Yet Oliver was suspicious when Rose suggested that they should sleep in the same bed.
“Sleep together?” he said. “What about the witches?” They were alone in the hall. Oliver had drunk a good deal of rum, even for him, and his speech was slurred.
“The Gypsy told me not to worry about that,” Rose said.
“The Gypsy? What Gypsy?”
“Henry’s Gypsy—the one we went to see on the day he died. She said the witch would only come in the form of a bear, so there’s nothing to worry about, really. I would have told you, but then the football game happened, and you … lost interest.”
Rose looked modestly at the floor. Oliver uttered a gassy drunken laugh.
“Lost interest?” he said. “Is that what I did, Rose?” What was wrong with him? Was he too drunk to realize what she was offering him?
Rose said, “I thought you might be pleased.” “Teased, you mean. No, thank you, my dear. I’ve had enough of fucking the air, thank you very much.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t.”
Oliver’s voice was hard. Rose tried to force tears from her eyes to soften his heart. None came. She thought about her years in Lockwood Hall—the cold, the nights the Lockwoods ate supper without telling her, the darkness, the look of contempt on the servants’ faces because she was poor and because they all knew how Robert had used her. She began to sob.
“I never thought that you could be so cruel,” she said to Oliver. “Not you.”
Oliver was still grinning. “Come, Rose,” he said. “We both know you don’t want to be a wife to me. So what’s all this about?”
Rose was sobbing uncontrollably now. Oliver shook his head violently to clear it of rum.
“By God, Rose, you really are something,” he said. “You ruined me in London for no reason at all, and now you’re going to spread your legs and jump onto it off the bedpost for appearance sake?”
Rose wiped her eyes. As soon as the tears were gone, all trace of distress vanished. She was as perfect as before.
“You were not tender in London,” she said, pouting and looking sidelong. “The place was strange. I was frightened. You were so impetuous and so … masculine.”
“Sorry about the tenderness,” Oliver said. “There’s not much I can do about the dimensions, lucky for you. You really mean this, do you?”
“Of course I mean it. We are husband and wife.”
“Are we now? When do we start?”
Rose silently counted the days again. “Friday,” she said. “But you must promise to be tender.”
“Friday? It’s Wednesday now. Why not a bit of tenderness today or Thursday?”
Rose looked modestly downward. She should feel the twinge by Thursday. “A woman knows the right moment,” she said.
When the moment arrived, Oliver astonished her. Everything seemed to be as it had been before, but in fact it was all different.
The moon was full on Friday night, and the bedchamber was illuminated by moonlight when Oliver shook the door to see if it was locked and then entered. Rose stood looking out the window. She had combed out her hair so that it hung to her waist, sprinkled scent on her neck and bosom, and put on the same transparent gown that had so excited Oliver in London.
Rose identified Oliver’s peculiar male odor and sweat and decay as soon as he entered the room, but to her relief, she smelled no spirits. Perhaps he would be less clumsy if he was not drunk, perhaps he’d be quicker; Robert always had been. Rose continued to look out the window. She could see Oliver’s reflection in the wavy panes, remembering how she had kept him off in London by telling him that she couldn’t see him in the looking glass.
Groaning like an old man as he bent over and straightened up again, Oliver undressed in his careless way, boots thumping to the floor, buckles and buttons rattling on the wooden floor as he threw down his waistcoat and breeches. The moon, hanging in a cloudless sky beyond the branches of the oaks, was as white as salt. Rose kept her eyes fixed upon it.
Just as before, she gagged on Oliver’s tongue as he kissed her, then closed her eyes as he stripped off her clothes. He picked her up and dropped her on the bed. The frame groaned as he crawled in beside her. She kept her eyes closed, and began to think about riding in Buckinghamshire—that was what she had always thought about when Robert played the husband. She could see the horse, a tall chestnut with a white star, smell the leathers, visualize the cloudy sky making a quarter-turn around her as she pirouetted into the saddle …
Nothing happened. Rose opened her eyes. On the other side of the bed, Oliver lay on his back with his arms crossed on his chest, his big horny feet protruding over the footboard. He was not looking at Rose, but gazing upward at the tapestry canopy.
