Enid quickly checked on her grandmother, who was snoring lightly in her bed. Downstairs in the kitchen, her father was sitting at the table with a wooden cup held loosely in his hand. The stench of sour cider filled the room. He looked up, face expressionless, and said, “Ye’ll be leavin’ on the morrow.”
Enid nodded and went straight to the fire to retrieve the pot of porridge that had been cooking slowly in the embers all night. She served her father a bowl without looking directly at him. She always saw her mother reflected in his cold blue eyes, saw him flinch a little when he looked at her, as if every glimpse of Enid’s face forced him to relive his wife’s abandonment all over again.
She looked just like her mother, or so she was told; she’d been four when her mother left. There were no mirrors in the house, but Enid had studied her heart-shaped face and deep-set eyes in the window glass. She and Sorcha looked nothing alike. Enid had nearly black hair to Sorcha’s reddish-brown, and her eyes were the color of mud, whereas Sorcha’s were a deep sea green. Enid wasn’t pretty by Sorcha’s standards, but in the lower classes in this day and age it was best to be plain so you didn’t attract unwanted attention.
Enid didn’t know why her mother left; whether her father’s cruelty had driven her away or if he had become broken and bitter because of her departure. She only knew her mother had been there one day and was gone the next, leaving behind her husband, young half-breed daughter and her old mother, now called Elizabeth. Grandmother Elizabeth once told her that her mother, whose Mahican name was Bluebird, had pined for the old ways and went to live with the Iroquois in the south, but it wasn’t a subject they often discussed in that house.
Aggie, the new household slave, entered from the side door carrying a full bucket of milk. A basket of eggs was nestled in the crook of her other arm. Her black eyes warily watched Fergus Thompson’s back as she skirted behind him to set the bucket on the floor next to the churn. She set the basket on the buffet table and then tried to leave quietly the way she’d come, but Fergus reached back without looking and snagged her skirt. The dusky-skinned girl didn’t resist as he pulled her to his side.
Enid busied herself readying the brick oven for baking, trying to ignore Aggie’s murmured sounds of protest at whatever her father was doing. Aggie was the former slave of Jedediah Johnson, who’d given her to Fergus in what Enid suspected was trade for his daughter. She tried to console herself that unlike Aggie, at least she was getting marriage out of the deal. She was only a year older than Aggie and had no idea what the other girl thought about her new situation. She did know how lonely her father had been, but seeing him with a girl half his age, and from the sound of it, a girl very much unwilling, made her sick.
Despite the fact that it would probably anger him, she abruptly left the room, left the house. She rushed past the young oak tree and headed for the orchard by the creek. Plucking an apple from the nearest branch, she stalked to her favorite patch of meadow and flounced down in the light of the rising sun. The grass was moist with dew, but not wet enough to soak through her skirts. She was hungry and the apple was crisp and sweet, but she hardly enjoyed it.
Not for the first time, she railed internally against the disparity between her world and Sorcha’s. In her innermost mind, she and Sorcha were one and the same person, but on the outside, out of necessity, she’d developed two distinct personalities. Both lives were hers, but they were wildly divergent, and she much preferred life in the twenty-first century. How could she not? Here, she was slightly better than a slave, working from sunup to sundown with very little joy in her life. There, slavery no longer existed! At least not in America. Aggie was in the kitchen right now sitting on Enid’s father’s lap, unable to stop him from fondling her. Enid certainly couldn’t help her. Sorcha’s father wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing, but if he did, Sorcha wouldn’t be completely helpless. Here, the authorities would laugh if Enid tried to tell them; then her father would beat her and it would all be legal and normal.
She got up and fetched a bucket, filling it quickly with apples that hung low on the branches. Her father would forgive her lapse in manners for storming out of the kitchen if she used the excuse that she planned to bake him a cobbler.
Before she reached the front door, she heard the dull clop clop of a horse’s hooves on the dirt track. She stepped a little faster, hoping to get inside before the visitor got near enough to see her, but then, “Miss Thompson!” rang out. Enid shuddered, because of course it was Jedediah.
