Caleb's Crossing (25 page)
A coughing spasm wracked him. Like so many in the school, he had a wetness in the chest that seemed to last all winter long. I wished, again, that I had at hand the proper herbs for a good expectorant. He dabbed at his mouth with a square of linen. I had hemmed some for him, finding his own stained and threadbare. I saw him run his finger over the place where I had embroidered his initials. His eyes, as he looked up at me, were tired and rheumy, and very sad.
“Your brother confides he intends to leave the school, so you will be here, serving in payment of a debt beyond the which he owes. I know full well that legally you are bound to me, whether he completes his year or not. And neither am I obliged in law to agree to sell the indenture to any person. I don’t wish to be uncivil to your grandfather. But neither do I wish to let you go, all the more so since I see you so very unhappy.”
He was clearly distressed, and not only at the thought of losing a capable housekeeper. He got up again and came toward me. “Dear to me, yes. You are. In a very short while, I have come to feel … our talks, they bring me … I don’t suppose you would consider … that is, I wonder if you have any…” He had turned a pale, putty color. He reached out a liver-spotted hand. He lifted my chin. “That is to say…” The pads of his fingers were shrunken and fleshless, the loose skin cool and dry. “I do not know … I cannot tell … what your views might be on the prospect of a different marriage … to … to…”
I shot up off the stool, toppling it beneath me. He was not a tall man and suddenly we stood, eye to eye.
“You?” I blurted.
He looked startled by my violent reaction. He ran a hand over his crown, raking the thin, sand-colored hairs across the mottled flesh of his balding pate.
“Me? Of course not! My dear Bethia. You misapprehend me. I was going to say, to my son. To my son, Samuel. You have seen Samuel at meeting. Indeed, I introduced you, when first you came to us.”
He had righted the stool, and gestured for me to sit down upon it. I did so, in a state of some distraction. I did not hear the half of what next he said. My mind was busy conjuring Samuel Corlett, probationer fellow at Harvard, whom I knew only as an austere presence beside his father in meeting, and a rather less austere, more animated figure when I had glimpsed him, gown billowing, walking in the college yard with one or another of the scholars he served as tutor. He did not visit the school, his duties requiring him to be at the college of an evening. But I knew that the master passed a good part of the Lord’s Day visiting his son in his college rooms.
The master was asking my age. I gathered my wandering wits and made him an answer. “I will be eighteen in October, master.”
“He is twenty-six. No yearling, but neither by any means a graybeard. A considerable difference in age is no bad thing, if the parties … But I put the stern before the bow here. Samuel expressed himself to me of an interest in being acquainted when first you came to me. But when I broached this with your brother, he led me to believe that your affections were engaged by this island lad, Merry. The way he framed it, you came here all but handfasted. So I told Samuel. But now, you say that the business with Merry is by no means as your brother presented it … and my son still … the short of it is, I told him today I would speak to you. He was impressed by your eloquence, in meeting … that unfortunate matter….”
How odd. At the very moment I had been called upon to reduce myself before the community, I had, apparently, elevated someone’s estimation of me. It had crossed my mind, as I stood to speak my confession, what a remarkable thing it was that the rare time a woman’s voice might be heard in our church was when she was execrating herself.
“He is a serious man, excellent scholar, high in the regard of President Chauncy. And when I told him you knew Latin … I will let him press his own suit of course, but I think you will find…”
The picture of Samuel Corlett was becoming clearer in my mind as the master spoke. I was thinking to myself that he must have favored his late mother, for he looked nothing like his father. For one thing, he was very dark, the opposite of the freckled, fair-haired Master Corlett, and a good head and shoulders taller. He was a plain man, not handsome—his nose had been broken, perhaps in some childhood mishap, and no one of any skill had seen to it. It splayed across his face, giving him, at first glance, the cast of a ruffian rather than the look of a refined scholar. But his eyes belied that first impression. These were deep-set, quite black, watchful and intelligent. Thinking on it, I now realized that I had often looked up, at meeting or while passing near him upon the common, and noticed those eyes upon me. What harm could there be in agreeing to meet with him? I turned the matter over in my mind.
The master had stopped rambling. The silence lengthened.
“Forgive me, Master, for my earlier misunderstanding,” I said at last. He gave a dry little laugh. His hands were folded on the desk in front of him. He let them fall open and raised his brows, questioning.
