Charis in the World of Wonders

by Marly Youmans

  “A kind of light shone around you. To me you were like a dove glimmering in the midst of crows. I know the royal nature of gold, and at that instant I felt alchemically changed by grace, and that all of me was malleable and perfect like gold. It sounds like bedlam madness to me now, but I—I loved you and wanted to be with you always. Does that sound like madness?”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “No. I do not know.”

  I remembered my words to Bel, saying that a young woman with no fortunes and no family and no place to meet and court was not likely to wed. Unless a man be bold, honorable but impetuous. . .

  His fingertips found mine, and our hands laced together. Where we touched, I seemed more alive than I had been since leaving our house near Falmouth. My pulse flickered like a bird’s.

  “You are milk and flame and gold,” he said. “Your white skin, the changing reds of your hair in the different lights of the sun. I dreamed about us last night; I think about you all day long.”

  The fire of a blush rose in my face, so that I was glad of the curtain’s shadow. My skin was ever a betrayer of my feelings, as bold as a white cloth stained to red with the dye called kermes berries. That he desired my company was pleasing; I did not ask myself how much I wished him to say, or how well I wished him to make use of this time that might not come again. To be alone with a man was a rarity, and even more so to be alone with Mr. Herrick the goldsmith—Goodwife Holt would make sure of that.

  But now we were together, and I could feel the blood moving in his hand and the slight roughness of the skin, callused from working the metal. The scent of him was pleasant, a musky mixture of sweat with ambergris.

  “Pardon my forwardness, that I have dreamed of you, and that even now I may be profaning your maiden privacy with my touch.”

  We stood silent, but when he made as if to release my hand, I spoke. “I would not be called too quickly won,” I said. “And should be more strange and distant. But in traveling through the wilderness, I may have lost all rules of courtesy and sense of how to behave.”

  “You don’t yet fathom me,” he said. “And such sudden loves may seem too rash.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And unadvised,” he added.

  “Yes.”

  “And dream-like and frail, not likely to endure,” he said. “Yes,” I said.

  “But would you marry me,” he said, but not as if it was a question—more like words in a trance. And all the time the vein at my wrist flittered and said that I was already his.

  But fear of my own wild impulse was in me also. I might have been skimming along Falmouth cliff, about to jump into the waves below.

  “Yes,” I said, “yes.”

  “Forever and ever,” he said, as if this life could go on without change.

  “If your bent toward me is as bright and pure and sterling as your own hammered silver. Or more—tike the miracles of gold that the Wise Men from the East carried.”

  “It is,” he said. “Like the star that stood over the babe and his mother. Like the night fields when there are no clouds, and the stars are spilled.”

  “Yet how can I be sure when I know so little of you?”

  “You must sense it already, surely. We are both so solitary. We have fallen out of the world, all our people dead. And our former places know us no more. But I love you, and I will love you more when I learn your ways. Will you marry me,” he said, again not as a question but dreamily.

  “Yes,” I said again, “yes.” My feet, so long careful, now seemed to skip from secure ground. And this time I added, “I will.”

  His face was close to mine. I could feel something sparking and lighting between us, as when a bolt of brightness is turning in the atmosphere, enlivening the motes of air, and abruptly I feared that the moment would flash away as quickly as lightning, leaving nothing but shock and a smell of sulphur, a devilish perfume.

  “Call me Jotham,” he whispered.

  “Jotham,” I said, feeling the power, the intimacy that sleeps inside a name and wakes when a woman is given the right to say a man’s Christian name. And I gave him the right to my forename in turn.

  “Charis,” he said, “the marvelous red-and-white grace of Charis.”

  His lips discovered mine in the dark. My pulse flicked faster and faster and sent out stars like struck flint. Our veins turned to white flame that ran from one to the other. For how does a woman feel when she is first touched by desire? I was a tree of liquid silver that budded with white flowers and erupted in white leaves inside his embrace. We were more—orchards of gold-fire and flower. For a long time, I leaned against him, caught and burning yet unconsumed.

