Читать книгу Angel and Apostle - Deborah Noyes - Страница 11

Pitching stones at the water’s edge the next morning, I heard voices back at the cottage. I raced to see who was there, for no one ever came to our little shore and a visitor other than our neighbor, Goodwife Baker, was cause for alarm. Maybe I was to be hauled away to the scaffold after all. Mindful of it, I came to a cringing halt halfway up the hill when I saw Liza at the door in her old gray smock and cranberry cap.

“I’ll put her to work if you won’t,” she was saying with her back to me. “Such a child should not be idle.”

“What such is that?” Mother wondered from the threshold, and went on sweeping last night’s rain from our sunken floor as if she didn’t see me.

“I’ll not mince words, miss. It’s well and good that our betters spoil their children, but she’ll not gain from it. She won’t be small forever, nor will such idle sneaking seem quaint in a maid.”

“No,” Mother chimed. “Her future’s bleak, as you say.”

Liza seemed stumped by that. She hadn’t expected Mother to agree so cheerfully. “She might marry up. I’ve seen it done.” The old woman parked hands on ample hips. “You speak pretty, I dare say. And you’ve dressed her well. What’s more, your needlework’s quite the fashion in town. I hear the quality wet themselves to wear what a sinful hand will craft, sumptuary laws be damned.”

“Marry up?” Mother had refused the bait. “Here in the seat of my shame? I think not.”

“Then train her for service like my own mum did. Send her away. Meanwhile, let me put her to good use. My master’s still at sea, his eldest came last night with his list and went again this morning, and I’ve got my hands full with a blind child and his sick mother. It’ll plump up her character.”

Mother smiled and swept, swept and smiled. “Will it, now?”

“It will.”

“And what will you have her do?”

Liza whirled and made as if to lurch at me, roaring, “Ha!” I nearly leapt out of my flesh. She straightened and turned serenely back to Mother. “I’ll stop her sniffing about, that much I know. She has a sneaking nature, I observe. Come, child.” She stuck her arm out straight as an arrow, palm up, and her fingers beckoned.

I stepped slowly forward and took that dry old hand, looking back but once. Mother shook her head, eyebrows raised as if to say, “Well, then,” and blew me a tepid kiss.

Liza worked me all right. Day after day for weeks till I knew that fine house, that garden plot and fieldstone cellar, better than my own snug cottage. She did her best to pry secrets from me too. “Have you seen your father lately, dear heart?” and “Is it true your mum’s badge glows full of hellfire at night? A lass I met last Lord’s day said you can see your mum well off, burning like a demon lantern. Tell poor Liza where she walks to at night, love. There’s no harm in it.”

“Tell her nothing,” Simon cautioned, smiling, “that you won’t have the whole marketplace know, Pearl—and quickly too.”

“Bah, I wish you deaf and dumb instead of blind some days.” She turned to me. “He’s a good boy, he is. Keeps me honest.”

One early morning Liza fetched me to the house and then sat with her feet up, swigging from a little flask she slipped from the kerchief tucked behind her bodice, below which I fancied her old breasts drooped like withered peaches. She sat and laughed at me for working so hard, for my ready fawning. “Simon, look here,” she bellowed. “Ah, well, you can’t look, but your girl’s scrubbed the very skin off the planks.”

Whoever would imagine it—me, someone’s girl? Good thing he couldn’t see me blush. Though I spent little time on the receiving end, I had sense to know how exasperating gratitude can be. He spoke softly in his deep voice. “Hush, Liza. You’ll wake Mother. And what would you have Pearl do, now she’s here enslaved to you?”

“Oh, today,” fretted the old woman with a blithe wave of the hand. She pulled on her flask again, swiping dribble off her chin. “Your dour brother may be ashore again, but it’s May Day, after all. We should be merry.”

“Do you really think him dour?”

“Well, no.” Liza relented. “Sober, more like—and too fine for his britches. A good boy, though. You’re both good boys.”

I was still taken with the notion of May Day. I crawled nearer Liza’s chair on hands and knees and rested my chin in her lap. She didn’t fault me for it. “Show me how it’s done,” I begged, “the May games.” I knew a show like that would be banned right quick in Boston.

“You don’t need my teaching. A little bird told me you weave a faultless garland in your own right.” She gave my head a lazy pat and sighed. “In old Norfolk such and maypoles were no heathenish vanity. Even in my day there was piping all night in the barns, feasting and dancing. We had wakes and ales on Lord’s day, fools and bells and bonfires in summer, hot cockles and thrashing of hens at Shrovetide.” She slumped back on her chair so the legs squealed on the wood. I felt sure she would tip over in her zeal, but she leaned in when Simon shushed her again, whispering conspiratorially, “We had carols and wassails at Christmastide with good plum porridge too—and not a spoonful of it profane.”

