Serpents in the Garden (The Graham Saga)

by Anna Belfrage

  Matthew threw Alex a cool look. “There are plenty of things for Mama, but they come with the mules.”

  Right; stuff like bolts of fabric, needles and thread, a new kettle to replace the old one, but nothing specifically for her – not this time. She tucked her hands in under her arms and retreated a few paces. She wanted to tell him about the Indian and the horrible gift, needed to feel his beating heart under her cheek, but as he made no move to come to her, she stood to the side, feeling abandoned.

  *

  He had ridden like the wind in his haste to get back home. Home to ensure nothing had happened to his sons while he was gone, but also to reassure himself Alex was still here, with him, and not yanked back through time. The whole incident with the black man had left him edgy and nervous, all too aware of the times he’d nearly lost her.

  But on the long ride back, it had been his anger that had swelled and grown, so that when he rode into the yard and saw her standing to the side, he felt at first a weakening relief that she was still here, then a flaming rage that she should have taken it upon herself to decide what he should know or not.

  He looked over to where Angus was leading Moses off towards the stable, and his right fist closed. By tomorrow, Angus would be gone, he decided, feeling very small and mean-minded. But what was he to do? Keep him on and risk that one day he would not attempt to woo, but force himself on one of his sons? Angus’ narrow shoulder blades shifted under his stare, and Matthew dragged his eyes away from him to smile down at Samuel, who had taken his hand in an effort to catch his attention.

  “Mama saw an Indian,” he said.

  “You did?” His eyes flashed over to Alex, who was standing some feet away, her arms crossed in a forlorn gesture over her chest. For some reason she paled, tightening her hold on herself. “Well, did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “A brave? An Iroquois?”

  “I have no idea; he wasn’t wearing Indian garb.” She gnawed at her lip, seemed on the verge of saying something, but shook her head instead. “I can tell you later.”

  All through supper, Matthew exchanged but a minimum of words with Alex, submerging himself in his bairns while she busied herself with serving up meat soup, slicing bread, and insisting that all eat at least one carrot stick. When Matthew told the household that he wished to speak to his wife alone, the kitchen emptied so quickly it was almost risible, with Agnes mumbling she would handle the dishes later before darting after Naomi and Betty.

  Matthew sat back in his chair and extended his legs towards the hearth. The lesser man in him was enjoying her evident discomfort. “Why?”

  Alex hitched her shoulders. “I’m not sure. Maybe because I was afraid you’d overreact and—”

  “Overreact?” He looked at her with dislike. “How can I overreact? That man, crawling over our son!”

  “It wasn’t quite like that, and it’s not as if he’s undamaged himself, is it?”

  “I don’t care if he’s been buggered every night by the men he shared a hut with.”

  “He was?” Alex gasped.

  Matthew closed his eyes at her innocence. “I have no idea, but men will be men. Angus is a pretty lad, near on girlish. So I guessed. He wouldn’t have survived three years on a tobacco farm without some protection, and he paid for it the only way he could, by offering up his arse.”

  “Jesus,” Alex muttered.

  “As I said, I don’t care. He touched my lad in an untoward way, and had you told me, I’d have had him off our land that same day – as you well know.”

  Alex nodded: that was why she hadn’t told him, because however mad she was at Angus, she was also sorry for him – and for Agnes. But she’d been vigilant, she assured him, ensuring Angus was never alone with her sons.

  Not good enough, he told her, not at all good enough. “Never again. You will never take it upon yourself to choose what I should hear or not when it comes to our bairns.”

  “But—” Alex protested.

  Matthew brought his hand down so hard on the table it made her jump. “Never,” he said, his eyes inches from hers.

  “Never,” she promised, and in her eyes he saw just how humiliated she felt. At the moment, he didn’t much care.

  “Good,” he said as he got to his feet. “And now I must speak to Angus.”

  Angus was mute. He sat slumped on a stool, his mouth slack as Matthew told him in a matter-of-fact voice that he wished him gone next morning. His contract had been revised, Matthew explained, and he was free to go. There would even be a pouch with a few shillings and a change of clothes for him, but he was not welcome to stay.

