The Taker (40 page)

So that morning, I stood in the Boston harbor, waiting to board the ship that would take me back to Camden in completely different circumstances than when I’d arrived: two trunks of beautiful clothes and gifts, a purse with more currency than the entire village saw in five years, and luxurious travel accommodations. I’d left St. Andrew a disgraced young woman with no prospects and was returning as a refined lady who’d stumbled across a secret provenance and lucked into riches.

Obviously, I owed Adair much. But it did not make me less sad about what I was doing.

While at sea, I hid in my cabin, still overcome with guilt. In an attempt to blunt my emotions, I sat with a bottle of brandy and, with drink after drink, tried to convince myself that I was not a traitor to my former lover. I was coming to present an offer to Jonathan on Adair’s behalf, a gift one could only dream of: the ability to live forever. Any man would readily accept such a gift—even pay a fortune for it—if it were presented to him. Jonathan had been chosen for admittance to an unseen world, to learn that life as we knew it was not all there was. He could scarcely complain about what I was bringing him.

Yet
I
knew that this other plane of existence came with a price. I just didn’t understand what that price was yet. I didn’t feel superior to mortals, as I didn’t feel like a god. If anything, I felt I’d left the sphere of mankind and crossed to a realm of shameful secrets and regret, a dark underworld, a place of punishment. But surely I was not entirely lost. Surely there was a chance to make up for one’s sins, for atonement.

By the time I’d arrived in Camden, hired the carriage, and started my solitary trip north, the idea of rebelling against Adair began to creep into my head again. After all, my surroundings were so unlike Boston that Adair seemed so far away. I bargained with myself: if, after arriving in St. Andrew, I saw that Jonathan was happy in his life with his overbearing family and his child bride, I would spare him. I
could take the consequences on myself: I would slip away and make my own way in the world, because I could never go back to Boston without Jonathan. Ironically, Adair himself had given me the means to flee: I had more than enough money to get off to a good start. These fantasies were short lived, however; I couldn’t forget Adair’s warning to do as I was ordered or suffer at his hand. Adair would never let me leave him.

In this unhappy frame of mind, I steeled myself to roll into St. Andrew that October afternoon, to face the surprise of my family and my acquaintances for being alive, and their eventual disappointment at what I had become.

I arrived on an overcast Sunday. I’d been lucky that the season wasn’t as punishing as it could be and the snow along the route had been passable. The trees were bare against a gray flannel sky and the last leaves clinging to the branches were a dead color, shriveled and curled, like bats hanging from their roosts.

The church service had just let out for the day and the townspeople spilled from the broad doors of the congregation hall onto the common. The parishioners stood conversing despite the cold and the wind, reluctant as always to forgo companionship and return home. No sign of my father; perhaps with no one to accompany him, he’d taken to going to the Catholic mass for convenience. But my eyes found Jonathan immediately, and my heart rose on seeing him. He stood on the far edge of the common where the horses and carriages were tethered and was climbing into his family’s buggy, his sisters and brother waiting in a row for their turn. Where were his mother and the captain? Their absence made me anxious. On his arm was a young woman, white with fatigue. Jonathan helped her into the front seat of the buggy. There was a bundle in her arms—a baby. The child bride had given Jonathan something I could not. At the sight of the baby, I nearly lost my courage and told the driver to turn around.

But I did not.

My carriage swept into this scene, and was immediately an object of curiosity. At my signal, the driver pulled the horses up and, heart in my throat, I sprang from the carriage into the crowd that had gathered.

My reception was warmer than I’d expected. They recognized me, despite the new clothing and styled hair and hired carriage. I was encircled by people I’d always suspected cared little for me—the Watfords, Tinky Talbot the blacksmith and his soot-smudged brood, Jeremiah Jacobs and his new bride, whose face I recalled but whose name escaped me. Pastor Gilbert bustled down from the congregation hall steps, his vestments twisted by the wind, as my former neighbors whispered around me.

“Lanore McIlvrae, as I live and breathe!”

“Look at her, all fancied up!”

Hands reached from the crowd to offer a handshake, though I saw from the corner of my eye the clucking tongues and shaking heads on the fringe. Then the crowd parted for Pastor Gilbert, who arrived red faced from exertion.

“Dear lord, is it you, Lanore?” he asked, but I scarcely heard him, I was so preoccupied by his appearance. How Gilbert had aged! He’d shrunk and his portly belly had slimmed, but his old face was wrinkled like an apple forgotten in the cold cellar and his eyes were rheumy and red. He clasped my hand with a mixture of affection and trepidation. “Your family will be so happy to see you! We’d given you up for”—he blushed, as though about to let slip the wrong word—“lost. And here you have returned to us—and in such obvious good fortune.”

At the mention of my family, the expressions of the onlookers shifted, though no one said a word. Good God, what had happened to my family? And why did everyone seem so much older? Miss Watford had streaks of gray in her hair I did not recall. The Ostergaard boys were fully grown and bursting out of their hand-me-down clothing, wrists protruding from the too short sleeves of their jackets.

The crowd parted again at a commotion in the back, and into the circle stepped Jonathan. Oh, how he’d changed. He’d lost the last
of his boyishness, the carefree sparkle in his dark eyes, his swagger. Handsome still, he had an air of sobriety about him. He looked me over, taking in my obvious changes and seeming saddened by them. I wanted to laugh and throw my arms around him to break his somber mood, but I didn’t.

He layered my hand between his two. “Lanny, I didn’t think we’d see you again!” Why did everyone keep saying this? “By the looks of things, Boston has been good to you.”

“It has,” I replied, offering nothing yet, wanting to pique his curiosity.

At this point, the young lady holding the infant edged through the crowd and hovered at Jonathan’s elbow. He reached back and ushered her forward.

