Читать книгу Rivers Parting - Shirley Barker - Страница 6

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I was Joan,” she thought, telling herself a little running story, half past, half future, to comfort her, as she huddled on a heap of dirty linen and tried to forget the icy rain tapping on the deck overhead. “Always Joan, because I had no right to any other name. And I lived in St. Nicholas’ workhouse behind the broken hedges, where the old men drooled, and the old women scolded, and the young, swollen girls were always weeping. I lived there till I was tall enough to carry round ale in Jack Gambrell’s tavern, and then one day a man came there whose name was Johnny, and when I looked at him I knew the why of everything. And Johnny and I were married and had a fine house and many children, and lived together all our lives, and died together one night in our sleep when we were old. But once I did a fearsome thing, a thing to make you tremble and take the breath out of your body. I came all alone across the great sea. Only once in my life did I do anything like that, high and awful.”

She had not been at all afraid when she set out from Nottingham on a rainy day, just like the day Johnny had left her, all Trent valley dank with mist and the coach wheels spinning in the blue, greasy clay of the London Road. She had not been afraid when they passed Land’s End and the scent of burning gorse died away on the wind behind them. Not when the Pied Cow, a small but ungainly ship, lumbered across the path of an autumn hurricane, not when her bedmate broke out with the running sores of smallpox, not when the crew got drunk and roared through the women’s cabin had she been afraid. But it would all be over in a few hours, and she was wondrous afraid of it now.

She shivered and drew closer to Alice Goble, who lay burrowed in the quilts beside her. Alice moaned a little.

“Oh ... ! Did I hurt you, or have you got the pains again? Mistress Catherine says her brother Fernald will know what to do for them when we get to the shore. He was a ship’s surgeon in the King’s Fleet, she says.”

Alice, still bearing in her body the wounds of childbirth made months before, smiled wanly in the dim light that sifted through the cracks in the planking over them.

“I doubt he saw much of my trouble in the King’s Fleet,” she said.

She looked at the girl beside her, then at her own baby daughter asleep on a soiled blanket across her knees. Some day they would know what troubled her now, the awful deathlessness of being a woman: how love, and hard work, and childbearing drained the life out of you, till you’d think after a while it would be done, and there’d be an end of it, but no—more life kept coming in you to pour away. She clasped and unclasped her wasted hands, drew her breath shrill and quick.

“Or are you grieving for Adam?” asked Joan, trying to be wise and comforting.

For Adam Goble, master carpenter of Cripplegate Ward by London Wall, had died at sea, and gone down, sewn up in sailcloth with two charges of round shot, somewhere between here and there—somewhere about forty-five degrees north latitude, Captain Stephenson said, after he’d finished reading the Prayer Book, and two half-drunk sailors had bundled the poor corpse over the side. Oh, your man need not be buried with kings in an abbey—if he’s laid at St. Mildred’s, Bread Street, or Allhallows, Staining, or Michael’s in Cornhill, or Martin’s-in-the-fields, you can go and sit by him of a summer evening, when all London’s abroad in the streets and the grassy spots for air. Even if he’s laid with his own folk by the church in the little country town he came from, you can go there once a year with a decent nosegay in your hand. But how can you go back through all that heaving water and seek for a soul that’s laid down at forty-five degrees north latitude?

With a sudden impatient need to escape from her sorrowful destiny and the ills of her body, Alice struggled to her feet. There was not enough room between the deck and the rocking floor for her to stand upright, so she sank back again, but her movements had awakened the child, who began to wail dismally.

“Hush, Bessie, love,” said Joan, lifting it in her slim, strong arms. “I can’t suckle you, but I’ll get you some broth maybe.”

Walking with her head bent low under the worm-eaten timbers, she stepped into a larger cabin where half a dozen women were gathered around an iron pot of coals trying to warm themselves. Mistress Catherine Warburton, eighteen years old, come of a noble family somewhere in the west country, was just lifting a brass piggin of stew from its nest in the heart of the pot. Shaking her head at the odor rising from it, she turned to Joan.