  “Why?” Angus asked. Matthew stood looking down at him for a long time, pity warring with disgust.

  “I won’t have you making catamites of my lads,” he said and turned on his heel.

  *

  “What have you done to your shirt?” Alex asked later that evening, in an attempt to regain some kind of normality between them.

  Matthew looked down at his tear. “Oh, that. I caught it on something.”

  “Caught it on something,” she mimicked and held out her hand. “Give it here. I’ll have to mend that before I wash it.” Matthew drew the shirt over his head and lobbed it at her before going over to the little writing desk.

  Alex was faintly disappointed. The whole idea had been for him to come over and hug her, complaining about being cold. Fine, mister, if that’s the way you want it then that’s the way you’ll have it, and until you ask, I won’t tell you about the damned Indian either. She stabbed the needle through the cloth, not really caring that the resulting mending was nowhere close to her normal standards.

  “I’ve been in discussions regarding marriage for Ruth,” Matthew said suddenly.

  “Ruth? But she’s a child!”

  Matthew gave her an irritated look. “For now, aye. And nothing is set on paper. It’s just a preliminary discussion.”

  “With who?”

  Matthew continued with his writing, the only sound in the room being the scraping of the quill against the thick paper.

  “Who?”

  “Henry Jones,” Matthew replied, swivelling on his stool to face her.

  “Jones!” Alex let his shirt fall to her lap. “No way. I’m not going to share grandchildren with that bastard – or his wife.”

  “That’s not for you to decide,” Matthew snapped.

  Alex studied him for a long time. “I see, this is my punishment, is it? For not telling you about Angus.” She crumpled the shirt together and threw it in his face. “Over my dead body, Matthew, you hear?” And then she was out of her chair so fast the candle flame guttered and died. Without a further word, she left the room.

  *

  Matthew shrugged, tossed the shirt to land in Alex’s basket, relit the candle, and went back to his letter. She’d be back soon enough, even if he heard the door slam as she left the house. He finished his letter and sat for some time before the fire, nursing a pewter mug of whisky. Still no Alex, and with a little sigh he banked the fire and retired upstairs.

  He was used to this, Matthew reminded himself as he lay in bed. Alex always did this when she wanted to punish him. Out she’d go to wander in the dark, and he’d be left lying awake and restless in bed, not knowing for sure where she was or if she was hurt. Mostly he’d go after her, but tonight he had no intention of leaving his warm bed to go traipsing around in the dark. The silly woman could sleep in the hay for all he cared. Two nights sleeping on the ground had him exhausted, so he rolled over, pummelled his pillow into a more comfortable shape, and closed his eyes to sleep.

  He woke much later, and something was wrong. Alex still wasn’t back, and Matthew’s nostrils were invaded by the smell of smoke. Fire! He was out of his bed so fast he stubbed his toe against the floor, and then he was outside in only his shirt, staring in the direction of his stables. He heard Alex scream, there was a loud clatter and a thud, and he ran in the direction of her voice.

  From his ca
bin came Mark, as undressed as he was, and Agnes came running with Betty at her heels. When Matthew threw the doors open, he was met by a wall of heat. The hayloft was on fire, the horses were shrieking in fear, and on the floor was Alex, lying by the fallen ladder. For an eternal second, he feared she might be dead, his eyes stuck on the blood that was trickling down her face. But then she moaned, pointing upwards to where the loft was burning, and he was suffused with relief that she was alive, no matter that her sleeves were singed and that there seemed to be something wrong with her foot.

  Around them, pandemonium reigned. Thick acrid smoke billowed from the loft. Agnes rushed by with her arms full of implements, dropped them just outside the door, and rushed back inside, all the while praying in a high, carrying voice. Mark struggled with the oxen. Betty had managed to lead out one of the horses and was rushing back in for the next one. Matthew swept his wife into his arms and carried her outside, ignoring her unintelligible gibbering.

  “Here,” he said to Mrs Parson, who had made it from the house by now. “See to her. I must help with the beasts.”

  Mrs Parson creaked down on her knees and wrapped her arms around a crying Alex, nodding at Matthew to go and do what he must.