“You needn’t long so for it, Liza,” soothed Simon. “There’s little chance to be merry in England now. Dr. Devlin says they’ve closed the playhouses. My brother’s heard you’re not to be caught whistling in Covent Garden lest some saint hear you.”

“Well, the mistress sleeps, and the sun shines; the floor here’s clean—” she patted my head—“and May is the mischief in me. Come, you,” she commanded me, “and let’s crown the King of May.” Liza plucked Simon off his chair, and we headed out toward the woods behind the house. “And you’ll be his bride.”

We trekked a long while, humming in our throats like bees, then settled in a secluded clearing. Warblers and sparrows darted in treetops as Liza and I gathered columbine, trout lilies, and trillium; we snapped off evergreen fronds and carried it all to Simon while Liza sipped from her flask. Simon hoarded our stash on his lap, breathing in armfuls, running his hands over hemlock and juniper as if they were heirloom silver. I wove him a brand-new crown while Liza wove one for me, singing hoarsely:

A garland gay we bring you here,

And at your door we stand,

It is a sprout well budded out,

The work of our Lord’s hand.

“What cruel church is it won’t let us nail a birch branch over the door for luck?” she sighed when she’d finished, tousling Simon’s long, dark hair and crowning us both with great ceremony.

He was our king all that bright morning, and I his queen. Bawdy Liza bade me kiss the groom, and he only winced a little. I felt like a bird pecking at seed. His lips were as smooth as the inside of a cat’s ear, and I believe he thanked me afterward, under his breath.

“Now dance,” cried Liza. “Dance!” But she was drowsy now (perhaps she’d been at her flask all night, it being a holiday) and slumped against a birch with her mouth open, drifting off to sleep in our May palace far from the trodden path. We obeyed our dancing master well—spinning, more like—round and round, elbows linked, till Simon cried dizzy and we collapsed in a heap. We lay on leaves and crushed wild onion with our arms touching till I got up to paint his face with the morning’s last dew.

“Queen Pearl,” he said solemnly, his blind blue eyes peering right through me, and he caught my painting hand, circling my wrist with long fingers as if to measure it. I yanked it back, unused to such an easy touch, used to being in charge. We were awkward a moment, faced perhaps with our two ideas of what grown horizontal brides and grooms do to amuse themselves. After a bit of squirming, that scrap of shame wore off. We lay all the morning listening to catbirds and to Liza’s swinelike snore, until poor Mistress Milton back at the house began shrieking for cider.

I never saw Simon’s mother, who lay shut up in her chamber the weeks I labored in that house. She was an imperious figure of ever-increasing proportions, and sometimes I imagined her beyond the door on her haunches like a great sphinx, ready to devour those who ventured unprepared into her airless chamber. She was indeed weary of this world, and as her state worsened that month, Liza came to fetch me less and less often. Soon she came not at all, and I reverted to my feral state, wiser and lonelier for it.

When I made my old spying rounds now, I never found Simon on his chair in the garden but saw only the new vegetable plot overtaken in the sun. Wondering how people could be so grand as to neglect such a task (neglect me, for that matter) I slipped in and weeded as best I could (though none had asked for me), the feel of earth a familiar pleasure. More and more, though, pride kept me away from that house. And then one day when my chores at home and my lessons were done, I wandered downtown with heavy heart to spy on saints and ladies and found instead a funeral procession.

Mistress Weary of this World had been in state for days, said a strange child who claimed to be a cousin, holding out her gloved hand and her ring, a gaping skull, for me to envy. I saw Simon and, beside him, his brother, Nehemiah, the face from the painting and the rain. For a moment I couldn’t take my eyes from that face, but when I looked again at Simon, I felt a thrill of fondness, and something like remorse, for grief had settled in his aspect.

Before them, behind the pall and coffin bearers, stood a tall, rugged but finely dressed man who must have been their seafaring father. I could see both Simon and his brother in the man, whose neat black-and-silver hair was combed back in a becoming way under a stately hat. Many others snaked down the street in murmuring pairs behind them, and I slipped into the line as it passed. I saw ahead at the church gates the minister, standing with clasped hands and a mild smile of welcome.

We snaked behind the church, and the coffin was placed on a bier by the fresh grave. I kept near the back and vanished in a sea of cloaks as mourners flowed inside the gates for the eulogy, coughing and whispering and even laughing under their breath—funerals were as often as not a chance for socializing. I knew his manner of oratory well enough, but this minister—unlike our own, who had of late been ill and under Dr. Devlin’s distinguished care—had a dull tone with no music in it.

