Читать книгу The Last Gentleman - Shirley Barker - Страница 3

1.

LIKE WATER DOWN

THE MERRIMACK

“She was a scandal to all the province five years ago when you come away from there,” said Mistress Davenport, a long iron spoon in her hand, peering into the depths of the black kettle bigger round than she was. “I don’t see what you be going back to her for.”

“I’m going back to her because she needs me,” said Lydia simply. “And as for the scandal, I don’t know—”

“Ha!” jeered the third woman in the room, a heap of mildewed satins and laces that in a time no man remembered must have been fine. The other two paid no attention to her.

The kitchen in the long wooden ell behind the General Wolfe Tavern was full of sound: snap and crackle and low steady song of the fire; the beat of rain on the roof and the drip of it off the eaves; the murmur of men’s voices in the taproom on the Fish Street side. Early afternoon it was, the last Saturday of August in the year 1774, but dark and cold as an autumn twilight. Beyond the small square panes, the clustered roofs and chimneys of Newburyport in Massachusetts were hidden by fog and rain. Lydia could not see them when she looked out, but she knew well that they were there. She turned again to the tavernkeeper’s widow, who was carrying on the business with the aid of her sons, much as she had done in her husband’s time.

“I don’t know that it be a scandal,” she repeated. “All she did was to marry, and the Bible says that it’s better to marry than to burn—”

“ ’Tisn’t impossible to do both,” scoffed Mistress Davenport. “What’s taken you, Lyddy? You never was a one to quote Scripture, and there’ll be little enough of it where you’re going. Governor Johnny Wentworth’s all for fast horses and card-playing, I hear.”

“There’s far worse things could be said of a man,” retorted Lydia. “Johnny Wentworth’s loved all up and down this coast. He may be the King’s Governor, but he was born a Portsmouth lad. He’s one of our own.”

“Aye,” said Mistress Davenport, her face softening. “He’s one of our own, as you say, and perhaps he’s not to be blamed for acting in too great haste to grasp his pretty wench. I always said the fault was with her. If Johnny was to die tomorrow, my lady Frances would be ready with a third. Likely this time she’d hold the wedding and the funeral all together, and not have to go to chapel twice and wait ten days in between, like she done before. But I don’t need to tell you of it. You was a maid in her house at the time.”

“Yes,” said Lydia slowly. “I was a maid there—then.” She paused a moment, looking into the firelight, then she went on. “You never saw Frances Wentworth, did you, Sarah? If you had, you wouldn’t judge her so.”

“Indeed I saw her. At her coach window once, as she rode through town. They did not stop here. We were not good enough. She dined at Tristram Dalton’s mansion house. She was married to poor young Mr. Atkinson then.”

The two women stared silently at each other across the firelight space between them. Then the hostess concluded: “I have to admit, she was middling fair.”

“She was more than that,” said Lydia. “When Mr. Copley of Boston painted her picture, she was said to be the most beautiful woman in America. But it is not her beauty I am thinking of. There have been women who were both wicked and beautiful. It is a sort of lightness about her—you might as well speak ill of a puff of thistledown. It goes where the wind wills it to go, and you cannot blame it for that, or tell it nay.”

Mistress Davenport stood up and smoothed her homespun skirts. “Lightness is no uncommon quality in women,” she said. “There’s women with lightness in every attic in Chandler’s Lane and strutting along the dockside whenever a ship comes in. But I’d not serve them in my taproom. If that is all—”

“It is a different sort of lightness I meant!” cried Lydia, feeling her cheeks grow hot and her eyes widen. “Lightness is not the word—but it is something about her that draws you to her and makes you forgive all. If you knew her as I do, you would see!”

Mistress Davenport went to the tall carved cupboard at the end of the room and brought forth a bottle and glasses.

“You’ll have some more rum, Ma’am Hooper,” she said to the old woman in the ruined satins. “You want some rum, Lydia? You got a long ride ahead of you.”

“I’ll take your rum, and gladly,” said Madame Hooper. “It has the warmth of the far islands where it came from, warmth that is better than fire to an old body.”

