The Vanishing Point (44 page)

Upending the clay vessel, the woman poured the spent water on the grass. Leaving the flowers beside the grave, she strode off toward the well at the edge of the cemetery. Hannah closed her eyes and felt almost faint as the roses' fragrance reached her hiding place. In her basket was a bunch of sweetpeas, stems wrapped in damp cloth to keep them fresh. Sweatpeas would look lovely among the dark roses.

The stranger returned with freshly drawn water. Limber as a person half her age, she sat on her heels and arranged the roses in the clay vase. She sang softly. Hannah could not catch the words, but the melody made her ache. It sounded like a tune her sister used to hum while spinning. May had died at forty-four—a stalwart age. Had she grown stout with the years? Had her beautiful hair turned gray? Hannah could only see a laughing girl on the Bristol pier.

Hannah started. The woman had noticed her. Springing to her feet, the stranger stared. Hannah picked up her bunch of sweetpeas and walked toward her, held out the flowers as an offering. Certainty flooded her—there was no question anymore. She didn't falter but spoke loud and clear.

"So you are May's Adele."

The woman lowered her face as she took the flowers.

"She wrote of you in her letters," Hannah said. Hastily she added, "I am her sister."

When the woman lifted her face again, Hannah saw that she was crying.

"You are Hannah," she said. "I kept praying that one day you would come." Her speech had a foreign ring to it, a soft melody beneath the words.

The pounding in Hannah's head became a roar. She burst into tears like an eighteen-year-old girl who had just been told that her sister was dead. "But
how?
I did find her body in the woods." She quivered like wind-tossed foxglove, remembering the boy she would never see again. The boy she had falsely accused, over and over. Adele caught her as she collapsed. Her last thought before
she went under was that this would be the final attack. She would fall into the bottomless green well and never come up again.

***

She opened her eyes to see the tranquil sky, Adele's face.

"You will be fine now." Adele spoke as though she willed it to be so. She wiped the spittle from Hannah's face and helped her sit up. "May never did forget you," she said after a moment had passed. "She did have dreams of you. She did wake up weeping for you."

Hannah tried to speak but could not.

"I have a story to tell you," said Adele.

***

When Hannah felt well enough to walk, Adele led her down a back lane to a narrow house squeezed between a wig shop and a cobbler's. The sign over the door read
Madame Desvarieux, Dressmaker.
A young black girl sat stitching at a scrubbed pine table in the center of the shop. When they entered, she stood up.

"Mistress, I am nearly finished." She held up the silk petticoat she had been hemming.

"This is Esther, my apprentice," Adele told Hannah. "Esther, you may have the rest of the day free."

With a smile, the girl folded the petticoat, took her shawl, curtsied to Adele and Hannah, then let herself out the door.

"This was where your sister and I did ply our trade," Adele said. "May could stitch like an angel."

Hannah stepped up to the hearth. In the evenings, she reckoned that Adele would pull the curtains over the front window, set her stool by the fire, and cook a simple meal to share with her apprentice. Centered on the mantelpiece was a box covered in faded wool tapestry, a pattern of roses and doves. Before she could stop herself, she stroked it.

"This is May's handiwork, is it not?" Hannah's heart beat so loudly, she thought Adele must hear it.

"Aye. Her workbox."

Hannah tried to smile. Her sister loved beautiful things—even her workbox had to be pretty. Wandering along the shelves, she fingered a bolt of watered silk and imagined her nieces coming in to order new gowns. Ah, but Rebecca wouldn't think this quarter of the city respectable; it was too close to the harbor where sailors and whores congregated.

Opening the back door, Adele revealed a small garden crammed with a riot of vegetables and flowers. Creamy white roses climbed the walls of the earth closet. A rabbit hutch occupied one corner. The big hive beside the rear gate looked to be an excellent defense against thieves. The hum of bees nearly drowned out the hammering of the cobbler next door.

"At our childhood home," Hannah said, "we also kept bees at the bottom of the garden."

"We led a simple life, but we never went hungry. Below is a cellar where we kept our conserves." Lifting the edge of a rag rug with her toe, Adele revealed a trapdoor.