  Some moments stand like landmarks on a journey, as when Jacob crossed the river and wrestled until he won a new name and a blessing. And though he was lamed, all things seemed new; the morning leaped from the horizon, and there was the gold of light.

  Afterward, when the boy who hammered at silver ceased his pounding and we returned to the shop, I looked around and saw the world had altered. The flintlock above the hearth floated close to the wall. The silver by the window seemed buoyant on the shelves, as if the bowls and teapots were planets that might lift and whirl around my sun. For I felt glowing, radiant in the gloom. A little branch of red coral burned among the silver, along with a tiny dish of moon-bright pearls and a chunk of lapis lazuli, its deep blue like something quarried from the depths of the sea.

  That we had no one to watch and keep us from mischief and ruin was no matter to me. Were we not both innocent of guile? Even the thought of the whip with its embedded smarts of bone or metal had not kept me from the goldsmith’s shop. I had fled from both normal life and massacre long before that day. Hortus had borne me into a new realm where I saw more strangely than others of my kind. And I knew in my marrow that Mr. Herrick—Jotham—would never harm me.

  He passed out of the shop, and I could hear him talking to the boy. I began to dread that I had been away from the house too long. But he came back inside and dashed upstairs, and returned with something cradled in his arms.

  “Here,” he said, “take this. I want you to keep it. About the time your family sailed from Boston, Joseph brought me a book and asked me to add silver to strengthen and protect the corners. He knew that I was still an apprentice and intended to retrieve the book at some future date when I was my own master. But he never came to get it, though I had a letter from him about a proposed return a year back. And when you came here and I learned from the town talk that he and all your family were lost, I added the engraving to the front and a latch.”

  The volume was heavy in my hands, bound in leather with wide silver corners, each decorated with a medallion. A broad silver band wrapped the book, with a central oval containing a portrait engraving of my brother. And it was like enough to make me catch my breath.

  “You must go,” he said, “and see me again only with someone to accompany you, or else there will be the evil of meddling whispers and perhaps worse. I will meet with Mr. Dane, who has been like a grandfather to me. He will declare the banns for us if I ask him.”

  Abruptly, I was afraid not of the lash but of how I hardly knew Jotham. Mr. Herrick. What if the encounter just past was but a dream, too glistening-sweet to be substantial? But I said nothing and only gripped the book more tightly.

  “See, the book is blank inside, and the band has a lock and key,” he said. “I made it secure so that you could write down all that has happened to you without fear of others reading your words. Someday your children and grandchildren will want to know the story of your courage. They will want to hear how you escaped your troubles and fled through the forest to safety. Or perhaps you will want to write it so that you know what and who you were when you went to the wilderness, and how you were changed afterward. To put your days in order.”

  He offered me the key on a chain.

  I bent my head and let him slip it around my neck and was startled when his hand brushed against my skin.

 
; “All will be well,” he murmured, a little sadly.

  “I trust so,” I said, though was not sure. Children and grandchildren. Through him, would I have and be important to a household again? Would I belong to family? Would I give my own offspring the names of those I loved and missed? Was there anything earthly of more consequence to me in the New or Old Worlds? I did not think so.

  “Major Saltonstall should know of this; I will write to him if that seems good—I know him through the militia and town business. He thinks well of me, I believe. At any event, I shall ask his blessing on us. For we must have consent from a magistrate since you have no parents to speak for you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Why?”

  “It is the law that ‘no orphan not disposed in marriage’ by parents may marry except by consent of all the town selectmen, or else more easily by a member of the General Court—and Major Saltonstall may serve us there.”

  Another worry had come to me. “I have no dowry. No bed rug, no bedstead. No andirons, no sideboard, no treen or pewter dish, and no brass candlesticks.”

  “Hush,” he said. “You are your own dower. I want no more.”

