I gasped for air, then finally succeeded in pushing the words from my throat. “I would be better if you would remove yourself from me.”
“I am certain you probably would.” With amusement flashing in his eyes, he rocked forward, off my stomach. Then he dropped a knee to the ground and extended a hand to me.
I ignored it and tried my best instead to sit. Successful, I took a careful deep breath. It caught. I coughed. Tried again. My chest trembled as it expanded.
The captain leaned close and began to pluck grasses from my sleeves. “Did all savages look like you, I would quit my worries and welcome them here without another thought.”
“You did not have to dive down upon me.”
“Neither did you have to roll yourself into me. Although I must say, it was completely unexpected and therefore tactically sound. Perhaps I should have the men at watch post themselves right there,” he gestured toward the ridge, “in preparation for launching themselves in a roll at the enemy. ’Tis as good a strategy as I have ever devised.”
I pushed his hand away from my sleeve.
His gaze left my eyes and came to rest at some point beyond my shoulder. “Tsk.” He leaned closer.
My breath caught once more.
He reached out behind me but then almost immediately straightened, putting distance between us. “Such a bad end to such a dreadful hat.” He handed it to me.
Streaks of dirt were smeared across the crown. The brim had been battered. “You do not like my hat?” Why did he not like it? It was just like everyone else’s.
“I could never look without prejudice upon anything that would hide your lovely locks from view.” He reached out a hand to capture a curl that spun in the breeze below my shoulder. It was then that I realized that my coif had disappeared as well.
I gathered up my hairs, spun them around my hand into a bundle and slapped my hat atop them. Then I pushed from the ground, intending to start a search for the coif. As I gained my feet, however, my ankle buckled once more. I cried out in pain as I stumbled.
The captain, still on one knee, caught me as I fell. “I place my humble person at your service.”
I could only protest his falsehood. “You are not humble!”
He chortled as he gathered me to his chest and came to his feet. “Nay. I have been graced with many things, but that particular quality does not number itself among them.”
Had he no shame? No remorse? To clutch my person to his broad chest in the plain light of day? Such things were not done. And why was I so fixed upon his chest and his eyes . . . those eyes that were as varied as the ocean, shifting from light blue to indigo with every glance.
With great effort, I brought my fascination with his person to a halt and concentrated upon his words instead. Had he not just recognized within himself a sin? But though recognized and identified, he appeared to suffer no guilt from it! What kind of man was he?
A shout from the ridge above us made the captain turn. As he did so, he faltered for an instant as if trying to keep his footing.
I threw my arms up around his neck.
“I wish I always had my arms filled with such a grasping woman! ’Twould be Paradise indeed.”
He made as if to drop me and when I screamed, he tossed me above his head instead. And then he caught me up close against his chest again. He smelt of tobacco and leather and . . . the wind.
“You must let me go!”
“Must I?” We both watched Mary as she appeared at the ridge. He called at her to come join us.
“Truly, you must.”
“But then how would you get home?”
“You cannot carry me,” I protested.
“I cannot? I think I can. I am.” He glanced at me. “Ah, I see. You mean I should not. Are you certain?”
“ ’Tis not . . . seemly.”
I felt his shoulders shrug beneath my arms. “As you like. I suppose there are other ways of going about it.” He shifted me within his arms and then threw me over his shoulder. Gripping me at his chest about the knees with his arm, he let my own arms and head flop loose at his back.
Beating upon him with my fists did nothing but make him laugh. I doubted a hammer could knock a dent in that rigid back of his.
Mary was smiling long before she reached us.
“A new manner of transport, Susannah?”
I might have glared at her, could I have lifted my head high enough to see her.
“I would think walking more comfortable, if not more prudent,” she continued.
“She has turned an ankle.”
“And so you turned her over your shoulder?” There was a sauciness in Mary’s retort that ought to have shamed her. Indeed, it ought to have shamed me. But the thing of it was, she had me wishing that I were walking beside the captain, talking with him, looking into those changeable eyes instead of being flung over his shoulder like a sack of meal.
“What else was I to do when she eschewed my arms?”
“I did not—”
My words were jolted from of me, as the captain began the descent toward home. Mary walked beside him, keeping him in conversation as I tried to keep my hat on my head and clutch at the captain’s waist for security at the same time.
I walked up to the hay meadow after the Phillips sisters had left Goody Clarke’s house. My path had nothing to do with following them. As I had on the day when I saw the captain, I often walked the meadow of a forenoon, after weeding in the garden or sewing and before beginning preparations for supper. Despite the grime of his profession, Thomas was a simple and tidy man who left little in the way of a mess behind him. Our home was small. There were but two of us living within it. On a day like this one, the air heavy with humidity, I liked to walk the ridge to catch the breeze that skipped off the crest of the hill and continued on without descending into the valley. It was a good thing to build beneath a ridge for shelter from winter’s cruel gales. But in the summer, it was insufferable. And in this one thing, I chose not to. Suffer.