I looked down, and fiddled with my cuff. “I would not, that is, I have no objection….” Of the two of us, of a sudden, I was the addlepated, tongue-tied one. I took a deep breath.
“What I mean to say is, I would be pleased to receive your son, Samuel Corlett.”
I
n the event, it was Samuel Corlett who received me. The master and I had reached the same conclusion, though we never voiced it one to the other. Since it was probable that nothing would come of this conference, there could be no profit in alerting Makepeace that the master and I together plotted to flout his will. Better, then, to meet Samuel Corlett in his college rooms, where we would be neither watched nor eavesdropped upon.
My brother had made known his desire to quit the school, and waited only on word from the mariner on whose sloop he had previously traveled of a shipment of goods headed for the island. He did not attend the classroom. This made it easier for me to avoid all but the most perfunctory contact with him. When the Lord’s Day came, I walked to the meeting house with Master Corlett and set out after also in his company. What then could seem more natural than to join the master in an afternoon visit upon his son. The weather was unsteady, in the way the townsfolk said was typical of a Cambridge spring: a sudden rise in temperature that roused the senses, then, just as sudden, snow again. Even as a warm day brought relief from the long winter, each thaw uncovered the town’s ugly middens, awakening their stench and setting it in competition with the sudden, elusive fragrance of an early blossom.
Samuel Corlett had moved into vacant rooms in the Indian College, which had housed no native scholars so far. It presently had in residence five or six English scholars, and a young Nipmuc man, John Printer, who tended to the college press. This press—the only one of its kind in the colony—had formerly occupied space in the college president’s house, but Master Chauncy had a large household and was very glad to have it removed to the Indian College hall.
I was curious to see where Caleb and Joel would be housed, should they matriculate. It was a good building—showing every penny of the four hundred pounds young Dudley said it had cost—although the brick walls held the cold air inside them and some parts of it remained unfinished. As we passed by the chambers and studies, I saw that some of the interior walls were bare, not yet plastered, and several windows were oilpapered and unglazed.
We climbed the central staircase, and Samuel Corlett showed us into his own study, which was a large room with a diamond-paned window looking back across the yard towards the northern end of the dilapidated college hall he had recently vacated. “I could not have received you with any degree of comfort, over yonder,” he said. “Of course, I must not get too settled in this place.” His father smiled. “Indeed you should not. You will be ousted soon enough by my brace of likely young prophets, Caleb and Joel. When they matriculate, you will be obliged to give up these rooms to whomever Chauncy selects as their tutor.”
“And then I shall have to wedge myself back into the cabinets that pass for chambers at the old hall,” his son replied. “But I shall welcome the privation, if it advances the cause for which this building was made.”
There was a good fire in the study grate and I was glad to give up my cloak and mittens. There were two large bookshelves, full, with several more volumes piled in small stacks upon the floor. There was also a cabinet of curiosities which drew my eye, filled as it was by skeletons of diverse small creatures and jars of organs in preservative. Samuel Corlett saw my eyes upon these things. “These do not disgust you, I hope?”
“By no means,” I said. “I am much interested in the natural sciences, although I have never been able to study them in a formal way. Forgive me for asking so directly, but I understood you were taking a higher degree in theology, not physiology?”
He smiled. “You understand correctly. But sometimes, I allow myself to be distracted. Reading is the mind’s good provender, but one wishes, at times, to engage the hands, with the mind, in learning. A botanic garden, a mechanical workshop, an anatomy laboratory such as they have, in the universities of Europe—one day, perhaps, Harvard too might boast of such things. I would study physiology and theology both, were it in my power.”
“Like the pawaaws…” The words were out before I could snatch them back.
Samuel laughed. “You are too long out upon your island amidst the salvages, if you think those warlocks know aught worthwhile of physic. Even so, I think they are wise who say that the soul has its part to play in the health of the body.”
His rebuke was made in the most amiable manner; still, I felt I had stepped into a mire, and did not wish to plod further on such uncertain footing. In some areas I might not show myself to advantage. I changed the subject as naturally as I could, shifting my gaze to the bookshelves and remarking upon the great number of volumes. His face became animated. “It is my personal library—my one extravagance.” He had seemed pleasant enough, but as soon as I showed an interest in his books, he came fully alive, taking down his pet volumes, expounding on when he had first read them, or where he had acquired them. “Do you admire poetry, Mistress Mayfield? Then you may like to see this—by our colony’s first poet—the sister of one of my father’s pupils.” He thrust a slim volume into my hands. It was “The Tenth Muse,” by Anne Bradstreet. I exclaimed, and said how much I admired her.
