by Peg Kerr
“She is, then, do you think?”
“Aye, sir—but of course she will be that sorry she was not home for you.”
Jonathan nodded. “I will be upstairs, resting. Please see I remain undisturbed—but send my wife to me when she returns home.”
“Aye, sir.”
Goody Grafton turned back to the kettles on the hearth, and Jonathan went upstairs. He turned toward his bedroom, wanting nothing more than to lie on his bed and stare at the ceiling, trying to bring order to his spinning thoughts. Instead, however, he stopped and stared down the hallway. After a moment, he went down the corridor to the small room that he had set aside for her, reluctantly eased open the door, and went in. All looked unchanged. He looked around at the green hangings, the simple rush-bottomed chair, the chest underneath the window. He stood thus for a long time, soaking in the room’s stillness, trying to let his fears dissipate. The floor was neatly swept, the candle on the stand in the corner half-burned down. The only sound was his own harsh breathing. The chest—slowly, he walked over to it, squatted down, and unfastened the lid. But although his fingers tightened on the hasp until the metal’s edge creased his fingers, he could not bring himself to raise the lid. A thousand possibilities raced through his mind, all seeming to lead into despair and darkness.
“Father, help me,” he rasped aloud through gritted teeth. “What must I do?” Sobs rose in his throat with a violence that astonished him. His fingers jerked away from the hasp as if burned, and he knelt, hands caressing the lid, and wept for a long time.
When the tears finally ceased, he rose, scrubbing his face with his fists like a tired schoolboy. He staggered out of the room and down the corridor to fall across his own bed fully dressed. With an arm thrown up over his eyes he soon escaped gladly into a black, soothing well of dreamless sleep. When Eliza returned from Goody Taylor’s that afternoon, Goody Grafton surprised her with the news that the master had come home early feeling poorly and now lay abed upstairs. Concerned, Eliza hastily brewed a balm and chamomile tea for him and carried it up with her. Tiptoeing into the room, she set the tankard down on the candle stand and sat by his side on the bed. He started awake as she gently stroked his shoulder.
“Uh... Oh, Elizabeth.” Groggily, he straggled to sit up as she tenderly ran her hand over his cheek. She gestured to the tankard, and when he nodded, she picked it up and offered it to him. But as she held the brim to his lips, Jonathan’s memory came flooding back, and he jerked away from the proffered drink. He seized her hand with a grip that made her gasp, and she jumped in surprise, stifling an outcry of pain. They froze, staring at each other, and then Jonathan slowly took the tankard from her and set it on the floor. Wide-eyed, Eliza sat still and watched as he took her other hand and firmly turned them both over, examining them carefully, deliberately. At the sight of the swollen, blistering flesh, his face hardened into icy stillness, and in response she felt a tremor of fear, although she hardly understood why.
He released her hands again. “I... do not think I wish to drink what you have brought for me.” His voice sounded cool; he fell back against the pillow, looking away from her. Eliza started to reach out to him, to touch his face again, but the sight of the blisters on her fingers made her check the motion, and she thrust her hands under her apron instead. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she stumbled to her feet. She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering, but he refused to look at her, and eventually, she stole away from the room.
She fled to the hall and tried to busy herself there in tasks over the hearth, but Goody Grafton’s curious eyes eventually drove her outside. There, Eliza set a tub outside the wash-house, filled it with a kettle of hot water from the hearth, and busied herself sanding and scouring the pewter plates. She scrubbed until her poor abused hands cracked and bled in the wash water and her back and arms ached, but pain was what she wanted, something to distract her, to keep her from seeing again and again in her mind the chilling look in Jonathan’s eyes. When she had rinsed and set aside the last plate, she looked up to see the sun just beginning to touch the horizon. Flinging her apron up over her face, Eliza burst into sobs.
Eventually, after calming herself down and wiping her face clean of all trace of tears, she crept back inside and helped Goody Grafton finish preparing the evening meal. Jonathan came downstairs looking pale and grave, and the household assembled to eat. He said little during the meal, and the servants, too, sensing something different, did not joke and chatter as they usually did. When the meal was over and the plates cleared and washed, Jonathan brought his Bible to the fireplace in the hall and everyone gathered to kneel for the evening devotions. “I have decided,” Jonathan said, “to read tonight from the Ninety-first Psalm.” He turned to the correct page carefully as the servants exchanged covert, puzzled glances, for the daily reading had been following the New Testament for the past four months. Eliza kept her eyes downcast, her heart beating hard. “He who dwelleth in the secret place of the most High,” Jonathan read, “shall abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in Him will I trust. Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust: His truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”
His voice was growing tight with tension. He stopped to take a deep breath and then continued: “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it will not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.” His voice cracked on the last word. He looked up from the page and over at Eliza, wanting with all the frustrated longing of his soul to somehow reach her through her silence, and for her to understand, both the promise and the warning. She felt the intensity of his gaze, so scorching that she did not dare look up to meet it. More keenly than ever, she, too, felt all the barriers the curse had placed between them, now on his side as well as her own. He was trying to convey something to her with the psalm, she knew—the urgency was clear in his reading. But she could not understand what he meant the message to be. Tears of frustration welled up in her eyes again, and she furtively wiped them away.
