Caleb's Crossing (24 page)

“But grandfather has reversed himself.”

“He … what?”

“I unburdened myself to him, when last I was on island, one month since. He told me to consider well, and make no decision, and work my hardest, and if after one month had passed I still felt the same way, then he thought my plan a good one, and said he would carry my letter to Jacob Merry in person, and stand surety for the debt.”

I could hardly breathe. I felt all the blood drain out of my face and a great coldness rise. For the first time in my life, I thought I might faint. I leaned my weight against a tree and grasped at a low-curved branch to support me.

“Why look you so? Why such a violent reaction? Any one would think I—” He stared at me, frowning. His face darkened. “It is your unlawful affection for that half-tamed salvage that brings this about, is it not? There is no cause otherwise for you to have such a revulsion to so suitable an alliance as Merry.” His mouth twisted then, into a mirthless smile of triumph. “I knew it! All your protestations to the contrary, just feints and falsehoods. Know this, sister: you will put that attachment behind you today. You shall do my will in this, and that is an end of it.”

I had never in my life uttered an oath to God but I did so then. “God damn you, Makepeace,” I said, and turned, and made an unsteady way back towards Mr. Corlett’s house, with Makepeace’s voice calling after me that I was the one at risk of damnation.

XIV

I
entered the kitchen only to find the room crowded, just when I most needed some time and space alone. Anne was seated where I had left her, her book open upon the table. Master Corlett had joined her, and Caleb and Joel one on either side of him. A lively seminar of some kind seemed to be under way. Anne’s face, no longer hidden and shadowed, seemed lit with a sharp intelligence as she listened to Caleb and Joel, who were engaged in a disputation on whether beauty implied godliness. She had just asked a question, and Caleb had his face turned to her, answering. His voice, as he addressed her, was soft and solicitous. As distracted as I was, it struck me how different this was to our rough and tumble arguments, our many seminars held upon sand dunes or under oak boughs. He had shown no care for proper manners then but spoke his mind in a carefree, brotherly way.

Brotherly
. Now, of all times in my life, did I wish Caleb truly was my brother, rather than that selfish, imperious, weak-willed soul to whom fate had shackled me. If it were so, I could turn to him now, and he would surely help me change the fate being thrust upon me.

I had my hand on the door latch, hesitating. There was supper to prepare, and yet I did not want to interrupt the teaching, nor could I get about the kitchen with so many bodies in my way. I was struggling to keep my composure, and felt I might give way at any moment. I turned, to go back out, but the master called my name and bade me sit. “I—I do not think—I need to be about my duties,” I said, trying to speak in a normal voice. Caleb, whose back was to me, caught the agitation in my tone and turned. I have no idea how much of what I felt was disclosed in my face, but Caleb’s gaze informed me that I did not look myself. He stood up and grasped my elbow, and steered me down upon the bench.

“Are you quite well?” said Master Corlett, all concern. “You look flushed—are you fevered?”

“It is nothing,” I said. “A headache merely.”

“My dear, please, go into my chamber and lie down upon the bed. I shall send a boy to the apothecary for a draught….”

“No, master, do not trouble a boy, there is no need of a draught.” The apothecary charged a chouser’s prices for draughts any goodwife could distill. I knew the master was not in purse to pay for such things. “But I will lie down for a brief while, if you can spare me.”

I was never so pleased to be alone. When the master closed the door I turned my face into his pillow and wept without restraint. After, I lay there, depleted, unable to summon the will to rise. Before long, the exhaustion of the previous night lay hold of me and I fell into an unintended sleep.

When I woke it was full dark. I jumped up, poured some cold water from the master’s pitcher into his washbowl and splashed my face, straightened my cap and went to the kitchen. There was no one there, just a pile of trenchers piled into the sink. It seemed the boys had fetched their own bread and cheese and I had not even heard the racket they usually made in the dining hall. They were all now at evening prayers, where I should have joined them. Instead, I pulled out a stool and sat quietly, trying to think. I decided that if the master called me to his chamber after prayers I should unburden myself to him, and seek his counsel. He was a kind man, wise and godly. He would know how to advise me.