Before Hannah could think what to say, Adele led her up a narrow staircase. "Above is the bedchamber."

Hannah followed her to a garret with a slanting ceiling. On either end were tiny gable windows. She surveyed the sparse furnishings: a bed with a box at its foot, a few baskets of scrap cloth and empty thread spools, a washstand, a chest of drawers, and a stool. There were no decorations on the whitewashed walls, only a candle sconce. The floor was bare wood, everything so plain that it reminded her of the wilderness house she had shared with Gabriel. The bed curtains were tied back, allowing her to view the room's one extravagance—a quilt stitched from scraps of cotton, wool, linen, silk, and velvet. How long, she wondered, had it taken to gather all those tiny squares and triangles, all those different colors that glowed as rich as jewels?

"That is May's work," Adele told her. "It did take six years to finish."

Hannah caressed a patch of brocade as blue as May's eyes had been. "How did my sister die?" Having this conversation twice in one lifetime was a cruel fate. Sometimes she thought that, even taking into account her many sins, God had dealt too harshly with
her. She and Adele had lived in the same city for more than twenty years. Why did this meeting have to take place now, when she was too old to endure the tragedy? Twenty years ago, at least, she would have been able to wrestle more bravely with her grief. Not crumple on the edge of Adele's bed.

"It was the pneumonia." Adele sat beside her. "We were both ill from it. I lived and she died." She went to rummage through the wooden box and pulled out two yellowing letters. "I think you would like a remembrance of her. She did write these to you. But they were returned."

The faded words running across the paper ripped open the old wound. So May had tried—and failed—to find her again. She read Richard Banham's note about the fire, saying that she, Gabriel, and the child had most likely perished.

"She knew about our child. Did she hate me for it?"

Adele shook her head. "May loved you. She prayed for your happiness. Here, take this, too." She passed a square of folded silk. "There is something inside."

Hannah unfolded the silk to find a slender plait of chestnut hair bound in a circle. Father's voice sounded in her head.
A circle has no beginning and no end.
She closed her fingers around her sister's hair, untouched by gray.

"I wish I had something more to give you," Adele said. "We did live a very plain life." She drew in her breath. "We came through the forest with nothing but the clothes on our backs and some money May did steal from Gabriel Washbrook. We used the money to buy this house and start our business."

Hannah flushed at the sound of her lover's name, which had remained unspoken since he had disappeared.

"This is treasure to me." She opened her hand to see her sister's hair. "I just wish—" She broke off. Her heart was so full of loss and regret, she didn't know where to start.
A circle has no beginning.

"I think I know what you suffer," Adele said. "You loved him. You love him still."

"How would you know such things?" There was a ringing in Hannah's head. Father had told her that the place where a ship
was lost over the horizon was called the vanishing point. Gabriel was as lost to her as May.

"You are so pale." Adele spoke with solicitude, reminding her of how Gabriel had spoken to her forty-eight years ago when he first took her in. When he fried the fish for her, taking care that she ate and didn't just shrivel up in grief.

"What he did to her was cruel." Adele's voice was grim. "What she did to him was crueler, letting him think she had died in his trap. I could not stop her. Hannah, I wish I had, but I was so afraid. I knew not if we would survive the journey."

To think her sister had been capable of such a hateful jest. To think she had gone so far to punish him. A long green tunnel yawned before Hannah. She willed herself down that passage that would take her back to the past, back to her youth. She would have believed him, would have embraced him with all her love. She would have never let him go.

"Later she did sorely regret it," Adele said. "She was most sorry on account of what happened to you."

Hannah saw her sister's face.
Darling, forgive me. I was so lost.
May had lost her baby, then Gabriel had driven her out of the only home she had left. The salt tears burned. This was more than she could bear. Really, she should leave at once. Back home, they would worry and wonder why she had been gone so long. Her granddaughters would alert Rebecca, who would then send Benjamin out to look for her. Young Benjamin, who had Gabriel's black hair and melting eyes. When Hannah tried to stand, she found she was dizzy. She sat back down on the edge of the bed.

