by Peg Kerr
“You tempt me,” William admitted. “And yet...” He sighed with real regret. “I fear I must wrestle with the angels today and concentrate on my duty at hand.”
Jonathan lifted an eyebrow roguishly. “If you ride with us into the wood, you may then lift up your eyes to the hills, from whence cometh your help—even to write your sermon, perhaps.”
“Even the Devil may quote scripture, they say,” William replied dryly before he could stop himself, and then winced inwardly at his own words. He had not meant to be so rude. But Jonathan simply sat back in his saddle with an infectious shout of laughter that made his horse prick up its ears. “Oh, come along with us, man! Goodman North is vexed to the blood over another jangle with his wife and needs some cheer.”
“I little consider myself as competent to offer counsel upon the affairs of the heart,” William said with a small, wintery smile.
“Oh, indeed, I do not ask you to! Simply getting him out of the reach of Goody North’s tongue for a day will effect the cure.”
William’s mouth twitched. “I see. An act of Christian charity. How then can I refuse?” He rose. “Very well, I will join you. Give me but the opportunity to saddle my horse and pack a saddlebag.”
Within the hour, the four men rode out into the woods, with flintlocks loaded, primed, and at half-cock. Three of Goodman Ethan Hubbard’s dogs ranged alongside, noses eagerly pressed to the damp earth. Although the men kept a sharp look out for signs of small game and deer, not to mention Indians, their talk, as usual, chiefly concerned not affairs of the heart, but politics. “Of course Andros must be sent to England for trial,” Goodman Hubbard insisted as they rode. “Andros, Dudley, Randolph, and the rest of the villains.”
“Randolph,” Goodman Timothy North sniffed in a tone of deep contempt, and spat into a clump of ferns.
“Upon what charge?” Jonathan asked, just to be perverse.
The two younger men stared at him. “Why, he is a bloody traitor, that’s what!”
“It will be interesting to see how the committee of trade will treat the case,” Jonathan replied, a glint of amusement in his eye at the thought. “They can hardly censure the colony for casting out its governor, when they have just done the same with King James.” He ducked his head to avoid a branch as his horse stepped over a log.
“I do not dispute we have chafed under Andros’s rule,” William said. “Yet consider the difficulty of his position, coming in directly after the colony’s restructuring. ‘Tis not his fault the charter was withdrawn.”
“I wonder that you were voted to the council of safety at all,” Hubbard muttered.
“Unfair, Ethan,” Jonathan protested. “Reverend Avery wishes to see the charter restored as much as any of us.”
“But how can he defend someone who tried to sell us out to the French and the savages?”
“I simply say you must consider the evidence carefully before joining in the general contempt,”
William said stiffly. “I have read the depositions concerning Andros’s so-called betrayal to the French, and I find the evidence flimsy at best. Hate his policies if you will. I do not defend his overturning of long-standing land titles, for example. But beware false judgment based upon heated passions and wild rumor. That, my friends, works only to satisfy the Devil.” He stopped himself abruptly, suddenly aware of his own hectoring tone and the sullen look on Hubbard and North’s faces. Goodman Hubbard opened his mouth to reply heatedly, but North gestured sharply to interrupt him and pointed toward one of the dogs, which was nosing about in excitement at the foot of a small rise.
“Look. Blackear has caught some scent.”
The men drew rein to watch. A second dog caught the trail, too, and bayed, springing away with its nose to the ground.
“A deer, think you?” Jonathan said, reaching for his flintlock and checking his brace of pistols. North grinned. “Let us go see.”
Eliza had just eased the completed body of the first coat off the saplings when she heard the dogs, and the sound made her look wildly around in alarm. As the sound of barking and growls neared, she seized the coat and her bundle of broken flax and fled with them back into the cave. Trembling, she wrapped the coat around the flax and sat on it, against the wall. Through the veil of creepers, she could see an enormous dog bound up onto the rock, disappear back down into the ravine still barking, and then reappear with two other dogs. They clustered in front of the cave and raged at her, stiff-legged, and she flinched back, covering her ears at the noise.
