by Allyson Bird
“I won’t be that,” she said once to nobody in particular, and naturally they didn’t care.
But several years down the road when her lover spoke to her? He called her sweet things. Pretty things. “My darling” and “little bird” and her favorite, simply “lover.” He never spoke her name, not once in all the time they were together, and that was one of her favorite things about him.
But that was in the future. Now she was a child, now an awkward adolescent. Now it was all about rules and society and making sure her ankles didn’t show. Now it was about being a lady and having a governess and looking for a father where she really didn’t have one. He was a paper doll in a finely cut blue suit. He was a sea captain on an ocean without stars. He was a million different things, just as she had been everyone but Hester, and none of them were correct.
He died, and it really was a relief. She went under the care of a relative, and life didn’t change so much. She still looked at the moving wallpaper and heard the whisper of dead things. Perhaps they were her parents. Perhaps it was her soul.
Things like that didn’t matter so very much to a young woman with coltish knees and hair that didn’t know how to settle under a bonnet.
But what did matter? Paint. Her art. Pictures. Dreams.
Ladies didn’t paint, but Hester did. Real women sat near the window and sewed intricate little swatches of embroidery. They didn’t pull their hair loose and lean into the room’s sunlight with a hunger that was absolutely indecent. They didn’t close their eyes and smell the deep, dark scent of the paints and powders and brushes as Hester did.
“What a degenerate,” a woman whispered to Hester’s aunt. This woman’s face was lined and caked and had more paints and powders and brushes on it than any of Hester’s canvases ever would.
“Poor thing lost both parents,” her aunt sighed. “I really try to do the best I can.”
“You’re a saint,” the Puritan Harlot said, and patted the aunt’s hand. “Nobody could expect any more. You’ve done all you could.”
They burbled and cooed about Hester’s inevitable future as a spinster, but Hester had already kicked her shoes off and slipped out the back door. The sun fell on her hair as she unlaced the top of her dress, breathing in the good air as she ran for the fields.
Wild things run, and Hester knew she belonged to the grasses and skies.
“I did my best,” she whispered to the bees and birds. Her skirt was hiked up far too high. Feral flowers and thistles bit at her pale legs.
“I know,” she heard, and she spun around.
Nobody was there.
That was the first time she and her lover never met.
Hester was shameful but her hair was rich and her lips full. She caught the eye of a solid older man whose previous two wives had died young. Young, but hard. They had both been desert girls, their eyes green and squinted against the too-bright sun. Here, the rivers drowned them. The grasses choked them. Like snakes, they had shriveled and died when dragged out of their burrows and left somewhere strange and foreign. Children expelled from their wombs and life expelled from their lips. That was all.
William, for that was this man’s name, had watched with helpless horror as both wives had passed on. Ineffectual man that he was, he had rung doctors and wrung his hands, but that didn’t stop their chests from heaving, their lungs from expanding, their blood from flowing.
He began with a wife. He ended up with a corpse.
Wife two was also lovely although a bit swivel-eyed. She made an even spindlier corpse.
Wife three? She would be young and lush. She’d be able to survive the fields and greenery. Half wood-sprite, half fawn, and she and William would be stolidly and deliriously happy. Within dignified reason, of course.
He watched Hester’s bonnet slip from her head as she tore through the field. Something moved in his chest. Perhaps it was resignation. Perhaps it was joy.
He called upon Hester’s aunt that very day. Hester was improper, yes. Impetuous, certainly. But he was a man of fine reputation. He could provide for her. Train her up in the way she should go. He could do all of these things, certainly, and what’s more, he was perfectly willing to. He had a satisfactory estate and his children needed a mother. He would be willing to overlook her more girlish nature and raise her into the fine young woman he, and Hester’s aunt, knew she could be.
The aunt was grateful. Hester, not so much. But her opinion meant nothing in this matter, and she knew it.
The wedding was stiff and fine. She wore a dress too constricting and too good for her. It was trimmed in lace and pearls fetched by the sea.
“You look wonderful, darling,” William said. He calculated net worth with his eyes. He found an errant stray of her hair and pushed it back with a thick finger. “As beautiful as any of my other wives were.”
“Thank you,” she said demurely, but her eyes were full of lions and forget-me-nots and the sea.
William smiled at her.
“Love isn’t really so important. You’ll see. Standing is. Reputation and luxuries. All of this will be agreeable by and by.”
“That comforts me,” Hester lied, but it was a lie of kindness, and so she was forgiven.
After the wedding, which was simply ordinary, she moved into William’s home.
“Good afternoon, children. This is your new mother.”
They looked at her and she looked at them. William nodded and a servant took Hester’s only bag.
“I’ll just run this up to the master bedroom,” he said, and disappeared. A puff of smoke. A breath. A black cat in the moonlight.
“Does he always move as stealthy as that?” she asked the children, and they nodded.
