by Megan Chance
Chapter 4
’TWAS LATE WHEN EVERYONE BEGAN TO LEAVE, BUT THE LEAVING had nothing to do with the hour. I had known most of these people my whole life; tonight their voices had been loud in the corners, snatches of arguments I’d heard often these last months falling here and there through the house—rumors that Increase Mather had failed in getting the new charter from the king and queen in England, worries about land titles revoked and taxes going ever upward because of the war with the Indians and the French—things I cared nothing for. My neighbors could debate long into twilight; they had done so many times before, ’twas a favored way to pass the time.
So it was odd the way those conversations stopped when the pastor arrived—so late I’d thought he would not be coming. My father sat at the table with the other four members of the Village Committee. When Parris came through the door with his family, they stared at him, their talk dying uncomfortably. The parson seemed unaffected by the deliberate silence. He stood there smiling until my father had to rise to greet him. After that, my mother’s funeral feast broke up quickly. The sun had set; the shadows of the woods crowded the pathway, so the threat of Indian attack seemed more real than ever; and the men began to talk of walking back in groups together, their muskets at the ready, their fingers poised at their powder horns.
Jude and the few other remaining children reeled through the hall, dizzy from too much beer, tumbling into the spinning wheels and the barrels of salt meat filling the corners, squealing with laughter as they dodged around the churn and the washtubs. The girls, whom I’d once called my friends, lingered, their smiles wide as they cast their eyes in the direction of the village boys. I watched them with too many memories of the days when I’d done the same. When the last bowl of beer had emptied but for the dregs, and the cakes we’d baked were nothing more than crumbs scattered on the table, they finally left. I was glad when they were gone. My father stood at the door, listening as our neighbors filled his ears with good-byes and murmured assurances of Mama’s election. The parson and his family were the last to go.
“’Tis no time for sadness, Brother Fowler,” Master Parris said, clutching my father’s arm. “Our good sister is embraced now in God’s glory.”
Father nodded, but his farewell was low and strained. When the pastor took his wife’s arm and called for his niece Abigail to lead away his three other children, my father looked relieved. He closed the door too quickly behind them, shutting out the cold wind, leaving us in a quiet that seemed strange after the noise of the day.
“’Tis getting late,” he said. “You children go to bed. Tomorrow is the Sabbath, and the babe’s baptism.” He looked past me to where Susannah tended the fire. “’Twould be best if you took yourself up as well, Sister. You’ve a long day to look forward to.”
She looked up with a little smile. “Aye. Longer still if ’tis your minister giving the service.”
There was no answering humor in Father’s eyes. “The word of God is welcome in any wilderness.”
“I have not said it wasn’t, Brother.”
He looked ready to say something sharp, but then he only started to the parlor. “As you wish, but I’ll say my good-nights. ’Twas a trying day.”
I saw my aunt hesitate. Then she straightened from the fire and called out, “Brother—”
My father turned.
“I may have lost my sister, but I know you buried a wife today, and perhaps…Well, ’twas no easy thing, I know. I bid you…a peaceful rest.”
It seemed my father relaxed at her words, though I don’t know why I thought it, because his posture did not change. But perhaps the softening I saw in his face was real and not caused by the dimness of flickering candles. It reassured me; I had been right to cast my doubts about Susannah aside. “Aye,” he said, and then he saw me standing there. “Charity, Jude, ’tis late.”
I knew that tone. So did Jude. I saw her get up from the settle without question, rolling drunkenly into her step as she went to the stairs. I followed her, leaving my aunt alone to rake up the fire for the night.
Our room was cold. The nor’easter had left winter in its wake. The chill wind whistled through a crack in the window’s casement, and I remembered how frigid this room had been last winter, how the ice inside the windows had barely melted the whole day through. I went to the window, finding the bits of rag I’d stuffed there rotting now, disintegrating to dust at my touch. Jude was undressing to her chemise and crawling between the homespun sheets of the trundle bed.