I treaded lightly, carefully, not willing to step through a sparrow’s nest from sheer carelessness. The sisters’ trail was easy enough to spot. It bored straight through the meadow grasses, oblivious to beast or fowl. My eyes scanned the field, looked through the bowed grasses to see movement. Over there, where they rustled first this way and that, might be a fox. And over there, where they shook in clumps forming a jagged line, might be a hare.
I wandered over to the edge of the ridge and looked down upon the houses, so orderly, so precisely placed upon the meandering road. I liked knowing that none of them, none of those goodwives in those houses, imagined that I was up here. None of them knew that I was looking down upon them. After feeling, so often, for so long, that they and those like them were looking down upon me, it gave me great satisfaction to do the same to them.
The string of my thoughts was severed by a motion down the hill and to my left.
I turned in that direction, shifting my hat to shade my eyes from the sun.
It was Susannah Phillips.
And that captain.
I took a step closer. They were . . . she was . . . he had lifted her into his arms. But now he was throwing her over his shoulder.
I felt myself smile, so I tucked my chin into the collar of my shift. But that did not stop me from watching.
Susannah’s sister had joined them and now they were walking down the hill toward their house, all three of them. Four of them. Mary carried the child.
That they would cavort so openly. And laugh so freely. Did they not know they tempted God? I knew how quickly laughter could turn to tears. I knew how swiftly madness could follow mirth. Better not to laugh. Better to keep one’s head down, keep one’s hands busy, and keep one’s self in hiding. As much as possible.
Susannah’s hands reached up to clamp her hat onto her head.
The captain spun round, causing her to fly out from his back.
I could not hear the sisters from where I was, but I could see them.
Quite clearly.
What would those goodwives say? With any luck, they would never see, never know. Surely on this day, at this hour, I was certain to be the only one watching.
I turned my eyes from them and kept to my course, but again, my attention was drawn by a motion. I looked up across the valley to the other side of the ridge. The side where it curved around by the sawmill. And it was there I saw him.
Simeon Wright was standing on the crest of the hill, fists at his hips, watching the goings on beneath us both.
I let myself sink down into the grasses and then sat there for a long while, rubbing my arms against a sudden chill.
Mary went before us into the house.
I could hear Mother long before I could see her. “ ’Tis the last time I will give you leave for visiting of a forenoon! What have you to say to account for yourselves?” I heard her step closer. “And why do you carry my daughter across your shoulder like a sack of flour?”
“Because she turned an ankle and did not think it seemly for me to carry her in my arms.”
As he dumped me onto a bench beside the table, it seemed to me that there was a smile lurking in my mother’s eyes. She knelt before me, lifted my skirts, and untied my garter.
And then she paused for a moment and lifted her head to look at the captain.
He sighed, threw up his hands, and left the house.
Then she slid the stocking from my injured foot and poked and prodded until I was near to writhing at her examination.
“There is no break, but there is a swelling. And you won’t be much use to me for a week.” She shook her head as she drew my stocking back on and settled my skirts around my legs. “I had thought you had a sound head upon those shoulders. ’Tis Mary with her candor and high spirits that I have worried over all this time, and now I see that it should have been you.”
She pushed to her feet and took the child from Mary, sending her out to the garden for field balm.
“What am I to do with you?”
“I am sorry.”
Her face softened and she came close to pat my arm. “I know you are, child. What were you about?”
“We were coming back from Abigail’s. By the hay meadow.”
“The hay meadow? And why?”
“Because we were stopped along the way, going, at every house by every goodwife wanting to know about the captain.”
“Ah. Well, then you have paid for your folly.”
I supposed I had.
For the remainder of the week, I was relegated to the menial duties of knitting and scouring pots, entertaining the babe, and churning milk into butter as Mary took over my tasks of biscuit making and fire tending and cooking.
But worse, I was subjected to the captain’s amused glances whenever I happened to meet his eyes.
At least my humiliation was limited in its scope. None but the family, and the captain, knew of it. It would have shamed me to think of John having seen us. But it shamed me even more that though I could recall with vivid clarity the captain’s scent, and though I could remember the many variations in the color of his eyes, I could not do the same with John. Had he gray eyes or green? Blue or brown? And why was it that I did not know?
7
IF I THOUGHT MY humiliation at the hands of the captain had been accomplished in secret, I was disabused of that notion at meeting on the Sabbath.
“Why was the captain carrying you in his arms in broad daylight down the ridge?”
“I thought you had your hopes pinned to that John Prescotte.”
If my ankle and my courage had allowed it, I would have turned on my heel and marched right out of the meetinghouse. But good girls did not do things like that, and folly had to be atoned for.
“I had turned my ankle, and he was trying to help me. As for John, I do not know of what you speak.” The less said, the better, the faster the talk would cease. At least that is what I hoped.
“Is he not joining us today?”
I looked in the direction Goody Ellys pointed and saw the captain, musket at his shoulder, marching round the meetinghouse.
I shrugged. If he did not, then he was liable to be fined for refusing to attend meeting.
Goody Ellys clucked. And then she continued with her questioning. “So . . . you fell off the ridge?”
I nodded.
