Serpents in the Garden (29 page)

Chapter 33

“He can,” Adam repeated stubbornly. “He says my name.”

“Really?” Alex said. “Not so that I can hear it.”

“He whispers it.” Adam caressed Hugin over his bright, black plumage.

“Ah.” Alex smiled at her five-year-old and handed him a spade. “All that row, okay?”

Adam gave her a resigned look but started turning the long bed.

Alex sat back on her heels. Her youngest was no longer a baby, but a sturdy boy that pulled his own weight in the household. Hugin flew over to sit on Adam’s shoulder, and Alex smiled at the two of them. She had serious doubts about the bird’s vocal abilities, but none whatsoever about its relative intelligence.

“Up there with the pigs,” she’d said to Matthew, making him laugh. Actually, Hugin spent a lot of time with the pigs, and so, in consequence, did Adam, the sow flapping her ears at him in warning when he got too close to her new babies, but otherwise tolerating him.

“I suspect she considers him one of her own,” Alex also said to Matthew, and he had nodded and said that, yes, given the normal state of Adam’s clothes and hands, that was probably a fair supposition.

It was the first week of April, a fine, bright day. This year, spring had taken a very long time coming before literally exploding, leaving all of them short-tempered in the unseasonal heat. Matthew and his elder sons were working themselves silly now that the fields were no longer waterlogged, and the rest of the household was coping with the chores they left undone, resulting in very long days. Alex massaged her back: three days of digging had left her muscles very sore.

Two loud voices drifted out from the dairy shed, and Alex didn’t even have to check to know it was Ruth and Sarah, locked in their constant bickering. Those two were really getting on her nerves. Just the other day, Alex had surprised all – and, in particular, herself – by slapping the girls and telling them to leave the room. Since then, the continuous war was fought at a lower decibel, but was just as deadly, with the girls quarrelling over every ribbon, every garter, every single piece of clothing that wasn’t clearly labelled with one or the other’s name – which in practice meant every garment they collectively owned.

“You can always take away all their clothes,” Matthew had suggested the other night when Alex complained.

“It will get better once their courses come,” Mrs Parson said, grinning when Alex moaned that might still be years off. “Or you might consider staking them out in the forest and hope the Indians take them, no?”

“They wouldn’t,” Matthew had muttered. “Even Indians have a sense of self-preservation.”

Alex stuck her head into the dairy, told Ruth to leave the skimming to Sarah, and to go and help Mrs Parson in the kitchen. It was touch and go which of the two girls looked the most upset by this distribution of chores, but they did as they were told, and with a chunk of cheese in one hand and a pitcher of milk in the other, Alex followed her eldest daughter to the house.

She sighed inwardly when she saw Peter Leslie ride into their yard, but arranged her features into a welcoming smile. Peter smiled back and dismounted.

“Alex.” He bowed in greeting. “Is Matthew around?”

“He will be shortly,” Alex replied. “It’s dinner time.”

Peter shone up, and Alex rolled her eyes at him.

“Come off it, you knew it was.” She shooed him indoors and poured them both a mug of Mrs Chisholm’s excellent cider, studying him surreptitiously. Ever since Constance had left for Virginia, Peter had been a frequent guest, and Alex suspected that he was very lonely. At home, Nathan and Ailish treated him with deference but no real warmth, Jenny had returned to Providence, and his two youngest children were strangers raised by the coloured woman assigned to wet-nurse them. No, his only family these days consisted of Thomas and Mary, so Alex supposed the poor man must at times be starved for conversation.

“Do you miss her?” Alex asked, making Peter look at her with surprise. “Constance,” she clarified.

Peter took off his hairpiece and scratched at his head. “No, that marriage was a mistake.” He replaced his false long curls and exhaled. “At times, I miss Elizabeth.” He twisted at one of the pewter buttons on his coat cuff. “Ah well, she’s best off dead. But I am blessed in my brother,” Peter said with a faint smile.

Alex nodded. Thomas Leslie might be dull and unimaginative at times, but he was also steadfast and loyal, and very fond of his younger brother.

“And Mary,” she teased.

Peter laughed softly. “Oh, yes…and Mary. It used to be I didn’t understand what Thomas saw in her, but now I know. She’s singularly sweet! Ineffective and vague, not the sharpest of intellects, but so restful to be with.”