“We’d best not go about the ship, Captain Stephenson says, for the men have been at the strong waters again. He tries to govern them, but there’s more drunk than sober, for they’re as glad as we to see land. How is Alice?”

Catherine was lovely, Joan thought, for all the dark waxiness under her blue eyes, the tiny salt sores on her lips, and the stains on her rich velvet.

“Not well. What’s to become of her when we get to the shore, mistress?”

Joan looked at the other women, goodwives all of them, and older, worn and bedraggled from weeks of sickness and fright and bad food and no way to wash themselves, but lighted inside, somehow, like candles glowing behind the rood screen in the great London church she had gone to just before they sailed from Gravesend. By sunset they would be with the men they loved, just as she would be with Johnny, and she knew that she was glowing, too. Only Catherine, spoiled with too many suitors to give her heart to any, had come out of England a free woman.

“When we get Alice to the shore,” she said, answering Joan’s question, “the first thing is to cure her body. My sister’s husband will know how. He comes of men who were great doctors in the French court, and healing’s a magic in his family these two hundred years, Joanna says ... whether it’s for broken soldiers or barren queens. And Sarah told me that once she can get to her herbs that are stored so deep in the hold, she has a healing potion, too. Didn’t you, Sarah?”

Sarah Scriggins, ruddy, square-built, near forty years old, with a bit of a beard, smacked her lips over a strip of rusty bacon she had just fished out of the rank-smelling stewpot.

“I was brought up in the house of Prue Trot—best midwife in Essex. Saw my first birth when I was eight, and swore then that if that was the way it was, for myself I’d have none of it. Nor did I ever, for all my three husbands. Yes, I know a thing or two, though I wasn’t with the King’s Fleet. I’ll fix the lass up and then we’ll get her married—awwwwwk!”

She thrust her thick hand into her bosom, pulled out a flea, and cracked it between blackened nails. “Take that, you bloody devil!” she said.

Over their heads the hatch opened to let in a burst of sleet and a tipsy shouting. Then Captain Stephenson scrambled down the ladder, his kind face red and bluff from forty years of facing into the sea wind, salt caked and frozen in his eyebrows.

“Never saw a coast come at you out of the fog like this one does,” he said, pleased that the voyage was so near done, with little sickness, only one death, and no harm to any man’s goods. “Never sighted the fishing isles, though we’re in past them. Yonder’s the true coast, and we’ll be up the river’s mouth within an hour. Anybody want to see it?”

“I do,” said Joan.

“I do,” said Alice Goble weakly from the arch between the cabins. Everyone turned to look at her, gaunt and swaying, her great eyes agleam.

“Adam, my husband, said it would be a fair land, a green country, and I should grow well there. I shall look at it for him.”

“Put blankets round ye then,” said Captain Stephenson roughly. “Rain’s let up but it’s not over, and like to turn to snow ’fore night.”

“We three will go,” said Catherine Warburton, shaking out a robe from which the vermin dropped and darted. “Joan, you wrap up too. You may be a bride before sunset, and we don’t want you sneezing at the altar.”

If they have an altar, thought Joan, as she handed Bessie over to Sarah and drew the rough wool shawlwise about herself. Johnny’s letter had talked of building “fishing flakes” and “salt pans.” It hadn’t said anything about churches.

They had not been on deck since the winter storms began on the night December came in, and the salt air tasted fresh and clean to them after the cabin stenches of illness, unwashed flesh, and caged animals. Helping Alice between them, they crawled through the hatchway and tried to get a foothold in the freezing slush that covered the splintery planks. The wet canvas of sails bellied and strained above them and falling sleet stung their faces. Clinging to the side of the ship, they straggled forward, soiled, musty skirts flapping, their hair whipped before their eyes. Shouting sailors ran everywhere at once, and from the roofed pen in the stern came the squawks of hens and the sad roar of the great yellow Danish bull Captain Mason was sending over to serve the cows already stocking his manor. Midway of the Pied Cow, and beside a hatch leading down to the hold, stood John Raymond, the purser, his black beard blown out like a pennant, his voice hoarse as he read from the paper in his hands the list of supplies that he was bound to deliver to Captain Neal, and listened for the voice of the sailor below, assuring him that they were there.

