by Megan Chance
“Charity!” I called, but she hurried up the stairs, slamming her bedroom door.
Susannah said in a soft voice, “You must get her from this place soon.”
I sat heavily on the bench. “The snow has let up. I’m going today to make arrangements.”
“She barely eats. ’Tis as if she thinks I will poison her.”
“She doesn’t trust you, though I have tried hard enough to reassure her.”
Susannah said nothing. She busied herself at the fire, but I felt her tension. I saw her unspoken words in the rigidity of her movements.
“What is it?” I asked her. “Have I offended you?”
“’Tis nothing—”
“Tell me.”
She paused, and hung a kettle onto the crane before she turned to face me. “How well do you really know your child?”
“Well enough.”
“Lucas…Do you know that she hangs on your every word? That you wound her nearly every day with your uninterest and inattention? Do you know that she is frightened nearly to illness of your sermons and your God-fearing prayers, but she listens because ’tis you who speaks?”
“I am not inattentive—”
“Do you know,” she went on, stepping across the room toward me, “that she knows enough of life to understand what is between you and me? She senses you may have reasons to lie to her when you speak of me. Perhaps you have not said to her that I mean you ill, but she cannot help but see that you think it. The way you avoid me, the anger in your voice when you speak to me—”
“Enough,” I said. “You have said enough.”
“I have not said nearly enough.” Color defined the angles of her cheeks. “Tell me, Lucas, because I do not know what to believe.…Tell me: Have you castigated yourself so much for the desire between us that you’ve convinced yourself I’m the villain Charity believes me to be?”
The words, the words…I did not want to hear them. “We…must not…discuss this. It cannot…be.”
“I did not wish it so,” she said. “But you’re wrong to think we must not discuss it. We have no choice but to do so.”
I sank my head into my hands. She said nothing for a moment, then bent close to me. “Shall we admit what we want of each other, Lucas? Or deny it still?”
I looked at her. “I will deny it to my last breath,” I said violently. My vehement reaction seemed to surprise her.
“We cannot live with each other this way.”
The world spun out of my reach, and I hated her for taking my well-ordered life from me. I jerked to my feet, and the bench crashed to the ground. “What would you have me do?” I asked angrily. “Shall I bed you and damn us both? Is that what you want?”
She did not flinch. “Aye. Perhaps then, this thing would die. But you keep it close; how can it help but grow?”
“Do…not…torment me.”
“You torment yourself,” she said bitterly. “And me, because you will do nothing.”
She left me. She went to the cellar door and disappeared down the stairs. It thudded shut behind her.
There was a thought—an instinct—that I must leave here. I had plans. Salem Town. I started to the door. I did not mean to go to her. I wanted with all my soul to be away. And yet, as I passed the cellar door, I opened it. I stepped onto the stair; I let the door close behind me. She had taken the betty lamp; the stairs were in darkness. I saw the faint glow below, the disjointed bits of shadow. I took those stairs as one condemned, with slow and dreading steps and the knowledge that this was the end. After this, my soul would belong to Hell, and yet the Devil had me chained already. I could not stop.
When I reached the bottom, she looked up as if she were surprised. She had set the lamp on a barrel of salted pork. She had a pitcher in her hand, and she was bending to the barrel of small beer, but when she saw me, she straightened.
I wanted her to say something that would take this terrible responsibility from me. To beckon me on, or hold out her arms, or speak encouragement. I wanted to be able to say: I could have turned away had she not done this, or said this. She was a temptress, a siren who bewitched me so I was not myself. But she merely stood there as I came closer. She did not back away, or try to move past me. She did not give as I came so close to her that I felt the press of her skirts against my thighs. When I spread my hands over her hips and closed my fingers over her skirts and jerked her close, she only lifted her face to me.
I backed her against the barrel. I plunged my fingers into her hair, twisting until I saw her eyes water from the little pain, and then I took her mouth the way I had dreamed of taking her.