“’Tis cold, Charity,” she complained. “My toes are freezing.”
I shoved the rag as best I could back into the crack and told myself to remember to find a new one tomorrow. Then I leaned close and peered out the window. The moon was rising, full and bright, and the night sky was clear. Against the clapboards of the house, the oak branches scratched and tapped. “’Twill be a freeze tonight, I’ll warrant.”
Jude was sniffling into the pillow bear now. Soft, muffled cries that it hurt to hear.
“’Tis all right, Jude,” I said quietly. “Everything will be fine.”
“I miss Mama.”
“I know. Me too.”
“She never let my bed be cold.”
I winced. The hole my mother had left seemed suddenly far too big to fill. “I’m sorry. I should have remembered to get the bed warmer. I won’t forget tomorrow.”
Jude’s sniffling broke into little hiccuping sobs. “I don’t want you to remember. I want Mama to do it.”
“She’s with God now, Jude. You know that.”
“Aye, she is.”
I spun around in surprised disbelief. I had thought ’twas the spirit again, talking to me in my mother’s sweet voice, but it was my aunt standing there. I took a deep breath to calm myself, and then I saw she held the long-handled bed warmer, and I felt glad that she would remember such a thing, that she would know of my mother’s habit, and sorrow that I had so easily forgotten.
She came inside with hardly a sound and went over to the trundle. “But your mama hasn’t really left you, Jude. You must remember that.”
Jude wiped her eyes, nodding silently. Susannah gestured her away from the bed, and Jude scurried back, hugging herself and shivering as our aunt took down the covers and ran the bed warmer over the sheets, letting it rest for a moment at the foot.
Then Susannah drew back. “Hurry now,” she said. “Get in before the chill hits again.”
Jude did it without a word. She huddled into the blankets, burrowing down so far that all I could see of her was the length of her braid trailing over the pillow like a mouse’s tail.
Quickly Susannah slid the bed warmer between the covers of the feather bed she and I would share. Then she knelt again beside Jude, patting the small, rounded hump of my sister. From beneath the covers came those sniffling sounds again.
“Sssshhh, sssshhh,” Susannah said. “apos;Tis all right to cry, Jude. ’Tis all right.”
“Father says it’s not,” came Jude’s muffled voice.
“Remember what your father said? About being happy because your mama was with God?”
The lump beneath the covers went still. Then I saw the jerk of Jude’s braid as she nodded.
“I think that’s true. I think your mama’s happy now. But I know you miss her, and ’tis no bad thing sometimes to cry over it.”
The covers came down. Jude’s little pinched face showed again, her red-rimmed eyes and pink nose, and I watched the way Susannah smoothed back my sister’s light brown hair, gently pulling the loose strands from where they stuck to the tears on her face. If I narrowed my vision to just her hand, I could pretend it was my mother sitting there, soothing my sister the way she’d done so often. The only thing different was that Mama would never have told Jude it was all right to cry.
“Jude must learn to control her tears,” I said, correcting my aunt gently. “They will only make Father angry.”
Susannah stopped her stroking and looked up at me, and there was a p
ity in her eyes that confused me. “Ah, yes,” she murmured, “’tis best not to make him angry.”
Her answer unsettled me. It sounded again as if she was insulting my father, though I could not decide exactly how that could be, because her words did not. I found myself wanting to defend him. I went to the shelf beside the bed that held the candle and grabbed up my Bible. “This is where we must look for reassurance. Come, Jude.”
“I don’t want to get out of bed, Charity,” my sister whined. “Father’s gone to sleep already without making us—”
I pointed to the floor beside my bed.
Jude sighed, then dragged herself from her warm covers. I felt a moment of regret that I was making her do it, that I was not huddled beneath warm bed rugs and toasting my feet in the warmth of the gathered coals, but I knew what Father expected from us. When Jude was kneeling at the side of the bed, I went down beside her. The floor was cold and hard beneath my knees. I opened the Bible, letting the leaves fall where they would, and then I began to read. “‘But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away—’”
“Oh, Charity,” Susannah said quietly, “can you not find comfort from the Lord instead of punishment? Your mother was buried today. Allow yourself to grieve.”