“Hmm,” Alex said in a non-committal tone.

“I forgot.” Peter dug his fingers into first one pocket, then the other, before extracting a letter and handing it to Alex. “It was sent on from Providence by Hancock – arrived with the first ship of the season.”

She recognised the handwriting immediately: from Jacob. Alex held the thick square of paper in her hand, and what she really wanted to do was to leave the kitchen to read it, but instead she tucked it into her bodice with a mumbled thanks. It lay warm and promising against her chest all through dinner. It teased and murmured while she helped Agnes and Betty with the clearing up; it chafed in irritation at being left unread, screaming silently at her that she had to read it, and read it now. Alex couldn’t agree more, and after ensuring things were as they should, she escaped outside to open it in peace.

*

Matthew heard her before he saw her, and turned to see a white-faced Alex thrash her way towards him, a crumpled paper in her hand. She stopped in front of him and held out the paper. Matthew’s windpipe squeezed shut when he recognised Jacob’s handwriting. He’s injured, or ailing, mayhap even dying.

“Read,” she croaked. And Matthew did, scanning yet another description of Jacob’s days, his employer and the people he saw on a regular basis – including his uncle. Halfway through, Matthew raised his eyes to Alex. The tone of the letter was exuberant, not in any way alarming, and he couldn’t understand why his wife was the colour of a dirty sheet.

“Go on,” she said. Matthew turned the page, and there, just at the top, he found it. He swallowed audibly. No, this couldn’t be right. He read it again.

I told you, did I not, of how Uncle Luke has a fondness for miniatures, collecting wee, bitty paintings that he keeps in his office. Pretty things for the most part: a tulip, puppies in a heap, lasses milking or sewing – a lot of lasses. Dutch, Uncle Luke says. And then there’s this other wee painting that I saw some time ago. Uncle Luke is not much fond of it, but keeps it on account of it being painted by Aunt Margaret’s mother, who disappeared when Margaret was but a wee bairn. Imagine that: a woman painter!

By now, Matthew’s skin was prickling with disquiet, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to read the rest, but Alex’s eyes insisted that he should.

Not a very good painting, all blues and greens whirling round and round, but most disconcerting, making my head ache and unsettling my stomach. To look at it was to be captured by it, and it seemed to me it sang – but that is but a fancy, brought on by how my guts cramped. No, personally I much prefer the lasses, and so, I think, does Uncle Luke. Not only painted lasses, mind, but to say more would be to be indiscreet.

Sweat formed along Matthew’s spine and in his elbow creases. His mind did strange leaps from one conclusion to another. A painting of swirling blues and greens, such as Alex’s mother had painted and apparently littered the world with. Two sets of blue eyes under dark, well-defined brows, two women remarkably alike…

Impossible, it had to be impossible! But the painting! Dearest Lord, the painting! He had seen two of them before: squares of vibrant colour from which emanated the hushed, seductive whispers of a seashell, little pieces of art that had made his guts shrivel in fear. Both of them burnt to ashes, and now there was a third? This was the work of Mercedes, accursed witch that she was, and if so Alex and Margaret were sisters, born three hundred years apart to the same woman! And he, God help him, had married them both. It was enough to make him collapse to the ground, trying to stop the world around him from spinning.

“It can’t be,” he said. “It just can’t!”

“It is,” Alex said hoarsely. “No wonder we were so alike.”

Matthew stared down at the letter again, willing the words to have changed, the description of that dangerous painting to be gone. Disconcerting…not a strong enough word for a painting that could send you helpless into another time.

“We must—”

“Yes, I know,” she interrupted. “But I have no idea how to phrase it.” If it had only been Luke, she wouldn’t have bothered, she told him. For all she cared, he could drop right down into the twenty-first century and land in front of a bus or something, no matter how good he seemed to be to Jacob. Aye, he agreed, but now there were others to consider – in particular, their son – so somehow they had to warn them.

“I should have seen it,” she said. “All those times when I resented her for being so like me, and it never struck me!”

“And you find that strange?” Matthew took her hand and drew her down to sit beside him. “You had no reason to suspect she might be kin.” He, who had at times seen them side by side, had not wanted to see the resemblance, made uncomfortable by the fact that they were so alike.