Soon, the hunters had clambered up the rise and stood, panting, at the entrance to the cave, pistols ready in their hands. “A bear?” Goodman Hubbard said uneasily.
Cautiously, Jonathan lifted a swath of creepers and peered within, his pistol raised. As sunlight pierced the grotto, what he saw made him straighten up in astonishment. Eliza stared up at him, her eyes huge, elf-locks tumbled about her face.
“Not a bear?” William called.
“Tis a girl.”
“A girl?” William repeated, dumbfounded.
Jonathan put his pistol away and took a step toward Eliza, and she started violently. He could see she was trembling. “Call back the dogs,” he said over his shoulder. “They frighten her.”
Goodman Hubbard and Goodman North pulled the dogs away and made them lie down on the other side of the clearing. Jonathan cautiously stepped forward again, spreading his hands open as William peered in over his shoulder. “Do not be afraid, child,” Jonathan said softly, as if fearing to startle a doe about to take flight. “We are not savages; we will not hurt you.” He studied the cluster of feathers tied about her neck and dangling between her breasts, and then turned his attention to her face for a long moment, noting with admiration its clean planes and curves. When she leaned a little away from him cautiously, something made him catch his breath in enchantment at the grace in that small movement. “She is beautiful,” he whispered, half in wonder. He knelt down slowly at her side. “How came you here?”
Eliza, mindful of the fairy’s warning, shook her head, for she dared not speak.
“Who is she?”
Jonathan waited for her to answer, but she remained silent. “Can you not answer?” he asked gently. She watched him warily, but he smiled at her so kindly that the last of her fear disappeared.
“Perhaps she is French and cannot understand us?” Goodman Hubbard suggested doubtfully, craning his neck to see into the cave.
“But what would a French girl be doing in the woods all alone?” William asked, puzzled. Goodman North snorted. “I don’t know. What would any girl be doing in the woods all alone?”
“Has she fled an attack by savages?”
Jonathan, never taking his eyes from Eliza’s face, shook his head. “I do not know.” He tentatively extended a hand and touched the feather charm, and then reached out for her hand. “She understands us, I think, but she seems to be mute.”
At his touch upon her fingers, she opened her mouth soundlessly in pain, and he looked down in surprise. “What—?” The sight of the swollen blisters on her hands twisted his gut. He drew his breath in a hiss through his teeth in sympathy. “Come out into the light, child. Reverend, come look at this.”
He drew her gently but inexorably out of the cave and held her hands up in the light. William came closer to peer at them. “I don’t know ... some kind of inflammation, but not a putrid infection, I think.”
“Goodwife Carter would know,” Goodman Hubbard offered.
Goodwife Carter was the town’s midwife and herb-woman. “Aye, that she would,” Jonathan replied thoughtfully.
“What’s in here?” William said, his eye caught by the bundle of flax, wrapped in the nettle coat, on the floor of the cave. He stooped under the veil of creepers and went in to pick it up. A nettle leaf still clung to the end of one length of the flax, and his fingers brushed against the stinging bristles. He yelped and jerked his hand back.
“What is it, Reverend?”
Eliza, s
eeing what he was doing, suddenly lunged toward him, terrified that these men might destroy the coat without understanding what they were doing. By reflex, Jonathan’s arms seized her up short by the waist, and she strained and flailed in his grasp. “Hey, lass, hey, peace, bide a bit!” he exclaimed in surprise.
William backed up a step, alarmed by the desperate look in her face. “Give it to her,” Jonathan told him hastily. William put the bundle and coat into her arms, and she immediately stopped struggling. After a moment, Jonathan cautiously released her. She did not move, but simply stood, hugging her work to her breast desperately, her eyes wild and wary again.
“May I see what it is you hold?” Jonathan asked her gently. “Fear not, I will not try to hurt it.” After a moment, reluctantly, she relaxed her grip and allowed him to unfold the coat enough to see its shape. “By all that’s holy, what is that?”
“This is what stung me,” William offered, pointing cautiously to the nettle leaf without touching it. Gingerly, he put his offended finger into his mouth, wincing.
