The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  ALSO BY CLARE BEAMS

  We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Clare Beams

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover art by Michelle Kingdom

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Beams, Clare, author.

  Title: The illness lesson / by Clare Beams.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019014152 | ISBN 9780385544665 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385544672 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385546348 (open market)

  Classification: LCC PS3602.E2455 I65 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019014152

  Ebook ISBN 9780385544672

  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Clare Beams

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Birds, Again

  Chapter 2: Laying of Plans

  Chapter 3: Miss Eliza Pearson Bell

  Chapter 4: School Begins

  Chapter 5: Couched

  Chapter 6: A Fainting

  Chapter 7: Mrs. David Moore

  Chapter 8: Red Spot

  Chapter 9: Performance

  Chapter 10: Carriage

  Chapter 11: Spread

  Chapter 12: Correspondence

  Chapter 13: Dr. Hawkins

  Chapter 14: An Animal Within an Animal

  Chapter 15: Treatment

  Chapter 16: Paroxysm

  Chapter 17: Bodies

  Chapter 18: Nest

  Chapter 19: Provisioning

  Chapter 20: Classroom

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For my daughters,

  Tess and Joanna

  Divination seems heightened and raised to its highest power in woman.

  —AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, CONCORD DAYS

  “Birds in their little nests agree,” sang Beth…

  —LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, LITTLE WOMEN

  1.

  BIRDS, AGAIN

  ASHWELL, MASSACHUSETTS, 1871

  Wonders, wonders!

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 4)

  The first of the birds Caroline mistook for her own mind’s work. When the streak of red crossed the kitchen windowpane, fast, disastrous-bright, she thought it was some bloody piece come loose inside herself.

  Then her father appeared from the study and held the doorframe, leaning in. “Caroline! Did you see?”

  They found it in the yard, real after all: high in their birch tree, pecking judiciously at the bark. The size of a dove, the shape of a crow, and a brazen crimson tip to tail feathers, the shade a cardinal might bloom to if dipped in wine. It had a crestless head, all sharp planes. As the Hoods watched, it took a choosy bird-step forward, then craned neck over back to root around in its wing.

  “No question at all,” Samuel Hood said. His hand on Caroline’s arm felt slight. This shock had dislodged his usual serenity, and in his face she saw old age, the way his features would fold in on themselves. To brace them both she gripped his fingers. “Trilling hearts. Who’d have believed?”

  “A trilling heart,” Caroline said.

  She had just one hazy red-tinged memory of the trilling hearts’ only prior appearance in Ashwell, twenty-five years earlier. Standing barefoot in the grass of the front garden, four years old and afraid to go down the path because of the bird that stood guard there, chopping up a worm with its brutal beak. Snip, snip, snip, worm bits on the gravel. On the steps behind her, sewing in the sun, her mother.

  “What can this mean?” her father asked.

  “That there’s a red bird in our tree.”

  Samuel put a hand to his shirtfront. When he was a boy, his appendix had almost burst before the surgeon managed to remove it, and in moments of great excitement a heat-and-pain phantom seemed to revisit him. Sometimes Caroline found him with his fingers pressed there while he wrote and knew he was imagining readers, roomfuls of them, schools of hands turning reams of his pages.

  “There is some significance,” he said.

  The immensities of God’s creation often whittled themselves down to make a message for her father. But this—in this wouldn’t anyone read meaning? The red flash, the answering thrum.

  “You know it was your mother who named them,” Samuel said, as if speaking about a person who’d stepped into another room.

  Caroline tried again to turn her four-year-old head, to leave off staring at the bird and catch sight of her mother’s face.

  “You never told me,” she said.

  “I must have. Well. When we first saw them—a group of us out walking in the afternoon, just happening upon them in the fields, you can’t imagine—she said they put her in mind of hearts, scooped right out of chests. Disembodied, trilling hearts, she said.”

  The bird’s shape was wrong for this description, but its feel was right. The trilling heart looked like something safer left hidden.

  “Do you think David will be here in time to see?” Samuel said. As always, David’s name sounded louder than the rest of the words. “And I must tell Hawkins. I’ll write him today. Hawkins will know if there’ve been others spotted. He’s told me nothing grows or flies or runs in Massachusetts without his permission.”

  Caroline hadn’t seen George Hawkins, or any of the Birch Hill men, in years, but she could picture the set of his mouth in delivering this not quite jest. He was a physician, only an amateur naturalist, but the sort of man who never considered himself an amateur at anything. They all were.