He cleared his throat and went on. “Because thou has made the Lord, which is thy refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For He will give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.”
He closed the Bible. No one spoke or even seemed to breathe. Finally, Jonathan rose stiffly. “I bid you all good night.” He went up the stairs without a backward glance.
Methodically, Eliza went through the tasks of snuffing out the last candle and banking the fire so the embers would keep until morning. Then she went upstairs, where she found Jonathan already retired to bed. Slowly, she undressed and then slid underneath the covers beside him. They lay rigidly side by side for a while, and then timidly, she nestled in more closely, laying her cheek against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her as always, but he did not kiss her hair as he usually did. Still, she tried to take comfort from his touch and the slow, regular beat of his heart. She listened, and after a while it seemed to her that his breathing slowed into the rhythm of sleep. Experimentally, she stirred, and his arms around her immediately loosened. Carefully, she stole out from underneath the covers, wrapped a shawl that lay at the foot of the bed around her shoulders, and tiptoed from the room. She did not see the faint starlight from the window reflected in his eyes as they turned to watch her go.
Jonathan waited through the slow turn of the hours of the night, ears straining for sounds. He did not
hear the door downstairs open to the outside yard, which reassured him a little, but still, hours passed before Eliza returned. He took care to close his eyes and slow his breathing again as she slipped into the bed next to him. He did not put his arms around her again.
Jonathan regained more command over himself the next day and resumed his duties. The casual observer could certainly have found nothing wrong with the magistrate’s unfailingly courteous manner toward his new wife. In the days that followed, however, Eliza sensed a growing change in his manner toward her. It cut her to the soul, for although she felt it, she did not understand the reason. He grew watchful, distant and wary. The silence they shared in the evenings now felt strained and jagged with tension rather than companionable. More than once she turned to see him looking at her with an expression of such black anguish that she became frightened. She longed to reach out to him, to console him, but although he sometimes accepted and returned her embraces, at other times he stiffened and turned away from her touch.
Eliza tried to lose herself in the rhythm of daily tasks and hide the signs of tears as best she could. She took to wearing all the time under her chemise the feather charm she had fashioned. But it was the work she did weaving the coats for her brothers at night that gave her the most comfort. Working quickly, she finished coat after coat, extending her time at the task into the small hours of the morning. Soon, she thought hopefully, once the task was complete and she had found her brothers and broken the spell over them, she would then be free to end the silence between Jonathan and herself. The weather grew colder, and one morning Goody Grafton looked out into the yard and remarked,
“Eh, we must harvest the last of the cabbages today. Surely ‘twill freeze hard over the garden in the next day or two.”
Eliza thought with dismay of the dwindling pile of nettle flax stored in the chest upstairs. She had made good progress, for most of the coats were now complete, but there was not enough nettle flax left to finish them all. A hard frost would kill the last of the nettles in the churchyard, too. If she did not go there tonight, she would probably not be able to gather any more until the new nettles sprouted next spring. The thought of following the lonely path in the dead of night and meeting the ghosts again terrified her. But her will was firm, for she thought of her enchanted brothers, facing the prospect of another unsheltered winter, perhaps harsher than any they had ever experienced before. Once again, when the household had settled itself for the night, and she felt sure Jonathan slept, she eased herself out of bed as usual. She went to look out the window. The half-moon had begun to rise over the trees. She noticed that her hand on the windowsill was shaking; she wrapped her arms around her waist and prayed desperately for courage. Gradually, her shivering ceased again, and she reached for her petticoat, skirt, and bodice and began to dress.
Behind her, Jonathan instantly became alert at this, although he remained rigidly still. He watched her through lowered lashes as she pulled on her cloak and shoes and glided out of the room. At the sound of the outside door opening and then closing again, he rose, too, and dressed hastily to follow her, his heart hammering quickly.
He had to hurry to keep up with her, although he took pains to make his passage as quiet as possible. He was afraid she would look back and discover him, for the moonlight was bright enough to make every stone in the road gleam. But she never did. When she turned at the fork of the road leading to the churchyard, he stood behind a tree, watching with grim despair as she glided out of sight into the deeper shadows along that path. Then he crossed the road and hurried to pound on the minister’s door. A servant girl stumbled to answer the summons, her hand smothering a yawn, only to be rudely shouldered aside once the door was open. “Where is your master’s room? He must come with me immediately.”
She stared at him, blinking stupidly, and he impatiently snapped, “Don’t stand there looking at me with your mouth agape! Go fetch him at once!”
“S-sir, pardon, sir.” She bobbed a curtsey and backed away hastily, turning to do as she was bid. But the knocking had roused William, too, and she met him coming out of his room, carrying a candle. "Well? Who is it, Dorcas?”
“Please, sir, it’s Magistrate Latham, and he says—”
“Reverend? Is that you?” Jonathan hastened to his side and whispered urgently in his ear. “Your words are vindicated, William. I followed Elizabeth here—she is on her way to the churchyard.”