“Seven hogsheads of beef ... eight firkins of butter ... a box of cheeses—be the cheeses there, Davy?—four flock beds ... lead and shot ... cod lines and fish hooks ... spices and mustard seed ... twenty-two bushels, three pecks oatmeal—it’s a poor country that can’t grow its own victuals—four polaines for shallop sails....”

Past John Raymond they edged, and huddled finally in the prow, Joan Sweetapple, workhouse girl, Catherine Warburton, lady, Alice Goble, carpenter’s widow, their arms about each other, not only for warmth, because this was a time they wanted to share, even to the touch of the body, this first look at the new country that was to be their home and their children’s home so long as the blood lasted.

Stephenson stopped beside them for a moment, pointing.

“Straight ahead,” he said. “It’ll look out through the fog about there.”

The wind quickened, and the mist broke into long, crooked strands that drifted apart from each other till between them you could see the dark gray water before the ship, and straight overhead the white-gray sky with the cold rain coming down. Now you could see more and more gray sea, the fog massing into gray-purple clouds on the right, thinning always on the left. Now a hard, white line sparkled where the fog was thin. The captain passed again and pointed to it.

“That’s Rye Sand,” he said.

“Rye?”

“After Sussex coast. It’s the way to name everything here for something at home.”

“Why?”

“You’ll come to know,” he muttered, his voice harsh with pity.

“But ‘Piscataqua’? That’s not an English name.”

“No. That’s Indian tongue. It means ‘Rivers Parting’.”

“Oh ...”

Now straight ahead of them loomed a dark mass like a low hill in the water, turning from black to green as they sailed closer in, and they could see it was an island, covered all down to the sea edge with huge evergreens gnarled like monsters, growing out of slippery slate-colored rock, every twig adrip with sleet, the wynds and lanes between them drifted with snow. Now came a scatter of little islands, all bare, without leaf or stem except a beaten-down, yellow cover that might be sodden grass. There was nothing to say. Nothing. You waited, hoping that something better would lie around the next curve of shore.

And then suddenly they were not in the wide sea any longer, but in a broad stream draining down through wind-lashed forest—and all the world was gray, sucking water, and black trees, and white sky pouring down rain. Not a roof, not a spire, not so much as a cleared field or a shaft of chimneysmoke. A country that God might have made in a bad mood on a winter day, and then left lying here at the end of the world where no one was likely to find it.

“Well,” said the captain, “here we are. Not much like Gravesend, is it?”

“But how far is it to the town and the houses?” asked Catherine, her voice sharp with anxiety, “and Captain Mason’s manor?”

“That’s Mason’s manor,” said Stephenson bluntly, flicking his thumb toward the wall of spruce and hemlock crowding, implacable, on the western bank. “There’s no town yet. Only the stone house at Pannaway, set on the point where gales keep taking the roof off, and a few pole and thatch huts where the men sleep, and the Great House where I’m taking you.”

“Is that ... all?”

“All but the fishing flakes and the salt pans, my lady.”

Joan looked down into the stream of liquid gray ice slipping past them into the open sea. She hated the river suddenly, the flow of it, full and malignant as a great serpent, relentless as time, flooding out of unknown darkness, powerful to sweep everything on its bland surface into an unfathomed doom. She was to hate it every day of her life and never to live a day without seeing it, but this curse had not come upon her yet, and she shrugged her shoulders and shivered, and began to watch the beaches of broken rock with eagerness, for Johnny was sure to be somewhere along them. Hadn’t he written for her to come?

Catherine’s look was one of bleakness and effrontery. She had wanted to come to her sister because she was lonely for someone of her own blood, but why hadn’t Joanna written her how it really was? It would have been better to have married the worst of her suitors, bald Sir Roderick, with his Kentish manor and family ghost, and the tumbling, carrot-haired children he had fathered on an Irish housemaid. Almost better ... she wasn’t sure.

