The Taker-Taker 1

by Alma Katsu

  “What are you, Jonathan’s solicitor now?” Her face reddened when I didn’t rise to the bait. “Aye, you’re right, it could be either Jeremiah’s or Jonathan’s, but I know it’s Jonathan’s. I know.” Her hands wrapped around her belly though she showed no sign of pregnancy.

  “You expect Jonathan to ruin his life on your assurances—”

  “Ruin his life?” she shrieked. “What about my life?”

  “Yes, what about your life,” I said, drawing myself up as tall as I could. “Have you thought what will happen if you publicly accuse Jonathan of fathering your baby? All you will accomplish is to let it be known that you are a loose woman—”

  Sophia chuffed, spinning on her heel away from me, as though she couldn’t bear to hear another word.

  “—and he will deny the affair. Deny that he could be the father of the child. And who will believe you, Sophia? Who would believe that Jonathan St. Andrew would choose to dally with you when he can have his pick of any woman in the village?”

  “Jonathan will deny me?” she asked, incredulous. “Don’t waste your breath, Lanore. You’ll not convince me that my Jonathan would ever deny me.”

  My Jonathan, she’d said. My cheeks burned, my heart hammered. I do not know where I found the nerve to say the evil things to Sophia that I said next. It was as though another person was hidden inside me, one with qualities I’d never dreamed I possessed, and this hidden person had been summoned from inside me as easily as a genie is conjured from a lamp. I was blind with rage; all I knew was that Sophia was threatening Jonathan, threatening to ruin his future, and I would never let anyone harm him. He wasn’t her Jonathan, he was mine. I’d claimed him years ago in the vestibule of the church, and foolish as it may seem, I felt that possessiveness rise in me, fierce and primordial. “You’ll make yourself a laughingstock—the homeliest woman in St. Andrew claiming that the most eligible man in town is the father of her child, not the oaf who is her husband. The oaf she despises.”

  “But it is his child,” she said, defiant. “Jonathan knows that. Does he not care what would happen to his own flesh and blood?”

  That gave me pause; I felt a guilty twinge. “Do yourself a favor, Sophia, and forget your mad scheme. You have a husband—tell him the child is his. He’ll be glad for the news. I’m sure Jeremiah has wished for children.”

  “He has—for children of his own,” she hissed. “I cannot lie to Jeremiah about the child’s lineage.”

  “Why not? You’ve lied to him about your fidelity, no doubt,” I said ruthlessly. Her hatred was so palpable at that moment, I thought she might strike at me like a snake.

  The time had come to drive the stake through her heart. I looked her up and down with hooded eyes. “You know, the punishment for adultery for the female partner, if she is married, is death. That is still the position of the church. Consider this, if you insist on going through with your decision. You will seal your own fate.” It was a hollow threat: no woman would be put to death for being an adulteress in St. Andrew, nor in any frontier town where women of childbearing years were scarce. The punishment for Jonathan, if the townspeople decided by some wild chance that he was guilty, would be to pay the bastardy tax and perhaps be ostracized by some of the town’s most pious for a short while. Without a doubt, Sophia would bear most of the burden.

  Sophia whirled around in circles as though searching for unseen tormentors. “Jonathan!” she cried, though not loudly enough for her husband to hear her. “How could you treat me like this? I expected you to behave honorably … I thought that was the kind of man you were … Instead, you visit upon me this viper”—she shot me another venomous look through teary eyes—“to do your evil work for you. Don’t think I don’t know why you do this,” she hissed, pointing a finger at me. “Everyone in town knows you’re in love with him but that he will not have you. It’s jealousy, I say. Jonathan would never send you to deal with me in this way.”