Not long after that, one of the younger pupils came to say that the master indeed wished to see me. I knocked upon his door and entered, expecting his usual kindly good evening, and perhaps a solicitous enquiry as to my headache. Instead, he looked up at me with a face stern and filled with displeasure.

“Your brother reports that you have subjected him to most grievous execration, even unto uttering an oath to God. What say you?”

“Well, yes, master, I did, but—”

“There are no buts in this matter, Bethia Mayfield.” He stood. “Here in Cambridge, in the absence of your grandfather, your elder brother is your head and guide, to whom you should submit yourself. And yet you cast aside his guidance as if you have more wit and care than he. Since you confess your sin freely, and in light of your unexceptionable behavior until this day, I see no need to involve the court in the matter.”

“The court?” I had been stunned into silence by the severity of the master’s tone and his unaccustomed harshness toward me, but at this I could hold my peace no longer. “Why should the court care about what I said to my brother in a private conference?”

“Leave aside for a moment your abusive carriage towards your brother and your hectoring and unbecoming speeches. As a minister’s daughter you must know that uttering an oath to God is a grave sin. As a magistrate’s granddaughter, I expected you also to be fully aware that it is a crime against the laws of this colony. I do not know what may be your grandfather’s pleasure should such cases come in his way, but here the General Court exacts stern penalties upon it, even unto driving an awl through the off ending tongue.”

My hand flew unbidden to my mouth. “That very kind of zealotry is the reason my grandfather quit this colony and took ship for the island,” I said. My head really was aching now: a sharp, stabbing pain that felt as if the torturer’s awl had been driven between my eyes. Even so, I should have known better. Had I laid a finger upon a red-hot iron, I would have had wit enough to snatch it back, not reach forth and grasp the thing. Where was my self-mastery, my long self-schooling in discretion? I seemed of a sudden compelled to speak my every inner thought, to puke them out, like bile.

He gave me over to Makepeace for beating, and I shall not write of it, only to say that, when I turned, between blows, to look at my brother, I saw that his eyes were glazed, his lips moist and his face slack with pleasure. I did not look at him again, even as I lowered my skirt and thanked him, as I was obliged to do, for correcting me.

There was no private place to look to my weeping stripes, so I neglected them, and a day or two later they commenced to fester. I had noticed, with the boys’ various cuts and scrapes, that nothing in this place healed speedily, as young flesh should. There were of course no salves or anything of the kind. I had had it in mind to compound some, later in the spring, when I could find the right plants, so as to have store on hand for the younger boys’ scrapes and bruises, and for the rare occasions when the master laid the switch to them. I had not thought to need such a product for myself. Anne saw me struggling awkwardly to wrap a linen piece around my angry sores. She drew from her own box a bottle of some sharp-scented, cooling lotion and applied it with a gentle and practiced hand.

I told no one of the beating. But Anne must have disclosed something about it to Caleb. When I passed by him in the hall, he bent his head close to mine and whispered, “I will see to your brother.”

“By no means!” I hissed. “You must not think of it!” But he had already gone by me, his attention seemingly engaged by the spine of the book he held in his hand. The next day, Makepeace could not rise from his bed. A gripe had seized him, so severe that he lay moaning in pain as each spasm wracked his belly. That, when he was not wobbling, wan and weak, to the necessary, which he was obliged to do more than a dozen times in as many hours. I confess it; I am no saint. I took some pleasure in his suffering, though I did ask Caleb’s advice as to how his people might compound a binding draught should such a condition beset them, and sent, in due course, to the apothecary for the remedies he named.

As for me, my punishment was not done with. It continued the following Lord’s Day, when I was required to make public amends. To do so, I had to stand forth in afternoon meeting and declare my remorse for having inadvisedly and blasphemously expressed myself. For the week thereafter I was obliged to wear a paper pinned to my breast which bore the words of the psalm:
I will take heed unto my ways that I sin not with my tongue
;
I will keep my mouth with a bridle.
This was unfortunate, as the younger pupils felt licensed to make sport of me by poking out tongues or neighing like a horse every time my back was to them.