“No, it’s kind of uncommon for sisters to be born with a three-hundred-year gap.”

Matthew laughed nervously. A witch; twice he had married the daughter of a witch – the same witch. In his head, he raced through the Lord’s Prayer. His windpipe shrank. Deliver me from evil, he repeated fervently, oh sweetest, dearest God, deliver me from evil!

“Be merciful to me and bless me and mine,” he breathed. “Let Your countenance shine on me and keep me and mine safe.”

Alex gave him a long look, but Matthew ducked his head, mumbling something about all of this being most confusing.

“Confusing?” Alex’s voice was uncharacteristically shrill. “Bloody scary, that’s what it is – and impossible! I wonder why Mercedes left,” she went on, her eyes unseeing on the open fields before her. “What made her abandon her child?”

“Mayhap she had to.”

Alex tugged at the grass. “Poor Mercedes, flitting from one time to another in a continuous attempt to find her way back to her own time. I hope she finally did and found some peace.”

“Aye,” Matthew replied, but more because she expected it of him than because he agreed. He was convinced Mercedes was one of those souls condemned to wander through the outer wards of hell, and he did something he hadn’t done for many years: behind his back, he made the sign against the evil eye.

Matthew got to his feet and helped Alex up. “Walk?” He was too upset by all this to concentrate on work, and from the way her face lit up, it was obvious Alex was of like mind. They set off in the general direction of Forest Spring, walking in silence through the bright green of the maple woods.

Beneath the trees, the sunlight fell in slanting rays, and, with the exception of the background chatter of birds, it was blissfully quiet. Matthew inhaled, holding the air in his lungs for some seconds before exhaling. It helped: his mind emptied of all these confusing images of Margaret, Alex and Mercedes, of his Jacob staring for too long into a painting and disappearing from him forever. Instead, he rested his thumb on the inside of Alex’s wrist, and he wasn’t sure if it was her pulse or his own he picked up, but, whatever the case, the steady throbbing calmed him even further.

At the entrance to Forest Spring, they stopped for a moment to ensure they were alone, and then they drank at the well before sitting down with their backs against the weathered cabin wall.

“Why don’t we do this more often?” Alex asked, extending her legs in front of her. “You and me, nature all around, and nothing else.” She gave him one of those blue looks that could still make his cock stir. “It reminds me of that first time with you.”

“Mmm,” Matthew agreed, half closing his eyes.

“Not
the
first time,” she corrected with a laugh. “But that whole first month. How we talked…”

“We still do,” he said seriously.

“Yes, we do, don’t we? But there’s something about walking and talking at the same time… Besides, most of the time we talk, we’re surrounded by an avid audience, right?”

“Audience? They don’t listen much – they talk as well!”

“All the time,” Alex sighed. She pulled her legs up and rested her chin against her knees. “We never discuss religion anymore. I can’t remember when we last argued about the concept of predestination.”

“Discuss religion with you? I thought we agreed that I was right and that you, as my meek and obedient wife, will follow where I lead.”

“Hmph! A meek and obedient wife would have had you bored to tears in less than a day.”

“Aye.” He took her hand again. He twisted his head to look at her, smiling at how her hair had escaped her haphazard bun to fall in a wave along her cheek. She sat staring straight ahead, a long strand of grass between her teeth. “What are you thinking about?”

She turned her face in his direction, her mouth very soft. “The first time,” she said huskily.

“Ah,” he nodded and pulled her close. At last, his cock stretched, that took you a very long time.

*

“Four or five,” Alex laughed a while later, trying to roll away from his tickling hands. “Or maybe even six – but definitely not once.”

“I was young then,” he mock growled.

“Yes, and it was ages since you’d had sex,” she said, suddenly very serious. She sat up, half-naked, and looked down at him.

“A very long time,” he agreed, just as serious. Three years in prison for something he hadn’t done, and all on account of his accursed brother and false Margaret.

“Sister or not, I’ll never forgive her for what she did to you.”

“Brother or not, I don’t think I can forgive him either,” Matthew sank down to lie on his back. “I’ve tried, and he seems to have done well by Jacob, but I can’t wipe the slate clean. He robbed me of my son, he stole away my freedom – twice – and what he did to you…” He shook his head, eyes tightly shut.