The Hearth and Eagle (35 page)

Susan sighed, glad to be able to share her worry with a man whose opinion she respected. “Unsuited indeed for a match, though he claims Massachusetts birth and seems to have some means.” She shook her head, drawing her sandy brows together. “Still, I’d not fret so much for that, Mr. Porterman,” she said slowly. “The girl’s not been happy ever since Johnnie Peach was killed. She’s seemed to fit in no place. She’d never make a contented spinster, but it seemed ’twould be her lot. Now she’s found somebody, and niminy-piminy furriner that he is, I’d not stop her only—” she compressed her pale mouth and looked down at her lap. “That’s not the nub of the matter.”

“What is, then?” asked Amos, leaning forward.

“I doubt he’ll ever marry her,” said Susan. She turned her head and looked into the empty fireplace. “But she’s that daft about him, I’m afraid...” The dull red rose up her neck and cheeks and into the sandy gray-streaked hair.

“But that’s outrageous—” shouted Amos, springing to his feet. “Get Mr. Honeywood to throw him out of the house.”

Susan gave a curt laugh. “Roger’s no use. He’s daft about him too. Roger won’t ever see what he don’t want to.”

“Then
you
must do something.” He strode over by Susan and stood beside the settle glaring down at her.

“I’d do plenty if I knew what,” she answered tartly. “Hesper’s a woman grown, I can’t lock her in her room.”

“Talk to that, what’s his name—Redlake.”

“Nothing to talk about. There’s no getting hold of him. He’s a good listener, I’ll say that for him, but you try to get anything out of him and he’s close as a poked clam. Only one thing I know, excepting what I can read of him with my own two eyes is”—she paused, added with an ironic pride—“he thinks Hesper’s mighty handsome.”

Amos opened his mouth and shut it again. Frowning he went back to the Windsor chair and sat down. “Well, I guess she is,” he said weakly. His depression returned to him, bearing with it a type of unhappiness he had not felt since he was a boy in Danvers and his puppy had fallen through the river ice and drowned. The same feeling of helpless loss, and rage and loneliness. Even Lily Rose’s death had not felt like this.

“I ought to go,” he said, but his deep voice so lacked its usual incisiveness that Susan looked at him sharply. A fine figure of a man, she thought. Big and dependable. Looked like a sea-faring man, though he wasn’t. Steady far-seeing blue eyes under the tow-colored brows. Thick hair, so light you’d think it frosted with brine. And a skipper’s mouth, tight-clamped, made to give orders but upped at the corners a bit so there’d never be petty meanness.

Why’d that fool girl have to treat him so stupid, why’d she have to throw herself at this gangling dolt of a painter instead!

“I’d admire to have you stay on a spell, Mr. Porterman,” she said.

Amos shook his head, half rising. “I must go, ma’am, I really must—”

He stopped and they both turned their heads toward the back door. From outside on the stoop there had come a light clear laugh, tinged with excitement. I never heard her laugh before, thought Amos.

Hesper came into the kitchen followed by Evan. Her shining hair was loosely bundled into the net and curled around her smiling face. She had an astonishing air of assurance and coquetry, though the smile faded as she saw Amos and her mother staring at her. She said “Oh—” and turning put her basket on the table. Evan gave the two in the kitchen a semi-ironic bow. He looked harried and sulky. Carrying his easel and paints he disappeared through the buttery and back passage toward his room in the new wing.

“At least—” snapped Susan to her daughter, “you’re a mite earlier than usual. You’ve not greeted Mr. Porterman.”

“G’d afternoon,” said Hesper lightly in Amos’s direction. “Yes, we’re early because Evan couldn’t seem to get the hang of the painting today. He gave it up.”

Her eyes sparkled as she said this, and she moved to the drainboard, and unpacked the basket with an air of secret triumph.

“You mean he’s all through, and he’s going to leave Marblehead?” asked Susan, but without hope.

“Oh I don’t know about that,” said Hesper. This time she gave them both a vague and tolerant smile.

Amos clenched his hands on the chair arms. Emotions he had never suspected seemed to rush into his hands. He wanted to shake Hesper, he wanted to strangle Redlake. In a moment his hands unclenched and the violence rushed upwards into his tongue.

“What’s going on between you two!” he shouted in a thunderous voice.