It always surprised Lydia to hear the grubby throat, the mouth with its famous double row of teeth, bring forth the same precise cultured speech one heard on the lips of visiting ladies from Boston or finer guests from oversea. The old woman had walked into town from nowhere years ago, dressed in the same draggled finery that still clung to her, and set up a school in a tumbledown cottage at the south green. She was learned, and she could take the children from the hornbook up through the Latin grammar as well as Mr. Moody at Dummer School, but she fancied herself for a witch and liked to tell fortunes and boast of darker, supernatural powers at her command. You could see her walking at dusk in the salt marshes below the town, closely followed by her “familiar,” a black fowl with a square-trimmed beak. Newburyport might have hanged her for such antics a hundred years before, but now it laughed at her openly and consulted her by stealth.

“Yes, I’ll take your rum and welcome, so long as it be in free gift,” Madame Hooper repeated.

“That’s understood,” nodded Mistress Davenport, tilting the bottle over the glass in the woman’s blue-veined hand.

Lydia watched them, feeling no wonder at the friendship between her tidy hostess, cut to the pattern of all Newburyport housewives, and the outlandish slattern, welcome nowhere else in town. Sarah Davenport was a friend to everybody.

“Rum, Lydia?” she asked, still holding the bottle.

Lydia smiled at her. “What I’d like right now, is a cup of tea,” she said.

Sarah tossed her head and flounced back to the cupboard to put the bottle away.

“And who wouldn’t, I’d like to know? There’ll be a deal of water flow down the Merrimack before we again taste tea here, I’m afraid. We’ve Liberty Tea, of course—but it’s made out of loosestrife I picked by Pipe Stave Hill.”

Madame Hooper gave a disparaging grunt. “I’d rather drink from the Frog Pond,” she muttered, taking a pull at her glass.

“Well, I don’t know but what I had, too—” began the hostess, and then broke off. “Why, Bart Stavers!” she cried. “I thought it be about time!”

Bartholomew Stavers, who drove his Flying Stage Coach on a weekly trip between Boston and Portsmouth in New Hampshire, stamped into the room through the door that led from the stables on the Threadneedle Alley side, and went at once to the fire. His face was brown from the constant wash of all kinds of weather, and he wore a rough canvas cloak above his leather jerkin, pulled cowl-wise over his head to keep off the rain. Flinging the cloak aside, he stretched his hands to the blaze.

“Colder’n a witch’s tit, and August not yet gone,” he exclaimed.

“If you’re cold now, what will you do ’fore winter’s over?” demanded Sarah. “Where’ve you been? Dallying with that yellow-haired widow by Rowley Green?”

Bart Stavers scowled and shook his head. “Nothing like,” he complained. “Would that I had been! The bay horse cast a shoe two miles out of Ipswich, and I had to lead him back and leave the young gentleman sitting in the coach all the while. ’Twas lucky I carried only the one passenger.”

“Passenger?” cried Sarah. “Where is he? Must I prepare a special meal for him?”

“He’s in the taproom, and he requires no special meal. He says he’ll eat whatever’s laid out there. But he wants to know if there be waiting for us a female passenger—one Lydia March who’s bound to Portsmouth to serve in the house of the governor. He was expecting to meet with her here.”

“Young gentleman’ll find bread and cheese and a cold joint, and Anthony’s there to serve him,” said Sarah, her moment’s flurry over. “What’ll you take for yourself, Bart? Was you expecting to meet with a young gentleman, Lydia?”

Bart Stavers peered into the kettle, leaned closer over it, and drew a long breath through his nostrils.

“I’ll just dip myself some of this stew, Sarah,” he told his hostess, taking a bowl and ladle from hooks near the fireplace, “though why the devil you have to put turnips in it—!”

“Yes,” said Lydia slowly. “I was expecting to meet a gentleman. Frances wrote me—”

“You’ll get more than you’re expecting, Mrs. Lydia,” interrupted the self-styled witch woman, putting down her empty glass on the brick hearthstones beside her chair. “More than you’re expecting—in New Hampshire. But it won’t be a gentleman!”

A silence followed the last ringing words of the old woman, for she uttered them with all the vehemence of a reverend minister in the pulpit proclaiming Judgment Day. Bart Stavers held the ladle poised over the stewpot and turned to look at her curiously. Mistress Davenport frowned and bit her lip. After a moment filled only with the snapping of pine knots on the hearth and the tap of rain overhead, Lydia stood up and smiled across the fire at Madame Hooper.