I stumbled over the next words, and then the text blurred; I could not read. I saw Jude turn to me, but her face was blurry too, and I had to look away. “I am finding comfort in the Lord,” I said, and though I meant the words to be convincing, they rang soft and muffled by my tears.
“Shall we leave off the prayers tonight?” Susannah said. “Your father will never know if we don’t tell him. Shall I sing you to sleep?”
I looked at her in dumb surprise. Your father will never know. I thought of yesterday and how she’d led me into laying my mother out, her words to Jude—You shall not tell your father—and something settled uncomfortable and false inside me.
“Sing?” Jude asked. “You mean…a psalm? Like at meeting?”
“If that’s what you wish,” Susannah said. “You would like that, would you not?” Susannah patted the trundle bed. “Come along, Jude. Into bed.”
Jude leaped toward that welcoming hand, leaving me kneeling alone by the bed, my limbs numb from the knees down, the cold working into my hands so my fingers were stiff and unpliable, skeleton fingers clutching my Bible.
Susannah tucked Jude beneath the covers, and my sister shivered and smiled gratefully back at my aunt, already forgetting her tears. Susannah put her hand to my sister’s hair, and then, without a word to me, she began to sing.
Her voice was soft and sweet. She sang as one used to singing, nothing like the way we stumbled over the psalms in meeting, each singer imagining a different tune, and none of them well. Susannah’s words were clear and true. I could almost hear the virginal lending accompaniment. “‘Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me and turn his merry note unto the sweet bird’s throat.…’”
I could not take my eyes away from her, from how prettily she did it—a tilt of her head, a fluttering hand. As if she were acting out the song, performing it for our pleasure. I tried not to think it. But the more I tried not to think it, the more it came into my head.
“‘Come hither, come hither, come hither: Here shall he see no enemy but winter and rough weather.’”
I could imagine her on a wooden stage, singing as she played the virginal, smiling at the audience below.
I heard the Devil in her voice. “Stop,” I said, but my words came too soft, and she kept singing until I nearly yelled, “Stop it.”
She looked up then and put her fingers to her lips to quiet me, gesturing toward Jude, who was asleep already. Then she finished the song, the final words trailing off in a lilt. “‘Here shall he see no enemy but winter and rough weather.’
“What is it, Charity?” she asked, rising from Jude’s side and making her way to sit on the bed. “Did you not like the song?”
I was afraid. When I looked at her now, I saw wickedness. I had been seduced again—just as Mama had predicted I would be. In my grief, I had taken the easy path that Susannah put before me—lies to my father, secrets kept. The Devil was leading her, and he had known my desires before and answered them. She was what I’d thought—an actress who could lie at will. She was not my mother. I prayed for the strength to push her away, but my hands were trembling. If Christ hath no possession of thee, then thou art possessed of the Devil. I tried to say the words, but ’twas as if I’d forgotten their sounds.
“I worry about you, Charity,” she said quietly. “’Tis not right to keep yourself from grieving this way. Your mama would not want you to be so brave.”
Those brown eyes of hers looked soft and soulful in the dimness, but this time, I knew her for what she was. The knowledge gave me strength. ’Twas easier to fight the Devil now, when I knew what he looked like. I would not be deceived so easily again. “How could you know what she would want from me? I heard what Father said—you’d not seen her for years.”
She winced. “I admit we had not seen each other for a long time. But she wrote me every month. I knew my sister well enough.”
“My mother.”
“Aye. Your mother.” Susannah sighed. “I would have done anything for her, had she asked it. ’Tis why I’m here now. She called me, and I came.”
That surprised me. “She asked you to come?”
Susannah nodded.
“Why?”
My aunt hesitated. “She longed to see me, I think. As much as I wanted to see her.”