  I had prepared myself to be cool. I backed a few steps away from her as though she was mad or dangerous. “Of course he told me to see you—otherwise, how would I know you are with child? He has despaired of being able to make you see reason and has asked me to speak to you, as a woman. And as a woman, I tell you: I know what you are up to. You are using this misfortune to better your lot, to trade in your husband for someone with means. Perhaps there is not even a baby. You look the same as always to me. As for my relationship with Jonathan, we have a special friendship, pure and chaste and stronger than that of brother and sister, not that I would expect you to understand it,” I said, haughtily. “You don’t seem to be able to comprehend a relationship with a man that doesn’t involve lifting your skirts. Think hard on it, Sophia Jacobs. It is your dilemma and the outcome is in your hands. Choose the easiest path. Give Jeremiah a child. And do not approach Jonathan again: he doesn’t wish to see you,” I said firmly, then left the barn. On the path home, I trembled with fear and with triumph, burning from spent nerves despite the cold air. I had summoned all my courage to defend Jonathan and had done so with a single-mindedness I didn’t know I possessed. I had rarely ever raised my voice and had never forced my position so vehemently on anyone. To know I had such an inner power was frightening, and yet also thrilling. I walked home through the woods, light-headed and flushed, confident that I could do anything.

  NINE

  It was the noise that woke me the next morning, a musket fired, ball and powder. A musket shot at this hour meant trouble: a fire at a neighbor’s house, a raiding party, a terrible accident. This shot came from the direction of the Jacobses’ farm; I knew it as soon as I heard it.

  I pulled the blanket over my head, pretending to be asleep, listening to the murmurs coming from my parents’ bed below. I heard my father rise and dress, and go out the door. My mother followed, probably wrapping a quilt around her shoulders as she went about the tasks she did every morning, stoking the fire and starting a pot of water to boil. I swung around to sit upright, reluctant to put the soles of my feet on the cold plank floor and start what seemed heralded to be a strange and ill-fortuned day.

  My father came back inside, his expression grim. “Get dressed, Nevin. You must come with me,” he said to the groaning lump in the bed downstairs.

  “Must I?” I heard my brother ask in a voice heavy with sleep. “There’s the cattle to feed—”

  “I’ll go with you, Father,” I called down from the loft, pulling on my clothing hastily. My heart was already beating so hard that it would be impossible to remain in the house and wait for news of what had happened. I had to go with my father.

  A snow had fallen in the night, the first of the season, and I tried to clear my mind as I walked behind Father, concentrating only on stepping into the footsteps he made in the fresh snow. My breath hung in the crisp air and a drop of mucus beaded on the tip of my nose.

  Sitting in the hollow before us was the Jacobses’ farm, a brown saltbox on the broad expanse of white snow. People had begun to congregate, distant small dark shapes against the snow, and more were coming to the farm from every direction, on foot and on horseback; the sight made my heart start to race again.

  “We’re going to the Jacobses’?” I asked of my father’s back.

  “Yes, Lanore.” A taciturn reply, with his customary economy of words.

  I could barely contain my anxiety. “What do you think has happened?”

  “I expect we’ll find out,” he said patiently.

  There was a representative present from every family—except the St. Andrews, but they lived at the farthest reach of town and could scarcely have heard the shot—everyone in mismatching layers of dress: dressing gowns, uneven hems of a nightshirt peeking out from beneath a coat, hair uncombed. I followed my father through the small crowd until we’d nudged our way to the front door, where Jeremiah kneeled in the muddied, chopped snow. He’d obviously shoved himself hastily into breeches, boots unlaced on his feet, and a quilt draped over his shoulders. His ancient blunderbuss, the g
un that had fired the alarm, leaned against the clapboard siding. His great ugly face contorted in agony, his eyes red, his lips cracked and bleeding. He was usually such an emotionless man that the sight was unnerving.

  Pastor Gilbert pushed his way to the front, then crouched low so he could speak softly into Jeremiah’s ear. “What is it, Jeremiah? Why did you sound the alarm?”

  “She’s missing, Pastor …”

  “Missing?”

  “Sophia, Pastor. She’s gone.”

  The hush of his voice sent a wave of murmurs through the crowd, everyone whispering to the person on either side of them, except for me and my father.

  “Gone?” Gilbert placed his hands on Jeremiah’s cheeks, cradling his face. “What do you mean, she is gone?”

  “She is gone, or someone has taken her. When I awoke, she was not in our home. Not in the farmyard, not in the barn. Her cloak is gone but her other things are still here.”