William turned his head to look at him, startled, and a wave of shock flooded through his body, jolting him instantly awake and bringing with it a kind of silent, fierce exhilaration. “It will require but a minute for me to dress.” He gripped Jonathan’s forearm and squeezed it, and hastened back into his room.
“Dorcas, bring my boots!” he flung over his shoulder before shutting the door. A scant four minutes later, the two men left the house and were hurrying after Eliza. They approached the wicker gate leading to the churchyard, and William put a cautionary hand on Jonathan’s elbow.
“Softly, man... .We do not want her to see us.”
“Aye.” They slowed their steps, and with a quick gesture Jonathan indicated a tree close to the gate. They slipped behind it and peered cautiously around its sides. “Do you see her?” Jonathan breathed.
“Wait....” William squinted, straining to see through the mists coming in the hollow. After a moment, he pointed. “There,” he whispered.
A tendril of mist danced away from his jabbing finger, hesitated, and then continued flowing away through the fence and oozing along the ground through the tombstones. It joined another patch of mist pooling around the hem of Eliza’s cloak.
She stood rigidly still in the moonlight, shivering, staring into the mists just ahead of her. Perhaps it was the disturbance of air from her passage that made the wisps of night vapors roil and separate. Perhaps....
“Blessed Father,” Jonathan hissed. “What are those?”
“It is as I told you,” William muttered in his ear. “See? She is conjuring them.”
“No—Elizabeth!” Jonathan choked and took a step forward. William clamped a hand on his arm and pulled him back.
“Nay, are you mad?” he growled. “Be still, for pity’s sake. Watch.”
Eliza felt the first touch on her shoulder, soft and tentative. The touch slid down, heading for her waist. She wrenched away and hurried forward, feeling her way along.
Around the dim corner of one tombstone, one insubstantial figure crouched in front of another. The one floating above the ground moaned and Eliza caught in the shifting vapors a glimpse of something like a skull, grinning a rictus of a smile, with black gaps from missing teeth. The touch of ghostly hands continued, gentle, reaching out to grope at her from ail directions with the insistent desire of the dead for the living. The sensation made her shudder convulsively, and she brushed them all away like insubstantial wisps of fog, dispersed with the flick of a hand. Something like cold flesh pressed up against her, and wraiths swirled around her, whispering coarse, dimly heard suggestions in her ear with hoarse chuckles, only to disappear behind her as she pushed on. Panting with fright, she stumbled through the long, yellowing grass to the nettle patch and plunged her hands in to yank the stalks up by the roots, as her lips moved in silent prayer. Grimly, she stripped the leaves from them and pulled up more, although the burning pain brought tears to her eyes, until the heap of bare nettle stems had piled to the height of her knee. She darted apprehensive glances behind her shoulder as she worked, but the ghosts had fallen back, watching her, once she stood among the nettles. When she lifted her gleanings and began to pick her way back, the ghosts parted before her, as if reluctantly, and dissolved into nothingness over the tombstones.
Jonathan and William crouched lower behind the tree as she fumbled the wicker gate open and passed through it. As she passed by them on the road, they carefully eased their way around the tree in the opposite direction, keeping it between her and themselves.
Jonathan collapsed against the trunk as
Eliza’s figure dwindled into the dark distance. “Elizabeth,” he said, his tear-streaked face pressed against the bark. “I have lain with her, holding her in my arms. This very night her head rested on my breast—how could she ... how could she... ?”
William winced, for the picture gave him almost as much pain as Jonathan. As compassionately as he could, he said, “The truth needs be faced now, Jonathan: your own eyes have seen the evidence you needed.”
“Aye. They have, may God have pity on me.”
William shivered at the expression on his face, but pressed on relentlessly, saying, “God will condemn the entire congregation unless we move now to root this pestilence out from among us. You and I should fetch help to lay her by the heels this very night.”
“Must it be done? Nay, you are right,” Jonathan added quickly. He passed a hand over his face, struggling to master himself in the face of such a terrible shock. “Alas, poor wretch! Then let it be done quickly.” He stood up and started down the road, with William following in his wake, wondering if by wretch Jonathan meant his wife or himself.
Eliza was bone-weary and sore by the time she returned home. At the threshold, after removing her pattens, she wrapped the corner of her cloak around the nettle stems to muffle any possible noise and carried them up the stairs to the small room Jonathan had given her. There, she lowered them quietly to the floor in front of the chest and then gratefully collapsed beside them panting. It took her a few moments to regain her breath, and by the time she did, a leaden heaviness was already stealing over her limbs. She knew she had to return to her bed before Jonathan awoke and missed her. But perhaps, she thought sleepily, she could simply rest sitting here, for a moment... only a moment. Leaning against the chest, she drew from her chemise the charm she had made, turning it to see the silvery lines etched by moonlight along the edges of the feathers and wondering how her brothers were faring. She blinked wearily, and then her head drooped onto the lid of the chest, the feathers slipping from her slackened hand.