Prayers were muttered, and the eager procession shifted again for the interment. I kept away as the crowd positioned itself by the grave, and I roused myself again only when Simon and his brother stepped forward toward the gaping earth to cast their sprigs of rosemary. The elder held his brother’s wrist, guiding the slender hand to release its fragrant twig. Then there was the light hiss of earth on the coffin, and the group began to disperse. I heard Liza’s voice, overloud at some distance, crying for Simon to come to her.

“I have him, Liza,” spoke the brother, who walked always with his wide hand at Simon’s elbow and seemed to give him little way. “Here.”

Liza bustled through the crowd and embraced both boys heartily, despite the elder’s embarrassed looks. Simon only looked lost, and while Liza bounded to the father and the elder son stood by the gravedigger’s elbow, I slipped to Simon’s side and whispered in his ear, “I’ve missed you, Master Simon.”

His face filled with the light his eyes lacked. But it drained away as quickly as it had come. He shook his head. “Go now, Pearl, before Liza scolds you for the world to hear.”

“I will, but can’t you come out one day? When your heart is able?”

He dragged at the ground with his heel. “Nehemiah won’t have it. He’s had an earful from the town fathers and wants you not under our roof.”

“Is he your keeper?” I looked for the elder boy, fearful suddenly.

“Yes,” said Simon. “He keeps us well. He’s in more ways father to me than Father.”

“Then I’ll come to the edge of your garden and speak like a sprite in the trees. Your turnips and peppermint need affection.”

“I’ll weed at sunup. My brother will be gone again to Cape Ann. Go now,” he said.

“Farewell then.” I nodded pointlessly toward the grave. “May she rest well with the angels.”

He looked down toward his boots, though not at them, I knew. His silence terrified me. “I can’t help what he says,” Simon whispered. “He says you must go home and stay there. With your fallen mother.”

Before I could understand, I saw Nehemiah turn from the gentleman he had been conferring with. I’d been watching the tall man’s back—his familiar carriage—from the corner of my eye, and when he turned I turned, as if we were dancers separated by space, and I recognized Dr. Devlin. I looked wildly from him to Simon, and my eyes blurred with heat. I ran out of the churchyard and crisscrossed quiet lanes and meadows and marsh until I was sick and stooped with running. I didn’t stop until I dropped to my knees by the bay, and I wondered, sobbing for breath, if I would ever know a life without this sinking.

Most every year at this time there were anxious rumblings around town when great flocks of birds blackened the sky in their passage south. I once overheard a farmer at the inn tell of a roosting site near Virginia to which families came from hundreds of miles away, driving their hogs, to camp and wait. The men met the birds’ deafening arrival armed with poles, guns, and pine-knot torches, with iron pots full of sulfur, while the besieged women plucked and salted. All around, branches sagged and snapped, the farmer said, and none could hear a rifle’s report a yard away nor his own voice whooping, and when they went, the flocks left a snow-white sea inches deep. The pigs had their fill and were fattened, the wolf crept forth and the lynx, the polecat, the possum.

But in Puritan Boston, such plenty was ungodly. It was the devil’s work, all glut and gloat, and worse than suspect. “Where are they going?” I asked Mother as the year’s first stragglers came. She looked up from the crimson thread and her deft fingers embroidering. “I don’t know, Pearl. Some say they bear dark tidings, but I think there is too much evil in the world to be carried on the wings of pigeons.”

I paced the cottage and finally, weary of her concentrated stare that did not include me, slipped outdoors again. I thought the rhythmic pumping of their wings, the rippling wave of noisy birds, was the most comely sight I’d ever seen. The pigeons had a slow grace as a whole that they lost once they settled in fields and on branches, from which boys netted and clubbed them, stuffing them into sacks.

I ran and twirled under their shade into Goodman Baker’s meadow, imagining myself aloft with them until I was too dizzy to stand. Collapsed on the grass, I watched the travelers surge past while the sun broke their ranks as light from Heaven pierces clouds. I mourned their going and wondered a while about Heaven, and would my mother be there to greet me at my turn. If, as the godly wise claimed, this life was but preparation and atonement, my short stay on Earth was doomed enough. Mine would not earn the hottest room in Hell, though Mother’s surely would.

Simon had called her fallen. He had spoken like the others. But he couldn’t, like them, look daggers at me from on high. I shook to think of his face, his empty eyes searching for me, finding nothing, only the dark. Who had schooled him? Nehemiah only? His recently arrived father? Now that they wore the black bands I couldn’t hate them, but it was hard to see these people—who had seemed so promising a diversion—now as any different from the others, like Dame Ashley, who just this morning as I was murmuring the Lord’s Prayer had snapped my back with her hazel switch and said, “Even your temptress mother sits straight, child, and she with every reason to stoop.”