“Lanny, you remember Evangeline McDougal. We married shortly after you left. Though there’s been enough time since your departure for us to have our first child, I daresay!” He laughed nervously. “A girl, can you believe my first child would be a girl? No luck, I say, but we’ll get it right the next time, won’t we?” he said to a red-cheeked Evangeline.

Logically, I knew that Jonathan would be married and that it was possible he’d have a child by now. Seeing his wife and daughter, however, was more difficult than I would have imagined. My lungs felt constricted. I went numb, unable to mumble congratulations. How could everything have moved so fast? I’d been gone only a few months.

“I know it seems so soon, fatherhood and all,” Jonathan said, looking down at the hat in his hands, “but old Charles was determined to see me established before he passed away.”

My throat tightened. “Your father is dead?”

“Oh yes—I forgot, you haven’t heard. Right before my wedding. It would be two years ago, I think.” He was dry-eyed and calm. “He’d become ill right after you left.”

More than two years since I’d left? How could that be? It was unreal, like something from a fairy tale. Had I fallen under a spell and slept while the rest of the world went about its business? I couldn’t
speak. Jonathan squeezed my hand, breaking my trance. “We shouldn’t keep you from seeing your family. Do plan to come to the house for dinner, soon. I would like to hear what adventures prevented you from returning to us until now.”

“Yes, of course.” My mind was elsewhere: if all this change had been visited on Jonathan’s family, what of my own? What misfortune might have befallen them? And, judging from what Jonathan had said, two years had elapsed since I’d left town, though this made no sense. Did time move more quickly here, or had it passed more slowly in Boston, in the swirl of nightly parties and the languor of Adair’s rooms?

I asked the driver to stop the coach up the road from my parents’ house. The cabin had changed, there could be no denying it. Modest to begin with, it had grown shabby while I was away. My father had built it himself, like the other first settlers (the only exception being the captain, who’d brought carpenters up from Camden to make his fine house). My father had made a single-room log house designed to be built onto later. And build on he did: an alcove behind the main room to provide sleeping space for Nevin, a loft for us girls, where for many years we’d slept three abreast, like dolls on a shelf.

The house sagged like a good horse that has aged. Chinks of wadding had fallen out from between the logs. The roof was missing a few shakes. Debris had piled up on the narrow porch and the bricks in the chimney had loosened. I saw dots of reddish hide between the trees beyond the house, which meant cattle still grazed in the pastures. My family had retained at least part of the herd, but judging from the condition of the house, something drastic had happened to their fortunes.

I studied the house. The family was home from church—the wagon stood empty by the barn and I could see the ancient chestnut gelding grazing in the pen—but there was no activity around the house, just a ragged plume of smoke rising from the chimney. A mean fire on
a cold day. I stole a glance at the woodpile. Neglected. The firewood barely stood three rows high with winter coming on.

Finally, I asked the driver to pull up in front of the house. I waited for a sign of movement within, but getting none, I drew up my courage, climbed out of the carriage, and approached the door.

Maeve answered my knock. Her mouth agape, she took me in from head to foot before shrieking and throwing her arms around my neck. We managed to waltz over the threshold and into the house, her happy voice filling my ears.

“Dear lord, you’re alive! Darling Lanore, we thought we’d never see you again!” Maeve wiped tears from her cheeks with the edge of her apron. “When we didn’t hear from you … the nuns wrote to Mama and Papa and told them you were most likely lost.” Maeve blinked.

“Lost?” I asked.

“Dead. Murdered.” Maeve gave me a clear-eyed look. “They said it happens all the time in Boston. Newcomers arrive in the city to be spirited off by brigands to their deaths.” Her eyes gazed up at me, rapt. “If you were not lost, sister, then what did happen? Where have you been? It’s been nearly three years.”

Nearly three years! Again, the lost time rattled me. Outside of my time in Adair’s company, the rest of the world had been like a train keeping to its own timetable, not about to slow down for me.

I was saved from making an explanation at that moment when my mother shuffled up from the open trap door to the root cellar, her apron gathered to cradle a few potatoes. She dropped everything at the sight of me, turning white as sheeting.

“It can’t be!”

My heart squeezed to a standstill. “It is, Mother. It’s your daughter.”

“Back from the dead!”

“I am no ghost,” I said through clenched jaw, trying to hold back tears, and as I hugged her, I felt the reluctance in her wiry old muscles melt away. She hugged me back with all the strength left in her, which was considerably less than I remembered.

As we spoke, she, too, wiped tears from her eyes. She looked over her shoulder at my sister, and nodded. “Fetch Nevin.”

My stomach clenched. “Must you, so soon?”

My mother nodded again. “Aye, we must. He’s the man of the house now. I’m sorry to have to tell you that your father is gone, Lanore.”

You can’t predict how you will react to news of that sort. As angry as I’d been with my father and as much as I had begun to suspect that something dire had happened, my mother’s news knocked the wind from me. I fell onto a chair. My mother and sister stood around me, hands clasped.

“It happened a year ago,” my mother said, soberly. “One of the bulls. A kick to the head. It was very sudden. He didn’t suffer.”

But they had, every day since: it was apparent in their hardened faces, the shabbiness of their clothes, and the house’s disrepair. My mother caught my eye roving discreetly.

“It’s been terribly hard on Nevin. He’s taken it on himself to run the farm, and you know it’s too big a job for one man.” My mother’s once gentle mouth had developed a hard set, her way of dealing with the merciless circumstances.

“Why don’t you hire some help, a boy from one of the other farms. Or rent out the property. Surely someone in town is looking to expand,” I said.

“Your brother won’t hear of such a thing, so do not be so reckless as to mention it to him. You know how proud he is,” she said, turning her head so I wouldn’t see the bitterness in her expression. His pride had become their misfortune.