  “The pigs!” Mark wheezed through coughs. “I can’t get the pigs out.”

  Matthew rushed over to the pigs’ enclosure. The sow had backed into a corner, screeching in terror at the fire that dripped from the hayloft floor above her home. Matthew threw himself at the stable wall behind her, he kicked and tore, and Patrick was on the outside, grabbing at the planks and tearing them apart until there was a hole large enough for the pigs to escape through.

  Behind him, Matthew heard the hayloft give. Just before crawling through the aperture, he turned, transfixed by the conflagration. A blackened, elongated shape plummeted from one of the roof beams to land in the roaring fire.

  “Oh God!” he said, his voice cracking. “Dear Lord, no!” With a roaring sound, the last of the hayloft collapsed, and Matthew threw himself outside.

  The entire household was standing before the burning stable when Agnes realised one of them was missing.

  “Angus?” She turned this way and that, looking for the lanky shape of her brother. “Angus?” There was a wobble to her voice. “Angus!” she shrieked, and threw herself towards the building.

  Patrick grabbed at her waist and pulled her back, making low shushing sounds into her hair.

  “Oh Lord,” Agnes whimpered when the roof fell down in an explosion of sparks. “Where is he? Where is my brother?”

  *

  Alex woke next morning with one arm neatly bandaged, her forehead stitched, and her husband fast asleep beside her, still in a shirt that smelled of smoke. She used her aching fingers to prod him, and with a start he woke.

  “What happened to you?” she croaked, taking in his torn nails and damaged hands. His hair was singed on the left side, and there was a huge bruise on his face.

  “The pig kicked me.” He fingered the purple discoloration.

  Alex laughed, even if it hurt like hell. Shit! Well, that’s what you get when you fall from the hayloft. She closed her eyes at the remembered horror. “She’s not the most polite of creatures. Did you get them all out?”

  Matthew nodded. “But the hay is gone, and I don’t like feeding them on grain throughout the winter. I’ll have to go to the Leslie place and barter for some feed.” A lot of the oats were gone as well, he told her, and most of the tack and the saddles. Matthew muttered that it would be a costly effort to replace all that. At least the plough was undamaged, and Agnes and Betty had managed to save most of the expensive iron equipment from the blaze.

  “That’s good.” Alex fiddled with the tassels of the new quilt. “But Angus…” she whispered. If only she’d been a few minutes earlier, she might have stopped him. If, if, if. If she’d seen the light in the hayloft sooner; if she’d not slipped in the mud while crossing the yard; if she’d been faster up the ladder – oh God!

  “We found him, what was left of him that is – a few charred bones, no more.”

  “Ah.” She blinked: the swinging body, the stool kicked aside, knocking the lantern off its perch to land in the stacked hay. A matter of seconds, and it was all on fire.

  Matthew smoothed her hair off her face. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “About yon Indian. You should have told me the whole story.”

  “At the time, you didn’t seem all that interested, did you?” She turned her face away.

  “I was—”

  “…pissed off, I know. As does every single person in our household.”

  “I had the right of it,” he said, sounding indignant.

  “Fine.” She waved him silent. She had no energy to quarrel with him. “Those Burleys, they’re sick obsessive bastards,” she muttered instead.

  “Aye, I can’t say I was much thrilled to stand eye to eye with all three of them.”

  “What? You’ve seen them? When?” She took his hand. His heart…that damned Philip Burley threatened to send her Matthew’s skewered heart, and…Alex coughed.

  Matthew raised their interlocked hands to his chest, pressing them close enough to his skin that she could feel the reassuring thump of his heartbeat.

  “In Providence,” he said, going on to recount his recent encounter with the brothers. “I swear, those brothers…” He broke off, and tugged at one of her curls. “Do you want me to braid it for you?”

  She nodded and sat up, biting back on a surge of pain when she put too much weight on her burnt hand. Matthew clambered up to sit behind her, brushed her hair until it lay thick and untangled, and braided it together into a plait.

  “You scared me,” he said to her nape. “I saw you bleeding by the ladder, and feared that the last words you’d ever hear from me were words of anger. And it broke my heart to think that perhaps you’d die and not know how much I love you.”