But Alice felt her limbs dissolve in the final terror. This was no bountiful, kind country, where a sick woman could grow well, and a baby girl tall and comely. This was a tangle of hard roots, and black, broken crags, washed by bitter salt water, and to take it, a man or a woman would need not only a strong body and fearless heart, but he would need laughter. There was no laughter or fearlessness left in her. But oh, the long way back—and London without Adam Goble!

“Is this—what it is?” she asked, faltering.

“I—I’m afraid so, lass,” muttered Will Stephenson.

Alice looked at the New World silently and well. The sleet nagged at her forehead. She felt the drip of her own warm blood from her unhealing flesh. She shut her mouth tightly, then opened it a last time. “Joan, you look to Bessie,” she said. And then she was over the side like a sea trout, caught, but escaping, flashing back from the deck into the misty element that bred it. The sucking tide caught her. The trailing, purple-brown kelp reached up. It was the mortal end of Alice Goble.

And that was how it happened that when John Scarlock carried his bride up the shaly beach at Strawberry Bank, three cold nights before Christmas, in God’s year 1631, she had a child in her arms that was no blood of theirs.

Not that they could have been alone then, even without poor Bessie Goble, who lay amiably in her drowned mother’s shawl, and smiled, and slept, and bothered nobody much. For the word that a ship was in, a ship from home, had brought men, and women, too, though fewer, scurrying out of the thick trees and down the frozen hillside, like ants that swarm to a dropped cell of honeycomb. They thronged the waterside in the bitter twilight, where great soft snowflakes were falling with a hiss into the black river. Their lanthorns bobbed excitedly about, and their eager voices rose above the low, sucking sound of the swollen current, above the grating of rowlocks that brought the shallops in from the Pied Cow. Walter Neal stood in their midst, his velvets tattered, but the fire undimmed behind his dark eyes. His words were all for John Raymond the purser with his list of food-stuffs, but his glances followed Catherine Warburton, as a short, swarthy man with a crooked nose and a furred cloak, her brother-in-law Renald Fernald, the great doctor, stepped out to help her ashore. Just behind him stood a woman, older than Catherine, but with the same blue eyes and calm beauty; and then he came back to the shallop and set Joan ashore too, and Catherine was presenting her to them—“My friend, Joan Sweetapple.” (She did not say, “Joan, the bastard barmaid from St. Nicholas’ workhouse.” She said, “My friend ...”) They could never have been friends at home, but here in the new country—where nobody knew what she was unless she told them herself, where a man could set his own value, and so long as he wore it well it would pass.... And then she looked past the Fernalds and saw Johnny.

He strode toward her in the light of the weaving lanthorns, and it was surely he, but it seemed to her as if the eyes and the faded green coat were the only things about him she had ever seen before. His face was sharper and browner, and lines had written what he was all the more plainly upon it. He would never again, she thought, look quite like the other lads leaning against the wall of Jack Gambrell’s tavern on a summer night, lads who were like to each other as the blades of grass, or trees in Gamwell Chase, young, smooth trees. He was like the thorny, the writhen tree in the field alone, that faces its own destiny beyond the shelter of its kind. There was a wary quickness about the way he moved, a quickness which she could not know a man must learn if he were to stay alive in the forest and kill before the other. There was love in his face, but there was an unyielding look, too, that was strange to her. He would never again be a laughing boy she could kiss carelessly in the hedgerows. “I am John Scarlock,” his look said. “Take me or leave me—this is what I am.”

He came up and put his hands on her shoulders, and neither of them said anything.

Oh, Joan, he was thinking. Here in all the hemlock and spruce and pinewood, you are still the holly tree, and that’s the strongest tree in England. This country will not take you. You will always be home to me. Fast as I clear an acre you will set primrose in with all the pumpkins and Indian corn. Oh, Joan ...

“You came,” he said finally, clearing his throat.

“Yes,” said Joan. “I said I would.”