Temptress. The word, like many words, had a certain roundness, a gleam about it. I wagered it was no great task to skirt Heaven, and perhaps Simon would help me do it. If Mother wouldn’t be in the beyond to hold me, there was no point in going there at all.

As promised, he was in the garden at sunrise. Though Mother wondered why I’d mastered my chores so soon, and would I be late for Dame Ashley’s lessons, I’d reassured her, kissed her cool cheek, and proceeded to my post by the beech tree. “I shouldn’t have come!” I called coyly.

He gave a solemn nod over his fist full of weeds.

“I never saw you weeding before. How do you know a carrot from not?” I challenged.

“I feel them. Some I won’t pull, if I’m not sure it’s waste.”

“I shouldn’t have come.” I nestled the toe of my shoe into a curved tree root.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“‘Sorry’ is a fool’s gift.”

“Come here. They’ve all gone for the morning.”

“I won’t,” I sniveled. “I always come to you. Now you must come to my realm.”

“I dare not ask what that realm is, pixie.”

“Come again to the woods.”

“No.”

“Why not?” I challenged. “Because of savages and wolves?”

“And other things.”

“The fiend.”

“He sleeps by day, I expect.”

“I doubt that truly.” I saw in mind a rippling field of new grass, a bird’s nest, and the physician who was by now a constant confusion of bright and dark in my thoughts. Like the dappled forest he attracted me, but for fear of him I had not honored his compact these many days. I couldn’t think what I might barter for his baubles, what “morsels” he might favor, and the longer I delayed the more forbidden his game appeared—and the more inclined I felt to keep my strange encounter with him private, though he’d only requested secrecy in relation to my father. I even kept the doctor from Simon, to whom I now pledged, “I will be your sight.”

“It was different with Liza there.” Simon raised his head, like a bear testing the air. “Still, I wish you would.”

“Then come.” I scaled the lower fence rail, tugging at my dress, and took his hand. He rose slowly, as one in a dream rises, and I led him back to the fence, raising his foot. “Climb through.”

He struggled, gripping my arm. “You don’t believe in throughways?”

“I told you . . . my realm. We have our own outs and ins.”

Once across, Simon resisted, standing still and alert.

“Do you know what sort of day it is?”

He shrugged and grinned but with half his heart, I saw. “A chill one. The sun shines and then retreats.”

“But do you know the look of it?”

He frowned with impatience. “Don’t mock, Pearl. Tell me if you must.”

“Everything,” I began in a lofty tone, “is past straining. There is new life under every surface. You feel it in the garden, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he sighed.

I took his hand and led him to the beech tree. “You know this beech tree?”

“I don’t know it. You spoke of standing by it.”

“This is a grand tree. If you look up in the early morning—that is, right now—there’s a green light that sears the eyes. It’s like a burn, it’s so bright. The new leaves are wide open and laced, like this—” I wove his fingers and mine together.

I reached up and plucked a leaf for him. “Its leaves are coarse but soft, like the touch of fingers.” I rubbed his face with the leaf, but he didn’t smile.

“Don’t look so grave, Simon. It’s a good thing.”

He rubbed the smooth bark. “How does this surface look whole? I’ve forgotten.”

“Have you groomed a horse? Your old cow will do. This trunk is like the bone and muscles of their legs, firm and curved and strong. Like the great haunch of a beast of burden, only wider and tall as two houses. There are hundreds and thousands of trees here of all sorts, many much taller than this. But her branches are like outstretched arms. Her bark, the outside, isn’t green like the leaf but gray . . . do you see it yet?’

He laughed. “What is gray?”

“That will do,” I said, tugging him further into the woods, “for now.”

It was slow moving with Simon, who tested his footing and came so carefully. “Don’t you trust me?” I asked once. “Do you think I’ll leave you?”

He considered, and I watched his jaw tighten. “You might.”

“And you would well remember it.” I let go his arm and moved away stealthily.

“Pearl?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t, Pearl.”

“Why did you say it?” I begged.

“The world spins.” He spread his arms wide like a preacher, but they soon settled safely at his sides. “I hear a roar of birds and leaves in wind. I know what those things are because I know how they sound, but they have no shape now, except here.” Simon tapped a finger to his temple. “When first you stood at my fence, you said you were like the rain. Do you know why I pray for rain?”

“No,” I allowed him. “Why?”

He stepped toward me, and I stepped back. “Because it gives a shape to things. It falls on the roof and slides down the walls. It pounds on the old stump outside where father cuts wood. It brings the earth its edges. Without it the world’s like a big, soft pudding.”