Resigned, she turned and offered him the best smile she could muster. No matter how odious his appearance, no matter that his first wife was barely cold in her grave; he would give her a respectable home, and that was more than the daughter of a poor Irish immigrant and an Indian squaw could hope for.
“Good day to you, Mr. Johnson.”
Jedediah’s bay mare rolled her eyes and snorted, bucking a little as he dismounted. “This one,” he said, stroking the mare’s neck and then giving it a firm pat, “is a spirited animal. Can ya ride?”
Enid had ridden the nag that pulled her father’s plow many times. “Yes, sir.”
“Have ya ever ridden for sport?”
She blinked. “Forgive me, sir, but do you mean hunting?”
Jedediah laughed. His teeth were stained brown and some were black with rot, and his Adam’s apple bobbed on his thin neck. “No, my dear girl, I mean for pleasure. Have ya ever ridden for the sheer joy of it?”
A rare memory of her mother chose that moment to surface: Enid, looking across a wide, sunny field of young corn from the bare back of a spotted pony; a woman with two black braids hanging down her back, gazing over her shoulder at Enid, brown eyes crinkled in laughter.
She looked down at her feet. “No, sir.”
“Jedediah!” Her father’s voice boomed from the doorway. “I see ye’ve come to look over yer property. Pray reassure me there be no buyer’s remorse!”
Enid had to give it to Jedediah: he looked appalled at Fergus’ crudeness. “Not at all,” he said. “I were merely passin’ by.”
“On the way to where?” Fergus asked, gesturing at the wilderness encroaching on the farm.
Jedediah’s face went red and Enid took pity on him. “It is a lovely morning for a ride.”
“Yes…yes! Would that ya could accompany me.” He looked expectantly at Fergus.
Her father’s face froze, but only for an instant. Social convention didn’t mean much on the edge of the frontier, not to someone like Fergus. He said gruffly, “Take her,” before turning on his heel and stomping back into the house.
Enid sat behind Jedediah’s saddle, balanced precariously on the mare’s wide rump. If she could have gotten away with it, she would have straddled the mare instead of sitting with both legs primly to the side. As it was, she had to hold tight to Jedediah’s waist to prevent her heels from digging into the skittish mare’s hindquarters.
As expected, Jedediah smelled horrible. No one ever washed and because of it, the stink of human body odor was commonplace. It was one of many things Sorcha found distasteful that Enid had to tolerate. She reached a hand into her linen dress and wiggled her fingers under the waistband of her petticoat. There, she dug deep into the pocket tied around her waist and withdrew a small bundle. Pressing it tightly against her nose, she inhaled the dried lavender within.
Jedediah said, “I know the weddin’ is sudden-like for ya. I thought mebbe ya’d like to see the farm.”
“That would be a comfort, I am sure,” Enid replied.
He didn’t talk much after that. Her father’s farm was on the outskirts of the village to the west of them. They rode east, away from what little civilization the area offered. The mare plodded along the narrow trail, past a placid pond, which even in her apprehension Enid found beautiful. When they finally reached Jedediah’s homestead, the sun was high in the clear October sky.
To say her father had told her little about what to expect would have been an understatement. The house wa
s a log cabin built precariously atop a steeply rising hill. Each jerking step the mare took threatened to unseat Enid. She was forced to clutch Jedediah even more closely as they lurched upward. He’d scratched at his scalp several times on the trip; she prayed his greasy hair was not infested with lice.
Next to the house was a small chicken coop, the only other structure in sight. She heard the clucking of chickens, but no lowing of cows. A scan of the area didn’t reveal a recognizable crop. She’d assumed he was a farmer since he’d called this a farm, but there was no evidence of it. From the looks of the house, he wasn’t a carpenter. In this day and age, it would the height of discourtesy to ask him what his occupation was, even if she was about to marry him.
When they approached the front entrance to the cabin, a middle-aged black woman appeared with two white children clutching her apron. Jedediah dismounted and helped Enid from the back of his horse. The children didn’t move; didn’t rush forward yelling, “Daddy!” But Enid knew they were his, and the discovery made her already nervous stomach cramp up something fierce.