  Alex leaned back against him, pillowing her head on his chest. “I always know that, just as you know how much I love you.” He wrapped his arms carefully around her, but it still hurt. “That doesn’t mean that I’ll let you marry Ruth to Henry Jones,” Alex went on, yawning hugely. “Just so you know.”

  Matthew squeezed, making her yelp. “We’ll discuss that later,” he said, indicating this subject was not done and dealt with.

  “Later,” Alex agreed, and her voice was as steely as his. She craned her head back to look at the small patch of sky visible through the window. “Poor Angus.”

  “Aye, poor lad. But it was a wicked thing to do, to set the stable on fire. I didn’t think it of him.”

  Alex shook her head. “He didn’t do it on purpose. He just didn’t want to die in the dark.”

  “Merciful Lord,” Matthew groaned. “What have I done?”

  “You didn’t know he’d do that.”

  “I forgot. I was too angry and afraid to remember that greatest of all virtues is compassion.”

  Alex raised a bandaged hand to his cheek and gave him a clumsy pat. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Aye, it was. I could have waited to talk to him in daylight; not left him alone to mull it over in the dark.”

  She didn’t reply, raising her good hand to wipe at her eyes. A lost boy, she thought, a damaged young man with no one to turn to.

  *

  “You make a very bad patient.” Mrs Parson scowled at Alex. “I tell you, no? You must stay off that foot for a week or so, and you mustn’t use your hands, and what do I find? Mrs Graham hobbling around in her kitchen!”

  “What am I supposed to do? Just lie here like a stranded whale?” Three days in bed had her crawling out of her skin.

  “Aye, why not? You could use the time to meditate on your sins. Lack of patience for one—”

  “But I have work to do! The boys need new breeches before the winter, and I haven’t even finished their stockings yet and—”

  “Shush! Betty is doing a fine
job with the knitting, and Naomi has already made new breeches for David and Samuel. And Adam can stay in smocks a wee while longer, no?”

  “No choice, apparently.” The moment she was up and about, she’d make sure Adam got his first pair of breeches. She glanced at the chest where the new bolts of serge, broadcloth, linen and cotton lay stacked. The dark blue would make Agnes a nice bodice… She turned to face Mrs Parson. “How’s Agnes?”

  “Not well,” Mrs Parson replied with a slight shrug. “Matthew and I have decided not to tell her the full sorry tale. It wouldn’t help, we think.”

  “No, probably not.” Alex studied her hands, overcome by an image of Angus on his stool, the noose already round his neck.

  From outside came the sound of hammering and sawing, and, to her surprise, she could hear Peter Leslie’s voice among the others.

  “Peter?”

  “Helping Matthew with the stables,” Mrs Parson said, “and Peter Leslie is a right good carpenter, he is.”

  “So is Matthew,” Alex said proudly. She extended her hand to caress the carved roses decorating the closest bedpost, thinking her husband was more of an artist than a journeyman. She swept her eyes over the small room: the bed, the chest that contained their few linens and stockings, the stool, the dressing table in maple wood – all of it created by Matthew.

  “Right besotted you are,” Mrs Parson snorted. “Unseemly, almost. Here.” She handed Alex a thick, folded square of paper. “This might keep you still for some time, no?”

  Alex hefted the letter in her hand. She recognised Simon Melville’s scrawled handwriting, and for an instant she held the letter to her nose, hoping to catch a faint smell of home, of peat fires and wet bogs, of gorse and heather. Rather clumsily, she opened the letter, giving Mrs Parson a distracted little wave when she left the room.

  Some time later, she folded together Simon’s long letter, and, with a little sigh, settled herself deeper in bed. From what Matthew’s brother-in-law described, the Lowlands were infested with strife, the few outspoken Covenanters that remained chased like deer through woods and moors. Much better here; for all that there were Indians and Burleys – no, don’t think about them – it had been the right decision to come here and carve a new life out of nothing. She drew a long, shaky M with her finger on his pillow. Coming here was why he was still alive – had they stayed in Scotland, he would have been rotting on a gibbet since years ago, and all for the sake of his religious convictions.