I determined to listen no more, fixing fast on my question. “Why did you say it?”

He sniffed thoughtfully at the air. “I don’t know.”

“Because he told you about Mother?”

“He did. My brother has always told me. I have no eyes, Pearl. I depend on him.”

“But are you blind inside?” I asked cruelly, and skipped a few yards in a mad little dance, slapping at the brush with relish.

He started at the sound of me, considering a moment. “Perhaps.”

Simon seemed small and alone there in the clearing, and I admit I enjoyed it. His graveyard voice echoed again and again in my mind as I danced round him. Go home. I let my silence wash over him. To your fallen mother. I let him seek for the edges of the world and find them not, hands hanging idly at his sides. I let him wonder at green leaves laced like fingers, at hundreds and thousands of trees like the still legs of beasts. He was afraid to bring those watchful hands of his to bear on these savage woods, I saw, but I knew also that it wasn’t really me or my negligence he was afraid of. Go home.

“You bade me go home, Simon, to my fallen mother. I can’t go home,” I said softly, and he lifted his head. “Any more than you can.”

He stood half bewildered in that clearing as I settled silent as a cat on a mossy rock. I told him it would not be long but that he must be patient. I waited, without a word more, for forgiveness to come.

After a time, he relaxed. He settled on a crisp bed of last year’s curled chestnut leaves, pulled his knees up, and rested his chin on them. He let the sounds of the woods wash over him with my silence, and we were alone in all the human world. Gradually, his hands took in his surroundings. He lifted pods and shells laced with winter rot, held them between thumb and forefinger to feel the tiny teeth marks, and dropped them. A squirrel whirred and clicked and complained in a branch above, and as the sun climbed the coo and twitter of birds stilled. I came closer until we sat together without touching.

“Do you feel me here?”

He nodded, no longer contrite or fearful. The teasing light returned to his face. “I should slap you.”

“You may then if you like.” I lifted his hand, placing it palm down on my smaller palm. He gave it a halfhearted slap and laughed nervously. We sat a long while in the woods, and once I fled to a nearby meadow. He didn’t look frightened exactly, when I returned, but rather grateful to hear my light step. I wove still-dewy wildflowers into his shaggy hair and made myself a chain, or half of one, before I lost interest and began to flick away the petals. My singing voice was shrill and off key, even to my own ears. Mother cautioned me all the time to restrain it, and my laugh with it, on the road to Sunday meeting.

Simon sat very still, and sometimes let his hands ride lightly on my wrists or forearms as I worked, following each movement to its end. We worked thus, and I told him of the streaming light and gave him a strip of white birch peel to hold, explaining that it was the skin of one kind of tree. I prattled on about the bluebird’s bright dress, the pigeons perched like foolish sentinels in every branch, the crystal gleam of the spider’s web. I bade him listen for the brook that traveled from his home to west of my own, and once we sat as still as rabbits in our concealed clearing when a man went by whistling on the path. Simon heard him before I did and clutched my wrist as the man approached, leaves crunching under his boots. Traders, town leaders, and men of the church took that path often to the Indian settlement.

When the walker was some distance away, I led Simon back the way we had come. I felt how surely now he belonged to me, and when he stumbled in the brush, I spoke gently, with more patience than I felt. I planted him back among the needy turnips, and went away smiling to endure my travails with Goodwife Ashley. Simon did not look after me, of course—why should he? But I felt him listening, and now he knew where in the great pudding of the world my footfalls carried me.

Some days later I returned to the grave of Mistress Weary of this World. Carved below the grinning skull on the marker were the words:

Reader beware as you pass by

As you are now so once was I

As I am now so you will be

Prepare for death and follow me.

Here Lies ye Body of Mrs. Caleb Milton whos sol took its flight from Boston to ye Heavenly mansions on May 26, 1649.

It was no thanks to Dame Ashley that I could read this epitaph. Mother, who had been raised by wealthy parents from Nottinghamshire and Holland, took pains that I understood the language well, and I knew my letters long before she bartered for my education with Goodwife Ashley, who let me under her roof with the others in exchange for fine embroidered cloth or a new pair of gloves when it suited her (and it often did; she was as vain as a cockerel). Though I could scarce write my own name, I could read well enough, and the portent on the grave, so like others in the churchyard and like the sermons I was well accustomed to, interested me little. Mistress Milton was no puzzle but an ordinary woman who’d fled an unremarkable life.

