The Vanishing Point (2 page)

Joan gripped her shoulder. "And on your wedding night, what will happen when he discovers you are no maid?"

At this, Hannah crept out of the room. May looked into Joan's eyes without flinching. "You know as well as I," she said, "that even the most hardened rake cannot tell a maiden from a whore if she holds herself tight enough." She swallowed and tried to smile. "If he goes looking for blood, I shall prick my finger with a needle." Then she shook her head. "Oh, Joan, I don't think Father kept my history secret from them. I think they know already what kind of girl I am." Before Joan could berate her any more, May embraced the older woman, who wept noisily in her arms.

"Your own father is shunting you off for a pile of tobacco!"

"Hush," May whispered. "I go freely. I have chosen this."

A
T THE AGE OF FIFTEEN,
May had started with the boys. In the beginning, she had tried to be a decent girl, contenting herself with kisses, sweet words, and secret glances. But her hunger mounted, not leaving her in peace until she took her first love, the baker's youngest son, by the hand and led him to the copse of willows behind the churchyard wall. Opening her legs, she had drawn him deep inside her, let him pierce her through.

May and her first love took to meeting in the meadow near the gristmill. Those were the hours she felt most alive, sprawled in the grass, limbs flung open so that her body took the shape of a star. She felt as though she could rise and float up over the clouds, even as he covered her with his body, anchoring her to the earth. He brought her cider, which she drank until the stars began to spin and her throat burst with laughter. He called her his angel. She could sport all night, rolling in the grass with her sweet boy, threading her fingers through his hair, kissing the cider from his lips. She caressed him and rubbed her body against his until the stars fell from the sky and silvered their naked skin.

She took care not to get herself with child. Joan had grudgingly shown her the method she herself had used to prevent conception in her younger days. May took a tuft of clean sheep's wool, dipped it in honey, and thrust it into the mouth of her womb. There was no shortage of wool in her village. Every week May received a great heap of it to card, comb, and spin. Her fingers were so nimble that in a good week she earned nearly as much from her spinning as her father earned from his languishing practice of physick. As for the honey, Joan kept two hives at the bottom of their garden.

Her first love had called her his honey pot. That thrilled her. If only he knew how true it was. She was a walking pot of honey, the golden sweetness seeping between her legs. When he lapped it from her sticky thighs, he fancied it was her own unique sweetness he tasted. Honey was delicious and pleasing. It also killed a man's seed before it could reach her womb.

A few hours before daybreak, when May crawled back to bed with the honey still glazed on her thighs, she was too breathless to sleep. It was Hannah who eased her into slumber, Hannah with her sweet breath, her arm flung around May's waist, her red hair spread over the pillow like a silk shawl. Those in their village who dismissed Hannah as plain had no clue how winsome she looked in sleep, how innocent. May's trysts left her moist-eyed with love, not just for her lover, but for everything she saw. Those nights she thought she could embrace the whole world. She imagined that in her intimate encounters, she experienced the same ecstasies of universal love that holy men experienced in prayer. Her trysts gave her such an infusion of the life elixir that their household no longer seemed such a lonely and somber place.

In the morning, between spoonfuls of porridge swimming in thick cream, she smiled across the table at her father, who commented on the healthy glow in her face and inquired if she had slept well. Father, God bless him, slept so soundly she could creep from her chamber night after night without troubling him. Indeed, his thoughts were so immersed in his books and jars of physick herbs, it was as though he lived in a lofty tower far above ordinary affairs. The clucking of the village gossips never penetrated his ears. Hannah was too loyal to betray her. Joan only rolled her eyes.

Neither she nor her lover ever spoke of marriage. For a youngest son with few prospects, marrying her was a dream beyond his means. She knew that Father would never let her wed a baker's son. As for her own desires, trysting in the meadow was more beguiling than the prospect of setting up a household. She lived for that sweet excitement of brand-new love when she couldn't sleep for the pounding in her heart. When she saw the village wives with their pregnant bellies and gaggles of snivel-nosed brats, she pitied them. Yet before she could further contemplate her future with the boy, he left to visit his kin in Cornwall. Both he and May thought he would be gone only a few weeks. However, he never returned. Later May discovered that his parents, not approving of his infatuation for her, had arranged for him to be apprenticed to a cooper in Truro. Never having learned to read or write, the boy could send her no message of how he fared. In ballads, girls who lost their lovers drowned in a river of their tears. May did her share of weeping, but she reasoned that if her mother were alive, she would not want her to pine for him forever.