’Twas not a kiss…but more an assault, openmouthed, breathing her in, devouring her. I had never kissed Judith this way, nor in truth any woman, and yet I did not temper it. She opened her mouth to mine, and I tasted her tongue and the cider she’d drunk, the wintergreen she’d chewed, little bits of it still clinging to her tongue.
I heard the pitcher fall to the ground. I felt it rock into my heel. I kicked it away and pressed her back still again, jamming her hard into the barrel, easing away only far enough to reach the lacings of her bodice, which I yanked and tore until they gave, until it fell open beneath my hands. I wrenched the string of her chemise so it fell open and her breasts were freed. I pressed my palms to them, but the touch was not enough—I was like a demon even to myself. I balled her skirts in my hands, drawing them up and up, petticoats, chemise, shoving them around her waist, gathering the pocket beneath her skirt with them so it turned upside down, and keys and thimbles and coins clattered to the floor. Her thighs were bare and warm. I lifted her, and she put her hands around my neck and helped me, crying out as her hip cracked against the keg, as the lid rocked. Then she was sitting on it, her legs spread, curved around my own hips, and I loosed my breeches and thrust inside her with such force that she cried out, though ’twas not a cry of pain, and I swallowed the sound. I braced my hands on the edges of the barrel and rocked her until the lid became unsettled and I felt the beer spilling over my fingers; I smelled the yeast and malt of it, filling the air along with her scent: lemons and musk and sex. She gripped her ankles to the small of my back and met my every thrust, and we battered each other in pleasure-pain and denial, in recognition.
I came in a surrender of my soul—a pleasure so intense ’twas as much a torment, and when she cried out, ’twas against my lips—a rush of breath, a sudden lax, and we were throbbing together. I heard our breaths, mingled, shallow. I felt the beating of her heart against my chest.
I closed my eyes, resting my cheek against her hair. I could nor catch my breath, nor admit myself to the world again. ’Twas only when I heard the steady drip drip of small beer on the floor that I became aware. My hands were wet, the scent of beer heady, and I was afraid of myself.
“Forgive me,” I whispered against her jaw, not knowing for whom I said the words—myself or her, or…God. “Forgive me.”
“You take too much responsibility, Lucas,” she said, stroking the hair from my face.
“Who else shall rake it?”
“Me, for one,” she said. “Or…fate. Or God. I cannot help but think…I would never have chosen this for myself. My sister’s husband—”
“Your brother.”
“No.” She shook her head against mine. “No, I will not call you that any longer. You are not my brother. I will not accept that sin too.”
“It does not matter what you accept. The truth is there. A sin cannot be something else simply because you wish it so.”
“And you…believe this is a sin.”
“What else could it be?” I cried. I pulled back from her, looking at the shadows of her eyes, her hair—wild now, falling over her shoulders, her bared breasts. ’Twas a mistake to look at her thus—the moments that had just passed filled my head again, along with a quick, relentless desire that filled me with despair. I could not fight this, not over and over this way. Having sinned once, I would sin again—now that I knew the feel of
her, the taste.
She reached out for me. “I wish it were otherwise too. But I am…drawn to you. Do not mistake me—I did not want to be, and yet I cannot seem to help it. And I…I have been thinking…Perhaps this is what I came to Salem for. Perhaps ’tis what God wanted of us all this time.”
I loosed myself from her grip, reaching for my breeches. “I cannot believe that.”
“Because you won’t allow yourself the pleasure,” she accused. “Because you would rather be unhappy—”
“I am not unhappy.”
“Ah, Lucas, look at yourself!” She gestured at me, and I glanced down, watching myself fumble with the fastenings of my breeches. “Already you lock yourself away from me. What just passed between us…’tis so rare. Have you ever felt anything so powerful before now? Even with Judith?”
’Twas true, and yet my guilt over that was overwhelming. “Satan has read my heart; ’tis all. He presented me with a temptation he knew I could not resist.”