Simon had characterized his mother as a pious Puritan. It was she, he said, who initiated their journey to the New World. His father, an adventurer with precious little religious feeling, repaid her by spending most of his life between ports. Perhaps, in the end, she regretted her decision. Her eldest, Nehemiah, was learning his father’s merchant trade. Simon, who could go nowhere, had been her only consolation. She was at best a cold, babbling woman from the sound of it, babbling over her scriptures by the fire as the world flowed past her door. The cries of wolves far off in the wood made her back stiffen each night against the hard work that was expected of it by day.

As for Simon, Liza was his only comfort. She was kind to him, he said, if brisk and impatient, and though he occasionally had to listen in the night, he hinted, when she took a furtive lover to her bed, Liza was a voice to follow and a relatively cheerful one at that. She was noisy at her work and let him be idle just often enough without forgetting that he could complete most any task if someone brought it to him or him to it.

I stroked the cold stone and sang a little parting song to Mistress Weary of this World, who had borne me a friend. Though the public festivities surrounding her funeral might be deemed colorful enough—with rum and cakes and trinkets for all—hers seemed to me a lonely end. Thinking thus in the damp churchyard made me long for my own mother’s arms and know, for an instant, the worth of that embrace, though her mind often wandered from me.

I didn’t go to her, of course, because I am as lazy as a cat and knew Mother was stooped over her needle and thread or churning butter, and that I would purchase her affections only with an hour’s work or more. Instead, I walked along the edge of the quiet churchyard hitting pebbles with a stick. I crept through the tall grass that swayed by the dappled tree line, a tiger in darkest India. I scrambled up a pine as far as I could go before the middle limbs, or lack thereof, blocked my ascent. I tugged at and arranged my dress and sat on a sturdy branch, legs swinging, high above the dead. I heard cows lowing on the distant Commons, a dog barking, wagon wheels grating the earth to the rhythm of horses’ hooves. I heard also the laughter of children, a sound that at one time would have haunted me. I felt the sap on my palms and—hoping, for Mother’s sake, that it was not on the skirt of my dress—listened to the taunts and playful shrieks grow distant. I felt not rage or melancholy, as I might have before, but a detached calm. Someone in this churchyard, and in this world, belonged to me now. I sat still and smiling above the dead.

I was not long in the tree when I heard a squelch of boots in the damp leaves and the light swish of vestments.

“Pearl,” said a voice I knew well from Sunday meeting, “come down from there.”

“No.”

“You mustn’t give the magistrates added cause to doubt your mother’s fitness. You don’t want them calling her teachings into question again, do you?”

“What teachings are those?”

“Exactly,” the minister said with a light laugh. “Come down, and walk a while.”

I studied his thinning hair, his pale, trembling hands. One of them found its way, as always, to his breast, as if he had run a vast distance. He was as thin as a sapling, but his voice at least was strong.

I pouted and crossed my arms, resolutely silent.

He strolled a moment among the graves, hands now clasped tight behind his back. This gave him an appearance of calm forbearance, but I knew better. I knew from years of observing him at the pulpit that those fingers, that palm, were itching to rest over his heart, which organ was, rumor had it, frail and faulty. I wished I could be one of the squirrels that sailed from branch to branch, tree to tree. I would escape into the woods without his pity.

“Why do you hide among the dead, Pearl?” His voice, for a moment, rang with hopeless wrath. “What draws you here? Do you wait hoping I’ll come out, as I did today, and speak to you? Do I seem a haven to you? I would wish it—and yet I wish you away, too, like any bright light that shines on failure.”

There was no denying that because he was a man, and kind, he brought me a degree of comfort. I’d even on occasion imagined him as my father—tried him on as it were, as I would a friend’s or cousin’s dress had I friend or cousin to speak of—but like the other townsmen I auditioned in mind, he fit ill. He would tie my morning bonnet with pale, fumbling fingers, I suspected, and because I made him nervous, I would feel forever nervous in kind. “I come to be among the dead, minister.” It was wicked, I know; mayhap I was a prophet unawares and teased him to ward off terror. “Are you dead?”

“Not quite yet, but in any case, you are alive. Haven’t you a friend to sport with?” His jaw clenched. “Chores to do? Life is hard for your mother, as you know. You might be a helpmate to her.”

“I am her helpmate,” I murmured, only half believing it. “And I do have a friend to sport with.”

“Then go to her. Don’t lurk here among the graves. It pains me to think of it.”

“I’ve come from him, just this morning, and I said the catechism with Dame Ashley after, and so my soul is safe for today.”

He looked up, alarm in his eyes. “It’s a finer knowledge than you imagine. Don’t discredit it, Pearl, nor let your mother’s damaged nature defeat you. You have a life and light of your own. Be true to it.” The minister shook his head distractedly and walked away from the tree in which I sat. His vestments made an angry swirl round him as he walked, hands clasped tight behind his back. “You are a lamb, Pearl, a lost lamb, and I have failed you and your good parent from the beginning.”

