Caleb's Crossing (27 page)

“Well said,” he answered. “They are boys, after all, before they are scholars. And some of them do come here very young. Aside from skating the ponds in winter I fear they get little activity for their bodies. It is always the mind we exercise. They are too cloistered and confined to suit their natures, spending such a vast amount of every day bent over their books. And speaking of books…”

He pushed open another door—heavy, oaken—to reveal the library. It was the most beautiful room I had ever seen. There was a row of lecterns, their polished wood gleaming dully in the good light. Each held a shelf, snug with volumes. There were half-lecterns on each endwall, these, too, filled to brimming with books. I had never in my life seen that number of books all together. “They have fashioned it after the libraries of Cambridge’s colleges, from whence our two presidents have come. As I told you, John Harvard’s original bequest accounts for some four hundred of the books you see here,” he said. “There are now twice or three times that number.” His sentences came out all in a tumble. He seemed suddenly all on edge, filling the air with this rush of words and facts that were clearly far from the thoughts at the forefront of his mind. I commented as aptly as I could, though my thoughts too were elsewhere.

“John Harvard must be pleased,” I said, “could he know how his gift is now enlarged.” The air in the room had a pleasant biscuit tang, like a hard-baked crust just drawn from the oven. I ran a hand along the tooled leather spines. Cicero, Isocrates, Virgil, Ovid. Luther, Aquinas, Bacon, Calvin. Just to have the liberty of such a room would be an education in itself. “The scholars must happily spend their hours here,” I said.

“Oh, we do not generally open the library to
them
. They are expected to purchase those books required for their course of study. These are for the use of the fellows, such as myself—for those, like me, in pursuit of the higher degrees. The collection is rich, as you see, in the works of theology and philosophy, poorer in books on medicine, and on the law. President Dunster had no success in obtaining money for such, our benefactors being most interested in minting divines. I do not think that President Chauncy will fare any better. Yet I believe strongly these studies should be counted among the professions, and taught with greater rigor here.”

“Whatever deficiencies you might see, to me it seems that one could profitably spend a lifetime here. I feel sorry the younger scholars are restricted, as you say. Why must they wait four years to access these treasures?”

He shrugged his shoulders and gave no answer. He seemed suddenly to have tired of playing the role of guide and interlocutor. He had walked to the window and was looking out, as though something below in the college yard required his full attention. A silence lengthened in the room. To cover my awkwardness, I drew out a fine edition of Plutarch. Sounds drifted up from the stairwell: someone was banging insistently upon the college door. But here, in the library, only the flutter of turning pages broke the hush.

He stood with his back to me. His hands, clasped behind his back, gripped and released each other. I set the book down on the lectern. It was a heavy volume and it landed with a dull thud. He did not turn.

“I think you must have formed some idea,” he said at last, “of the great regard in which I hold you.”

So we came to it. I took a deep breath. The silence in the room lengthened. Since he said nothing, I was obliged to.

“I am not sure…,” I began, but my voice broke. I coughed a little, to clear my throat, and tried again. “That is, while I welcome your good opinion, I do not see how it is I that I have earned it. Until this past sennight, the only one time you had heard my voice was in meeting, execrating myself.”

He turned then, a slight smile playing on his lips. “But you did it with such eloquence. Who could be unmoved?”

“I do not think your minister would be glad to know of it. Confession as a rite of courtship. No, I do not think that would gratify him at all.”

“I do not give a fig about my minister! It is you, Bethia, that I seek to gratify. Can I do that? Will you have me?”

Prepared as I was, this was too quick. I sat down upon the lectern bench and struggled for composure.

“I know this is abrupt. I would not have rushed this courtship in such a way if necessity did not compel it. And I must tell you, in all fairness, that I have nothing in my hands to offer you. My salary is a beggarly twelve pounds a year, and I have managed to put nothing by. My father is a poor man. The school is all he has, and he barely ekes a living from it, as you know better than most. You met, just now, the glazier, son to the brother of my late mother. So you see with what humble stock I ask you to connect.”