  “I have barely more than a sealskin and the clothes Mistress Salton-stall gave me.”

  “No matter.”

  “But I have a horse, a lovely ambler,” I said, suddenly remembering that I was not wholly without resource, “and he is my wealth.”

  “If you had nothing at all, I would be satisfied. As I suppose the Saltonstalls were, to care for you.”

  “Yes. I meant to return there. But now I shall not go back to them, I suppose,” I said. “Even fair tidings have a sorrowful edge to them.”

  “Yet we may have leave to go visiting,” Jotham said.

  “Yes,” I said, folding the book to my breast. “That would be sweet. They were good and kind to me.”

  “Go you on,” Jotham said, his hand lighting on mine as he glanced toward a window. “I would not have you leave. But fly away from me like some redbird of the forests.”

  “I would stay,” I said.

  “A hundred, a thousand times farewell,” he said.

  A last glittering brush of skin against skin, my cheeks and lips burning, and I was hurrying to the Holt house with the book in my arms and the key cold against my breast. All the way, the episode hung in my mind like a bright dream, yet my mind seemed wavering, jostled by uncertainties. Was this my right path? Too, I thought about the lash and its smarts and hoped the button-acquiring stranger I had encountered at the door would not ask about me, and that no one else had seen me come and go.

  “Lord,” I whispered, “Lord shield me.”

  Back in my garret, I tucked the book of pages under my mother’s blanket. Perhaps I would use the key later, after procuring ink and plucking a few feathers for quills to trim with my knife. Or perhaps I would write in it when my life was more settled. For now, the sight of Joseph’s face was enough. It was time for me to make an appearance at my work. As I climbed down the stairs, I could hear Lizzie and Bel arguing.

  To my surprise, they were squabbling in the sewing room. Good-wife Holt had arrived before me and was busy scolding them from the doorway.

  I peered around her and saw that the two were using the big shears. Bel was holding them open, and there was something clamped between the blades.

  “Oh,” I said. The sieve—the turning of the sieve. Though many might think them harmless, what was good about trying to wrest the future from two blades of brute metal? Didn’t foreknowledge of the future belong only to God?

  “Mary Carleton showed me how,” Lizzie said. “It is harmless. The Carletons all do it.”

  “Nonsense,” Goodwife Holt was saying. “What absurdities will you two fancy next?”

  She turned and almost strode into me. “And where have you been?” The frown lines beside her mouth dug in deeper as she surveyed me.

  “Out on my walk,” I said, “so that I may be refreshed for the afternoon’s sewing.” The words were not exactly a falsehood, but they were not the entirety of the truth. Yet I did not call it a sin of omission but a defense against one who would be my enemy.

  “Go you on,” she said. “Do not let me keep you from your appointed round of work.”

  At that, she swept away, turning into a nearby room and shutting the door with much force.

  Go you on. Jotham had used the same words, but then I felt no rush of passion against the words. I stared hard at the closed door before recollecting that the two sisters had been borrowing scissors, and not to cut cloth.

  Curious, I slipped into the room. Lizzie was clamoring for another attempt at fortune-telling.

  Mehitabel was still holding the flour sieve and Goody Holt’s big shears.

  “Why not, as Mother is gone away? Now put your finger on one side of the shears and I on the other. Ask it,” she said to Lizzie. “Go on and ask another question if you want.” She looked peevish, as if Lizzie had been asking a great many questions.

  Her sister began to chant:

  Days, mays,

  Jennet, linnet,

  Dowse, mouse,

  By St. Peter and St. Paul,

  If I shall marry one whose name begins with H,

  Turn about riddle and shears and all.

  She looked eagerly at the sieve, which remained inert and did not appear to give her the answer she desired. If she had owned the least amount of patience, enough to brim a little girl’s fingerhut, I was quite sure that she would have waited and seen it move. But she did not.