And then Catherine and the Fernalds and Walter Neal were all around them, saying they would go to the Great House where there was supper and a fire. Sarah and her husband, as thick and ruddy as she was, their arms around each other’s waists, stopped and said it was Joan’s turn to take Bessie, and then she had to tell John all about the child and the way of Alice’s going.

“So I shall bring her up in our house, John, and she will grow with our children.”

John smiled. “When we have a house,” he said. “Next summer, maybe. I’ve cleared land for it. But we’ll sleep at Humphrey Chadbourne’s this winter. He’s built well. Let me carry you. The field’s rough.”

“What field?” laughed Joan, her voice shaking with delight, feeling herself lifted in his arms. For the hill they were climbing, though bare of trees, was all tough, frozen sod, scattered over with sharp, yellow stumps that thrust out every foot or so.

“Oh, well. It will be a field. Here we are.”

Through the darkness Joan could see only that the house was square, with thick board walls and a peaked roof. Oiled paper covered the spaces that were designed to hold swinging casements, and they could hear a great crackle of burning logs and branches the moment Neal opened the rude door. Once inside, John eased her down on a bench covered with a litter of sweet, crisp boughs, and she laid Bessie down at the side and tried to look around her and keep her place in what was going on. But the room was all bright and shadowy with pine torches, and fire roaring up the sallow clay chimney, and there were so many people’s names flung at her—Ambrose and Beck Gibbons, and their child, little Beck; Thomas and Ann Warnerton; Francis Williams and Mrs. Helen; Roger Knight, Edward Godfrie, Sampson Lane—too many men to remember—all rough clothes, and kindly faces weathered by cold and wind, a colder wind than ever blew in Nottingham.

Boards on trestles down the middle of the room held a number of smoking clay pots, and Johnny left her to go there and come back with a wooden tray heaped with hot meat and a queer brownish loaf. He broke the food with his hunting knife, and they dipped their fingers in.

“Hmmm. What’s this?”

“That? It’s good venison.”

“It’s not like venison at home.”

“Nothing here’s like anything at home.”

Joan looked at him candidly. “I am,” she said.

“Yes,” he answered slowly, “yes. I think you are. And so am I—about one thing.”

“I hope—”

“I know!”

They ate silently for a few minutes. Everyone knew their relationship and had the homely grace to leave them alone. And there were other reunited couples. Humphrey Chadbourne, who had built the Great House to John Mason’s order, scratched his bald head and turned to Neal across a full ale mug.

“Governor,” he said, “can we find corners enough for everybody to kiss in?”

“So long as you find a corner for me,” retorted Neal, his eyes following pretty Catherine where she spread her skirts to the blue-green-orange flames, “devil take the others!”

“Well, devil won’t take them. They’ll come to me and ask the score. The sailors are bringing up four flock beds though. That’ll help.”

“Good. John Scarlock’s to have one of them. John’s my man out of England and always was.”

Chadbourne’s brows knit. “Not that I’m a praying man from Massachusetts, but ... I’m not keeping a Merry Mount either. Is he married to the wench?”

“He will be,” said Walter Neal, grinning, “hard and fast before bedtime. I’ve the Prayer Book in my pocket, and the power to read it over them—or we’ll say I have, since no other man has.”

His glance roved across the room where Catherine settled herself gracefully in a chair carved in the days of the old Queen, the only decent English chair in the colony, and belonging to Fernald. “Now that—!” he said.

“That,” said Humphrey Chadbourne, “doesn’t kiss in corners.”

“Wager it won’t?”

“No. Not a ha’penny on any woman’s honor. Workhouse gets filled that way. But speaking of Massachusetts, what’s to pay upriver?”

Neal’s brows drew together, but he made no other sign. “Upriver? We know this: that Massachusetts is scheming to take over all Piscataqua Country and set it praying; that they’ve sent Tom Wiggin there to stand for certain merchants of Bristol and Shrewsbury who hope to steal from us—John Winthrop’s friends.”

“Wiggin? Oh yes, I know who you mean. I never heard him called ‘Tom’ before.”

