The House on Primrose Pond

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  She sat down at her desk where the computer’s screen, left in sleep mode, now bloomed at the touch of a key. Music emanated from Jack’s open door; Calista’s door, which she had passed on the way in here, was closed. The house was quiet but vibrant; there was energy here—it was humming, it was glowing. It came from their conjoined rhythms, the boy’s moody melody, the girl’s silent brooding, her own insistent need to shape a story from the very best words she had at her disposal.

  She wasn’t writing the whole book in sequence yet; these pages were more like impressionistic renderings, placeholders to map out the feelings, the internal psychology of the characters. If she were truly writing this novel, she’d need to flesh out Betsey’s life more, as well as the times in which she lived. The religious revival known as the Great Awakening, the renewed war against the French that culminated in the 1745 siege of Fort Louisbourg in Cape Breton, the strict penal codes that were enforced on the local population—all these elements would have to be woven into her fictional account. But she was not there. Not yet.

  Once we were at the house, Mrs. Currier told Patience and Sarah to sit down and work on their samplers. Patience was very deft with her needle; the red and blue letters were perfectly stitched and neatly aligned. She had finished them all and was completing a verse from the Scriptures that ran along the bottom. When she saw me looking, she said, a trifle meanly, “You can’t read those words, can you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I can read them.”

  “No, you can’t,” Patience insisted. “You’re lying.”

  I looked at the sampler spread out on her lap. “‘Behold the day the Lord hath made; I will rejoice and be glad in it,’” I read. Patience’s hand stopped its darting motion, the needle glinting between her fingers.

  “How did you know what that said?” she said finally.

  “I told you. I know how to read.”

  “But you’re so little,” said Sarah. “Littler than me.”

  “My father taught me.”

  “Your father!” This seemed even more shocking to Patience than my being able to read at all.

  “Yes, my mother wanted me to learn.”

  “It’s not right in a girl so little,” muttered Sarah. But I could see she was just jealous. Her sampler was not as nice as her sister’s, but it was still better than the one I was working on at home, with all its knots, pulls, and uneven stitches. I’d had to yank out so many that the sampler looked frayed and old even before it was done. My needlework was not as good as my reading, and I was glad no one here could see and judge me for it.

  As the girls worked, some of the neighbor ladies came into the kitchen to sit down. The pies Mrs. Currier had been rolling out earlier were baking in the oven at the back wall of the big fireplace; an enticing aroma filled the house. Uncle Benjamin had told me it was too late to go back tonight, so we would be staying with the Curriers, and I was hoping the pie would be served later, after supper.

  Mrs. Clough, who owned the barn, said, “What a terrible thing. What will happen to the baby now?”

  “I expect she’ll be given a Christian burial,” said a woman who’d been introduced as Mrs. Brown. “Has anyone called the reverend?”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Clough said. “But we should ask. Burying her properly is the least we can do.”

  “More than her mother did,” muttered a woman whose big, puffy bosom made her look like a partridge. “To think she laid her under the floor of a barn—it’s indecent.”

  “That’s hardly the worst of it,” said a woman as stringy and lined as the other woman was plump. “They’re saying she killed the baby.”

  “Who killed the baby?” I asked. I had been listening to this conversation with growing horror, and even though I knew I was not supposed to interrupt the grown-ups, I could not help myself. I thought of the tiny pale face with its blue-tinged lips. I had known instantly that the baby was dead. But I had never imagined someone might have killed her.

  The women stopped talking and stared at me. “Betsey, that’s quite enough,” scolded Mrs. Currier. “It’s very rude to meddle in matters that have nothing to do with you. Girls, take Betsey upstairs, and, Patience, if you can find an extra bit of linen in my sewing basket, give it to Betsey with a needle and thread. Better for her to practice her stitches than to be a busybody.” I followed Patience up the steep, narrow stairs to the room above, my face hot with shame. My uncle had gone with Mr. Currier, or else he would have defended me.

  “That’s Betsey Pettingill, Benjamin’s niece. She’s the one who actually found the body.” Mrs. Currier’s voice—condemning yet filled with a strange, gloating joy—was loud enough for me to hear.

  Upstairs was a single room with one large bed on one side and two smaller ones on the other; a heavy curtain separated them. Patience went over to the side with the larger bed and knelt to rummage through a covered basket. Then she handed me a scrap of cloth and a needle that had already been threaded. I hunched down on a tiny wooden stool, but before I began I simply had to ask. “What were they talking about? Who killed the baby?”

  Patience glanced toward the stairs and then said in a low voice, “I think they mean that woman who came here to stay a while ago. Mother says she’s a distant relative of ours, but I don’t remember ever hearing about her before. Her name is Ruth. Ruth Blay.”

  “Why would she kill her baby? I don’t understand. Mothers love their babies.”

  “Not if the baby doesn’t have a father,” said Patience.

  “Of course the baby has a father,” I said. “Her father is Mr. Blay.”

  “Maybe there is no Mr. Blay. Maybe Ruth made that all up,” Sarah said.

  I looked helplessly from one sister to the other and back again. They seemed to understand something that had utterly eluded me. But I deserved to know; I had found that poor baby after all. I turned to Patience. “Tell me. You have to.”