  “Oh, that’s enough!” Lizzie struck the metal sieve, which flew off the shears and bounced on the floor. “Yes for almost all is useless. And none for H.”

  “Why are you so ill-tempered?” Bel looked at Lizzie, who glared back at her. “Perhaps you will marry them all in time. You may live to be ninety-six and have four husbands.”

  The lines on either side of Lizzie’s mouth deepened with her frown. “It didn’t give me just one answer, as I wanted, and now who will I have?”

  “We can ask the sieve to choose and go through the alphabet until it moves,” Bel proposed. “That might have worked better.”

  “I am no better off than before.” Lizzie swung around and looked at me. “What are you doing here?”

  I smiled at her in surprise. “This is where I sew.”

  She made a noise of impatience that reminded me of her mother before stamping out of the room.

  “I know what you were doing,” I said to Bel.

  She stared at me.

  “Why did you? That’s magic, you know—you were doing magic, and magic is forbidden. You could get into difficulties.” I put my hand on her arm, as if to hold her back from danger, but she laughed.

  “We learned how to balance the sieve from one of the Carletons. Hannah Carleton found out the man she would marry from the sieve-and-scissors.”

  “My mother would never have let me do any such thing,” I said, pulling my hand away. I felt unsettled but could not make out whether it was fortune-telling or the risk I had taken to see Jotham Herrick that made me fearful.

  Hands on hips, Bel surveyed me, and did not look convinced.

  “She said that even little acts could be devilish. They were pleasurable and curious like a marvelous bottle of aqua mellis that perfumes the air and skin but draws the interest of strange powers that snuff the air and can smell an atom of royal honey-water scent from worlds off. She told me that small infractions can lead on to greater, and that must be truth. But I don’t know—I have seen evil, and its face is much worse than sieve-and-scissors.”

  I perched on the sewing stool and took up the gown that I had been hemming when I left for my walk.

  “Lots of people do it,” she said, and fetched the sieve from the corner where it had landed. “It’s not like black magic.”

  “Scissors are powerful images of change,” I said, laying aside my sewing to retrieve Goody Holt’s blades from the floor and turning them over in my hands to make sure t
hey had received no hurt from knocking against the boards. “The Greeks dreamed that the three Moirai would spin and measure and cut the thread of human lives. Atropos would ‘slit the thin-spun life.’ The three sang of what was and what was past and what was to be.”

  “I know and care nothing about any old Greek lies,” Mehitabel said.

  “The Greeks thought the Moirai were goddesses of fate,” I said. “They were pagans and wrong. Still, there is much of worth in their writings.”

  “You ought to be a boy and go to college. You know such strange things.”

  “My father taught me with my brothers.”

  “But who cares about those old Moirai?”

  “The Greeks thought that the Moirai ruled the world, I suppose, for who could stand against them?”

  “And how could that ever be?” Bel Holt laughed to think of it. “Three women! Though I do believe that my mother ruled the house while Father lived. She hounded him to wear bone or gold or silver lace and great boots, though they would surely have gotten him into trouble with the constable for exceeding his rank. He was a plain man.”

  “Your mother has a taste for costly materials,” I said.

  “Long ago she was fined for wearing silk hoods. And they say she was punished for disorderly behavior when she was young—the neighbors marched her to the magistrates for usurping the business of a man. She also pummeled my father repeatedly with a distaff, or so I heard from Phoebe Wardwell, who was told by her husband’s aunt, so I suppose it is true. I do not think that he suffered much damage.”

  Imagine that! I smiled down at the shears in my lap. To picture Goody Holt rampaging up the stairs, waving her distaff as she chased the poor tanner! Probably all the damage was to his position among his neighbors and to his self-respect as head of the household. How I wanted to laugh!

  “The Moirai were a dream to explain why some only had a blink of life and others lived to creep about like crooked insects in old age. The Greeks did not know what we know, but they were wise.” I ran my fingertips over the engraving on the metal.