“No, that’s the chief trouble with him. Nobody ever called him Tom. Tom’s not a stiff-necked name. Church of England and honest fishing and fur trade’s not good enough for folk at the Bay, and they don’t mean it shall be good enough for us, either.”

“We didn’t come here to pray. We came here to take up land and get money.”

“I know, and we’ll fight them. Governor Winthrop loves us like the beaver loves the willow, which is to say he’d eat our flesh. But John Mason can cut his throat at Whitehall, and he knows it, so he won’t dare too far. He’s a mean devil, for all his psalm-singing.”

“Psalm-singing can prove a man’s godly. It don’t prove you’d do well to trust him.”

“No. It’s a rare strange thing, but all the good lads I know are better at cursing. Well, don’t worry, Humphrey.” His fingers moved deliberately along his scabbard.

“Think it might come to that?”

“No. But if it does ...”

They looked at each other a long moment, with agreement and understanding.

In their corner of boughs with the sleeping child between them, John talked to Joan.

“What’s in Nottingham?”

She thought for a long time. “Jack’s the same, and Ned. Moll Doubleday’s with child by God knows who. They’re fixing the cobbles in Narrow March, and there was a fire in the Goose Gate—some tanner’s shop, I think. It’s been a rainy summer and corn’s dear. Nothing much.”

“You saw Rob?”

“Yes, of course. When your letter came I was—”

“I know. Let me tell you. You were drawing ale.”

“I was. For Jack. We were alone, just at noon. The men were all in the fields—”

“I know. It must have been about gelding time; scroudging out brambles and barberry roots; getting in brake to bed the cattle.”

“That’s out of your book! You’re dripping with it still! You haven’t forgotten.”

“No. You didn’t think to bring it, did you, Joan? I came away without it. The weathers here are not Old Tusser’s weathers, but still—he’s a wise man, any season.”

“I did. It’s wrapped in my red skirt in a little chest in the Pied Cow.”

His smile almost dissolved her, made her voice higher and quicker. “When Jack read your letter to me, I put off my apron and walked out of there. I meant to go back and say good-bye and take my wages—but I never did. I started for Old Thorny to get the money to come here, and on the way I met your cousin.”

“Where?” He wanted to think of that countryside, to hear its names and description.

“By the sandstone spring under the hazels. First he asked for you and read the letter. Then we started for the house, and as we walked he told me—”

“—how he fought the Spanish bastards?”

“Well, it might have been. It might have been the French. My mind wasn’t on him.”

“I know what your mind was on. I came ahead of you, remember. You were thinking about the land ... the trees ... and the streets in Nottingham; that you were going where you’d never see them again ... and that you loved them.”

“I—I didn’t think anything like that. I thought of you and that I loved you.”

Speech without words or touch flowed between them for a few moments, saying everything. Then John cleared his throat.

“Women are different, I guess. I’ve known men come here for many reasons—some, like me, who come without any—but women only seem to come here for one, and that’s to be with their men.”

“All our lives, cradle to grave, we’ve never got any other cause to go anywhere for. It’s a pity men won’t stay at home, where there’s good fields, and decent houses, and all the old kin, but if they won’t they won’t, and there’s nothing to do but pack your other dress and start after. Don’t you ever think to go home, Johnny?”

“No. No, I won’t ever go home.”

“Don’t you want to?”

“We don’t do what we want to in this life. What’s more, we don’t know why we don’t. Tell me the rest about you—after you left Nottingham.”

“Oh, I went in the coach to London, straight to the docks just like you told me to, and found the Pied Cow. Captain Stephenson took me to Alice Goble’s to stay till we sailed. Oh, John! Her ending was so sad!”

“Yes. I know. Did you like London?”

“No. All the red-tiled roofs and the church spires were good to see on the sky, but while you were looking at them, somebody would open a gable and pour the slops over you.”

“And the voyage?”

“Oh, we sailed and sailed till we got here.”