He was pacing now, restlessly, up and down between the rows of books. The room was very quiet, except for the squeak of his boots. But from downstairs, I caught the sound of voices, raised. “I must tell you one thing further,” Samuel said. “Even were you to agree to make me the most fortunate of men, we could not marry at once. I offer an engagement only, since if any tutor shall enter into the marriage state his place at the college shall be ipso facto void. I must serve my charges, the boys over whom I have had supervision these last three years, until they complete their senior year. At that time, I will take my master’s degree. After, I would go to Padua, if I could, for the study of medicine, but I cannot yet see how I will be in purse to do it. Likely, I will hope for the offer of a schoolroom, if not yet a pulpit.”

He knelt down then, so that his eyes were level with mine as I sat on the bench. He reached for my hand. “Will you take me, Bethia, on such terms as these?”

While he spoke, the blood hammered in my temples. As I struggled to form an answer, the voices drifting up from the hall below us grew louder. Then there was a great tattoo of boots, pounding up the stairs. The latch rattled, the door opened. Samuel Corlett dropped my hand and jumped to his feet. A scholar, ruddy and gasping, almost fell into the room. Caleb stood behind him, his face, generally schooled to an inscrutable stillness, twisted up by uncontained emotion.

“Excuse me, tutor,” the boy stuttered, “but this lad here burst in, demanding…”

Caleb extended an arm and firmly pushed the stammering scholar out of his way and addressed Samuel. “Your father sent me to fetch you.” He looked then at me. “Both of you. The matter is pressing. Will you come?”

We hurried behind him, out of the library and down the stairs. Caleb’s long stride meant he was soon ahead of us, so I gathered up my skirt and ran, not caring what Samuel thought of it. We entered through the kitchen door. There was blood, a glossy pool of it, upon the floor. A dark trail led away from the kitchen, into the hall. The master’s voice, high, cracking with emotion, called out to us from his chamber. “Son? Bethia? Are you come? In here, quickly.”

I could see a blur of faces in the schoolroom, every eye trained on the closed door to the master’s chamber. Samuel opened the door and pushed me in ahead of him, pulling the door shut behind. I glanced back as the door closed and saw Caleb. For the first time since I had known him, I saw tears pooling in his eyes.

Anne was upon the bed, writhing, her face, sweat-misted and clenched in pain. Her skirt was blood soaked.

“Have you sent for the midwife?” I demanded.

“Midwife?”

“Yes. Midwife. The girl is plainly miscarrying.”

“But she … that would…”

“Master Corlett, send a boy to fetch the midwife, before this child bleeds…” I was about to say “to death” but I bit back the words, seeing the fear in Anne’s face. I knew the scene before me. I had witnessed it through terrified girlish eyes: mother, crying out, grasping at the table for support, staggering to her pallet, trailing blood. The arrival of Goody Branch, the low groans and muffled voices and the carrying away of a bloodied bundle. It was long ago, that afternoon, when mother lost an unformed womb-infant that was never mourned nor even mentioned in our prayers. But I had not forgot one detail of it: what was said and what was done.

“Get another boy to the apothecary’s for some ergot, in case the midwife has none on hand…. Bring me some linens, bring some warmed water from the kettle upon the fire and some cool water in a basin, and, if you please, leave me to tend the girl….”

I was aware of figures moving behind me, and of murmured commands in the hall. I stripped off Anne’s sodden skirt and her undergarments, and elevated her legs with a bolster. When the linens and basins of water arrived, I wadded cloths into a pad to stanch the hemorrhage as best I could, then I held Anne’s hand as another spasm wracked her. I made a cool compress for her forehead, and bathed her blood-streaked thighs with the warm water. Then I prayed.

XVII

B
y the time the boy located the midwife and fetched her back, the worst of the spasms had passed. I wrapped up the expelled contents of Anne’s womb as she lay, limp and panting. Her dark complexion had turned pale as plaster. The midwife, whose name was Goody Marsden, was a thin, wiry woman, quite elderly. Her manner was terse, unlike kindly Goody Branch. As she drew off her gloves, I noted that her fingernails were unclean. I proffered her a basin of warm water, of which she barely made use. She made no spare of Anne, but examined her untenderly, without speaking a kindly word. When the girl cried out, in pain from the prodding of her claw-like hands, she barked a harsh, “Be silent. You have caused quite enough unseemly clamor.”

