by Anya Seton
The two women sat silently in the kitchen. The candle guttered and Susan snipped the wick. “D’you think he’s after Nat?” she asked fearfully.
Hesper clenched her hands hard together; a spasm twisted at her mouth and she sat waiting. Then her hands relaxed. “I don’t know—” she said. “He’ll find Henry first. Love is stronger than hate, isn’t it? But they’re both strong.”
Her mother glanced at her sharply. “You must get some rest, Hessie. I’ll find some sheets, we’ll make up your old bed.”
Hesper gave a strange soft little laugh. “No,” she said. “We’d best make the bed up in there,” and she pointed to the paneled door beyond the fireplace. “In the borning room.”
Her mother started. She put the candlestick back on the table. She came over to her daughter. “Is it so? It’s begun? Oh, my poor lass.” Lord, she thought, this is dreadful. Roger so sick, Amos and the boy God knows where, the town burning. She was very tired, and her fat old face sagged suddenly with a frightened bewilderment.
Hesper seeing this put her hand on her mother’s arm. “Don’t fret, Ma dear. I can manage. Help me with the bed. Find me a nightdress while I wash.”
Susan’s bewilderment passed. She saw the shining of Hesper’s eyes, the exaltation in the pale soot-streaked face. Aye, she’s buoyed to her task, she thought. We must trust in God. Her normal efficiency returned to her. She helped Hesper into bed, and tearing a sheet in two, fastened it to the square wooden bedposts so that she might have something to pull on in the pains. She went upstairs and dressed herself, at the same time telling Roger only that Hesper was in the house, resting in the kitchen bedroom. He smiled feebly, but did not open his eyes, and she was not sure he understood. His pulse was very rapid and thready. His lips had a bluish tinge. She shook her head, and came downstairs again to her daughter’s bedside. “How often are the pains, Hessie?”
“Not so often—about every five minutes, I think.”
“I’m going out to find the doctor. For your Pa as well as you. I’ll hurry all I can, but you’ll have some time yet.”
“Oh, Ma. The doctor’ll be at the fire. Don’t go down into that...”
“Don’t be afeerd, Hessie—I’ll get back in time. Here’s a pitcher o’ tansy tea. You sip that between pains. It’ll ease ’em.”
Hesper’s eyes opened wide, and to Susan’s surprise there was a spark of humor in them. For Hesper thought of the trained monthly nurse, and Doctor Flagg, and the special woman’s doctor Amos had ordered from Boston. What would they think of tansy tea?
“I’m not afraid,” she said. Her gaze wandered around the little loW-beamed room. “The house’ll take care of me—like so many others...” she added, but Susan had hurried out, leaving the door open.
Hesper lay quiet listening to the measured tick of the banjo clock in the kitchen, and the distant lap of water against the rocks. She heard the mewing of the seagulls as they circled over Little Harbor watching for incoming dories with their loads of bay fish. Through the small-paned casement window she watched the gray sky become streaked with rose. The strengthening light fell softly on the little pine dresser, the narrow rush-seated chair, the low, sturdy bed which had been built by Isaac Honeywood for his wife’s first lying-in.
I was born in this room, she thought, and Pa, and back and back. When the pains came she clutched at the twisted sheets, gritting her teeth and holding her breath, while the sweat pricked out on her forehead and along her scalp. When they receded she lay quiet again, staring up at the rich dark beams. On one of the beams, the axe that had hewn them had left marks something like an anchor. She stared up at the little anchor, wondering if any of the other laboring Honeywood women had ever seen it. Sometimes she raised her head and took a sip of the bitter tansy tea.
The banjo clock whirred and then bonged five times, and as though it had been a signal the pain leaped at her with a new frenzy; it bit at her like a tiger, twisting and shaking her shuddering body in its bloody jaws. And she heard her own voice from far off, mewing like the distant seagulls. “Oh God. Help me!”
The tiger backed off a little, waiting in ambush. She saw its cruel yellow eyes watching. Panting and throwing her hands before her face she tried to hide from it.
She heard a step by her bed, and a voice say—“Hesper!” But at first she would not open her eyes, thinking it a trick of the tiger’s. And then she felt a hand on her forehead and looked up, to see her father bending over her, his lips trembling, his eyes blurred with tears.