“Thank you, Ma’am,” she answered demurely. “Thank you for warning me.” Then she drew her cloak over her thin lawn dress and turned to her hostess, putting out her hand. “Good-bye, Sarah,” she said. “Frances wrote that her husband would send his aide to escort me—a Mr. Hugh Giffard. I’ll go out and speak with him now, and likely Mr. Stavers will soon want to be on his way. Ask him to put my trunk in the coach, please. It is just inside the stable door.”

She paused a moment and then went on, her voice tremulous with controlled emotion. “I’ll be coming back—Sarah. I have to, for there’s my house by Crane Neck Hill. I did not sell it. I walked out and locked the door and left it, just as it was when we lived so happy there. David’s uncles will keep watch of it, and they have taken the livestock to their own farms. But it is still my home.”

Sarah Davenport looked at her keenly. “Yes, the house. I knew you had that, of course. But I hope—did David leave you enough money, Lydia?”

“He left me a hundred pounds,” said Lydia. “It is enough and more. I have taught school before and can do so again. There will be always the young needing to learn. I can make my way.”

Sarah drew herself up and stiffened her thin shoulders. “When Will went off to fight at Quebec,” she said, “we were poor then, and the children small. He left me a guinea—a guinea only—for that was all he had.”

Lydia smiled and waited. She had heard the story before, and was eager in heart to be gone.

“And when he came back,” finished Sarah triumphantly, “after we’d licked the French and the fighting was over—I handed the selfsame guinea back to him.”

“I’m afraid I’m not so thrifty as you are,” said Lydia, “but David won’t want his hundred pounds again.” She closed her eyes a moment and bent her head. Then they stepped into the taproom.

Sarah’s oldest son, Anthony, had lit the lamps though it was only midafternoon, and was scurrying among the tables, trying to serve custom. Half the men round Newburyport seemed to be there, Lydia thought, as she looked about her at the scarlet coats of the merchants and shipyard owners from the brick mansions up the hill, at the homespun shirts and leather vests of the fishermen and dockside workers. Plenty of farmers, too, had come in from the back country to sell their produce, for Saturday was a favorite market day. She kept looking for the young gentleman, but at first she could glimpse no strange face in the familiar crowd.

Then she heard Sarah exclaiming at her elbow. “God’s mercy, and why didn’t Anthony call me? The place is busier than it used to be in Stamp Act time. Men was that troubled and uneasy then, it took so much rum to calm them—the like I never saw! I was running with hot toddy and punch and cherry brandy, till I felt my legs was wore to the shinbone. And now it seems like those days had come again, what with the shipping all shut out of Boston Port, and the King’s troops there—not friendly like—and these messages running back and forth between the towns, about a great meeting in Philadelphia. Why is it, the more men be troubled, the more they cry for rum? Ah well, I suppose ’tis a case of any excuse. I’ll have to tell you good-bye, Lyddy. Anthony, run to the stable for Mose. He’ll have the coach horses fed by now, so Mr. Stavers can be getting on. Lyddy, I wish you well in Portsmouth, and I’ll pray for you there. But don’t you trust her—the governor’s wife, I mean. I don’t know what they think of her to the eastward, but it’s little enough we think of her here. Good-bye, child! Good-bye.”

Sarah elbowed her way among the men crowding round the bar and stepped behind it, reaching for an apron that hung on a hook there. Lydia looked again about the low room—the firelight shining on the black old rafters, tobacco smoke and woodsmoke drifting everywhere, softening every sharp outline, seeming to mellow all.

Then she saw him. He stood tall and slender, dressed in a suit of fawn-colored broadcloth with ruffles at his throat and wrists; a dark blue cloak hung from his shoulders. He was bareheaded, and he wore his sleek gold hair unpowdered, caught in a queue behind. As she stepped closer to him, she could see that his skin, too, was fair, but his eyes, a light gray and deep-set, shone forth under heavy dark brows. She knew at once that he could not be a Portsmouth man, but she had been certain in her mind of that before. “Giffard” was not a Portsmouth name. He did not come from anywhere in New Hampshire, that she knew, because of the graceful gesture as he lifted his glass and stepped back from the bar a little, looking about the room, looking, no doubt, for her. When New Hampshire men were graceful, it was with the natural grace of the bobcat and the whitetail deer. It was with the studied grace of the ballroom and the fencing school that Hugh Giffard turned to her when she put her hand on his sleeve and spoke to him.