  The bird raised its head again. Its black eye had the sightless sheen of a drop of oil. It tossed some bit of bark or insect back and swallowed it down, muscular throat squeezing.

  “I ought to send a drawing with the letter. Caroline, would you? You have a fine hand.”

  She breathed in on the swell of pride that came when her father praised her and stared at the bird, to memorize it, so that in the drawing itself she might earn that praise again. She noted the shape of the head; the shining, sharp-looking lines of the wings; the beak like a long, cruel tooth; the sweep of the tail feathers; that red, improbable shade.

  * * *

  *

  The bird flew away before David arrived, so they went back inside to wait. Samuel wrote, and Caroline drew. “I wonder what’s keeping him,” Samuel said, but this was David he was talking about, his last disciple and unexpected hope; he didn’t say more.

  In the confluence of Caroline’s two projects, the drawing and the waiting, a strange suggestion was taking hold. Only one bird, she reminded herself. Still, she tried to capture the line of the bird’s beak and thought,
Perhaps; she shaded its eye and thought, Perhaps.

  Considering slowed her hand. Her trilling heart had only the basic outline of a back and head by the time her father hurried to meet David at the front door. From two rooms away, Caroline heard them clearly—the founders of the Birch Hill Consociation had tried to plug the drafts of this hundred-year-old farmhouse when they’d bought it, but they were men with a greater affinity for ideas than for planks. “Astonishing,” her father was saying. “I never thought I’d see them again, not on this earth. I’d forgotten their look. Such a red.”

  “I wish I’d seen,” David said, and Caroline wished for a basketful of trilling hearts that she might carry to him, pinned against the shelf of her hip bone.

  “Caroline must have nearly finished sketching by now.”

  Before the door opened and they were upon her, she just had time to cover the page.

  “Caroline—” her father said, flushed and smiling.

  “Not yet.”

  David inclined his head, but her father went on. “Surely you’ve caught at least some part of the essence. Enough to give David an idea.”

  No two men in all the world to whom she would have been less willing to show a half-formed thing. “Just another half hour. I’ll bring it to you in the study.”

  Her father darted with a boy’s nimbleness and caught the drawing out from where she’d hidden it. He held it in the air and squinted. “Ah, well, not done. This is the basic shape, though, David. Nearly.”

  Caroline’s father had written a great and famous essay against cruelty, which scores of New England schoolchildren could quote from memory. She had seen him stop a man in the street who was striking his horse.

  “Oh yes,” David said.

  Samuel set the sketch gently back down on the tabletop. He led David to the study and closed the door.

  Caroline left the house. She strode off across the grass. She drove her legs forward as punishment—her own fault, always mostly her own fault—and sweat prickled the back of her neck, beneath her heavy hair. A deep, dark forest of hair, her father used to say, when she was a child, and kiss the top of her head. She’d thought he meant she had magic, or magic would happen to her.

  As she passed the line of trees that obscured the house from view, she didn’t slow, not until she had climbed to the top of the main hill. Below, their fields were spread, rich enough for eating, as if someone had taken up a heaping knifeful of sweetness and stroked it across the ground to tempt the appetite. The whole of the Birch Hill experiment needed no more explanation than that the weather must have been fine on the day they first saw the land. The sloping green of the fields in the sun, stands of trees clustered here and there, each casting its shade like the dark wet spill of an overturned bowl; the hills that grew greener and larger, greener and larger, in the distance, until at last they became mountains, and blue; the air thick with its grass-and-heather, baked-dirt smell; the chorus of humming, chirping, buzzing things in the grass, a small riot like the voice of the soil itself. The land had the same overabundant beauty as Samuel Hood’s essays, and so those men had all come here to found a bright-colored world on both. And when the trilling hearts had arrived, a month into their project, it had felt like God Himself was telling them, Oh yes, just what I envisioned, here, my final touch, by all means proceed.

  Important, Caroline thought, to remember this time how that time had turned out.

  She let herself run down the far side of the hill. The ground gave a little beneath her feet. The neighbor boy had come a few days earlier to help them with the July haying, and there was nowhere Caroline could go, not even her bedroom, without tasting cut grass.

  Caroline crossed the little valley, climbed the farther hill. And there, in the apple orchard at the crest, she found two trilling hearts twitching amongst the leaves of the largest tree. The first the brilliant color of the bird from this morning, the other—it must have been a female—a tamer red brown. Not just one bird anymore, then. Whatever was happening here, it was doubling, doubling. The tree they occupied, at the orchard’s center, was the only one the Birch Hill founders hadn’t planted—the farmer who’d sold them the land had done that—and the only one that had ever thrived, bearing full ripe fruit in the fall. The birds knew better than to trust their weight to the others’ spindly branches.