The young blacksmith, working half naked in the summer heat, had the most beautiful torso, golden and glistening. When he looked up from the anvil and met her stare, she winked and turned, inviting him to follow her into the alleyway, where he playfully pressed her up against the wall, his sweaty chest marking the front of her dress. She licked the sweat from his face like a mother cat.

Sometimes she felt as though she were questing after a dream lover, an irresistible phantom who enticed her from her bed night after night. His face kept changing. He could appear to her in any guise he chose—as the baker's son, the blacksmith, or even some young rag seller. Each time she took a new lover, swearing that he was the one she would love forever, another apparition appeared, stretching out his hand and smiling as if he had been her destined match all along. When she thought she had finally grasped him, the divine lover of her dreams, the enchantment vanished. She found herself embracing an ordinary village boy who taunted her for her loose ways and called her a trollop.

Before the illusion shattered, it was so sweet. The stars rained on her body as her lover plunged inside her. The next morning, she dredged out the honey-and-sperm-soaked wool and dropped it down the privy hole. Without uttering a word to Father, Joan brewed her decoctions of pennyroyal, tansy, and rue to ensure that her menses arrived promptly. May's belly remained flat as any virgin's. The village whispered it was witchcraft that she never got herself with child.

This was when May felt the first hint of dread. A few years before her birth, a woman had been accused of bewitching a married man and cursing him so that his wife remained barren. The woman had been tried, found guilty, then strung from the gallows. The story went that her body had been so slender and lightboned, the hangman had to grab her around the waist and yank hard until her neck snapped. Father said that no educated man believed in witches anymore, but Joan had warned May that in some villages, wanton girls like herself were publicly whipped, then locked in the stocks, and left there for everyone to jeer at and mock. Though the stocks in her village were rarely used, May felt a tremor whenever she walked past them.

Still, nobody troubled her. Father, after all, was a respected man. Half the village was in debt to him, for he treated the poor without asking payment. It helped that she looked so innocent with her large blue eyes. She never failed to appear in church, hands clasped and head bowed while the preacher railed on and on. When he addressed her sins—without naming her, thankfully—she put every ounce of will into appearing contrite. Only when the sermon was over did she raise her eyes to the Green Man carved in the church wall. His face emerged from a dense tangle of oak leaves. More leaves sprouted from his lips. The stone face smiled, as if to tell her that he understood her, even if no one else did. In the midst of all the talk of hell and damnation, the Green Man watched over her and gave her his blessing.

The year she turned nineteen, the innkeeper's son, smitten with her, declared that he would put an end to her wildness. When he asked for her hand in matrimony, Father agreed at once.
An eldest son, he had good prospects. Properly affianced, he and May could court in public with no subterfuge or shame. On Sunday afternoons, they went for endless walks, Hannah tagging after them as their self-appointed chaperone. Still, May could not quite fathom marriage. In her dreams, they simply went on courting forever. Eventually the banns were posted. Joan and Hannah summoned her to the market to pick out the satin and lawn for her bridal gown. The wedding date was set.

Three weeks before she was to be married, she and her fiancé went to the harvest fair in the next village. May wore green ribbons in her hair. She and her lover drank mead from the same cup. A piper and fiddler played, and all around them young people danced: shepherds and servant girls, milkmaids and farmhands. But May's fiancé did not want to join the dance. Instead he spoke with his brother about the cost of fixing the thatch on the inn roof, about how they couldn't afford to replace the thatch with slate. They spoke of their senile mother, how she needed a good nursemaid to look after her, and how none of May's father's remedies had done her any good. Then May's future brother-in-law, drunk on the mead, let his tongue slip, making a gibe about her lack of dowry. "What use is there bringing home a prized mare if she come not with a wagon of hay to feed her? And a used mare she is, besides."