  Hearing that Sophia—angry, perhaps feeling she had naught to lose—had not revealed my visit to Jeremiah eased a tightness in my chest that I hadn’t realized was there. At that moment, may God forgive me, I was worried not so much for a woman wandering bereft in the great woods as I was for my own part in her undoing.

  Gilbert shook his white head. “Jeremiah, surely she has just stepped out for a bit, a walk perhaps. She will be home soon and sorry to have caused her husband worry.” But even as he spoke, we all knew he was mistaken. No one went walking for recreation in weather this cold, first thing in the morning.

  “Calm yourself, Jeremiah. Let us take you inside, to warm yourself before you get a bone chill … Stay here with Mrs. Gilbert and Miss Hibbins, they’ll see to you while the rest of us search for Sophia—won’t we, neighbors?” Gilbert said with false enthusiasm as he helped the big man to his feet and turned to the rest of us. Speculation passed in the sideways glances of husband to wife, neighbor to neighbor—so the new bride has left her husband?—but no one had the heart to do anything but take up the pastor’s suggestion. The two women escorted Jeremiah, stumbling and dazed, into his house and the rest of us broke up into groups. We looked for a line of footprints in the snow leading away from the house, hoping that Sophia’s path had not been trampled by those who had answered Jeremiah’s shot.

  My father found one set of tiny footprints that could have been Sophia’s and the two of us began to trace her steps. With my eyes trained on the snow, my mind raced ahead, wondering what had drawn Sophia from her house. Perhaps Sophia had stewed over my words all night and woke with her mind made up, to have it out with Jonathan. How could our confrontation not have something to do with her disappearance? My heart beat fiercely as we followed the footprints that I feared would lead to the St. Andrews’ house, until the snow disappeared in the deeper woods and with it, Sophia’s tracks.

  Now we followed no discernible path, my father and I, the forest floor a dizzying patchwork of bare, hard ground and thinly scattered scabs of snow and dead leaves. I had no idea if my father was picking up telltale signs of Sophia’s path—snapped branches, crushed leaves—or if he pushed on out of a sense of duty. We traveled parallel to the river, the sound of the Allagash to my left. Usually I thought the sound of water rushing over rock comforting, but not today.

  Sophia had to have been moved strongly by something to venture into the woods by herself. Only the hardiest villagers went into the forest alone because it was easy to lose your way in the sameness. Acre after acre of forest unfurled in a repetition of birch and spruce and pine, and the regularity of boulders pushing their way up through the forest floor, all covered with extravagant mosses or crackled with celadon lichens.

  Maybe I should have spoken to my father earlier, to let him know that his neighborly sacrifice was unnecessary and that in all likelihood Sophia had gone to see a man, a man whose company she should not keep. She could be safe and warm in a room with this man while we tramped through the cold and damp. I pictured Sophia rushing along the trail, stealing away from her unhappy home to Jonathan, tenderhearted and confused, who would undoubtedly take her in. My stomach twisted at the thought of her tucked in Jonathan’s bed, the thought that she had won and I had lost and that Jonathan was now hers.

  Eventually we turned toward the river and walked a ways, following its contours. My father paused at one point, breaking a hole through a thin patch of ice to dip his hand in for a drink. Between sips, he eyed me not without curiosity.

  “I don’t know how much longer we will need to search. You can go home now, Lanore. This is no place for a girl. You must be freezing with cold.”

  I shook my head. “No, no, Father, I’d like to keep on a while longer …” It would be impossible to wait at home for news. I would go out of my mind or abandon all propriety to race to Jonathan’s house and confront Sophia. I could picture her, smug, triumphant. At that moment, I don’t think I’d hated anyone as much as I hated her.

  It was Father who spotted her first. He had been scanning the way ahead while I had kept my eyes trained on the dizzying ground underfoot. He found the frozen body trapped in an eddy formed by a fallen tree, almost hidden in a tangle of reeds and wild vines. She floated prone, caught in a mass of frozen cattails, her delicate body outstretched, the folds of her skirt and her long hair bobbing on the surface of the water. Her cloak sat on the riverbank, neatly folded.