Hesper started as though an actual clap of thunder had rent the kitchen. She turned on Amos a look of pure amazement, seeing him simply as a man—instead of intrusive foreigner and factory owner, for the first time in their relationship.

Her heart began to beat with a nervous disquiet. She put her hand to her throat. “I can’t think that you’ve the right—”

“No, I haven’t.” Amos had hold of himself now. “And I apologize. But I respect your mother, and I don’t like to see her worried.”

He stood up, towering above Hesper, and even in her bewilderment she felt the change in his attitude towards her.

She stepped back and turned her head towards Susan who stood watching. “You can stop fretting then, Ma—” she said. “Mr. Redlake has asked me to marry him,” and she marched out of the room.

Hesper’s triumphant announcement in the Hearth and Eagle kitchen was not strictly true. Evan had not asked her to marry him on that sunlit afternoon by Castle Rock. He had said that he loved her and he had asked her to go away with him, but the assumption of marriage had been Hesper’s, after which he had been silent for a long time, staring out over the ocean.

Then he had said, “Yes. I suppose so. You must have marriage. You’re not the kind of woman for anything else, are you, my dear?”

He took her hand in his looking down at the long slender fingers. They were roughened by housework but their fineness of line to the slightly tapered tips and the oval nails always gave him pleasure. They were the hands of a voluptuous and forceful woman yet they had a clinging quality. The fingers closed around his own hand now with childish trustfulness.

Evan sighed and turned again to contemplation of the sea. “Hesper, there’s something I want to make you understand—if I can. I love you—your body. I’m a man and I want you. But there’s nothing in the world I can be sure of still wanting a week, a month, a year from now—save my work. It’s the only thing can hold me.”

“Oh I understand that—” she cried. “And I’ll help you. I'll go anywhere with you, I’ll never complain. I’ll keep out of the way when you don’t want me, I’ll pose for you—”

Evan shook his head, as he kissed her eager upturned face, his eyes over her shoulder rested on the easel. Ever since his desire for her had got in the way, the painting had been bad. Today he had not been able to work at all. The unfinished picture glared at him with accusation. Hesper’s figure had gone wooden like an oversized puppet. The flesh tones were pasty. The oncoming wave behind her had thinned to a curl of green tissue paper. She saw his expression and for a frightened moment thought it directed at her, then she understood a little.

“It’ll come right when we’re married, darling—” she cried. “I know it will. Though I think it’s fine now. The colors are so pretty.”

Evan wrenched his eyes from the canvas, his nostrils tightened and a harsh look came into his eyes, then suddenly he laughed, pulled her over against him, burying his face in her full rounded throat.

The wedding was set for the following week in the parlor of the Hearth and Eagle. The Reverend Allen, their pastor from the Old North, was to officiate, and there were to be no guests except Peg-Leg and Aunt Mattie Dolliber.

“Hole and corner” business, Susan thought angrily many times during that week. Hesper seemed to have no mind or wishes of her own, and showed nothing but an indecent desire for haste. Susan’s dislike of her future son-in-law mounted daily.

He had refused to summon his family or even acquaint them with the news. He had objected to a church wedding, saying that he had no use for churches and even less for community gatherings.

“No use for weddings either, I’ll be bound,” Susan had snapped, and Evan had smilingly agreed, with the silky insolence which she found impossible to answer. “You understand me quite well, Mrs. Honeywood. The marriage is entirely to please Hesper. I doubt—” he added, “that I’ll be able to do much else to please her, poor girl.”

“Aye—you never spoke truer. I’ll be blosted if I know what she wants with you! You’ve nothing in your heart but your brushes and your tubes and your grummets of charcoal.”

The derisive light faded from Evan’s face. “Perhaps,” he said. “I wish Hesper saw as clear as you.” Suddenly he looked worried and boyish.

“I’m
not in love with you,” Susan muttered, but in that moment she liked him better than at any other time.

Roger was pleased with the marriage, except for the pain it gave him to lose Hesper. But he was moved by her obvious blooming—and he approved of Evan. He discharged his paternal responsibilities by catechizing Evan on his family, then writing to the minister at Amherst. The combined information was satisfactory.

Mrs. Redlake had been a New Bedford Robinson, daughter of a whaling captain and descendant of well-known Welsh and Lincolnshire lines. Mr. Redlake, though an outlander from Pennsylvania, came from good Quaker stock, was well to do and highly respected in Amherst.