May waited for her fiancé to speak up in her defense, but he just laughed and pinched her cheek. Not wanting to pout, she pretended to laugh along. She reached for the mead, only to discover that the cup was empty, and then it seemed that the empty cup was an omen, informing her that life as she knew it would soon be over. After the wedding feast, there would be no more dancing, no more slipping behind the hedges in the village green. She would be nursemaid to her mother-in-law, laundering the old woman's piss-stained sheets, enduring the old woman's insults and her brother-in-law's slights. She would hide her hair beneath a housewife's cap, keep her husband's house, bear his children. Her loins clenched at the memory of her mother's racked body on the blood-drenched bed. She almost fancied that her mother's ghost was warning her to save herself before it was too late.
Darling, you can see that this is no life for you.

When she stepped away, she expected her fiancé to follow, take her hand, ask what vexed her. He still had the power to draw her back, charm away her doubts. But neither he nor his brother paid her any mind. With heavy feet, she marched into the thick of the dancers. They whirled around her, beat their feet into the earth, kicked up clouds of dust that shone like gold in the evening sun. A barefoot tinker stood on his own. His waving hair fell to his shoulders. His shirt, made of parti-colored rags stitched together, was open in the heat, baring his collarbone and smooth chest. His eyes were clouded hazel, full of mirth. Those eyes undid her. He winked, his face open and shining. When he held out his hand, she felt the overpowering tug, the intoxication sweeter than mead. Stepping forward, she squeezed his hand and let him pull her body against his as if they were already lovers. Then all was a blur of the dust they raised with their wild dance. When the music stopped she kissed him. His mouth tasted of wild blackberries.

Her fiancé and his brother left her there, in the tinker's arms. Rushing back to the village, her fiancé tore down the banns announcing their marriage. Meanwhile the tinker led May to his makeshift tent at the edge of the woods. When he pushed up her skirts and stroked the insides of her thighs, she felt so light, as though she had left her body and earthly existence behind. She kissed him fiercely and drew him inside her. Afterward they sat by the campfire and shared a supper of streaky bacon and bread. Then, despite his entreaties, May pulled herself away. She walked alone and unclaimed to her father's house.

Father could hardly look at her. Even Hannah appeared bruised and betrayed. Joan cornered May in the kitchen. "You have brought dishonor on us all. Your poor sister is ashamed to show her face in public. Did you ever stop to think about your father? Wherever he goes, people laugh behind his back."

May wept, but the shaming was nothing in the face of her desire, that pull on her that set her pulse racing. Within a fortnight she took up with a young weaver.

By the time she turned twenty-one, her pond had run dry. From the rich crop of boys she had once loved had grown a field of jaded men, most of them now married. They warned their wives what would happen to them if they ever started taking after May Powers. One morning she awoke with the taste of too much cider in her mouth, bruises on her arms and thighs. Boys followed her down alleys, singing not sweet songs but obscene ditties.
Cherry-red, cherry-red, like a slut's own bed.
At village dances, disgusting old men took liberties, pawing her bosom and rump, then laughing at her outraged protests. Joan told her she should have thought of the consequences earlier.

In the eyes of her village, she had become something much worse than an old maid. Joan said she was a fool for not marrying the innkeeper's son when she had the chance. He was a fine man these days, with money in his purse and a baby boy. His wife was a mild-faced, yellow-haired woman who never raised her voice. She had come with a dowry of two milk cows and eight pounds in sterling.

***

When Nathan Washbrook's summons arrived, May reminded herself that she had loved many men. Odds were that she could find something to love in young Gabriel. But in those final days, her bridegroom was far from her mind. At every opportunity she stole into Father's study to examine his celestial globe and maps of the heavens. In her dreams, she was not earthbound but flew unfettered through the endless vault of stars. Nothing could stop her, nothing could contain her. She imagined the unexplored new world that would soon be hers.