“I think he is a ghost,” one of them whispered. Hester thought perhaps it was a boy, but they were all dressed in such frills and with ringlets spun so tightly that she really couldn’t be sure.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said, and the girl/boy child grinned, showing missing teeth, and Hester smiled back. Perhaps this could be bearable after all.
Hope deceived her. Three years went by and it was hardly bearable at all.
“Wear your hair up, darling. You don’t want to look unkempt.”
“If Sister Allistair invites you for tea, you simply must go. There’s no other way to look at it.”
“You have new standing, Hester. Mold yourself into the part. This is who you are now.”
William’s words showered on her skin as falling stars, and they burned just as badly. She twisted her hair into rolls and stabbed it with pins. She crushed her ribs with boned corsets. She pressed her feet into tiny, pointed shoes, tied her bows far too tightly, and always blackened her lashes immediately after her early-morning cry.
“Our other mothers were sad, too,” the girl/boy children would tell her. Hester would smile and put her arms around them, nuzzling them as one wild bird does to another.
“I’m not sad, darling ones. Don’t you ever think so.”
Sadness was feeling and Hester didn’t feel. At least not like she used to. She helped her newish children with their letters and their singing. She supervised the cook in the kitchen, which mostly amounted to saying, “That was lovely, Hilda. Would you please do the beef again soon?” and when William was away, which was often, she sat at the window and stared out.
“You aren’t meant to be here,” her invisible lover said next to her elbow. She heard him more and more now, but they were not lovers yet, you see. They were still voices caught in the ether. Ephemeral beings that had yet to touch.
“Here is as well as anywhere else, I suppose,” she sighed, and the exhalation from her breath fogged the window. Somehow, this made her ache.
“My little bird,” he said, and something about the crystalline flavor of his voice made her ache more, in the most decadent of ways.
“I want to tell you a story,” he said, “but only after you’ve lived.”
She knew he was gone before she turned to look,
so she didn’t bother. But she put her hand against the glass and wondered.
The Bible said that Mary, Holy Mother of God pondered sacred things in her heart. Hester did the same. Hester and Mary had very little in common besides being young and thrust into overwhelming motherhood, but they treasured up knowledge in their bosoms just the same.
That night her husband was out on business, as he often was. Hester slipped a cover over her nightdress and wandered the house, peeking in on the children and seeing that everything was set to rights. Of course it was. It always was. She then retraced her steps, seeing that everything was set slightly off. This picture, tilted just so. These papers pushed askew on the old wooden desk. This felt better. This felt more like home.
She took a candle and stepped outside. The cobblestone hurt her feet. She took a deep breath, snuffed the candle, and began to run.
The candle fell from her grip. Her loose hair bounced around her shoulders and elbows. The nightdress flapped like crow’s wings and she finally felt herself free. She fled the street, turned down the back way and raced to the fields of grasses where she belonged.
The moon, being a woman and quite understanding of these things, lit her way graciously. Clouds parted to show the stars. Hester heard the panting of her breath and the slightly sinister sound of her sky-white feet passing through brush unknown. Here, she startled sleeping butterflies, which took to the air behind her. There, she tripped and fell, but clambered to her feet in a sea of fabric and dew-damp leaves. Her breath came in gasps, nearly sobs, but she ran and ran and ran. Away from something or toward, she wasn’t sure, but what she did know for sure was that she had something to feel.
Fear.
Relief.
Desire.
Desire to shed her entrapments, desire to be free. Desire to be something other than a china doll with mechanical gears inside, grinding to starts and stops with elegant handwriting and a fine Sunday bonnet.
“You came,” whispered the voice, and this time when she turned to look, he was there. A young man. Thin, with clothes whose lace rivaled that of her most opulent of dresses. He wore a mask pale as starlight, with holes cut for eyes and a tiny slit for a mouth. Hester felt as though she should be frightened, but she wasn’t, not at all.
“I didn’t mean to come,” she said. “I simply ran.”
“And here you are. As it was meant to be. “
“Who are you?” she asked, and although she couldn’t see it, she felt that he was smiling under his mask.
“I am here for you. A gift from the universe, perhaps. Or maybe a punishment. But you are here, and I am here, and that isn’t any coincidence.”
There was truth in his words, a primordial conviction that thrummed through her veins as he spoke.
“I don’t mind being unhappy,” she told him. His body faded away in the shadows until only the mask could be seen in the moonlight. “Unhappiness is acceptable. But I don’t want to be…”
“Imprisoned,” he answered for her. She would have nodded, but it wasn’t necessary. None of it was necessary. The stations and etiquettes and things typically required of her suddenly had no bearing at all.
“You want to hunt,” he said, and this was true. “You want rain in your hair and blood on your lips.”
“I suppose I want a lot of things.”
“Then take them.”
His hands were warm on her skin and his lips pressed against hers with the slim filter of the mask between them. She ran her hands through his hair and over the porcelain of his face.
“Will you ever take it off?”
“Perhaps.”
“I’ll wait.”
The sun rose and Hester rose with it. Her lips were deliciously swollen and her nightgown and cover were askew in the most scandalous of ways. She felt more clear-eyed and lucid than she had been in years.