"We were dressmakers." Adele resumed the conversation, steering it into calmer waters. "For two spinsters, we did better than most."

Hannah had to concede that the room was soothing in its simplicity, far more peaceful than Rebecca's drawing room with its walls covered in patterned French silk and pictures in gilt frames. This had been the home of two masterless women, forging their way through life without husband, father, or children. She could
almost see her sister on the stool by the window, brushing out her long hair.
Hannah, can't you see that this is an adventure?

"You were very devoted to my sister. I am happy to know she had such a loyal friend."

"I loved her, but sometimes she tried me sorely. She never stopped chasing the men. I had to cure her of the French pox more than once."

With a lurch, Hannah imagined May leading sailors up to the garret, letting them unlace her dress, then lying with them beneath the dazzling quilt.

"In the end, she settled on one." Adele thumbed a patch of red velvet on the quilt. "A sea captain with a wife in England. He and May only saw each other once or twice in a year. I think this is why they never tired of each other. Their love ... it was always brand-new. He wrote long letters to her. But May was never his whore. She refused to take anything from him, not a trinket, even when we had hard times. Her pride made him love her more. He could not buy her anything until she did die. Her sea captain paid for her headstone." Adele turned her head away and wiped her eyes. "I could never afford such a thing."

Hannah touched her arm. "Did you have many hard times?"

"The business of dressmaking is fickle. Either we did have more work than we could take on or no work at all. When business was poor, we did other things to earn our bread."

Digging in the box again, Adele unwrapped a ball of sea-green glass. "I tell fortunes. From my mother I did inherit the powers. The older I get, the stronger they grow."

"I envy you," Hannah said. "I do wish that I could see into the future."

"The future, the past, the present," said Adele. "All the things that are hidden. I taught your sister to gaze into the glass when she was lonely for you."

Hannah brushed back tears. "Will you teach me, Adele?"

***

She saw him in the glass. He walked the snowy forest, dogs gathered around him, different dogs from the ones she remembered. Rufus was long gone. Gabriel wore buckskin and the fur of wolf and lynx. Snow crystals caught on the fur and glittered like tiny stars. Age had marked his face, yet she could still clearly see the boy he had been. He glided through the forest on Indian snow-shoes, leaving behind strange tracks that did not look as though they had been made by a human. Except to whistle to his dogs, he was as silent as when she had first met him. Unused to speech. He was slim as ever, spine unbowed.

"He thinks of you every day," Adele told her. "He remembers you with love."

***

In a shack on a faraway mountainside, Gabriel awoke with a start and sat up panting on his bed of skins. Though it was summer, he had dreamt of deep winter, of a girl with snowflakes in her flame-red hair. Even as he pinched himself and gazed at the moon through the glassless window, the dream lingered. Snow-flakes touched his face. The girl's warmth overpowered him as she wrapped her arms around him and laid her head against his pounding heart.
You have an angel's name. They named you after an angel.

He struggled to push the vision away, but she wouldn't be banished. Her fingers fanned out on his cheek.
Gabriel, I think I am in love with you.
A ghostly fire blazed in his empty hearth. He saw her young body, golden in its light, as she spread out on the furs, as she gave herself to him in perfect trust.

He couldn't sleep any more that night. At dawn, he opened his leather pouch. Inside, knotted in a scrap of old cloth, was a lock of her hair.

***

Father taught her that the place at which two receding parallel lines met on the horizon was known as the vanishing point. Beyond that point they disappeared from sight.

The day the
Cornucopia
set sail from Bristol, May cupped her
face in both hands and kissed her. "Courage, Hannah. This is no time for tears."

But Hannah wouldn't let her go. Finally May took her arm and led her up the gangplank. This time they set sail together, Hannah taking her place with May at the ship's prow. The wind whipped her sister's hair as she turned to her, eyes and cheeks glowing. She had never seen May so happy.

"A wilderness, they say the New World is. Have you never wondered, Hannah, what a wilderness is like?"

They both turned toward the western horizon over which they would vanish on their voyage. They were young, their lives still before them, their future an apple waiting to be tasted.