“Who was he?” she asked. She didn’t recall the dead man from the wedding reception, but there had been so many people congratulating her; and he wouldn’t have looked like that.
“Please,” he said, his voice tight with urgency.
“Is it because this is the men’s dormitory?”
“That’s so. The women live over across the way, above the chapel. No women come here. Never.”
“But, are none of you married?”
“Most of us are, ma’am.” The look on her face must have suggested that this explained nothing, and he added, “We’re saving each other from lustful deeds. Sinful acts. The way Reverend Fitcher has instructed. With time drawing nigh, such acts must be accounted. We all have to answer to the one true God for what we’ve done. There’s no hiding what’s in your heart. We daren’t lose our place, what he’s secured for us. And I surely must fear for your own place if you don’t leave here. It’s not seemly, you seeing old Bill this way.”
The man’s sincerity and absolute sureness scared her more than her husband’s behavior the previous night. They didn’t know, these people, what lust really looked like. But there was no point in protesting, and she chose to retreat.
Even as she turned to leave, putting one foot out to step down, she saw her husband enter at the bottom—enter and look right up. For a moment neither of them moved, trapped in mid-motion, about to rise or descend. Then Elias Fitcher backed away from the newel post as if out of courtesy, offering her neutral space.
She walked down the stairs, her pink and cold feet all too visible from below, and she wished she had put on her slippers now because she could not disguise that she was barefoot any more than she could pretend she hadn’t intruded here: She could see already in what ways she was objectionable.
At the bottom, however, Fitcher said nothing. He allowed her to pass on outside and started up the stairs, a shepherd more concerned with the flock than with any single sheep. Or was it the dead who mattered more? His shirt was loose and his sleeves rolled up. His left forearm bore scabbed lines like tattoos where she’d scratched him last night.
She walked back through the gauntlet, and no one said a word, as silent as conspirators caught with their daggers out. She went back beside the bell, where she’d started. The alarmist pretended he didn’t see her, focusing intently upon the door. Many more people had gathered now, all across the yard, hanging back as if fearfully certain the death would be close to them.
Within a few minutes four men came out bearing the body. He was still naked. He hadn’t even been covered for decency’s sake; it seemed unnecessarily cruel to expose a dead man to his neighbors this way: How could her husband have allowed this to happen? The man’s head hung loose over their arms, nearly dragging on the ground. His throat seemed banded by a black collar—circled by an inverted “V” where the rope had crushed it. The men laid him down on the grass. Elias Fitcher stepped out of the darkness behind them.
Behind Vern a woman began to scream, and she started to turn to see who it was. Before she could, the woman knocked into her, and Vern slipped on the wet grass and fell. The man who’d rung the bell stuck out his arms to catch her, and lucky for her he was there or she would have cracked her head against the bell. One of his hands caught her shoulder but the other glanced off and slid inside her dress, quite accidentally. Even as his cold fingers came in contact with her flesh, he was lurching away, horrified by the intimacy. She caught her balance and stepped back from him, her face hot with embarrassment. The woman ran wailing and waving her arms, but Fitcher was staring darkly and directly at Vern.
The woman collapsed on her knees. Her cries carried over them: “Oh, Bill, Bill, why go without me? Why?” She tried to kiss his face, but hesitated at his grotesquely twisted mouth. Her nervous hands hovered over him, seeking to touch him, hold him, but clearly prevented by his state. Finally she clutched at his hair and doubled so far over that her head pressed against the ground. Everyone stood around as though her display was wholly alien to them, and they didn’t know how to react.
Reverend Fitcher exclaimed, “Oh, my poor sister, poor dear Alice, come look away, look away from this tragedy!” He gathered up Alice and pressed her face to his own chest. “This is not William, don’t look upon him. William has gone now. William is in the other Kingdom.” All at once she threw her arms around him, and bawled to the sky. As if this were a signal, other women now came forward and surrounded her. They took hold of her and pried Alice from Reverend Fitcher, then closed ranks, blocking her view of her husband, and together walked her away from the body, up onto the porch, and through one of the doors.
Fitcher knelt as she had, beside the body of William. He closed the eyes, pried the mouth open enough to stuff the tongue back inside. He took hold of one arm, and climbed to his feet. Immediately others grabbed on to the other limbs and they all lifted the body again. As they carried it off, Fitcher chided the crowd in general. “This man has damned himself as surely as if he had killed one of you. He should never have been seen in such a state as this,” he said. “It’s unforgivable, but it is how he chose to clothe himself for death, and so it is how he must be, here and upon the far plain. His appearance can only breed thoughts of depravity among us. Were I a harsher prophet of the Old Testament, why, your wives might have to put out their eyes for having seen him thus—such is the justice meted out in our Book. But I am not such a one. We are not vindictive here. Vengeance belongs to the angels.
“I shall intervene on our behalf with the Lord and beg His forgiveness for our company’s inadequacy to prevent this. Let this damned soul bear the blame. He is responsible.” He let go the arm suddenly and swiveled about. “But there will be punishment!” he shouted. Spittle flew from his lips, and his face was stretched hard and red. “There will be reckoning! No one is blameless. No one. And the time comes swiftly upon us. Think on that, all of you!” Then he turned back to the corpse, lifted his part of the burden, and continued hauling it away.