  Patience and Sarah exchanged a look. Then Patience began speaking in a low, hurried voice. “Sometimes a woman is sinful and does things that a woman is only supposed to do with her husband. And then she gets a baby in her belly. When the baby comes and there is no husband, everyone knows how wicked she is. So she wants to get rid of the baby—to kill it, even—so no one will know what a bad woman she is or what she did.”

  “The mama did not kill that baby,” I said firmly.

  “How would you know?” scoffed Sarah. “You’re practically a baby yourself.”

  I started to cry, and used the scrap of cloth I was still holding to wipe my eyes.

  “Be quiet,” Patience said. “If you make noise, my mother will come up here and we’ll all be punished.”

  So I stopped, but I set the cloth and needle aside and said, “I want to lie down. Please, can I lie down?”

  Patience led me to her bed, where I slipped off my shoes and lay on top of the coverlet. Almost as soon as I did, my eyes closed and I slept—it had been such a long and exhausting day.

  When I awoke, the light was waning. Patience and Sarah were gone; they had probably gone downstairs. But I did not want to go down there. Not yet. I got off the bed, put my shoes back on, and went to the window. What I saw shocked me.

  There was a man—my mother would have called him portly but to me he was just plain fat—with a curled white wig and a waistcoat whose brass buttons barely closed, and he was leading a woman across the meadow. They were heading in the direction of a cart standing by the side of the road; the cart was tethered to a black horse that shook the great column of his neck, scattering the flies.

  Mr. and Mrs. Clough stood off at some distance, as did my uncle and the Curriers. Also the ladies who had been at the table, the partridge and the skinny scarecrow woman, as well as the one called Mrs. Brown. I did not like any of them. Patience and Sarah were there too, holding hands. Even from where I stood, I could see how somber they looked. How f
rightened.

  I sped down the stairs, out of the house, and across the meadow to join them. The fat man must have been the bailiff. And the woman he accompanied must have been Ruth Blay. She was slender, and I could see she was well bred. The dark brown hair that showed under her simple linen cap was smooth and shining. Her face was an oval, her eyes dark as her hair, and her lips thin and unsmiling. A spot of color in each cheek made her look feverish. She wore a pewter gray dress and a fresh white apron. When they reached the cart, the bailiff dug into his leather satchel and produced a length of rope; clearly he meant to bind her hands.

  “Is that necessary?” she asked, and the bailiff, who could not seem to look her in the eyes, shook his head and put the rope away. Then she stepped up and into the cart, ignoring the hand he held out. He climbed onto the seat and a light touch of the whip on the horse’s hindquarters set the animal into dark, fluid motion. Ruth Blay sat upright as the horse trotted off, her back erect, her face composed. Jump out and run! I wanted to scream. Go on now—he’s so fat he’ll never catch you! But she remained still as a statue as the wagon grew smaller and smaller and finally rounded a bend, disappearing altogether.

  That night, my uncle slept downstairs while I slept on some blankets that had been placed on the floor between the beds of Patience and Sarah. Only I did not get much sleep. As Mr. Currier snored loudly behind the curtain, Patience painted a grim picture of poor Ruth’s fate. “They’ll put her in a jail cell, pitch black and smelly. And filled with rats. Lots and lots of rats.”

  “Rats!” said Sarah. “I hate rats!”

  “And then there will be a trial. She’ll have to tell all about the baby—who the father was and where he is now. And if she really did kill it, she’ll be condemned to death.”

  Death! Although the night was warm enough, I felt bone-cold when I heard the word.

  “Yes,” Patience was saying. “They’ll put a rope around her neck and hang her until she’s dead. Or burn her at the stake, just like a witch. She’ll get so hot her blood will boil and her skin will melt.”

  I could not speak. How could this be possible? I remained in the makeshift bed, my body curled into the smallest shape I could manage. I wanted my mother then, and just the thought of her gentle brown eyes and kind smile made the tears come again, and they slid silently down my face. I must have slept eventually, but I bolted awake when the first pale light appeared at the window. I put my dress back on and smoothed my hair as best I could with my hands. Then I crept downstairs to find my uncle; I could not wait to leave this place.

  To Susannah, it seemed like the house was breathing, in and out, in and out, as she wrote. At some point, Jack stopped playing his music and wandered in to say good night. “Are you still working?” he asked. “Isn’t it kind of late?”

  “It is, but sometimes the spirit moves me, so I just have to go with it.”

  “I know what you mean, Mom. That happens to me too, like when I know I should be doing my homework or something but I just have to play a tune. It’s like all I can think about and I can’t stop thinking about it until it’s done.”

  He was so adorably serious, so seriously adorable, this boy of hers, that she just had to pull him into her arms and kiss his forehead. He didn’t seem to mind. She was aware of something faintly acrid in the way he smelled, and it struck her that it was a distinctly male scent—and that it was something new. She had been prepared for all the changes he was going through—the colossal appetite, the growth spurt, and the first suggestions of fuzz on his upper lip and his cheeks, the cracking voice. But this smell—it felt so intimate, so shocking, really. She was a little shaken, and sat still for several minutes after he left, just trying to absorb it.