The next hour passed in a blur. Inside, the rough-hewn walls and floor spoke volumes about Jedediah’s lack of prosperity. He was a poor man trying to hack a living out of the wilderness. Poorer even than Fergus, despite the fact that he owned a slave. But however deprived the household, it was well-kept by Bess, whose resemblance to Aggie suggested she was the slave girl’s mother. The children were Sarah and Ezekiel, six and five years old respectively. Neither one looked at her with curiosity. They knew she was to be their new mother, but their faces were blank and their demeanor subdued. Enid knew very little about children, but was intuitive enough to see they were in shock. She could certainly relate. The one window in the main room was open to the afternoon air, and either by design or accident it framed the view of a lone headstone about a hundred yards behind the cabin.
By the time Jedediah dropped her off in front of her father’s house, she longed to go to sleep and live in Sorcha’s world again.
Chapter Three
Sorcha
It had become habit to wake up and immediately construct a mental barrier between her worlds in order to function normally each day. When she spoke about Enid to Paula or her grandmother, she acted as if she were talking about another person. Disassociating herself made it easier to cope.
This morning, she found it harder than usual to push her raw emotions behind the barrier. She took an extra-long shower, scrubbing her skin pink as if it would banish the persistent memory of Jedediah’s stench.
After she got dressed in a short-sleeved white sweater and skinny jeans that tucked into her furry-edged ankle boots, she wanted nothing more than to rush out into the countryside and locate Jedediah’s cabin, but it had been so rickety she doubted the structure still existed. The gravestone that she’d assumed belonged to Jedediah’s dead wife might or might not still be there – her coffin could have been removed and placed elsewhere by new property owners at any time in the last 240 years. Or her final resting place could have merely been reclaimed by the land, obliterated from all memory.
Sorcha poured herself a bowl of raisin bran and slurped it down in her father’s study while she researched the property online. She was pretty sure she already knew what she would find, and sure enough, county records showed the entire area had been developed as condos.
Grammy Fay poked her head in. Her salt-and-pepper hair was still in curlers, but she was dressed in one of her favorite velour tracksuits. “What are you up to, young lady?”
Sorcha had a mouthful of cereal and couldn’t answer fast enough to stop Fay from jumping to her own conclusion. “Do I interpret your silence to mean you don’t want to tell me? I hope you’re not still trying to find out when Enid died.”
It was a source of constant conflict between them. Fay was firm in her conviction that Sorcha would have no end of trouble getting on with her lives if she knew when she, as Enid, was going to die.
Sorcha replied testily, “I know, I know. It’s perverse of me, but I can’t help it. I have to know.”
Fay had emigrated from Ireland as a child and had deep ties to Celtic mythology. Sorcha fully expected a superstitious piece of wisdom and Fay didn’t disappoint. “It’s dangerous to tempt fate.”
Sorcha nodded. “That’s what Elizabeth says, too.”
Enid’s grandmother was just as superstitious as Fay; it was something else the two old women had in common.
“How is she?”
Sorcha looked up. “Not well.”
Elizabeth’s grave was in the family cemetery out back. Her small, weatherworn tombstone was inscribed, ‘Elizabeth, b. 1700. Beloved Grandmother.” It was obvious from the words that Enid had not only composed them, but deliberately left off Elizabeth’s date of death, thus preventing herself, as Sorcha, from finding out when her grandmother would die. From Elizabeth’s long-standing symptoms, Sorcha knew she probably had tuberculosis and it was only a matter of time.
In a mock-cheerful voice, she said, “And Enid’s about to be married off to a freshly-widowed farmer, so I don’t know what will happen to Elizabeth after she moves out.”
Fay gasped. “What? Why didn’t you say anything? Married?”
“Yes, Grammy, married. It’s a common occurrence in the colonies for teenagers to marry. We don’t have much choice in the matter. No one gives a crap about all the pervy old men hooking up with little girls.”