“Aren’t you Mr. Giffard?” she asked.

He looked down at her, smiling. He was much taller than she. David had been taller, too. But once, she remembered, there had been another one, and they had stood almost even when they looked into each other’s eyes. She put the thought away.

“I’m Lydia March,” she said, with an answering smile.

“I’m glad to know that,” he told her, and the way he spoke the five words made it plain what country he came from and why his coat was so fine; made it plain that he was an Englishman from overseas, with the English speech still on his tongue. “I was beginning to think I’d have the devil’s own time to find you.”

Outside in Threadneedle Alley, Bart Stavers blew his coaching horn.

Hugh Giffard turned and put down his half-finished drink on the bar. Then he took her arm and looked her up and down, from the velvet cap on her high-swept hair to the high-heeled slippers on her feet.

“There’s mud in the alley,” he said, “let our man drive up to the front door. Will he have your luggage stored away?”

“Yes,” she murmured. “Mr. Stavers was to take my trunk.” She let the young Englishman lead her from the taproom, and turned to wave to Sarah, but Sarah was busy drawing ale and did not see.

At the top of the high flight of steps they stood and waited, looking down at the huddled frame houses looming through the rain. The carved and gilded tavern sign, with the head of General Wolfe encased in a wreath of iron scrollwork, flapped drearily from its long pole, and the fog drifted in banners down the sloping street.

“Is it a new journey to you?” asked Hugh Giffard beside her, still holding her arm. “Or perhaps you have been in Portsmouth before?”

“I was born there,” answered Lydia. “I lived there till I was eighteen.” She felt his fingers tightening through the woolen folds of her cloak, and shifted uneasily, puzzled that she should do so, for there was nothing rude or familiar in his touch.

“And that,” he said, “was surely not so long ago.”

“It was five years ago,” answered Lydia. “A very long time.”

The Flying Stage Coach trundled round the corner, and Bart Stavers put his horn to his lips again. Hugh and Lydia hurried toward it, and he handed her into the cushioned depths of the vehicle, climbed in himself. The driver called to the horses, the axles groaned, and they were off; down through Cornhill and into Broad Street that ran a curving course past the wharves and shipyards to Carr’s Island Ferry where they would cross the Merrimack.

Her companion sat silently in his own corner, and Lydia was glad of that, for she had much to think about as she heard the shouts of the boatmen, felt the lurch of the coach, and then the lift and fall of water under them. She was crossing the river she had not crossed in five years. She was going home. Like water down the bed of the stream, those years had gone. They had flowed past her, and they would not return, and all the other years would be other streams, still flowing on. What would she find in Portsmouth, she wondered, of what she had left there? But what was she bringing back with her, of the girl who had gone away?

She turned her head and peered through the rear window of the coach, saw the scattered lights in the small old seaport town crouched on its low hill. She looked through the window beside her and saw a flash of lantern light strike on the black water moving seaward just below. Then she turned to Hugh Giffard. The lantern light shone across him, too, and he was smiling quietly at her there in the dark. He cleared his throat.

“You were thinking,” he said, “of many things, or so it seemed to me. So I would not trouble you by speaking. Do I trouble you now?”

“No,” she answered, trying to put a warmth into her voice lest he think her a dead fish of a woman, queer and odd. “It is only—that I am going home, and I have not been there for so long, and I am wondering about all the changes that must have happened while I was away.”

He settled himself more easily on the frayed cushions. The coach was small, designed for three passengers at most. Sit decorously far apart as they would, they were still very close to each other.

“I find myself wondering the same about my home in England,” he said, “and I have been gone only six months from there.”

“But you must have had letters,” she answered. “I have had no letters at all.”

She had had the one note from Frances Wentworth, of course, but she had waited years for its coming, and when it came, it spoke only of the single thing.