A Marbleheader would have been better, of course, but there was excellent precedent for this match.

“It’s not unlike the romance of Agnes Surriage,” said Roger at supper on the wedding eve, pushing back his plate and beaming at Hesper and Evan with gentle benevolence.

The two young people looked up, Hesper smiling and happy as she always was now, and Evan interested. Susan flared up at once. “No more like than a mackerel and a lobster. Sir Henry was a lord, and Agnes was a maidservant, and to her everlasting shame she run away with him without a wedding.”

“Well, they got married in the end, my dear—” said Roger. “And it all began at an inn. The Fountain Inn, over by Bailey’s Head oil Orne Street,” he explained to Evan, certain of his attention to any bit of Marblehead lore, “it burned down years ago, but back when Sir Henry Frankland fell in love with little Agnes it was the chiefest inn here. Our place was closed at the time. That was in 1742, and my great-grandfather, Moses, was prospering.”

“A real love story?” asked Evan smiling.

Hesper looked across at him quickly, her heart contracting. Had she imagined a faint stressing of “real”? I mustn’t be a fretting fool, she thought. We’re being married tomorrow. He loves me. He said so. He’s different from other people. But I don’t know much about men. Only Father and Johnnie—A warm soft pain washed through her and receded. If this had been her wedding eve with Johnnie. We’d have been dancing, she thought, with astonishment, there’d have been people everywhere, bunches of flowers and maybe white streamers. There’d be a fiddler in the taproom. Half of Marblehead would be here. Johnnie had so many friends. We’d’ve danced most the night and been married in church in the morning. Then we’d have danced some more, and afterwards we’d have sailed off to Boston on Johnnie’s ship, like we planned so many times. Then after a while we’d have come back here—

She looked around the kitchen in sudden revulsion. Thank God I won’t be coming back here. I hate it.

She and Evan were going away. Not by boat; by train. And going to New York right after the ceremony. This was Evan’s decision, he wished to return to New York. He didn’t want to finish her picture by Castle Rock, he didn’t want to go on painting the sea. He wouldn’t talk about the picture at all. And that was wonderful, because all week he’d been entirely hers.

She sent Evan across the table a look of passionate love and gratitude. He responded to it, meeting her eyes with a somber intentness that made her heart beat fast and a shiver run through her flesh.

Tomorrow night, she thought, and so strong was the delicious panic that she murmured an excuse and left the table. She went out into the summer night hoping that Evan would follow her. But she waited under the chestnut tree for a while and he did not, so she walked slowly through the gate and down the street. It was soothing to be in motion outdoors and she had a desire to take final leave of Marblehead. Maybe, she thought with triumph, I’ll never see it again. Ma and Pa can visit me. And she walked past the houses on Orne Street looking through the unshaded windows at those inside and feeling sorry for them. Nellie Bowen with her parcel of brats and her stupid bewhiskered husband. Damaris Orne, swollen with her first baby, anxiously hotting up coffee against Tom’s return from the fire house where he spent most of his time. Did I ever really envy them? thought Hesper.

The streets were deserted, everyone was at supper, she walked rapidly up the hill by “The Old Brig” and the site of the Fountain Inn, feeling weightless and unreal. Ahead of her against the paling greenish sky loomed the Burial Hill and its surmounting shaft. How many times had she been dragged up those steep steps to bend her young unwilling gaze on the family tombstones and the Memorial shaft?

Now that she was leaving them, Hesper felt at last an interest. They must be included in the farewell.

She went first to the monument for drowned seamen, who had been lost off the Grand Banks in the great gale of 1846. Tom and Willy amongst them. She stood looking at the monument in the waning light and trying to remember her brothers. But she could not.

She wandered down the slope on a familiar path to a cluster of slate stones. The Honeywood plot. Isaac, John, Moses, Thomas, and their wives. All lavishly decorated with skulls and scythes and angels. Her father had told her that Mark and Phebe must be there too, near by, but their softer stones had long since crumbled. The latest stone of all was of granite adorned with a weeping willow. Sarah Hathaway Honeywood 1754–1848. That was Gran. What a one she was for telling me stories of the past, thought Hesper. She knelt down beside a richly carved tombstone, one which she had spelled out often as a child.