“Husband?” Rose said.
Oliver’s eyes were open. He did not answer or change his position. Minutes passed.
“Husband?” Rose said. “Is something the matter?”
Still Oliver did not move. Really, what was the matter? Was he asleep? Did he want her to make some gesture of apology for having denied him? She could not bring herself to kiss Oliver, but she did lift his hand and press the back of it against her cheek. The hand was limp, a strange condition in such a large object. When Rose let go, it fell back onto Oliver’s chest with a thump.
Oliver’s eyes were still open. He was breathing normally. But he seemed to be unaware of Rose.
Suddenly Oliver laughed explosively, a single derisive Ha! Then he rolled over onto an elbow and looked Rose’s unclothed body up and down.
“Lovely,” he said in a genial voice, as if remarking on a sunset.
Then, using a different tone, he began talking to someone else. “Just have a look at that, old boy, wake up and look, that’s all I ask,” he said. “You know you’ve never seen knockers like these on a mortal woman.”
Oliver spoke with such gruff affection that Rose thought for a moment that he was having some sort of a vision, that he might have thought that Henry had come into the room with them. So strong was this feeling that she opened her eyes and looked around. They were alone.
Oliver lay beside her, up on his elbow with his grizzled head propped in one hand. He was looking at Rose’s body, his face transformed by the look of wonder she remembered from their wedding night. With a shake of his head, he gave the flaxen hair between her legs a prolonged, painful tug. Rose sat up, gasping in surprise and pain. Oliver lifted her breasts one after the other, displaying them to the unseen presence he was talking to.
“Just feel that, old boy,” he said. “Silk and honey.”
Rose squirmed. Why wasn’t it over with? Robert had carried butter in his pocket so as to be quick. “Hurry,” she whispered.
Oliver seemed not to hear. He was still talking. “Nothing like it in this world, old boy,” he said. “Only a fool would refuse it. You say you don’t give a damn? Then you’re the loser.”
“What are you saying?” Rose said. “Whom are you talking to?”
“To my friend here.”
Oliver lifted Rose’s hand. She resisted, but he merely used a little more strength, guiding her fingers downward.
“Poor chap,” Oliver said. “Lifeless and limp.”
Rose snatched her hand away and leaped out of bed. “You bastard,” she said. “How dare you?”
“Calling me names is no help. I’m as surprised as you. This is the first time he’s ever refused to stand up for a lady.”
“You foul bastard. You’ve had another woman tonight. I smell her on you.”
“You smell another woman on me like you couldn’t see me in the looking glass in Catherine Street because I was a witch,” Oliver said. “I know you, Rose.”
His tone of voice was mild. He wasn’t even looking at Rose. Instead, he was looking beyond her, at something in the window.
“It’s that skinny little bitch, isn’t it?” Rose cried. “No wonder you want to give her the world. She’s put
a spell on you.”
“Ah, it’s witches again, is it?”
Oliver, smiling broadly, was still looking over her shoulder. “Look, Rose,” he said, “in the tree outside the window.”
Rose turned around. The oak was full of cats, eyes glittering like chips of moonlight.
19
Despite Rose’s ban on cats, Thoughtful had kept one of the kittens she had saved from drowning. She took it everywhere with her, carrying it inside her dress for warmth. At supper on Saturday, the day after Oliver’s visit to the bedchamber, the kitten crawled out of the neck of Thoughtful’s dress, purring loudly. It was a pretty animal, black with a white face and white boots, and so young that its eyes were still blue. Thoughtful fed it drops of milk off her fingertips and talked to it in Abenaki.
“Fanny,” she said, “please inform the Impostor that supper is at five, when Magpie rings the bell, and that she will not be given any food hereafter if she is late. And please ask the Impostor why she has no manners at all.”
“Rose, be kind,” Fanny said.
“I am trying to be kind. Tell her what I said.” “She understands.”
“You mean the Impostor understands English?”