The people started to move off, many of them with a speed that suggested they wanted to put as much ground as possible between them and the place where the naked man had lain. Vernelia tried to thank the bell ringer for catching her. “Sir—” she started to say but he interrupted. His face was pinched with fear.
“You can advocate for me, can’t you?” he asked. “Tell him they sent me down to sound the alarm? William, he was already dead, we couldn’t have saved him nor stopped him none. He’d done himself while we were eating. None of us missed him right away, or we would have stopped him.
“And then you fell and I—I didn’t mean to touch you that way.” He clutched her hand. “Please, missus, I beg you—tell him to intercede for me. Stop the Dark Angel from coming for me next. I couldn’t help—couldn’t help none of what happened. Me. Stephen Ellsworth. You tell him. You speak for me—” He realized abruptly that he was touching her again and flung her hand away so hard that she stumbled. He backed up against the bell, where he turned and ran across the open yard toward the orchard.
Vern retreated from the cold and her own confusion, into the warmth and safety of the house. In her room she moved the lovely firescreen and stoked the fire, placing more logs above the embers and then pumping with the small bellows until flames ignited before her. She dragged the wheelback chair over beside the hearth and warmed her feet. Waking to the alarm bell, she’d forgotten her own fear. How odd that a stranger’s death could so divert her. But death was like that bell—so loud that they must all hear and give it their attention.
Elias’s presence—his nearness to her in the stairwell—seemed utterly removed from the silent intruder who had used her so coarsely the night before. Although sex was a subject not to be discussed openly, might she not entreat or entice him to express his ardor with more gentleness hereafter? He reached the same destination if he did, and she arrived, too, the sweeter for that. She soon convinced herself that so decent a man must recognize the error of his behavior. She must pick the
right time to speak of it. She could see that Elias was distressed, that he felt responsible for the death. Of course he did—they were his flock. He guided them. If one of them fell, he must see it as a personal failure.
She wondered then about the bell ringer and his petition. What was the Dark Angel? Did he think death was looking for another victim? She must inform Elias about that, too.
She was still sitting by the new fire when he entered her room. Once again, there was no sound to direct her attention, but a sense of a presence, which led her for a moment to imagine that the spirit of Samuel had arrived—it was that same preternatural change in the atmosphere. She looked about her expectantly, finding, just inside the closed door, the slender figure of Elias Fitcher. He had put on his long black coat and buttoned up his collar. He held a small package in front of him, which he carried to the card table. Then he came across the room and Vern stood to greet him. She had by now convinced herself that the previous night’s proceedings were merely a matter of clumsiness on his part, of inexperience. She blushed at the thought of being more schooled in matters of sexuality than he. She had a compulsion to throw her arms around him.
“My darling,” she said, “how terrible that was. I’m so sorry you had to…” Her voice failed. She clasped a stone figure; fear leeched from his body into hers and she released him and moved back, asking, “What is the matter?”
“I can see you have no sense of it,” he said gravely, “which concerns me. You fly out of the house in an unlaced dress that barely suits the intimacy of a bedroom, and without shoes, showing off your ankles and feet to the entire community. You—”
“I thought there might be a fire. That bell—I’d no notion of what it meant, and I ran!”
“You conveniently fall into one of the men so as to force him to place his hands on you—no, not merely on but inside your undone clothing!”
“I did not fall conveniently. That woman, that poor Alice, pushed me when she ran to her husband’s body.” She fought not to show tears, but her whole being was reacting to the calumny of his accusation. “That Mr. Ellsworth was as mortified by the incident as—”
“So you know him by name?”
“He told it to me.”
“Why would he do that, eh?” he asked.
“Because of this very thing. He was afraid.”
“What does he have to fear if he be honest?”
“I don’t know. Something he called ‘the Dark Angel.’”
He waved a dismissive hand. “Superstitious twaddle. So he’s one of those, is he? It’s a wonder he’s stayed on if he’s fallen so far from the core of our belief.”
“I know nothing of any of this,” she replied, wanting to find out more. He gave her no chance.
“Worst and most unforgivable of all, you actually entered the men’s dormitory in that slattern’s attire.”
“Elias, how was I to know? I didn’t know you separated husbands and wives. Not until I was at the top of the stairs, and a man there told me I shouldn’t be there because of the community segregation, and naturally I turned to leave when he told me, but by then you had arrived, you saw me turning away, coming down—”
“Enough. I will not be painted the villain.”
“Who is painting you a villain?” Even as she said it, she knew she would not be able to speak of the previous night with him now. It would seem to him another attack upon his character.
“By implication, you do. You know nothing of the arrangement of Harbinger, and that is because I have told you almost nothing. It’s my fault, your ignorance, and so I bear the blame.”
“I’m not blaming you, Elias. I’m only accounting for my own innocent actions. I ran outside for fear that the house was ablaze and I would be trapped if I delayed. I followed the crowd to the source of the alarm, and no one spoke, no one told me I couldn’t go there.”