“I am but Satan’s minion, then,” she said.
I could not restore my equilibrium. “I don’t know what you are!” I was defeated. “I don’t know what you are.”
She said nothing. I did not move as she eased herself from the keg, and her skirts fell again to cover her. Her bodice was still unlaced; her breasts still bared, but she let it be. Her gaze lifted to mine. She whispered, “I have not been happy, either, Lucas. Not for a long time. This seems…’Tis a gift. Would we not be wise to take it?”
I stepped away. Coldly I said, “’Tis a lure set by the Devil to trap us. We cannot mistake it for anything else.”
I turned my back on her and raced up the cellar stairs before she could call out to me.
Happiness…Ah, what was that but the greatest delusion of all?
Chapter 22
I CAME FROM THE CELLAR, HURRYING TO THE BARN AND HARNESSing the horse in a fever to be away. It wasn’t until I was nearly a mile from the house before I realized I was trying to race Saul through the half-frozen mud and icy snow.
’Twas only the thought of Charity that brought any kind of settlement to my soul. ’Twas only the knowledge that I could not fail her—at least not more than I had already done.
When I finally arrived, breathless and freezing, at Daniel Poole’s house in Salem Town, I was calm enough to speak. Though when he opened his door and looked at me with concerned eyes, I thought he must see my sin shining like a new-made raiment upon me. ’Twas all I could do to appear myself. When I told him over dinner of Charity, he said thoughtfully, “I had thought you seemed troubled, Lucas,” and I was relieved and ashamed that he had not guessed more.
“She is only grieving,” Daniel said to me as he downed a tankard of cider. “To lose a mother…’tis a hard thing, especially one so good as Judith. Bring Charity to my house. She will heal—Alice and I will make sure of it, and she will be good for my children. Little Alice has longed for an older sister. Bring her a week from Saturday.”
I agreed with relief. Daniel was a good man, his wife godly. There were no better hands in which to entrust my daughter.
’Twas dark when I arrived home. I put Saul in the barn and rubbed him down, lingering over the task, before I went to the house. As quickly and quietly as I could, I went into the parlor and closed the door. ’Twas a fire laid there for me.
I stood for a while at the window, until I heard the steps in the hall. Someone was awake; ’twas no doubt who it was. I left the window and lay upon the bed, staring up at the hanging herbs. I tried to remember Judith, but her face was fading already in my mind. Seventeen years together, and I was forgetting her so quickly. I rubbed my face with my hands as if the motion would bring her back, and when it did not, I simply lay there watching the coals of a fire I could not bring myself to tend.
I saw the light shafting through the door as it cracked open, and Susannah followed it. The candle lit her face with a soft glow, and that reminded me of the way the betty lamp had illuminated her in the cellar. But for the fact that her hair was pinned up, her bodice neatly laced, we could have been there again.
She closed the door behind her, and then she set the candle on the mantel above the hearth and came to the side of the bed.
“Francis came by,” she said—such a mundane thing, as if ’twere a common occurrence for her to be here, at my bedside, as if she were my wife, and we were discussing the day’s events. It startled me so, I answered her in kind.
“What did he say?”
“The preachers are coming to the village tomorrow. Parris has agreed to have you both at the meeting.”
“Where?”
“The parsonage.” She hesitated. “There’s other news as well. Annie Putnam is having fits now too. And Elizabeth Hubbard.”
I sat up fully. “Francis told you this?”
“Aye. Whatever this is, ’tis catching…Did you go into town?”
“Aye. Daniel Poole has agreed to have Charity. I’m to take her a week from Saturday.”
We fell into silence.
“I’ll wish you good night,” she said finally, taking the candle, moving to the door. If I said nothing, she would go.
I said, “Come to my bed.”
For a moment, I thought she would refuse, and I was not sure I could bear it if she did. “Is this truly what you want, Lucas?” she asked.
“Aye,” I said.
She set the candle back on the mantel, where it flickered and smoldered.