“He’s old? Who is he? Do you like him at all?”
With a monumental effort, Sorcha kept her face neutral. If her true feelings showed, Fay would worry, and when Fay worried, she forced Sorcha to think and talk about Enid’s life. “He could be worse.”
“Oh.” Fay sounded doubtful.
Sorcha powered her father’s computer off and stood. To forestall what she anticipated was coming next, she said, “I know all about the birds and bees, Grammy.”
Fay’s hand slowly rose to cover her mouth. She stared at her granddaughter with eloquent eyes.
Sorcha brushed past her and grabbed her backpack. Outside, a crisp white frost covered the lawn. She thought about going back inside for a jacket, but didn’t want her grandmother to get her second wind, and besides, Paula was waiting in the lane.
With Luanne in the passenger seat. Again. Sighing, Sorcha got into the back.
Luanne turned and grinned, revealing a slight gap between her front teeth Sorcha hadn’t noticed before. “Sorry to disrupt the carpool routine again. Bail was set a bit rich for Mom’s blood, so she had to go visit her cousin in Poughkeepsie. He’s a bondsman.”
Sorcha didn’t mean to be rude, but she was tense and irritated, so she didn’t pause to consider the question that popped out, “How does Ben get to school?” And why aren’t you riding with him?
Luanne didn’t seem to be offended. “He rides his bike.”
“Every day?” Paula asked. “That’s a long ride from Cliffside.”
Luanne nodded. “Yeah. He’s kinda hard-core.”
“So that’s how he got that gluteus maximus.”
Paula’s comment made Sorcha roll her eyes, but Luanne only laughed and said, “Mountain biking’ll do that to a butt.”
Sorcha didn’t want to talk about Ben Webster – she couldn’t help but compare him to Jedediah. She dug her smartphone out and accessed Google maps, trying to ignore it as her best friend rather unsubtly probed Luanne for more information on Ben. She pulled up the satellite map of the general area where Jedediah’s cabin was once located. A little north of the condo development was what looked to be a park, but there was a small separate building, too.
“Whatcha doin’?” Luanne asked. Sorcha looked up to find the older girl’s eyes fixed on her smartphone.
“Nothing.”
Before Sorcha realized her intention, Luanne plucked the phone out of her hand and examined it closely. “That used to be the old Indian Artifacts Exhibition. Standard second grade field trip.” She handed the phone back.
“Oh
, yeah,” Paula said. “Remember, Sorch, in Mrs. Beckett’s class? Mario Sanchez knocked over that stuffed horse display?”
How could she forget? She’d been standing ten feet away when the horse came crashing down and split open, spewing moldy sawdust all over her.
“The museum,” she said thoughtfully. Even as a second-grader Sorcha had recognized the Indian Artifacts Exhibition for what it was: a small, low-budget, under-staffed local showcase. Maybe someone there knew something about the history of the area, though.
“We live nearby but it’s closed now,” Luanne said, unintentionally dashing Sorcha’s hopes. “The old guy who ran the place donated all the items to my college and we built a whole wing dedicated to the area’s history.”
She said ‘we’ like she had something to do with whatever rich benefactor got a tax deduction from building that wing.
Luanne rambled on. “There’s some really rare stuff, some of it from as far back as the American Revolution...but I’m sure you’re not interested.”
Sorcha produced a polite smile designed to throw Luanne off the fact that she was interested. Enid had been born in the midst of the French and Indian War, and even though history showed her small village played no part in the events of that war, Sorcha knew it had affected many of the villager’s lives – taken many of their lives. She tried to learn all she could to keep Enid and Elizabeth safe now that the conflict between the colonials and loyalists was heating up, but it wasn’t easy finding useful information. Written history in general was so condensed; limited to events the powers-that-be at the time considered important enough to record for posterity, and those events were often filtered or censored by whoever recorded it. Sometimes she stumbled across transcribed diaries or letters on the Internet, but none thus far had touched upon Enid’s isolated village. The same village Paula drove through now.
SelfSame Page 2