“Your sermons serve my soul well,” I said weakly, looking round for something or someone to draw my attention from his stern brow and twitching mouth. His pacing made me understand, for a moment, how hard my restless nature must have been on my mother.

“How,” he asked mysteriously, “have I kept his bitter secret thus long, only to find it lodged under my very roof?”

Even as he spoke, nodding with a kind of grim exuberance, I heard again the sound of boots squelching in the leaves. Both the minister and I looked to it and found a disheveled Dr. Devlin, hands behind his back, leaning over the fresh grave of Mistress Weary of this World. “A strange little bird,” he mused, peering up at me through his sad squint, “has lighted in our churchyard, minister.”

The good man appeared far more startled by this address than I was, and that was a puzzle. I had been given to understand—had overheard on my spying rounds—that the physician was an old friend of the minister’s, now boarding at the parsonage. Were their relations always so strained? Now the man of God hovered below my branch with bullish posture, and I saw from my vantage point the rosy bald spot on his crown perspiring. He thrust out his cleft chin, a pudgy infant’s chin in a man’s face, and I felt the stirrings of mirth at the unspoken bristling below me.

But then the doctor looked up and at me with those perilous gold-specked eyes, and called in a voice humorless as the night, “He might be a bloodless shadow, Pearl, for all the use he’s been. What other flock has suffered so dull a love?”

My body began to hum with the feeling it sometimes had in the woods, when an unseen presence unnerved me and bade me run. I was not afraid exactly, but there were things that came there, I knew, that could seize or overwhelm or slice me, the swipe of a panther’s paw or the current in the air before a storm, or a harpy from my own musings. It was a danger that for me, as for the doe or grouse, manifested itself in physical terms. I needed to run but had first to climb down.

The two men had drifted some distance apart, and perhaps in another time, had they been other men, they would have treated me to a duel. Instead they smoldered. I shimmied down the tree in rapt confusion, feeling my wool stocking tear underneath my dress. I could not remember such urgency, even as a young child in the presence of the governor when Mother, delivering to his grand house a pair of embroidered gloves, the most beautiful I’ve ever seen—guarding, I fancied, a lavish spell in their stitches—begged to keep custody of me. It was the minister, finally, who had convinced him. I looked at him now, so small and stung without his fine words, and feared for him.

The men didn’t speak but stared at one another, each glancing round from time to time to find me in the corner of his gaze.

“Is our little bird alone, Arthur?” the healer asked in a hopeless tone, smoothing his black hair back from the elegant forehead. “Or does the mother perch nearby?”

“Pearl is wayward,” said the minister, and that seemed to end the impasse, for the two men nodded as if in agreement. The distance between them diminished, and soon the physician had caught the pastor in a hearty embrace and they tolled with false laughter like rival schoolfellows. “Pearl!” called the minister. “Come here and meet my old friend, a sometimes wise physician.”

“I have had his acquaintance,” I called, dropping to a defensive crouch on the ground.

“Here, young lady. Right your posture. Come hither.”

I went and felt again the doctor’s winking gaze upon me. “Pearl,” he said simply, almost tenderly, nodding as if he knew me well. “I have had the pleasure of her acquaintance, Arthur, to be sure.”

There followed an interminable pause. “Yes,” I told the silence. I looked from one mute man to the other. “Why do you stare at me like cattle? What do you wish of me? A dance, perhaps?” I curtsied as low as I could and then stood again, waltzing a slow turn. “Mayhap a song?” I seized on my favorite verse of a tune Liza had taught me, “The Clarke of Bodnam,” and loosed my voice in a wailing frenzy:

Yet though my sins like scarlet show,

Their whiteness may exceed the snow,

If thou thy mercy do extend,

That I my sinful life may mend,

Which mercy, thy blest word doth say,

At any time obtain I may.

While the physician smiled, strange eyes twinkling, and clapped his hands, the minister looked appalled, and this left me pleased and frustrated. “Too idle for your tastes? Perhaps a fit, then? Will a fit amuse you?” I began shaking my head and hands and let my tongue loll. People sometimes traveled miles to watch a woman at her fits.

The minister began to look vexed, though Dr. Devlin held his gaze on me. “That will do,” the doctor said, as if we’d planned this eccentric outburst together. Clasping one narrow black shoulder, he steered the minister toward the graves. “Go along now,” he called over a shoulder, “lest you rouse the dead. I’ll expect you at dusk, at the line. Yes?” He winked at me, and I drank in sweet complicity like a tonic. Such unaccountable tolerance (I was used to being scorned, even stoned, for my thespian efforts) brought a rash of heat to my ears, but Dr. Devlin’s wink satisfied me in a way that nothing outside the forest had or could. Like Simon’s favor, it seemed a miracle.