  “Look away, girl,” my father said as he tried to turn me by the shoulders. I couldn’t tear my eyes from her.

  Father sounded the call while I stared dumbly at her corpse. Other searchers came crashing through the woods, following my father’s voice. Two of the men waded into the frigid water to pull her body from the embrace of the frozen grasses and the thin shelf of ice that had started to claim her. We spread her cape on the ground and laid her body on it, the sodden fabric clinging to her legs and torso. Her skin was blue all over and her eyes, mercifully, were closed.

  The men wrapped her in her cloak and took turns holding the edges, using it as a sling to carry Sophia’s body back home, while I walked behind them. My teeth chattered and my father came up to me to rub my arms in an attempt to warm me, but it did no good, for I shook and shivered from fear, not cold. I held my arms tight to my stomach, afraid I would be ill in front of my father. My presence dampened the discussion among the men and they refrained from speculating as to why Sophia had taken her life. They generally agreed, however, that Pastor Gilbert would not be told about the cape set deliberately aside. He would not know that she had been a suicide.

  When my father and I made it home, I ran straight to the fireplace and stood so close that the fire toasted my face, but even that heat could not stop my shaking. “Not so close,” my mother chided as she helped me take off my cloak, afraid no doubt that the cape might catch on a spitting ember. I would have welcomed it. I deserved to burn like a witch for what I’d done.

  A few hours later, my mother came up to me, squared her shoulders, and said, “I’m going to the Gilberts’ to help with the preparations for Sophia. I think you should come with me. It’s time you started taking your place among the women in this town and learned some of the duties that will be expected of you.”

  By now I had changed into a heavy nightgown, curled by the fire, and had drunk a mug of hot cider with rum. The drink helped to numb me, to tamp down the urge to cry out loud and confess, but I knew that I would come undone if I had to confront Sophia’s body, even in the presence of the other women in town.

  I rose up from the floor on an elbow. “I couldn’t … I don’t feel well. Still cold …”

  My mother pressed the back of her fingers to my forehead, then my throat. “If anything, I’d say you were burning with fever …” She looked at me cautiously, skeptically, then rose from the floor, tossing her cloak over her shoulders. “All right, this one time, seeing what you went through earlier …” Her words trailed off. She looked me over one more time, in a way I couldn’t quite figure out, and then slipped out the door.

  She t
old me later what had happened at the pastor’s house, how the women prepared Sophia’s body for burial. First, they set it by the fire to thaw, then they rinsed the river silt from her mouth and nose and gently combed out her hair. My mother described how white her skin had become from the time in the river, and how she’d been scraped with thin, red scratches after the current had dragged her corpse over submerged rocks. They dressed her in her finest dress, a yellow so pale as to be almost ivory, embellished with embroidery by her own needle and tailored to her slender frame with pin tucks. No mention was made of Sophia’s body, no abnormality, no remark of the faintest swell to the dead woman’s abdomen. If anyone noticed anything, it would be attributed to bloat, no doubt, water the poor girl had ingested as she drowned. And then a linen shroud was tucked into a plain panel coffin. A couple of men who had waited while the women completed their work loaded the coffin into a wagon and escorted it to Jeremiah’s house, where it would lie in wait for the funeral.

  As my mother calmly described the state of Sophia’s body, I felt as though nails were being driven into me, exhorting me to confess my wickedness. But I held on to my wits, if barely, and cried as my mother spoke, my hand shielding my eyes. My mother rubbed my back as though I were a child again. “Whatever is it, Lanore dear? Why are you so upset for Sophia? It is a terrible thing and she was our neighbor, yes, but I didn’t think you even knew her very well …” She sent me up to the loft with a goatskin filled with warm water and went to chide my father for taking me with him into the woods. I lay with the goatskin pressed against my stomach though it brought me no comfort. I lay awake, listening to all the sounds of the night—the wind, the shaking trees, the dying embers—whisper Sophia’s name.

  As had been the case at her wedding, Sophia Jacobs’s funeral was a mean affair, attended by her husband, her mother, and a few of her siblings, and not many others. The day was cold and overcast, snowfall promising to drift down from the sky as it had every day since Sophia had killed herself.