“She understands the look on your face. Some words are almost the same in English and French—including the name you call her by.”
“Really? Teach me some more French words. How do you say ‘ugly,’ ‘rude,’ ‘imbecile’?”
The kitten, purring ecstatically, clambered over the top of Thoughtful’s curly head and then down her shoulder before disappearing inside her dress again. Thoughtful peered down into her bodice and spoke gravely to the tiny animal again in Abenaki gutturals.
“Look, Mr. Ash,” Rose said. “The Impostor has a kitten in her bosom.”
Ash pretended not to hear. Yet Rose thought that Ash’s eyes, set in his pallid face, were distinctly more melancholy than before. How difficult it must be for him to live in the same house, so near to her and yet so far! Certainly Ash, who did little except read books nowadays, had been unusually quiet since coming to America.
“Mr. Ash,” Rose said. “Are there any witches in America?”
Ash sighed. “I have explained that point. They are everywhere because they are Satan’s creatures and Satan is everywhere. Especially in America, if we are to believe Mr. Joseph Mede of Cambridge University. According to Mede, Satan transported the Indians to America long before the coming of Jesus Christ and made them his own chosen people.”
“Satan’s own chosen people? What for?”
“So as to put at least a part of mankind beyond the reach of salvation.”
Ash recited the proofs of Mede’s theory: the Babel of Indian languages, the tendency of the Indians to practice sorcery and black magic, the hellish torture and cruelty that Indians inflicted on Christians when they captured them, the great epidemic that God had sent to weaken the Indians just before the Pilgrims landed.
Listening to what Ash was telling her, and realizing what it meant, Rose felt her breath grow shorter.
“Then the Indians are all devils?” she said.
“Theoretically, yes. I can discover no scriptural support for Mede’s idea, except by implication in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in which he says that those who are without Christ are ‘strangers from the Covenants of promise.’”
“How interesting,” Rose said in her harshest voice. “The Impostor talks to the creature in Indian, the language of Satan, just as a witch will speak in tongues to a familiar spirit.”
Fanny held up a hand in warning. “A familiar spirit?” she said. “What are you trying to do, Rose?”
Rose smiled at Ash, but would not meet Fanny’s eyes. “I am trying to amuse you with this interesting theory about Satan and the Indians. What form can familiar spirits take, Mr. Ash?”
“In England, a rat, usually, sometimes a mouse or a toad,” Ash said. “But when Saul visited the woman of Endor, she raised up a familiar spirit that took the form of Samuel.”
“And these familiars stay close to witches, and at night take their usual form, which is that of a devil, and play the husband to their witches?”
“That is the usual pattern. Witches, because they are female, are insatiable.”
“But ugly. They have need of familiar spirits to satisfy their lust because men find them too ugly. Is that not so?”
Ash did not answer. He was astonished that Rose, who was so incurably stupid, had been able to remember so much of what he had told her in their many conversations on the subject of witchcraft, even if she remembered it faultily, and to make such a telling case as she was making.
“Could a witch make another woman, even a beautiful woman, appear ugly to her husband?” Rose asked.
“I know of no such case,” Ash said, “but certainly it is possible.”
“Rats, mice, toads—disgusting creatures,” Rose said, her eyes fixed on the kitten, which was crawling out of Thoughtful’s collar again. It looked around and suddenly meowed, one yowl after another, in a surprisingly loud voice. Hearing such a small creature make such a tremendous noise, everyone laughed but Rose.
She said, “ A clever witch who knows Indian magic would have a pretty thing for a familiar spirit, I suppose—something that charms and amuses. A kitten, for example.”
Fanny and Thoughtful slept in the same room at the opposite end of the Manor from Rose. As soon as Thoughtful was asleep, Fanny walked down the long central passageway and opened Rose’s door.
Rose lay on the floor in her chemise, brushing her hair and listening at the cracks between the boards. She held a finger over her lips.
“Oliver and Mr. Ash are in the library,” she whispered. “They are talking about the letter to Lebbaeus Williams.”