“Yes, letters,” he agreed, “but letters do not always tell you what you want to know. They tell me that my brothers’ wives are all with child, that the roof of the west wing leaks and my favorite mare’s gone lame. But they do not tell me that the daffodils bloomed this year just as they used to do, and whether the gulls still nest on Flamborough Head. Does that sound like madness in me?”

“No,” she told him. “It sounds as if you would want to know about the same things I would want to know about. People must die and be born, I know, and roofs fall in, but we want to be reassured about the things that do not change.”

“I have been in Portsmouth since you have,” he said, “and I can tell you that there’s still rough water off Pull-and-be-damned Point. I can tell you that the men still cut salt hay in the marshes, and the fireflies twinkle through all the town gardens in the summer dark. Is it that you want to know?”

“Yes, that,” she said. “I did not realize till I heard you speaking just now, that I had been homesick for it all.”

Deep inside her a voice, wry and shrill like that of a twisted gnome, lifted itself and said, “Why do you lie to him, Lydia? You know that you have been homesick and you know the cause.” And she answered the wry gnome, “Be still. It is not to him, it is to myself that I lie.”

The ferry grated against the Salisbury shore, and the coach lumbered across the wooden ramp that bridged the gravel beach, lumbered forward in the rain. On the box outside they could hear Bart Stavers humming softly to himself. He had a lantern beside him and its light shone through the chinks here and there so that Lydia could see the head of her companion, and that alone, like a disembodied head floating on the dark. She wondered if she looked that way to him, felt sure that she did.

Suddenly she realized that he was speaking to her.

“You have no family left in Portsmouth now?”

“No. Others of the name, but no really close kin. My father was drowned in a squall off the Isles of Shoals the year I was born, and my mother served in rich families to earn our keep. She died when I was sixteen, and I took service in Theodore Atkinson’s house to wait on Frances, his son’s wife.”

Did she imagine that there was a slight difference in Hugh Giffard’s voice when he spoke again, an edge and a tenseness she had not noticed before? Perhaps it shocked the gentleman in him to find himself conversing so familiarly with a servant.

“Would that be she who is Frances Wentworth now?”

“Yes, Frances Wentworth. She was young, and her husband was ailing even then and wanted her constantly by him. She missed the gay life she used to lead in Boston as a girl. I went there to be a servant, to wash linen and scour, and lay the fires, but I became her friend and companion soon, because she needed that. ‘I will get a girl from the country to do the chores, Lydia,’ she told me.”

“And did she?”

It was over and past long ago. Why should it matter to him, or her, or anyone now?

“Yes, she did, and she taught me all the fine things she knew, so that we could do them together. She taught me to sing, and to play on the spinet, to embroider on lace and to do crewel work. She taught me to play card games and even to speak a little French.”

“And you were fond of her?”

“Oh, very fond!”

“Then why did you go away?”

Lydia looked out the window. The sky had lightened a little, and they seemed to be passing beyond the center of the storm. The marshes lay in dim twilight now, rather than in midnight blackness, and she could see the long winding channels through the yellow grass, the slanting haycocks, and here and there a knoll of solid ground covered with dwarf cedar and scrub oak and pine. The whole countryside seemed to cry out to her that she was going home. She turned back to Hugh Giffard, whose homesickness was for some far-off place called Flamborough Head.

“I went away because—you must have seen it happen—changes come across people’s lives. Doors close, and other doors open.”

She could see him nodding gravely through the half-dark.

“It was about the same time that changes came for her and for me.”

“What changes came?”

“For her—her husband died, and she was married to another—soon.”

“Yes—soon. I have heard talk of that.”

“Those who talk about it do not understand. She married, and was lonely no more, and had no more need of me. And there were changes—in my life, too. I wanted to be gone from Portsmouth.” She tried to keep the bitter edge from her voice, but knew that she had not.

He ignored it. “You were young,” he answered lightly, “and you wanted to see the world.”

“Yes, I was young, and I wanted to go away. I went to Newburyport and taught in a school for young ladies there. Taught all the fine things Mrs. Frances had taught me.”

“I see,” he said, stirring restlessly and gazing out into the night that once more drew around them. She knew that she should have gone on to tell him the final chapter of her little story, wondered why she did not. Instead she turned to him and asked, “You say you have been only six months in America?”