“Let me see that,” Goodman North said, reaching for the coat and bundle. At Jonathan’s reassuring nod to her, Eliza reluctantly released the coat and bundled nettle flax to Goodman North for his inspection and watched him anxiously as he turned it over in his hands, perplexed. “I recognize this,”
Goodman North said, a crease appearing between his brows. “A nettle leaf. I have been burning those accursed things off my fields for five years.”
“Weaving raw nettles?” Goodman Hubbard’s jaw dropped. “Is the girl mad?”
A pause fell and stretched, as the men stared at Eliza uneasily. Jonathan broke it finally, saying, “We must take her back to the town with us.”
“You can’t mean it!” William exclaimed.
Panic flared up in Eliza anew at the thought of abandoning her brothers. She tried to snatch the coat and flax back again, but once more Jonathan seized her about the waist, capturing her arms. “Ho, there, child, stay!” Goodman North stepped back, hastily, still holding the completed coat. Pinioned in Jonathan’s arms, she sagged in his grip and began to weep in despair.
“Don’t cry,” he murmured into her hair, distressed at her anguish. “Do not cry! I will not hurt you; I would cut off my hand before I would frighten you ... but you cannot remain here all alone. We will take you somewhere where you can be cared for; you will be safe there.” Carefully, he pulled away from her, keeping a firm hold on her shoulders, and tried to lead her toward the edge of the clearing, but as she strained to escape his grip, she stumbled, limping. He glanced down at her feet and exclaimed in horror at the sight of the raw, oozing patches covering them. “Look! Oh, she cannot walk. Goodman North, do you and Goodman Hubbard go down and lead the horses up as close as you can. I will carry her the rest of the way to set her on my horse’s back.”
The two men headed down the hill, Goodman North slinging the coat and nettle flax over his shoulder as the dogs loped after them. Jonathan gently forced Eliza to sit on the rock. She continued to weep and wring her hands, longing to be able to tell him why she wanted to stay.
William shook himself out of a kind of paralysis and stepped forward. “You cannot take this girl back,” he said forcefully.
“Why ever not, Reverend Avery?” Jonathan asked absently as he brushed a tendril of Eliza’s hair away from her tearstained cheek.
William glowered down at the two of them, hardly able to articulate why a weeping girl filled him with such alarm. It was not that she wept, he decided. It was the way Jonathan was looking at her. “I think she is mad,” he growled finally.
“Mad? Oh, surely not. But even if she were, do not even the mad deserve pity?”
“Or perhaps ... she is bewitched.” Or else she is bewitching you, he added mentally, his flesh crawling at the fascinated light in Jonathan’s eyes as he stared at the girl.
“Don’t speak nonsense.”
William clenched his fists. “We believe,” he said desperately, “that God has ordered the world that all the elect might live under the law of relatives. Quorum unum uni tantum opponitur. All must be in some relationship, opposing in paired contraries, one subordinate to the other, and all subordinate to God: parent and child, master and servant, ministers and the elders over the congregation, rulers over the subjects of the state.”
“Indeed?” Jonathan threw him an ironic glance. “Tell that to the former Governor Andros.”
William gnawed his lip with frustration, feeling helpless at making his meaning plain. “A governor who abandoned his duty—well, but you stray from the point.”
“What is your point?” Jonathan said sharply.
“Damnation, man,” William exclaimed through his teeth, “you studied Ramist logic! I know you have read the Dialectica; I gave you Richardson’s commentary myself! This girl,” he pointed at Eliza accusingly, “stands in no covenant relationship to us! She is no sister, no child of ours, no member of our church, and has no claim upon us! And if we take her into our fold” —he sniffed and swept Eliza with a withering look— “who knows what wrath of God she might call down upon our community? What if it be the Devil that guides these strange actions?”
Jonathan stood up fast, an unpleasant look in his eyes. But he checked himself and blew out a breath.
“For shame, William,” he said quietly. “You, who preached a sermon just this Sabbath past on the lesson of the Good Samaritan.”
Slowly, William’s face turned a dull red, and his eyes dropped. His soul thrashed in pain to be reflected in Jonathan’s eyes and dismissed as small and mean. He felt as if he had been slapped.