Rose listened intently for several more minutes, then got to her feet. “They never say what’s in it, only how to send it,” she said, still whispering. “They are waiting for Hawkes to come back so that he can carry it to Boston.” She handed Fanny the brush. “Brush my hair, Fanny. I can’t reach—it’s so long.”
Rose sat down on a bench in front of a full-length mirror and crossed her legs. She was barefoot. While Fanny pulled the brush through her hair, she examined herself in the wavy glass. Even her toes were shapely—each one mated perfectly to the one beside it, little pink toenails like mother-of-pearl.
Fanny stopped brushing and looked at Rose in the mirror. Rose held out her calf and examined its reflection.
“Don’t stop, Fanny, please. I’ll do yours. Then you can stay with me. I worry about you, sleeping with that Indian and her familiar.”
Fanny tapped her on the crown with the back of the brush.
“Rose, you must stop this nonsense about witches and familiar spirits. You know perfectly well that there’s nothing wrong with Thoughtful.”
“Stop?” Rose looked away. “How can I stop? Awful things are happening in this house, Fanny. I can’t tell an innocent girl like you how awful they really are. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Rose.…”
“Don’t ‘Rose’ me. I know the signs. I’ve seen her walking backward and twining her fingers, and you all saw her with that disgusting thing she sleeps with, talking to it in Indian.”
Fanny put down the brush and walked around to face Rose. She spun on her buttocks, turning her back to Fanny and the mirror, and began brushing her own hair. It crackled with static electricity in the cold room and stood out around her face.
Fanny tried to make Rose look at her, but instead she turned around again and looked knowingly at Fanny’s reflection.
“She doesn’t even have the voice of a girl,” Rose said. “She sounds like something that lives under the earth. We know that she has a mark under her hair because Hawkes shaved her. Witches are always shaved so that the judges can see what’s written on their scalps.”
Rose brushed rhythmically as she spoke, one angry stroke for each word. Her eyes, like the eyes of a child who is just learning h
ow to lie, were locked to Fanny’s in the mirror.
“Rose,” Fanny said, “you don’t believe a word you’re saying.”
“No? You’ll see. She’s made you blind to what she is.” Fanny seized Rose’s wrist; Rose struggled for a moment, then stopped brushing.
“Rose, listen to me,” Fanny said. “It’s one thing to have a joke about witches in London to get your own way with Oliver. It’s another to call Thoughtful a witch because you’re afraid that Oliver is going to give everything back to her.”
Rose’s expression changed. Watching her in the glass, Fanny recognized the look. It was the same panicky, helpless one she had worn on the day Montagu pulled down Henry’s house in Catherine Street and Fanny had had to yank her to safety by her hair. Tears wetted Rose’s cheeks.
“You’re against me too, Fanny,” she said.
“I’m not against you. But you’ve got to stop. They hang witches in this country.”
She began to cry again. “Oh, Fanny,” she said. “You don’t know! I’ve told no one what she’s done.”
Her eyes shone in the glass.
“Tell me,” Fanny said.
Rose looked right and left, then beckoned Fanny close. She put her lips against her ear and whispered. Fanny could feel the moisture in her breath.
“It’s a ligature,” she hissed.
“A what?”
Fanny knew the word. But what did Rose mean by it? She drew away and looked at Rose, but she had covered her face with her hands.
“I don’t understand,” Fanny said.
Rose parted her fingers so that Fanny could see her eye. She was wearing her ruby ring.
“A ligature,” she repeated. “Witches do it to men all the time. It takes away their manly powers, so they can’t be husbands anymore. Oh, Fanny, what am I going to do?”
Rose let her hands fall limply onto her lap and watched herself weeping in the glass. She was as lovely as a picture. Fanny walked backward out of the room, leaving Rose alone, looking at herself.
20
As dawn broke the following morning, Fanny found Ash asleep on the floor of the library. It was a large square room, taking up the whole thirty-two-foot width of the house and containing one of the four big stone chimneys that anchored the Manor.
Bride of the Wilderness Page 30