“Pa, you mustn’t—go back to bed—” she panted, and then the tiger jumped on her again. She clutched at the thin old arm in the nightshirt, holding on to it frantically.
She hurt him but he did not feel it. “There—” he murmured. “There, there, child—it’ll pass. I’ll not leave you.”
“Endure—” she whispered through her clenched teeth. “A sturdy courage to endure.” She did not know that she was quoting from the letter about Phebe; the words to which she had been forced to listen by her father had long vanished from conscious memory. But now against the agony and the mounting fear there was no other shield. Not sympathy, nor prayer, nor even love.
Roger could not hear her. He was far too ill to wonder how she came to be here this night. But as he had lain alone upstairs, drifting through a land of shadows, it seemed to him that he had heard her voice calling. He had not heard it with his dulled ears, but it seemed to him that her voice had cast out the shadows with a ray of brilliant light. He had seen the light shimmering throughout the dearly loved house, and he had known its source and followed it to the little room which had always been the gateway to the Mysteries.
He pulled the rush-seated chair over by the bed and tottered onto it, crooning to her as he leaned over her. “There, there—don’t, dear. It’ll pass ... Feeble, meaningless words. But as he talked to her, new words came, words such as he had never been able to find in a lifetime of searching. Their music filled the little room with the song of birds and sunlit winds, and the melody of the sea, and it seemed to him she listened. The tossing of her body stilled a little.
And then her mouth opened wide as though she screamed, but he heard no sound. She flung her arms back above her head, seizing the headrail, and then lay quiet looking up into his face. “Pa—” she whispered. “It’s born.”
He read the motions of her lips and a great joy shone in his eyes. He would have moved to help her with what must be done, but her face shimmered and slipped away from him. He sighed and leaned forward on the bed, resting his head on his arms.
When Susan and Amos and Doctor Flagg rushed into the kitchen five minutes later they heard the plaintive wailing of a baby. They rant into the little room, to see Hesper sleeping in profound exhaustion, and they saw Roger who seemed also to be asleep, but he was not.
Hesper lay for ten days in the little kitchen bedroom and she had great need of the glimpse of inner strength that she had attained to on the night of the fire and the baby’s birth. For there was not only the sorrow for her father, the desolation of the funeral, and the grief that she was not able to follow him to his last resting place on Burial Hill amongst all the other Honeywoods, but there was sharp worry about Amos.
For some days he tried to hide his situation from her, speaking with forced heartiness when he came into her room, fending off any questions by loud admiration of the baby boy who had a headful of dark curly hair and was heavy and strong as a little bulldog despite his early birth.
But Hesper was no longer willing to be lulled for long. On the morning after Roger’s funeral, she awoke to a determination born of increasing physical strength. She raised herself on her elbow and looked into the little pine cradle which stood next to her bed. The baby was still sleeping. She heard someone stirring in the kitchen, and called “Ma?” softly, through the half-opened door.
But it was Tamsen Peach, not Susan, who responded. Tamsen had moved down the hill from her own Barnegat home to help the Honeywoods as soon as the news of
the birth and death reached her.
“Mar-rnin’, Hessie,” she said, approaching the bed with a cup of steaming coffee and a slab of fried johnnycake. “Yore ma’s not down yet. Clean tuckered out, pore thing. How d’you rest?” She freshened up Hesper’s bedclothes, and poked an inquiring finger at the baby to see if he were wet, and her gentle serious face puckered with concentration as she changed him.
“Fine,” said Hesper. “Mrs. Peach, you’re awful good to us.”
“Good Lard, Hessie—” said Tamsen, astonished. “We allus help each other-r in a jam.”
I haven’t, thought Hesper, and she thought of all the years that she had avoided Tamsen. Quick tears stung her eyes.
“Now, ye mustn’t go grievin’ fur yore pa, child,” said Tamsen, seeing them. “ ’Twill tur-rn yore milk. Ye know he went real easy, an’ ’twas a stavin’ foine funeral. All the town to do him honor-r.”