I might have lost interest then, my heart grown fat on the physician’s sport, if not for the sneaking suspicion that they had—caught in their own drama—already forgotten me. My curiosity could scarce endure such a slight, and I slipped into the woods, creeping to the edge nearest them to kneel in shadow where the lady slippers bloomed. I listened with the babble of the distant stream at my back as they strolled, the doctor asking from time to time, without resolve, after the minister’s health and welfare. Was he warm today? Had the pain returned to his chest? Were the visions still troubling him? Had the herbs eased his stomach at all? What was it that weighed so heavily on his mind? He was aware, no doubt, that the rigors of charity, of forgiveness, would exhaust even a stout spirit. And having opened his heart to many a penitent, having borne the weight of countless sorrows, how can the responsible man rest while wickedness prevails, while the very heat of Hell seems to bubble up through his floorboards at night? “What will you tell the sinner, sir? Turn back? And what if such path is closed to him? Damnation is a pity, but there are more pitiful things. You sense the truth in my words, don’t you? It pains like a rotten tooth, Arthur. Extract it from me.”

“It’s difficult to know what is true,” the minister cut in sternly. “It is a difficult truth—though silence leaves a bitter taste in my mouth—that God alone can craft right judgment.”

“Would that He exists, then.”

The minister seemed to stoop under these words and brought shaking fingers to his temples. “Why do you toy with those whose trust you have savaged? Were you not my friend once? Daniel? Were you not her friend?”

The doctor soothed his charge with sentiments too soft for me to hear and held the other’s shoulder as if to steady him. “Death is friendship’s fond reward,” he called at length to the rocks and trees, to the pigeons and me, and sent one hand sweeping through the cemetery air. “And love’s. For sinner and saint alike, Arthur. But now,” he prescribed, steering the minister tenderly back toward the churchyard gate, “you must return to your rest.”

“What do you want here?” droned my pastor. “What would you have from us?”

“I would have you instruct me,” said the other firmly. “I crave spiritual guidance, which it is your civic duty to provide, is it not? As mine is to provide healing herbs and poultices.”

“Then make a public statement, Daniel,” he urged, anger flashing in his eyes. “Confess your crime. I have so counseled you—”

“But what do I gain by doing so without her consent, against her will? Shall I rob her more? Would you?”

“Would I?” The minister’s vehemence frightened me.

“No,” the doctor acquiesced. “Of course you wouldn’t.”

I knelt on a stick as they passed, and it snapped. The sound cut the air. The minister didn’t turn back, but the doctor did. He walked to the edge of the clearing, cast his searching gaze into the dark where I crouched as one in prayer, and bade me in little more than a whisper go home where I belonged, before he saw fit to tan my hide.

Later, in the garden, I told Mother of my strange encounter with the minister and his boarder, the new physician in town.

I had been weeding absently, watching plants sway in the garden Mother kept for physic, listening without care to the uproar of crows across the basin and imagining, with a sly and dreamy smile, that Simon was listening too.

No sooner were the words out of my mouth than Mother rose and rushed to me as to one in harm’s way. Clutching my shoulders, she fairly roared, “What are you, child, that torments me so?”

This bewildered me, and I must have flinched, for her face softened, and her grip relaxed. “I have heard as much—that he is returned to Boston—though our good minister would not have me know. As if our paths could fail to cross.”

“He?”

“The doctor you speak of, Pearl, is no friend of ours. He is a devil.”

Delighted, I tried to conjure his face and could not. “But the Miltons say—” I tried to twist away, but she held my shoulders fast and swiveled me round again. I knew better than to meet her eye, knew well how ferocious her resolve could be.

“Had I known that he stood in that good family’s house before me, I should never have crossed the Milton threshold.” Mother let go, exhaling hard, and walked away from me. “As for the minister, Pearl, has he not suffered enough for his sympathies? Why persist in going where you are not wanted?”

I knew enough not to pout but rubbed my shoulder for effect. “If I did not go there, Mother, I would go nowhere at all.”

She ignored my wit. “I’ll remind you. We have no use for doctors or surgeons. We have Goody Black, the midwife, for our ailments.” Mother settled on her knees with a hard sigh, staring past me at the sea. “Obey me in this.”

Her distraction humbled me more than admonishment could. In a feeble effort to recall her, I walked round and knelt before her. I reached out for the stark red “A” on her dress, which frayed artifact was, even in my earliest memories, like a ripe plum to my eye. Without a word, I placed my pale hand upon it, flat against her heart.