There are things you do not tell a lover, ever, she thought, and the trials of that voyage would be high among them. You can tell him about the dolphins leaping green and gold in the sunrise, the whales like swimming islands, and how St. Elmo’s fire burned over the mast all night. You would not tell him about the sickness and the other women retching all around, and Adam Goble laid on a filthy blanket in one corner, delirious and dying. The rotten food that acted like a poison; the drunken sailor who ripped your bodice while you beat him off with a slipper heel; the fat, white worms that dropped out of the timbers and bit red welts on you; and that storm when the great sea itself came crashing down the hatchway and you thought you’d never need a gravestone ... those were things he’d not find out from you. But there was one hurt you had to give him.

“Johnny, out at Old Thorny I talked with Bet....”

“How did the land look? Who’s helping Rob?”

“It looked the same to me, but I wouldn’t know. Kit married Gilly, and they’re a really grown pair and seeing well to things. But Bet said to tell you the hog lived but Watch and Warn are dead.”

He looked away from her. “They are? How?”

“Watch wouldn’t eat after you left.”

“Oh! And Warn?”

“With the pups.”

A man cannot weep, but he can rage. “Why the devil did Bet let that happen? What was she about? Warn always whelped easy!”

“Don’t you blame Bet. Her face ran all tears when she told me. She said, ‘I can’t help man or beast as don’t want to live.’ ”

Still unappeased he muttered, “I should have thought somebody would have taken care of my dogs for me. Why, Rob brought Watch’s great-grandfather home from the Navy. He was one of the fighting dogs that boarded the Armada ships just like the men did.”

“The pups thrived, Johnny. Squire’s black bitch May suckled them, and they’re fine dogs now. Ned says they’ll both be bigger than Watch.”

“Good. I wish we could get one of them over here.”

“Oh, John!” called Walter Neal, striding through the crowded room that was beginning to reek of woodsmoke and malt and sweaty woolen. He had a book in his hand. “Stand up with Miss Joan unless you’ve changed your mind about her.”

Stillness came suddenly into the room like a presence, troubled only by the crackle of fire and the scratch of snowflakes at the paper panes. Piscataqua folk put down their clay mugs, and stopped their gossip, and those who were sweethearts drew closer to each other.

John Scarlock rose up soberly, and Joan sat still for a moment, then scrambled to her feet and stood with her face lifted.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t changed my mind.”

Neal opened the Prayer Book. He looked around him at the yellow pine walls, still oozing amber resin, at the sapling ladder leading up to the dark caves of attic overhead, and the little ridges of snow that had drifted under the door. “Dearly beloved,” he intoned piously, and then shot a glance at Catherine Warburton that turned her whiteness ruddy.

“In the time of man’s innocency,” he read, and Joan remembered a spring night under the hazels, and all the sweet, sweet strangeness of love and the body’s hurt that would never come again.

“For such as have not the gift of continency,” he read. And what’s continency, thought Joan. Something in one of Johnny’s books I’d never have much to do with.

“Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” he read, and there was silence; no male kindred to speak up for nameless Joan in her russet dress.

He fumbled for a moment. “Oh, well—I give her myself.”

And at the end they knelt, and the kind, shaggy heads of the people who would be their friends and neighbors for the rest of their lives bowed around them. Joan thought desperately of all the black water from the river’s edge to England, of the black woods circling round, and the thick snow dropping down on everything. There was no holly, and no merry bells, and no proper English parson to read the service over them—only a straggling soldier with lust in his eye. For all she knew, no decent bed to go to afterward. But—she was marrying Johnny. She felt her life suddenly flooding out of the narrow bounds of flesh, losing itself in the source and the life that lay beyond, like the full Piscataqua losing itself in the sea. She was no more “Joan.” Only a warm mouth and a soft body, turning to him who was turning—oh, wonderful sweet and strange—to her. And when he took her to him this time, it would be in a completeness past the body’s love.

And then she realized that Walter Neal was looking in her face, not in Catherine’s, and that he saw how it was with her. Perhaps he, too, had lost himself in a far country long ago, as every man and woman must be lost before they can come to live. “Here endeth,” he said, so soft that even Johnny could not hear, “the Book of Joan. Mistress Scarlock, kiss your husband. Brethren, let us pray.”