“Yes, six months, and in Boston mostly. I am just now returning from a three weeks’ mission there, and the governor wrote that you would join me as I came by the Wolfe Tavern on my way. But I have been long enough in America, Mistress March, to know that you will never understand what it means in England to be the youngest son of a poor family that used to be a rich one. In America such an unlucky lad would take off his fine coat, and roll up his sleeves, and set himself to work.”

“Why, yes,” said Lydia blankly. “What else could he do?”

The young man shook his head. “Ah, but the matter is not viewed so in England. He cannot serve in a shop or become a blacksmith.”

“I do not see why not.”

“It would be as if a woman went on the streets to sell her virtue. Do you take the meaning of that?”

“Yes, I know the meaning of that, but I see no likeness in the two cases.”

“I told you that you would not understand. Ask John Wentworth when you come to Portsmouth. He lived in England for a time. Perhaps he can make you see it plain.”

The chill dank air of the marshes was seeping through the cracks in the coach body and around the ill-fitting windowpanes. He drew closer to her, and she did not draw away. Instead she answered him.

“No, I will not ask John Wentworth. I will take your word. But what is the youngest son to do? Will they entertain sturdy beggars in the almshouses there?”

“Why, if he is a scholar he may take orders and be granted a living within the church. If there is enough money to buy him a commission, he may become the officer of a regiment—” He broke off.

“And if he be neither of those things?”

She felt as if she were standing on tiptoe peering through a high casement that looked on another way of life. Her companion had lived in that way of life and been unhappy in it, and she sorrowed for him. Now she was the one who drew closer.

“Then, he may go into a sort of service—he may go and be a bailiff or a boon companion to one of his richer friends. He may even become an aide to a governor in His Majesty’s Colonies.”

Lydia felt that at last she understood.

“So you were a youngest son, and poor, and you knew Johnny Wentworth when he was in England, and you have come out to take service with him now?”

He laid his right hand over her two hands where she had clasped them in her lap. His fingers curved about hers with warmth and pressure.

“It is good that you understand, Mistress March—may I say Lydia? So few understand in this country. You live by such other customs here, and there is so much ill will between England and America nowadays.”

“Yes, I know that. I am wondering what will come of it.”

She found it hard to talk, to keep her mind on what she was saying, she had grown so dreadfully aware of the warm masculine strength inside the broadcloth cloak.

“I am wondering, myself,” he went on. “When I came here, I felt I knew the right of the matter. Now I am not so sure. And as for Johnny Wentworth, I never so much as saw his face until I came ashore in Boston. I was a boy at school in his English days. My father was from Gloucester, penniless like myself, and a younger son. Our family came with Duke William out of France—you have heard of the great duke?”

“No,” said Lydia honestly. “I have never heard of the duke.”

“No matter. He has been dead a long time, and so has Walter Giffard, the Lord of Longueville, who invaded England at his side. He was a man of possessions. It is a pity they have not endured with us until now. My father married into Yorkshire, Alice Creke, an only daughter, but her inheritance was not large. However, it was because of her that our generation grew up Yorkshire folk—like my brother’s good friend, and Johnny’s good friend, that Wentworth who is Marquis of Rockingham. It was at the marquis’ seat in our home shire that Johnny met my brother. Later, when our fortunes had fallen so, Johnny heard of it, and wrote that he had a place for me here. He said that I could also bring Dorothy, my little sister, since my brothers’ wives have small kindliness for her at home.”

“Where—is your sister—now?” asked Lydia haltingly. “You say you have been much in Boston. Perhaps she is—there?”

“No—she is in Portsmouth—!”

His speech was becoming as tense and broken as hers, she noticed, with a pounding heart. It was as if her consciousness, while not ebbing wholly out of her, grew dilute and thinned away, so that she could no longer perceive her companion as Hugh Giffard, the English stranger—as any man with a name and identity. Not Hugh, not David, not that other one—only as a young man turning toward her with quick blood and a sighing breath, and she felt herself prepare, willy-nilly, to respond to him with the responses she had learned in her husband’s arms. Not in one night had David taught her the way of the body’s love, but taught her he had, and now she knew it all too plain. Never again would she be the close tight virgin shuddering away. She would be like the flower unfolding—the soft arms reaching up and the answering mouth—She would be—

He stumbled on a few phrases further in his explanation.