When the sennight had passed I tore the paper from my bodice and cast it into the fire that warmed the oven for the morning’s loaves. As I watched it burn, I told myself that I must root out from my heart the bitterness that had set its seed there. I tried my best to pluck up the anger, the mortification and, yes, even hatred. It had come at last to this, that I felt actual hatred towards my closest living kinsman. I found myself, at prayer, chiding God for taking Zuriel and Solace, and leaving Makepeace. This was a wickedness. I knew it. So I tried to vision these ill thoughts as something written on a parchment that could be balled up and burned away to wither in the flame and be carried off like smoke. But the passions are not corporeal things that can be unmade so easily. The stripes from my beating had scabbed over, at last. I could not say the same of my injured spirit.

That night, the master called me to his chamber. I went, heavyhearted, and sat upon the rush stool, my hands folded in my lap and my gaze upon the pattern in the turkey carpet. If, as the minister at meeting had proclaimed: “It is the whore that is clamorous,” then I would school myself, once again, to be silent.

“The maid Anne tells me you do not eat.” I felt the master’s watery blue eyes upon me. “Indeed, you have a pinched, spare look. It will not do. This unfortunate business is done now, and over. I feel confident that you have seen your error and have repented it. There is no cause for you to continue to mortify yourself through fasting.”

I did not make him any reply.

“You cannot hope to manage your work if you do not eat.”

Without raising my eyes, I whispered: “Does the master have cause to be dissatisfied by my work?”

“No, no, no. That is not at all what I meant. Your work is quite satisfactory—indeed, exemplary—as always. I do not like to see you so woebegone, that is all. Can you not put this thing behind you?”

I continued to stare at the floor. When he saw that I would not be drawn on the matter, he changed the subject.

“How do you think she gets on, the Indian maid?”

I lifted my shoulders in a shrug.

“The two lads, Caleb and Joel, have taken it upon themselves to befriend her. I see no harm in it. You know them well: you have found them to be entirely honorable?”

I nodded. He waited for me to add something, but I did not.

“She seems less shy with them, at least. Do you think she is content here?” I replied by opening my hands in my lap. I might have said a great deal on the subject, at another time. It seemed to me that Anne had bloomed under the tutelage of Joel and Caleb. She no longer trembled at the slightest cause, and even seemed to sleep more restfully at night. But I pressed my lips together stubbornly. If silence was what they required from a woman, then silence they should have.

The master stood up suddenly and walked the few steps to the small diamond-paned casement that gave onto Crooked Street. “This will not do, you know. Will not do at all. I have come to rely on you, you see, and now, because of this business with your brother … you’ll not speak to me. You’ll not even look at me. And you are putting yourself in the way of becoming ill. How am I to get on?” He turned around then, wringing hands that were ropey with prominent blue veins. “Am I to take it that you do not want to marry this fellow—this islander—Merry, is it?”

I looked up then, and met his eye for the first time. “No,” I whispered. “I do not.”

“Is there something wrong with the man?” I shook my head. “Then what, exactly, is it that you object to? Surely there must be something wrong with him for you to take on so?”

“Nothing is wrong with Master Merry,” I said in a low voice. “There is a great deal wrong, in my view, with Makepeace Mayfield, who would buy and sell his sister as if she were a sow.”

“Well. Quite. I see. Though you do know, you must surely realize, that you mayn’t usurp authority from those who have been made head of you.” He sat down again at his desk and commenced to finger the pens I had mended for him. “Whole of it, most unfortunate. Your guardian, your very esteemed grandfather, he stands behind your brother in this. So, even if one were to raise, as I might, as his schoolmaster, raise—the matter of your brother’s judgment, raise a question as to his maturity, as it were—there is still your grandfather to be managed. Thing of it is this; I do not want to release you from the indenture, and you, seemingly, do not wish to be released. Not if it means marrying this man, albeit you say you find him unexceptionable. It seems a strange business to me, that you would rather toil here as a servant than make what your brother represents as a most advantageous match. But what do I know of women and their fancies…?”