“How came her work in your way, out there upon your island?”
“You may well ask,” I said, smiling. “The merchants who ply the channel are not apt to include poetry in their cargoes of necessities. Though I think one might soon come to deem it a necessity, who has the good fortune to be able to read it often.”
I had been looking down at the book in my hands, and when I glanced up I was startled by the transformation in his face. His expression had softened, yet his gaze seemed more intense. “In any case, I came upon her poems by merest chance. Someone had used a page of a broadside to wrap a bottle. It was my habit, always, to look over any such scrap that might come our way—news, as you can imagine, is scarce and valuable to us—and this one rewarded me most richly. One of Mistress Bradstreet’s poems, upon the late Queen Elizabeth, was printed there. You cannot know, Mister Corlett, how it thrilled me to learn that a woman might write and publish poetry, and such poetry! And such a woman—a faithful, blameless daughter, an esteemed wife and mother. My own dear mother shared my admiration for the work, when I showed it her, and she petitioned my father to seek out others of her poems for me.” I closed my eyes, and words I had committed to memory came easily:
“Now say, have women worth? Or have they none?
“Or had they some, but with our Queen, is’t gone?
“Let such as say our sex is void of reason,
“Know ’tis a slander now but once was treason.”
That line always brought a smile to my lips, and when I opened my eyes, both the Corletts were staring at me. I colored slightly. But then Samuel smiled too. His teeth were as crooked as his nose, but the effect was not unpleasant, for his eyes came alight in their deep recesses. “That has always been among the poems of hers that I most admire,” he said. “She is courageous, is she not? She goes right to the heart of it: A woman as exemplar for men.” He held out his hand for the book, and came easily upon the page he sought. “Here, she has it—Elizabeth is a ‘pattern of kings.’” A rare inversion of our present, lived reality. But one I think you would favor?”
He had a serious look now, and I did not want to give the wrong answer. I felt like one of the scholars he tutored, and I found the notion agreeable. How would it be, to have a husband who strove to elicit one’s ideas, with whom one could, over months and years of companionship, hone and refine them? Such a life would be something, indeed. I thought of Caleb’s reference, on the beach—it seemed an age since—to Prometheus, stealing fire. So might I steal learning, with such a husband. I thought of the alternative: arranging my face into an expression of interest while my spouse expounded on the conditions of pasture or the virtues of an undershot millstone, the struggle to access a book—any book—and the loneliness of longing to explore its weighty ideas and having no one with whom to share them.
“I do not ask for an inversion, Master Corlett. But perhaps the very volume in my hands bears witness to the fact that women might sometimes be fit to stand beside men, and not always and in every case behind them.”
The elder Corlett raised his eyebrows at that, but his son nodded, considering. “Well put, though a body may only have one head, is that not so?”
“True. But if you speak of marriage and the management of a household—” and here I felt the color rise again—“perhaps two heads offer twice the wit when dealing with the challenges of raising and sustaining a godly family.”
He laughed at that. “Your own wit makes the case most clearly, Mistress Mayfield.”
Wanting to get onto safer ground, I turned the subject then, to the college and Samuel’s role as fellow. He explained the course of study, speaking warmly of the scholars he tutored. “Master Chauncy of course gives all the lectures. My role is to discourse with my scholars and examine their understanding of what has been taught them.” A tutor was assigned to a freshman class, and rose with them. Master Corlett’s class were junior sophisters, who would enter their senior year in leaf fall. It was a class of some distinction, having in its number three of President Chauncy’s boys—a pair of twins and an elder brother, all having matriculated together. There was also John Bellingham, the governor’s son, a Weld from the Roxbury schoolmaster’s family and several ministers’ boys. But Samuel Corlett spoke most warmly of two others in his charge. One, young John Parker, was the son of a butcher, and had paid his tuition in sides of beeve and flitches of bacon. “He may not have been born a ‘son of the prophets,’ as the lads here like to style themselves,” Corlett said, “but he has made a prodigious effort at learning.” The other was John Whiting, a dreamy youth “so abstracted from temporal concerns” that he had oft times arrived for lectures with his shoes upon the wrong feet.