“Did they not?” His eyes narrowed, but now the focus was clearly not her, but more as if he were ticking off a list of names to confront at some later time. “They should have known you had no experience with…” He sighed. “Yes, I see it all now. You followed your instincts, as what woman does not?” He leaned forward and ran the back of his hand lightly across her cheek, smiled. “How can I possibly be angry with you on the very first day of our life together? Forgive me, dear Vernelia.”
“Of course, of course I forgive you.” She clasped his cold hand. “You must be so stricken by the event.”
“Yes, I’m deeply troubled. The poor fellow had been distraught for some time it seems. I should have known that he was in peril. But there are so many here, so many hundreds, and more arriving each day.” He pressed his hands together as if about to pray. “Well, then, first what we shall do is open your gifts, and then I’ll instruct you in all of your duties here. You do want to be a part of the community?”
“Of course. I cannot sit by idly while everyone else works. I thought—I feared that the reason no one spoke to me was that they think this of me already, that I’m some lazy useless creature expecting to be pampered now that I’m the wife of the great man.”
His expression softened when she called him that. “Well, we shall change their minds on that point soon enough. Now, let’s see what the ‘great man’ has for you, shall we?”
He retrieved his package from the card table. “The card reads: ‘For Mrs. Fitcher,’” he said. “I wonder who it could be from.”
It was a small box in red paper that had been waxed, and tied with silk ribbon. He handed it to her and she carried it to the bed to unwrap it.
The box was of rough pine. Vern could hold it in the palm of one hand. With the other she slid the top open. Inside, it was full of sawdust. She glanced back at Elias, but he was giving nothing away. Gingerly, she moved her fingertips through the sawdust, and almost immediately touched something hard and smooth. She brushed the packing aside until a bit of it showed. It was a stone, she decided. She poked fingers around it until she had sense of its size and shape. Then she reached into the sawdust and drew the thing out.
It was an egg, an egg carved out of marble. White with dark blue veins running through it, the egg had been polished perfectly smooth. Holding it, she recalled the sibylline words of the mesmerized woman: Take care of his egg.
Fitcher had come up behind her, and now his arms encircled her waist. “It is a perfect symbol of my love—like a real egg—perfect in form. Hermetic.”
Once more his touch charged her. She felt as if she must explode with energy, so much that she became light-headed in his loose embrace. His words breathed into her ear, “This symbol of my love you must keep with you always, wherever you go, and so I will be with you. My little egg.”
“Yes, I’ll take care,” she said, and tilted her head, trying to circle it back, hungry for a kiss.
Instead, he released her. But the energy, the lickerish pleasure, thrummed in her veins; she’d become a conduit, transferring energy from him to the receptacle—the egg, which, like a battery, generated the power flowing down her arms and into the pit of her stomach, where it opened like a flower, ripe and wet with dew. She didn’t want to let go of it.
“And now, wife, I must impart all the rules to you in order that you may belong here. But you must dress more properly before leaving your chamber. That is the first rule: You are the mistress of Harbinger now and you have to dress properly. You must never allow people to see you barefoot or dishabille. Understood?” He stared down at her toes with obvious fascination as he said it.
“Never. I know now.”
“Good. And you’re not to visit the dormitories—men or women. The men, you know already how I think of that. But even the women, they will only gossip. And you occupy a station above them hereafter, so you are not to lower yourself to sharing idle gossip.”
“But, Elias—”
“There are some in our company who won’t be saved despite being in our company. I tell you this in private between us, but it’s not to travel any further. Some are dev
oted. Others take pleasure in picking at the devotion, seeking its imperfections, without realizing of course that by so doing they are only revealing their own flaws. Do not fraternize with them.”
Again she complied—she understood his point. Women did gossip. She’d gossiped with Kate, and even now and again with Amy, it was true. She couldn’t see the evil in it, at least not in her own gossiping. She didn’t think she’d ever said anything terribly wicked about anyone, or if she had she was sorry for it now.
“The next rule has to do with time here. You were left alone this morning, as it was your first here. We are up at five each morning. All of us. You’ll not be an exception. There’s a morning prayer before breakfast and I will expect you there each day.”
“Of course,” she answered. Even at home, they were all up by six.
“And again each day with the noon meal, there is prayer. The time will depend on where you are employed that day. We must find suitable work for you. I already have something in mind, which we’ll discuss after you have your meal this morning.” He stroked his beard a moment, then said, “Ah, yes, one more thing.” He reached into his coat pocket and drew out a large ring of keys. The ring itself was brass, shiny where the rings had slid along, polishing it. He shook the keys in front of her. “When I go away, you’ll be entrusted with these, as you’ll have the entire house to supervise. You will have to make certain people continue to do their part.” He jingled the keys again.
Vern noticed then that one of them was larger than the rest and appeared to be made of glass. Fitcher dropped the ring back in his pocket and said, “But that’s for another time—when I go off to recruit. For now, please dress and we shall go down to eat together.”
“Elias,” she said, his name full of longing, of unfulfilled desire. But he was already walking away, out of the room.
Alone, she made herself set the egg down in its box. Her hands, she saw, were trembling.
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