and his eyes fixed on the ground, she drew away from him, and said very low to Johnson, “I’ll get him home all right now. I want you to go back down Bowden Street, skirt the fire until you come to the western edge of it. Find Henry, and bring him to me.”
“My God, ma’am,” whispered Johnson. “Is the boy out in this?”
“He followed me, but he’ll be all right. Henry has sense.”
Johnson opened his mouth and shut it again. He stared at the soot-blackened, disheveled woman. She’s got guts, she has—he thought. Keeps her head wonderful. And then he remembered her condition. “But, ma’am—you ain’t strong enough to walk all that way down to the harbor—let alone caring for him... ”
She raised her chin and looked not at Johnson, but past him with a strange level look. “I am—” she said. “I’m plenty strong enough. I’ve more strength than I’ve ever used.”
She turned and put her hand under Amos’s arm, and they started to walk again. In all the houses along Elm Street and then Back Street as they neared the water, there were lights, and pounding footsteps and sometimes weeping. Panic-stricken men, women, and children rushed about the streets, dragging out their household goods and piling them futilely by their doors, and swarming the roofs with pails and pitchers of water, crying to each other that all the churches had caught, that the fire was leaping down Washington Street, that the whole town would surely go.
Fear and shouting and turmoil all around her, and yet in Hesper there was an inner stillness. The town will not go, she thought, not the real town. God won’t let the evil go that far. Yet even as she thought that, a deeper honesty rebelled. For suppose He did let the evil go that far and farther, if in fact He did not concern Himself with evil, what recourse then for us?
And it seemed to her as she and Amos came at last in sight of the sea, stretching limitless and calm in the gray dawn behind her home, the old hump-backed house which had endured so many years through good and evil—that she knew the answer.
CHAPTER 17
SUSAN, in her nightgown and flannel wrapper, was in the kitchen, heating water on the little cookstove for Roger who had taken a sudden turn for the worse.
She heard the sounds at the back door and moved towards it with the candle. “Lord a mercy,” she whispered, as she recognized her daughter and Amos. “My God, what’s happened?” She stared at Hesper’s streaming hair, the blackened faces, and the torn clothes. “Come in—set down, the two of you. I’ll hot up some coffee. Is it the fire?”
“It’s bad, Ma,” said Hesper quietly. “All the business section’s burning—” She glanced at Amos who had sunk down on the settle, his arms resting on his knees, and was staring at the floor. She spoke very low. “The factory’s gone.”
Her mother met her eyes with startled dismay. “That is terrible,” she whispered. “What’s the matter with Amos? Was he hurt?”
Hesper nodded. She took the coffeepot from her mother, poured out a cup, and brought it to Amos. “Drink this, dear. You’ll feel better.” She sat beside him on the settle and held the saucer while he drank.
He finished the coffee, and suddenly threw his head back, staring at Hesper. “It was Nat,” he said in a puzzled voice. “Nat Cubby. He was hiding in my office when I got there. It wasn’t Johnson sent the message.”
“Yes, I know,” said Hesper quickly. “Don’t try to talk about it yet.”
Amos glanced down at his big hands, and back to Hesper; he continued in the same groping voice. “I’m a strong man, I’d make two of Nat, but he jumped out at me so suddenly I fell down—he kicked me on the head.”
Hesper gave a soft cry. Now for the first time she saw a bluish bump above Amos’s right ear. “I’ll get arnica—”
He shook his head impatiently. “It isn’t bad. He didn’t want it to be, just stunned me long enough so he could tie me up with the fishing line.”
“Gorm—” whispered Susan again, staring at him openmouthed. “What was Nat trying to do?”
He turned his head towards her, and some of the vagueness left his eyes. He answered in a surer tone. “He was trying to murder me. He fired the factory and thought I’d burn up with it.”
“But why—” said Susan soothingly. “Why would he want to do that?” For now she thought Amos still dazed.
“He said Leah told him to. He said Leah’d been with him every minute of these six months that he’s been wandering around the country, he doesn’t know where. But then she’d told him to come back to Marblehead and deal with me. So lately he’d been making plans. He’d hide in the factory nights and sneak past old Dan. He made a duplicate key to my strongbox, and read all my papers. He knew exactly when to strike. He got into that shed in the back lot and laid a trail of kerosene from it to the factory basement. He knew he’d been clever. Nobody could ever’ve guessed he set it, if I’d burned up.”
“The wind,”
said Hesper faintly, “held the fire a little. It jumped first to the hotel, and the feed store.”
“Do you mean this is true?” whispered Susan, staring at her daughter, who bowed her head.
“But where’s Nat now?” cried the old woman. She licked her lips and her head trembled. “I can’t hardly believe...”
“I don’t know,” said Amos. “He said he was going home to Leah. He locked me in, he left me there on the floor, trussed like a chicken. I could hear the flames crackling.”
“Don’t!” Hesper cried. She jumped up from the settle, poured more coffee for both of them, then went to the sink and pumped water into a basin. She brought this to Amos with a towel. “Let’s wash your face,” she said, “and let me see that bump.”
He submitted obediently to her ministrations, and Susan watching felt a new amazement imposed on the horror of the story Amos had told. Hessie so strong and sure. And Amos leaning on her like a little boy, letting her care for him.
After a moment the cold water and the coffee cleared his head. The protective curtain of shock melted away. He stumbled to his feet, looking down at Hesper with full awareness.
“My God—” he said. “Your dress is burned. Hessie, why aren’t you home? How did I get out of the factory?”
“Johnson and I,” she said, “and some Salem firemen. I—I guessed you’d be in there.”
He shut his eyes a minute. Then he touched the naked skin of her shoulder where it showed through the tear. “You ought to lie down. Please go and lie down. Where’s Johnson now?”
“He’s back there...” she gestured with her head. “Finding Henry. The boy followed me, but I know he’s all right. Johnson’U find him. Oh, don’t go back—darling,” she cried, as she saw the expression of his face.
“Of course I’m going back. I’m all right now. Do you think I could sit here? Take care of her....” he said to Susan, and he flung out into the waning night.