  Then her eyes moved back toward the screen. She’d better go to bed now, or she’d be cranky and sleep deprived tomorrow. Her kids were old enough to get themselves up and out of the house, but she still believed she needed to be up with them in the morning.

  So even though she was tempted to look over what she’d written earlier, she knew the trap. I’ll just change one thing here, she’d tell herself. A word. A line. A paragraph. And pretty soon she’d be not revising but writing again, and then who knew when she’d be able to sleep?

  NINETEEN

  At nine twenty-five, Susannah saw Corbin’s black SUV pull up to the house. She’d been up before seven o’clock and had been ready to go for a while. She was about to step outside, but he got out of the car, walked up to the door, and rang the bell. So he had old-school manners. Nice.

  “Good morning,” he said. “All set?”

  “All set,” she said. In the gray morning light, he seemed so vibrant: blue eyes, black-and-silver hair, red parka. He was so attractive, it was actually disconcerting; she hoped she wouldn’t have trouble concentrating on her work. She deliberately looked away as she zipped her own parka and followed him outside.

  It was a cold day—what else?—and though the light was flat and wan, there were no clouds, and snow was not in the forecast. Corbin had turned on the heat so the car was warm, and as she slid in and buckled her seat belt, he produced two coffees and a bag of blueberry muffins.

  “You didn’t make these, did you?” she asked.

  “No, they’re from Johnson’s, on Route 4. Do you remember?”

  “The place that made bumbleberry pie, right?” But of course she remembered much more than the pie. Watching him swim and dive, that night when he’d touched her . . . Sitting here so close to him now, their legs just inches apart, brought it all back. “And they made ice cream too. It was better than the place in town.”

  “Way better,” he agreed, and then went quiet. Susannah tried to think of something to say. But the proximity of both his body and her memories of it was distracting. Maybe this had not been such a good idea after all.

  Finally he said something. “There’s been a slight change in plans. My meeting in Concord got switched to the afternoon. So I thought I’d take you up to South Hampton first. That’s where Ruth Blay went when she left Portsmouth to have the baby. I remembered that my friend Joe Kayafas lives near there and he has an eighteenth-century barn on his property. I called him and he told me we could go in and poke around.”

  Susannah was relieved; here was something else to think about besides the line of his thigh or the crisply drawn shape of his profile. She’d already mapped out the discovery-in-the-barn scene, but she could flesh out what she’d written with actual details from the place. It would have been better seeing it in the summer, to correspond with her description. But there was no reason she couldn’t come back on her own if she needed to. “Sounds good,” she said. “Thanks for thinking of it.”

  “There’s something else I thought of. Look inside the glove compartment and you’ll see.”

  Susannah extracted a sheet of paper, folded in half. She opened it to find “The Ballad of Ruth Blay,” a long poem published in 1859, almost one hundred years after Ruth’s execution. “This is by that Portsmouth poet Albert Laighton.” She’d seen references to the poem but had not yet read it.

  “Yep. My mother liked it a lot and so I knew about it from her. I thought I’d look it up to show you.”

  “‘Saw her clothed in silk and satin,’” read Susannah. “. . . ‘Dressed as in her wedding garments / Soon the bride of Death to be—’ Not too likely. But he’s playing up the drama.”

  “Keep going,” Corbin said. “Read the part about the horse.”

  Susannah scanned the lines and then read them out loud:

  Nearer came the sound and louder

  Till a steed with panting breath,

  From its sides the white foam dripping,

  Halted at the scene of death;

  And a messenger alighted

  Crying to the crowd, “Make way!”

  This I bear to Sheriff Packer;

  ’Tis a pardon for Ruth Blay.


  She folded the sheet of paper in half again. “None of that is true, you know. No final pardon came from the governor. And he denied her last request for a reprieve; the execution went ahead as scheduled.”

  Corbin said nothing. Well, that had certainly extinguished any spark she’d been feeling. Then he switched on the radio. But instead of music, he tuned in to listen to a local talk show.

  Traffic was light and Susannah looked out the window as they sped along. She had a clear view of snow – and ice-covered fields; the snow would probably not melt until spring. Then Corbin slowed the car before turning into a driveway and bringing it to a halt.

  “Why are we stopping?”

  “We’re here.” He turned off the radio.

  Susannah looked around. All she saw was a house and, beyond that, a barn. Nothing else.

  “South Hampton is a tiny town,” he explained. “Eight square miles and under a thousand residents.” He got out of the car and casually reached for her hand. The sexual current she’d been feeling earlier switched on again in an instant. “That’s Joe’s place,” he said. “And that’s the barn.” She followed him across the field where the snow was untouched and deep; their hands remained clasped.

  “I didn’t realize it was so small,” she said. “Is it very old?”

  “It was one of the first towns granted by Governor Wentworth after New Hampshire was separated from Massachusetts in 1741.”

  “So when Ruth Blay was here, the town was almost thirty years old. That would have been considered well established in the colonial period.”

  “It would,” Corbin agreed. “And it was a cultural hub. At one time, there were twelve different religious sects here.”