Then she turned to me, asking if I could assize how much blood had been lost. I told her it looked to be a woundy amount. “She will need broth—a good strong one, be sure to prepare it so—and some watered wine, and rest. She has not sustained any lasting hurt.” I let out a sigh of relief at that, and she looked at me sharply and added, tight-lipped: “To her body.”

I was about to go to the kitchen to see what I could fetch when she laid a bony hand on my arm and tilted her head towards the bundle in the corner. I picked it up and turned, so that my back was to the bed and Anne could not see. Goody Marsden opened the towel and examined the bloody, waxy contents for a few moments, then threw the cover back over. “Burn it,” she said. She peered at me, her eyes a pair of hard, shiny brown pebbles. “Do you so. Directly. That is for the best.”

By late afternoon, I repented that I had followed her instructions so swiftly. For by then the whispers were already rife, and the evidence that might have silenced them nought but smoke and cold ashes. Words like “wild fornicators” and “lustful heathen” passed from mouth to ear until the muttering grew to a babble and any faint hope that the matter might be kept in hidels and smothered up was gone and done with.

When it came to my ears that Caleb and Joel were severally suspected of performing this corruption upon the girl, I went straight to the master and gave him the ground of what I knew to be true. The interview on this indelicate matter was the most awkward exchange I had yet had in my life, all the more so since Samuel Corlett was there at his father’s side. It took place in the schoolroom, since Anne still occupied the master’s bed. The master had asked Makepeace, who was still in residence at the school, to take the boys to the meeting house and supervise them at their books there while I had dealt with the bloody linens and bedclothes as best I could.

I sat upon the bench, fidgeting under their gaze like an errant schoolboy. I stared at the hands in my lap, wrinkled up from the effort at the wash trough, as I spoke my piece.

“You are sure of it?” Master Corlett said. I felt his eyes, and his son’s, regarding me gravely. “I know these boys are dear to you. You would protect them, to shield your father’s legacy as their patron and first preceptor, perhaps…”

I cut him off, perhaps uncivilly, but there was a great deal at stake.

“Master, the state of what came from that girl allows of no doubt. She was with child when she came here. I am certain of it.” Yet I thought of the willowy waist, swaying as she walked away from me down the path that first morning. Others too might remember that, and wonder. If she had thickened a little around the middle since, I had thought only that she was taking more nourishment, being easier in her mind. Yet the shapeling I had consigned to the fire that afternoon had been larger than the size of my fist, and fully formed. I had spent enough hours with Goody Branch to know that a womb-infant did not come into so humanlike a form unless it had been got at the least four, or even five months earlier.

“There is no way Caleb or Joel—or any other male person at this school”—and I said this last plain and slow, so that he would understand that the shadow of suspicion might fall not upon the two Indian youths only—“could possibly have committed this debauchery. Furthermore, master, we cannot lay it upon her English foster father, nor upon the police or militia or whosoever it was who held her incarcerated several months ago. It is my belief—no, certainty—that the girl was defiled somewhen between a month or two months before she arrived here, while she was in attendance at the dame school.”

“But that cannot be. She was biding then with the governor—in his own household….”

“Exactly so.”

“Bethia, have a care what you do.” It was Samuel who spoke. “This is a grave charge.”

“Do you think I do not know it? I do not say this lightly, but say it I must. Even though her state was not yet patent, she was bastard-bellied when she came here. Do you not see that your father’s reputation—and his school’s—also are at stake in this, if it comes to be falsely believed that the sin took place under this roof?”

“Well,” said Master Corlett querulously, “no one would blame me if the lusts of wanton young salvages proved too much for my powers of oversight.”

I leapt to my feet. “Master Corlett!”

The wrath and disgust I felt must have showed in my face, for he recoiled. His son put out a hand and laid it protectively upon his father’s shoulder. He regarded me coldly, not liking that I had addressed his father, my master, in such a way. The black eyes glinted.