“The girl goes with us,” Jonathan continued, softly but firmly. “Have no fear; she will have a proper place in the community. Goody Carter can look to her hurt... and now that I think upon it, the neighbor girl helping Goody Carter has recently left to go to housekeeping with Nathan Miller. Perhaps this girl—”
“She will be useless to Goody Carter,” William said spitefully, still smarting at Jonathan’s reproof.
“She is touched in the head, if she be not bewitched.”
“Let Goody Carter be the one to decide that.” He bent down and picked up Eliza in his arms. She shook her head desperately, tears continuing to flow down her face. “There now, be comforted,” he said to her soothingly as he carried her down the rise and set her on the back of his horse as Goodman North held the reins. “You will thank me for this someday.” He swung up on his horse behind her as William mounted, too, and they turned the horses’ heads toward the town. Eliza turned her head to look back over his shoulder, until the rise with the cave at the top was long out of sight. Then she turned her face to the west, where the sun was beginning its slow descent to the horizon. Her tears continued to flow, unchecked.
Chapter Fourteen
[The swan] looks in the mirror over and over
And claims to have never heard of Pavlova.
—OGDEN NASH, “THE SWAN”
Elias and Sean didn’t go back to the baths together. They didn’t talk about the experience, either. Sean continued to go, sometimes at Elias’s suggestion. But whenever Sean asked Elias whether he’d like to come along, too,. Elias would smile brilliantly and offer some excuse: “I just came from there,” or
“Nan, hard day at work today. Thought I’d just sack out tonight.” When he finally resorted to “Sorry, I have to wash my hair,” Sean got the hint and didn’t ask again. Sean continued to trick with others, but, by unspoken agreement, he never brought other men home.
There were several subjects they avoided discussing, Elias realized when he thought about it. It wasn’t that they didn’t have plenty of animated conversations. They could sit for hours in the garden of Yaffa Cafe, eating noodles and talking about Sean’s next article, or the books they’d picked up in an afternoon’s browsing at the Strand. They went to the Gray Art Gallery and analyzed composition and lighting in the photographic displays. They mapped out an itinerary for the world tour Sean always s
aid he would take someday. (“Do you realize no one’s ever really bothered to take Irish music to the people of Java? Or Morocco, or Papua New Guinea? Not to mention the penguins of Antarctica. I think this is a terrible oversight.”)
But they didn’t talk about what had happened at the baths, or about how Sean sometimes went out at night and came back four or five hours later, without any explanation. Elias wondered if he went other places for sex besides the baths. Movie theaters? The parks? Back rooms in the bars? He didn’t know, and he couldn’t ask.
He thought a lot about it, as the icy grip of winter receded and spring began stealing over the city. The grass turned green in Central Park, and a fine green mist appeared on the trees. Elias sat on his favorite bench, watching the swans swimming and the endless motley parade of people passing by. He pondered the way silences could stake themselves out between two people, even two people who loved each other. His mother and father, for example, had let the silences grow so large and malignant that surely they were more bound together by the walls between them than by anything else. The silences became dead places, no-man’s-land where nothing grew. The thought that he and Sean might end up imitating his parents’ marriage frightened him.
A picture could be worth a thousand words, he remembered. Sean had given him a Pentax K1000
camera as a gift over the winter holiday. A solstice gift, Sean said; Sean didn’t celebrate Christmas. Elias had been experimenting with the camera ever since, taking pictures of Sean, the street in front of the apartment, the swans in the park. As spring turned into summer, he began playing with the prints of Sean in the darkroom after work, studying the moments without words between the two of them. Sean understood immediately when Elias brought the pictures home to show him. “Interstices,” he said. “The cracks in between things, the intervals. Anticipation before something happens.”
“Exactly.”
Sean sat at the table, supper plate pushed aside, with the prints spread out before him. He stroked his mustache as he studied them. “I rather admire this.” He picked up one showing a close-up of Sean’s arm reaching out from behind the shower curtain to seize the towel on the bar. Just about to reach it, the muscles flexed, fingers clawed and tense. That was why Elias had taken it; he found Sean’s hands fascinating. Light coming from the frosted glass window in the shower stall outlined Sean’s silhouette, translucent through the shower curtain.