“And what were you doing up there?”
I sighed and heaved a prayer toward heaven. God answered: Nathaniel began drumming the rest of the congregation into the meetinghouse.
As soon as I was seated, I could not know which was worse: to be accosted by questions or to be rendered light-headed from the heat. As the minister took his place and led us in a confession of sins, sweat trickled down my brow. Babes fussed in their mothers’ laps, and now and then a clucking or a shushing could be heard above the minister’s voice.
Throughout the prayers and singing, the prayers and readings, the prayers and the sermon, I alternately wiped wet palms against my skirt and then set them against the smooth wood of the bench beneath me. And all the while I watched from the far edge of my vision as the captain paced round the building, up one side and down the other.
And I wondered what he thought of us. Though I do not know why. And as soon as I caught my thoughts wandering in his direction, I yanked them back toward the minister and his sermon.
The Sabbath meeting was one of the torments of my existence. No matter that I walked with Thomas to the meetinghouse, the moment we stepped inside we were separated, man from woman. He to the one side, I to the other.
Of course, I knew how to be still. And quiet. I could sit for hours with a stillness of soul that rendered the space around me void of my presence. I knew how to breathe so softly that I stirred not even the air in front of my face. And I knew how to sing so that none could discern my voice from the chorus of all the others. But still, in the meetinghouse I became a woman, joined to the other women in the town, even though I did not know how to be one.
How did one leave aside their memories to sit without shame in the house of God? How did one accept the look of another not as a challenge, not as a warning of danger, but as a simple passing glance . . . as nothing at all? How did one become an unquestioned part of something so great, so wonderful, as this community of souls?
The questions were not ones that I could answer. They were the product of my overabundant curiosity, for I did not aspire to something so grand. I was unworthy. More than any of them knew. But I wondered just the same. And I observed.
So much could be learned by watching.
And far better to watch than to be watched.
I listened to the lesson. I would not be so proud, so bold, as to think that it did not apply to me. But in the listening, with my head bent slightly in a posture of penitence, I could see. Well enough to know that Goody Blake was going blind, though no one knew it yet but me. It had to do with the way she cast her hands out before her as she walked and sat. I did not know how she could bear the knowledge of it. I doubt if she had gained forty years, and she had a little one still tugging at her skirts.
Goody Metcalf would have one soon. It did not show yet in anything but her smile and the way she slipped her hands beneath her apron to stroke her belly. It was her first. She would be allowed such indulgences.
The Hillbrooks were doing poorly. Their crops must have failed last year, though I had not heard it. Their property lay down toward the common at the farthest end of the town’s holdings. And now, with Indian troubles, they would not want to linger long during the summer’s harvest . . . if indeed they were allowed to go there at all. But they were wise. They had read the signs and planned for the worst. I could tell it by the way Goody Hillbrook had turned her cuffs inside out instead of replacing them with new ones. By the way she had resewn her skirts so their frayed seams would not show.
The Phillips. . . now there was a picture of prosperity. There was always work for a carpenter when a town was being established. And a good thing, for his
daughters would soon be marrying. Did they realize Mary Phillips’s gaze wandered toward Simeon Wright . . . even as her sister Susannah’s steadfastly avoided him?
I wondered about that. Perhaps, then, she had some inkling of his character.
As I sat there listening and wondering, Susannah’s gaze shot now and then toward John Prescotte. But not as often as one might think for a young woman all but pledged to be married. And not in the dreamy, thoughtless way of those mooning over their beloved. Nay, if anyone could be said to capture her full attention, it was Captain Holcombe, who marched round the meetinghouse with the precision of a beating drum. ’Twas to him that her eyes seemed unaccountably fixed.
Curious, that. Because Susannah was good. And kind and meek. Not like some who wore their religion as a cloak to be drawn on or cast off at will. Not like her sister. Neither like her friend, Abigail Clarke.
Those two were cut of the same cloth. Abigail had sat two years before, numbered among her parents’ children, watching Simeon Wright in much the same way Mary did now. But Simeon Wright had never, not once, returned the interest.
Nay, his attention was directed to two women in particular. To his mother and to Susannah Phillips, though only one of them was aware of it. And it was not a benign or casual interest.
I am sure that to ask Mary and her friends of Simeon Wright would encourage coy twitters. He was a handsome man and gave off the appearance of being receptive to flirtation. Half of the girls in town might imagine, with some reason, that he had an especial affection for them. I am sure he had sampled kisses from more than half. But they missed the clues. They failed to read the signs. They never noticed that his smile did not reach his eyes.
Not like Thomas’s. Not that he smiled very often. But who would, when burdened with a wife like me? I often wondered, on his behalf, what might have happened if he had not come to market on that day three winters ago. What might have happened, what his life might have looked like, had he not met me. Which of these girls might he have married?
I did not think upon it often because the burden of it was too great to bear. Neither did I look at Thomas often. Mostly because I did not want to see him looking at me. For he did. I could feel it. But they were most likely looks of sorrow and pity. What other kind could they be?
Love's Pursuit Page 4