“Take off your clothes,” I told her.
She smiled. “Ah, so that’s how you want it,” she said, running her hand over her breasts, sliding it down her bodice.
Her fingers were long and graceful as she fumbled with her laces—they had been knotted back together, I noticed, and remembered how I had broken them in the cellar. I reached for my knife—I had not undressed; it was still belted at my hip. I slid it from its sheath. It glinted in the candlelight, and Susannah went still. Her gaze slid to mine as I moved to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Come,” I said, and she stepped between my knees and raised her arms to allow me access. I slid the knife between the laces, slicing them easily, and then I sheathed the knife again and spread my hands beneath the lax camlet. I heard her breath, the little catch as I palmed her.
“I want you against my skin,” she murmured, pulling away, stepping back. She no longer lingered; she slipped off the bodice and her skirts until she stood naked before me, her pale skin glowing in the near darkness.
She stepped over to me, again between my knees, and her scent came to me so strongly it rocked me back. I touched her knees, urged them apart, put my hands on her hips and made her straddle me. ’Twas like my dream, and yet not like it—she was there, and the scarlet bed rug glowed around us, coloring the half light. But this time, I was the one clothed, and she as naked as she’d been born.
She pulled at my shirt, her palms were warm on my chest, and then I was falling back on the bed, and her with me. The urge to take her, to possess her, was as strong as it had ever been. As I shed my clothes in a frenzy and pulled her down again to straddle me, I wondered if ’twould ever be different than this, or if we were destined, she and I, to need each other so fiercely each time, to never pause, as if every meeting were the last, as if we might lose each other in the moments after.
Her skin was not perfect after all. Her shoulders were speckled with freckles; she wore dark moles as beauty marks—one inside her elbow, one just above her navel—a tiny fleshy one at the curve of her neck and another just below her breast. There was a single scar on her back, a whip mark cut deep.
“He did not whip me so much,” she told me as we lay, still coupled, in the cocoon made by green bed curtains. I had put the candle in the sconce above the headboard, and now it sputtered, ready to go out. “He preferred to use his hands. I think…He told me once that he did not want to mar the only thing he had of value. He planned for me to make a good marriage—to guarantee his future.”
“But you ran
away with the yeoman’s son,” I said.
“Aye. Though I did not run away with him, not exactly. ’Twas more as if I followed him.” She shifted, twisting onto her back without untangling her legs from mine. “He had meant for me to come. He had asked me to, but I think…I think he was surprised when I showed up in London. He did not know what to do with me.”
I traced her breast. I could not stop touching her. “What then?”
“I stayed with him a little while. Not long. A month…less than that. When he asked me to marry him, I left.”
“Why?”
She gave me a bemused look. “How can you care about this, Lucas?”
“Because I am ridden by the desire to know you,” I admitted. “Because you are in my head every moment, and I cannot understand why.”
“And you think to learn the reason by knowing my history.”
“No. Because…” I sighed, then closed my eyes, trying to think of the words. “Because when I am making a spinning wheel, I can tell by the fit of the wood in my hand what part it will be. People have never been that way for me. I am…mystified…by them. ’Tis not what I want now. Not for you. Not for…” Us. I could not say the word. I could not think of a future beyond this moment. I pulled her to me. “Tell me, why did you not marry your yeoman?”
“Because I did not love him. Because I ran away with him to punish my father. Because I was a girl from Lancashire and London is…London was…like no place I’d ever seen. I wanted to know every inch of it. To marry him would have been to fall into a trap. I was not ready for it.”
“You were not ready when it came to Geoffrey, either? Or Robert?”
She smiled. “Will you list them all for me?”
I didn’t smile back. “I cannot name them all.”
“Oh, Lucas.” She kissed my cheek. “You have already done so.”
I looked up at the herbs hanging like shadowed nests in the corners. “You must know this,” I said carefully. “When it comes to that trap you speak of, I—”