“She never mentioned you. I don’t think she missed you at all. Why ask you to come after so many years?”
Susannah looked thoughtful in a way that made me nervous, and I wished I had not been so cruel. She did not take her eyes from my face when she said, “I think she was afraid.”
“Afraid? Of what?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps…Perhaps you have the answer to that. I heard what you asked your father today. Tell me, Charity, what secrets do you think your mother was keeping? What could she have been afraid of?”
The question rattled me. I could not help it; I remembered the day I had told Mama about Samuel. I remembered the smell of the white hellebore we had gathered, and the wet, moldy scent of the deep shadows of the forest, the stink of the skunk cabbage in the swamp beyond. I knew I would never forget the look in my mother’s eyes, that terrible fear that had made me cry when she whispered at me harshly to shush, that I was courting the Devil, and I must never mention such a thing again. Not to her, not to myself, not to anyone.…
I met my aunt’s gaze as calmly as I could. “I don’t know what she was afraid of,” I said. “Nothing that I knew.”
She saw I was lying. She watched me for a moment more, and then she sighed and got to her feet. “Well, there’s tomorrow still to find out. And the next day. I’ve more than enough time.”
“You’re staying, then.”
“Aye. Your mother asked for my help. I’ve come all this way to give it. And I”—she smiled bitterly—“I won’t be returning to London. My life there…’tis best left behind.”
Only two hours before, I would have rejoiced at such news. Now I was in agony over it. She was staying—Satan’s inroads into my soul had not been enough; now she was here to tempt me still again. I got to my feet, clutching the Bible to my chest like a shield. I wanted no more of her or of this conversation. I was afraid now, again, and worse than before. Only yesterday, I had taken confidence from the things she’d said—I remembered so well thinking she and I were alike; she had given me hope that I could find goodness even with Mama gone.
Now I knew the truth. Susannah was just like me. She had not found courage but only weakness when Mama left, and like me, she’d taken the road the Devil offered.
“I’m tired,” I said. When I put the Bible down to undress, I felt naked, unarmed, and so I grabbed it up
again as I slid between the sheets of the bed, stretching my toes toward the bed warmer below. I kept the Bible hard against my chest, lying there stiffly when Susannah crawled in beside me.
She blew out the candle, and as the room snapped into darkness, I tried to relax into the bed, into the safety of blindness. I closed my eyes and prayed, though the words got lost in my head, and my feelings were a muddle. I stayed awake long after Susannah went limp and quiet beside me, and when her breathing came soft and even, keeping time with Jude’s from the trundle bed below, I lay there thinking about the things she’d said, the things she knew. I thought it would be my fear of her that kept me spinning into the night, almost till dawn, but it was not. It was something else instead, the simple question that sparked my memory: Tell me, Charity, what was your mother afraid of?
The answer so filled my heart I was afraid she would hear it.
My mother had been afraid of me.
Chapter 5
I WOKE TO THE SOUND OF MY NAME, A QUICK CALL THAT CAME TO me through a dream I could not remember. Charity. Charity. I jerked awake to see that it was early still, with dawn breaking in a gray light beyond the windows, the shadows in the room blue and ghostly. Jude was fast asleep, and there were no noises from downstairs; my father was not awake. There was no one calling me, no one near, but I couldn’t go back to sleep.
Then I heard it again, not in my head this time, but beside me. I turned in bed, and…She was there beside me, facing me, and her expression was sad and loving. I felt her warmth; I felt the weight of her body on the feather bed.
“Mama…” I meant to stay still, though I couldn’t help myself; I reached out slowly, as if she were a skittish wild bird, and touched her hair, and for that one moment, it was hers—thin and wiry, bouncing beneath my fingertips—
Then she was gone, and it was Susannah I was looking at, Susannah’s hair beneath my hand, thick and soft and brown, not gray at all. My aunt’s eyes opened, and suddenly she was looking at me in sleepy question, and I could not bear it.