  Caroline watched them move, in lines instead of curves, start-stop, pecking at the surface of the world. Those beaks she could almost feel, somewhere along her spine. She saw that she’d gotten the angle of their backs slightly wrong in her sketch.

  David wanted to see them. He could see them now, if she brought him.

  But back at the house, she found David and her father on the front lawn, watching more birds. Five trilling hearts hopped from branch to branch in the oak by the front door. All on their own, without her help, David’s eyes followed, and childish disappointment made her throat ache.

  “Look, Caroline!” her father shouted, though she’d stopped right beside him.

  “More in the orchard too,” she said.

  Samuel turned to David. “Now, I think. What better time? They’ve almost made our announcement for us.”

  David nodded.

  The certainty settled heavy in Caroline’s chest: My father has hatched some scheme, and David is leaving.

  Samuel whistled into the sky. The birds flapped a little at the sound, as if it were a greeting. “I feel twenty years younger.”

  Crisply, Caroline said, “What are you talking about, please?”

  “We have news, Caroline. We’ve been making plans, David and I—to open a school. The first of its kind, for the training of intellects and souls, hearts and minds. A school, here, for girls.”

  “What girls?” Caroline said.

  David laughed.

  “Any of them! All of them,” Samuel said. “Any who want what they couldn’t find in any other girls’ school. A true, transforming education, dearest. Like the one you’ve had.” His fingertips grazed her arm.

  The education that had grown a wilderness in her head, too large to fit into any available space she’d yet found, so that she’d always wondered what her father had planned for her exactly—if he’d planned anything, if he hadn’t just taught her all of it because she was there and because he could.

  “We’ll be filling a hole in the educational landscape,” Samuel was saying. “No one, no one, has done this before. Formed girls into women who can become their own best selves, who can be true partners to their husbands and true mothers to their children. Our school will be a pursuit of the divine in the human. We’ll teach thinking, not sewing or physical graces, not shallow parlor-trick erudition. We’ll teach them to read the text of the natural world.”

  Samuel Hood, essayist.

  “It’s unprecedented,” he said.

  But Caroline thought all this would have sounded familiar to the Birch Hill men; only the direction of its application had shifted.

  “Of course there’s the matter of what they’re to do with all that after,” she said. She did not look at David.

  Then her father surprised her. He stepped forward and caught her hand. “I know,” he said softly. “My dear, I do know. That’s why this school is so important, as a first step. There’s nothing to do with it? We’ll make something to do, while we’re making the doers.”

  Another small beginning, meant like Birch Hill to ripple. Shouldn’t her father understand that the ripples did not always follow? Birch Hill hadn’t lasted two years. And yet. A bird adjusted its wings, and Caroline thought she almost heard the slight friction of feather against feather. One impossible thing might follow another. Her father did mean what he was saying, she knew—he always did—and about girls, who else said and meant such things?

  She hadn’t realized her father understood what it felt like to her.

  Samuel gripped
her shoulder. “You’ll teach with us, Caroline. You’ll help us shape what we’re doing.”

  Caroline had briefly tried being a teacher. She hadn’t been sure what else to try, equipped with the education he’d given her, tied to this place, so three years earlier she’d gone to work at the Ashwell grammar school. A few of the children she’d adored, but when she raised her hand one afternoon to strike a boy who’d thrown gravel in another boy’s face, she only just remembered to open her fist. She’d returned to Birch Hill and told her father that the world wasn’t served by the troughs and peaks that teaching seemed to bring her to.

  “Teaching didn’t suit me, remember?” she said.

  David answered. “No one has taught the way we’ll teach here.”

  Fluttering on its branch, one of the birds gave its call. A single rapidly repeating note, almost mechanical in tone but lighter, higher: the sound of a quick tongue ticking on teeth.

  “Sir, for the name?” David said. He bounced on his feet as if testing the ground. “The School of the Trilling Heart. What do you think? In honor of the circumstances.”

  Joy suffused Samuel’s face.

  There were words that might have plucked him down to earth again, but Caroline couldn’t bear, in that moment, to say them.

  2.

  LAYING OF PLANS

  On this morning, though he did not yet know it, his whole life was to begin anew.

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 12)

  Hawkins wrote that he wanted to come see the trilling hearts for himself. Nature having arranged a thing so unmissable, I think I must oblige. He was plainly more interested in the birds than in the school. “That’s all right,” Samuel said, folding the letter and laying it in a drawer. “He’ll see once he’s here.”