“She stayed with Johnny’s wife. I was in Boston—attending to certain affairs—for him—” He had said that before, but it did not matter. Speech mattered no longer. That they were strangers did not matter either.

Suddenly he turned and took her in his arms. She felt his mouth on hers, felt the lift and throb of the blood through his veins and her own—felt the irresistible march of rivers to the sea. It would be a folly and a wickedness to deny the exulting tide that flowed hot and swift in both of them. They were nothing, and the living stream was all; a glorious strength and a holy power loaned to them for a little time, a stream that would go beating and coursing on when they were buried clay.

To the sea the rivers flow, she thought. No matter in what far-off mountain springs they rise, no matter what dams men raise to hold them back—to the sea the rivers flow—

And then, as suddenly, something seemed to be not as it was. They were no longer alone with the rush of the great rivers. Somehow the outside world had broken through. Hugh Giffard cursed, muttered an apology, and drew away from her before she realized what had happened; realized, more slowly, what the happening could likely mean.

The wheels no longer turned under them, and the swaying vehicle no longer lurched forward on the rutted road. Had Bart Stavers brought his Flying Stage Coach to a dead stop at the head of the Hampton marshes on a rainy night because he knew what was going on inside it? It seemed quite likely to Lydia that he had. He did not call out to forbid them, nor wrench open the door, nor so much as clear his throat. Perhaps he felt sympathy, remembering his own young days. Perhaps he was looking for a good story to tell tomorrow in the streets of Portsmouth. In any case, if he was aware of their abandoned folly, he meant to encourage and condone it! Unwittingly he had done the other thing.

“I’m sorry, Lydia,” said Hugh Giffard, his voice still tense, his face turned away from her. “But I have been so lonely. And you are lovely enough—to be any man’s excuse.”

David had used to tell her that she was lovely, too, when they were courting, but not so much in later days; that her hair was the color of copper beech leaves, and her eyes like amber in the sun. She had not heard words like these for a long time.

“I have been lonely, too,” she heard another woman cry out to him.

It must be another woman! It could not be she! She, Lydia March, would never be so bold and brash-spoken. She looked around, but there was no other woman there.

“I—my husband died last spring,” the strange voice babbled on. “Since then—I have been lonely.”

He finished straightening his disheveled jacket and gave her a long look.

“I did not know—you did not tell me you had been married, Lydia.”

“No,” she answered. “I do not know why I did not tell you that—except that it seems so long ago and far off, as if it had never happened at all.”

The coach was moving forward now. The moment Bart Stavers heard their voices lifted in speech, he had called to his horses again. Hugh drew his cloak about him and reached for the door handle, leaned toward it, and bent his head.

“Would you take it unkindly, Lydia,” he asked, smiling ruefully, “if I were to finish the journey outside?”

Lydia smiled back at him, still shaken and uncertain, but able to answer him in kind. “I should think it very gracious of you,” she told him, “to give Mr. Stavers your company.”

The door closed, and she heard him climb to the box beside the driver, heard the two men talking together, and smelled the pungent reek of tobacco smoke stronger than the salt tang of the marshes, the mustiness of the coach, or the fresh wet smell of the rain. Slowly her flesh cooled and her blood quieted. An exhaustion that was almost pain took possession of her, and she dozed a little. Once she woke to a sudden flash of terror, a blind fear of the future whatever it might bring. It would be better, she thought, to deny the future, to slip from the coach and flee backward across the foggy meadows, back to Newburyport and the calm gray life of her widowhood there. She actually put her fingers on the gilded handle of the door.

But then she remembered that the road they had come over was winding and treacherous and cut with salt creeks, that she had no lantern and her slippers were thin. More than that, she thought of Frances. “Do not trust her,” Sarah Davenport had said, but Sarah might have spoken kindlier words had she known why Frances needed her. She had not told Sarah that Frances was some four months gone with child.

She spoke, thought Lydia wonderingly, as though she feared Frances might do me harm! Why surely, that could never come to pass!

Once more she sank into the cushions and slept, while the coach wheels moved in their endless circles, bearing her back inexorably to the town where she was born, but not even in her dreams would she admit the real reason for her journey there.