Hesper nodded. She knew that they had all gathered round him at the burial service—the old Marbleheaders whose lines stretched back.nearly as far as his own—the Selmans and the Picketts and the Cloutmans, and the Tuckers and the Ornes and the Gerrys and the Brimblecomes, and others too, besides, of course, the Peaches and Dollibers. And this would have pleased him, no matter how he had shut himself off from them in life.
“I’m not grieving any more,” she said. “I know he was ready to go.” She finished her coffee and johnnycake, and Tamsen picked up the awakened hungry baby and laid him in her arms. He fed lustily with greedy gulping noises, and the two women looked at each other and smiled.
“Is Henry still asleep?” asked Hesper, and when Tamsen nodded, she added after a little pause, “and Amos?”
The older women hesitated, then she said, “No. He left here tor-rible early, just as Oi come down meself. Said he’d be bock later-r. Oi reckon he has a heap o’ worry from the foire.” She had not meant to say this, for Amos had warned her and Susan that Hesper must not be ■disturbed by any mention of the fire. And Tamsen had felt sorry for him. Outside of his wife’s room he had acted like one distracted these last days. Refusing food with which she tried to tempt him, forever flinging out of the house on unexplained business. He had not even attended his father-in-law’s burial, but had come in some time later haggard and silent, only to shut himself up in the Yellow Room upstairs which he was temporarily occupying. Of course he’d lost his factory, but plenty of others had done that too, and Mr. Porterman was a rich man.
Hesper shifted the baby to the other arm and said quietly, “Are there any newspapers in the house ? I’d like to see an account of the fire.” And also see if there’s any mention of Nat, she thought. During these sorrowful days when Roger’s body had been lying in the parlor, and she had been in the exhaustion of emotional strain and childbirth, she had not questioned anyone, but now she knew that she must find out what had happened outside the Hearth and Eagle.
“Well, there is some,” answered Tamsen reluctantly. She went out and brought back a copy of the Salem Observer, and the Fire Editions of the Marblehead Messenger.
Hesper thanked her and after the satisfied baby had been lowered back into his cradle, she began to read.
The figures were shocking. The entire business section in the new part of town had been destroyed, and more too. The South Church was gone, and the depot, and the Rechabite building and the Allerton Block, and thirty houses and twenty shoe factories. In fifteen square acres there was not a structure left standing. But there had, fortunately and remarkably, been no loss of life; one or two minor injuries, but that was all.
There was no mention of Nat Cubby, though the Messenger contained one pertinent paragraph to the effect that a jury would be appointed to investigate the origin of the fire, as there were some dark rumors circulating, and possibly suspicious circumstances.
There was no mention of Amos either except the listing of his factory as one of those completely destroyed.
She folded up the papers and lay thinking. Nat had caused a far greater devastation than he intended, even though he had not succeeded in destroying the one life which had been his aim. But if he should try again ... she thought with sudden terror. And what has Amos been doing these past days ?
Fool, she cried to herself, letting things slide again, hiding your head in the sand.
“Ma!” she called sharply, peering through the door into the kitchen. “Ma. Come here!”
“What’s all the pother?” said Susan appearing in the doorway. “Hessie, lay down!” For her daughter was half out of bed. “What’s got into you!”
Susan pushed her daughter down against the pillows, and retucked the covers, then she sat down on the bed, and surveyed Hesper with the grim amusement her daughter sometimes inspired in her. Susan had mourned deeply for Roger, she would miss him all the rest of her life. But she was never one to wear her heart on her sleeve, and now well rested, thanks to Tamsen, she had turned her face resolutely forward.
“Ma—” said Hesper. “I’ve got to know. D’you know what’s happened to Nat? Did Amos ever find him that night?”
Her mother’s face changed. She got off the bed, walked to the pine dresser, and mechanically straightened the wash bowl and pitcher. “You worrying about Amos?”
“Yes. I’ve got to know. How could I,” she cried with rising vehemence, “have been so soppy lying here in a sort of haze just thinking about the baby, and—Pa.”
Susan came back to the bedside. “You’ve changed quite a bit, Hessie, got a lot more spunk than I thought for. Now don’t go swinging the other way feeling responsible for everything. You had a right to a few days o’ peace. Yore body needed it.”