The way back to the house was far longer and more treacherous than the way out. But she smiled to herself and loosely linked her fingers with a tall, reedy man that nobody else could see.
It was strange having an imperceptible man around the house. He stood in corners while Hester brushed her hair. He leaned against doorjambs when she spoke to her husband. He sat quietly on the parlor couch while Hester and William argued.
“If you were here just a little bit more,” she would say, and William would cut her off. It was an argument so well-worn that she could mouth the words alongside him. Sometimes the man in the porcelain mask did mouth along, and Hester had to put her hand to her lips to keep from laughing at the absurdity of it.
“Hester, my work is important and keeps you in the comforts you so well enjoy. It is necessary that I take these business trips. Why don’t you busy yourself with the women’s charity, or host a few more garden parties? After all, your standing in the community requires…”
His words tasted like soot and hemlock. They sounded like the unseemly shriek of carriage wheels and grimy harlots. She let them rain over her while she studied her white gloves. Not a speck of dirt on them. So pristine. So pure.
She caught her lover’s gaze and blushed.
“What’s this? You redden?“ William said, and his voice softened. “I don’t mean to speak so harshly, my dear. I only want you to be content and respectable. Are you not happy? Do you want for anything?”
“I want for nothing, my husband,” she said, and he patted her on the head as he did his children.
“Will you try harder?” he asked.
Hester swallowed, and it hurt.
“Yes. I will try harder.”
She performed her duties with a diligence that would have floored William had he been paying any attention. Each day more and more color fled from her face.
From her soul.
“Darling,” her lover whispered, and when she turned to fully look at him, he saw that her blue eyes had gone nearly ice clear.
“Did you say something?” she asked.
“You’re losing yourself.”
“I’m afraid there isn’t much to lose.”
She took to painting reserved little landscapes on prim canvases up in the upstairs sunroom. Sea shores. Neat rows of breathless houses, lined up like soldiers or unhappy housewives.
Her lover didn’t say a word, but brushed the wetness from her cheeks with his hand.
“At least I am painting, yes?”
He leaned over and kissed her trembling mouth.
“Shall I tell you a story?” he asked. He released her hair from its pins and began to speak, telling her of sunshine and suicides and other things of beauty.
“I wish you could tell me all the stories in the world,” she said, and he smiled behind the mask.
“I can. Perhaps one day I will, my love. “
Another year came and went. Hester did needlepoint and kept her knees primly together at all times. She spoke carefully in dulcet tones. Her heart turned its face to the wall and died. She feared her soul and body were not long to follow.
“Would you miss me if I were gone?” she asked William. Her hands twisted over themselves. Her eyes never left the carpet.
“What’s that?” he asked. He was sitting at his desk, working on figures. Figures or bonds or letters or enchanted conversations with the stars, it didn’t matter. Whatever he was working on took his full attention. As always.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and slipped away. For the first time in many, many moons, she crept into her old solace, the fields. She didn’t run. She had not the energy. She walked. Staggered. At one point she dropped to hands and knees, crawling.
“How can I help you, lost little bird?”
Her lover had appeared beside her, his neutral mask lined with worry.
“I want to go home,” she whispered. She continued pushing her way through the brush.
“Where is home, exactly?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and curled up into a little ball. Something chittered in the darkness. Something else hooted in reply.
�
�I don’t know where home is,” she said again, and covered her face with her hands.
“Shh, darling, my love. Don’t cry.”
Her lover sat beside her and caressed her hair, her face.
“Your home is with me,” he said. “Wherever you are, that’s where I want to be. Wherever I am, you should be there also. I love you. I’ve never told you this, yes, but it’s true. I love you, my sweet little bird. You’re with me. You are home.”
She thought of her house, stricken of all color. She thought of William, who had stolen her very self away, piece by piece. She thought of their children, of their warm skin and big, bright ideas as fresh as the spring.
“You and the children are home,” she slurred, eyes suddenly heavy. And then she was asleep.
She awoke with her head cushioned in her lover’s lap. The sun shone in that gentle way that it has in early morning, before it remembers how horrid and loathsome humanity can be.
“Are you feeling better?” he asked.
She replied by lifting her mouth so he could kiss her. It was as if a first kiss, shy and searching and oh-so-wonderful.
“I meant it,” he told her, his voice warm behind the cold mask. “I love you with everything I have.”
“Thank you,” she said.
There was more, and she meant to speak it, but the words made her shudder inside as though she had swallowed moths.
He kissed her again.
“You don’t need to say anything more,” he promised, and she knew he meant it.
He helped her breathe. Made her really feel that she could be enough for him, without the ropes of pearls and chains of gold. Never had finery felt so constraining. She realized now that’s what it had always intended to be: leashes of silver and jewels.
“Your children are coming,” he said, and Hester started at his words.
“Here?” she wondered, but the girl/boy children were already upon them.
“Mother. We thought you would be here. Are you well?”