“But what happened, Ma?”
“Amos he forbade me telling you,” said her mother, frowning. “Still, I can’t see it his way. We all got to face up to things. Most o’ the harm done in this life comes from not facing up to things, seems to me.”
Hesper gave a sharp sigh, but she waited.
“Amos found Nat that night,” continued her mother slowly. “He first located Henry, just as you said he would; he found the lad with Johnson well out o’ the reach o’ danger having hot malted milk in Eben Dorch’s drugstore. That’s where I found Doctor Flagg, too, filling up his medicine bag with fresh supplies. I told Johnson not to hurry with Henry on account o’ your state, and the doctor and I started back down Washington Street.” She paused, glancing at Hesper’s strained face.
“Well, when we passed State Street, you may be sure I looked down it, and saw Amos as I’d thought I might. He was turning in the gate o’ the Cubbys’ house. I run down that street like a scalded cat, the doctor tearing after me, thinking I’d lost my wits. The door was open and I wasn’t much behind Amos clambering up the stairs. I screeched to him, but he didn’t hear me, he was opening doors and searching, and I prayed then...”
“Ma—” whispered Hesper.
“Well, we found Nat,” said Susan, with a crisp matter-of-factness. “Hanging from a beam in Leah’s room under the scuttle. He’d hanged himself with a strip from her old black shawl. And now you know what happened.”
Hesper’s stiff body relaxed, she sank back on the pillows. Thank God—she thought, thank God.
“I reckon he thought Leah told him to join her, like she told him to fire the fact’ry,” said Susan dryly. “I can't help feeling a mite sorry for the two of ’em, despite what Nat did. They was always like a couple o’ cockatrices in a hen-yard, an! I don’t know as they could help it.”
“Yes,” Hesper breathed, wondering how much her mother knew. Yes, there was pity. She had felt great pity for Leah, and now that Nat was no longer dangerous, now that Amos was saved forever from any more consequences of that weak moment, when he had allowed himself to be swung into an orbit so hostile to him—
“Aye,” said Susan, watching her daughter. “It’s a relief, isn’t it! I knew Amos was wrong. You’re a sight tougher than he thinks.”
“He doesn’t quite understand...” said Hesper.
&nb
sp; “He don’t understand Marbleheaders an’ that’s a fact. He hasn’t the sea and the wind and the rocks in his blood, an’ he hasn’t the fierce pride o’ being rooted with your own kind. But he’s a good man for all that.
“Yes,” said Hesper softly. “But, Ma—there’ll be an inquest now, won’t there—on Nat, I mean? And the papers, it’ll all have to come out, Amos testify—badgering him—”
Susan shook her head. “There’ll never be a word about it. The sheriff’ll hush it up. D’you think we’d give a lot o’ furriners the chance to gape and poke and pry into our troubles? Thing’s finished, Hes, since punishment’s now in God’s hands.”
Hesper nodded. She had no doubt her mother was right. Marblehead had never been one to let the outside world see it wash its dirty linen. And there was many another scandal that had been hushed up. No, the danger for Amos was past, she knew with devout gratitude, and now there remained only to reassure him and help him forget the horrible thing that had threatened. Oh, they’d have to economize, of course; the loss of the factory had been a heavy blow, but it might have been so much worse. Amos had other property, in Danvers and even in Marblehead, and he always managed. We’ll probably have to give up the carriage, she thought, and let Annie go for a while. Bridget and I can manage very well. I was getting awfully lazy.
Or maybe this would be the time to move from Marblehead; he probably wouldn’t rebuild here anyway. She thought dreamily of a little flat in Boston, or maybe some place like Worcester—anything Amos wanted.
She dozed a little until Henry came in. He was dressed very neatly in the black serge suit he had worn to his grandfather’s funeral, but all his flaxen sausage curls had been clipped off close to his head.
“Oh, Henry—” cried Hesper staring at the prickly wisps in dismay. “Your hair!”
“I cut it off,” said Henry. “Grandma said she wasn’t going to bother with all that dom-fool curling every morning, and I think she’s right. When are we going home, Mama?”