But perhaps Jane’s grandmother was right—better to meet her father while it remained her idea, not his, even though it seemed a great deal to ask on this first afternoon in the peace of her grandmother’s house, after so trying a sea voyage.
THE SKY HUNG the color of ice. Jagged, white shards of it, like the blades of knives—or swords—lined the stream. Jane could not have said there was one thing warm and welcoming in the sight of it, and yet as she stood gazing over the mill valley she felt the width and depth of its comfort. Even Winslow’s fulling mill and her father’s grist mill lay as still and peaceful as if all the trouble they had caused had been nothing but lies.
Lies. Oddly, the word brought Phinnie Paine to mind. But wasn’t that what all his agreeableness amounted to, now that Jane knew his true feelings about her father—lies? No marriage could thrive on such deceit. But as Jane walked and thought, she was forced to think, perhaps for the first time—of what Phinnie had said to her in her grandfather’s office. There had been no deceit in that. And how had Jane responded? First, with silence, even as Phinnie waited in all patience for any words she would offer. And what words had Jane finally offered? How my father loved you. Perhaps, after all, there was the biggest lie of all of it. Her father wanted Phinnie’s means and Phinnie’s talents, talents that included his ability to create more means, to create an air of agreeableness out of adversity. Which meant . . . more lies.
Jane continued walking until her father’s house rose before her, tall and square and solid and immovable. She stepped into the dooryard and halted. Once, when she was so young that she could remember nothing before it, her father had carried her into the dooryard and pointed upward. “Look, Jane, at the moon. Look how it watches over you. As I do.” Or was that what he’d said? Or had her corrupted memory added the “As I do”? Whether she correctly remembered hearing the words, it made little difference, for she could still feel their meaning—that she was loved and cherished and safe in her father’s arms.
Jane stepped across the dooryard and opened the door. Bethiah saw her first. She stumbled up from her knees in front of the fire and threw herself at Jane, shrieking enough to dull both their eardrums. The sight of the two sisters joined brought Hitty and Anne into it, and altogether the noise brought Mehitable down the stairs with the babe—so grown he could no doubt walk down on his own if Mehitable hadn’t gripped him so hard—and Neddy hanging back behind. Neddy would hang back; he would know the trouble her visit would cause, as would Mehitable, even as she reached over the clinging girls to lay a hand on Jane’s hair.
“My dearest Jane,” she said, the words matching what Jane had first taken for meaningless addresses in her letters; now Jane could look at her stepmother’s face as she said them and almost believe they were true. But she had little time to study the look before it was gone, replaced with the old, familiar mask, as Mehitable’s eyes moved from Jane’s face to something behind. Jane turned just in time to catch the closing of her father’s office door.
Chapter Thirty-one
TO KNOW HOW much one loved a thing one must see it at its worst—so it was with winter in Satucket. A few days after Jane and her grandmother had arrived another gale swept in, ripping a limb off the shadblow and raking a strip of shingles off the barn roof. A week later a northeast storm dropped a foot of snow, trapping the women within doors and burying the wood pile. With the New Year came a bitter, chilling cold.
Despite the adverse conditions, Jane’s family came to visit—sometimes just Bethiah but on the better days the three girls together. Mehitable came once and Neddy twice; Jane saw nothing of her father and he sent no message, which was all Jane had expected. She heard from Bethiah that their father spent most days closed up in his office, that Mehitable still suffered from her sick headache, that Winslow had gotten a new horse and there was no talk of anyone’s going to court anymore. She said, “Shall you ever come home again?” But before Jane could answer, Bethiah answered for herself. “He must say you can come, mustn’t he? He won’t, will he?”
When Jane made no answer Bethiah said, “I hate him.”
How simple it sounded in her sister’s mouth.
AT THE MIDDLE of January Granny Hall sent the neighbor boy for Jane as if she’d never been gone. The King’s road had been worked smoother than the shore road, the Southside road something in between, but by the time Jane reached the midwife’s she was mud to the knees. The old woman greeted her with a list of chores, as if she’d been saving them up for Jane: the dried herbs to be brought down from the attic, the roots to be pounded, the tinctures to be brewed, but at the midday she was sent to the Cookes’ alone, to treat a burn. The Cookes lived a good distance east along the King’s road, and just walking there Jane rediscovered the beauty of a sparsely trafficked road, the freedom to let her eyes light where they would, the comfort of knowing who and what awaited her around the turn. At the Cookes she discovered seven-year-old Priscilla, old enough to take her place at the fire but young enough to forget what it was; she’d laid the inside of her wrist across the hot iron and was still in tears when Jane arrived. An ointment of linseed oil, beeswax, and resin drew the heat and dried the eyes; it also reminded Jane what had been missing in all her supposed nursing of Aunt Gill: the patient never relieved, or, indeed, even ill.
As Jane worked her way back to Granny Hall’s, she continued to think of Aunt Gill, but to her surprise she discovered that some of the heat had been drawn from that too. Perhaps she was not as ready to forgive as John Adams had been, but perhaps she was, at last, forgetting. Or perhaps it was that here in Satucket Aunt Gill mattered so very little, after all.
THE COLD CONTINUED. FIRST the edge of the bay turned to slush, then the well froze, next the ink, and last the clock. By the end of the month the whole of the shore was locked in with ice, taking away any hope of a return to town by sea. At almost the same time Jane’s grandmother began to spend a good deal of time standing at the above-stairs window, staring out at the frozen bay. “Look, Jane,” she said. “Look there to the westward. Do you not think it shifting?”
Jane looked out and saw the crinkled white surface of the bay solid to the horizon. She looked to the west as instructed and saw only the rippled shadows of the late-day sun turning the ice to slate. She said, “You’re not looking to leave so soon?”
Jane’s grandmother didn’t answer at once. After a time she said, “No, but ’tis an unsettling feeling, knowing that were something to happen I couldn’t get to him.” She swung around. She gave a laugh that held little humor in it.
Jane said in haste, “Indeed, I do think the ice begins to move.” It was the only lie she’d ever told her grandmother, and its falseness rang loud in the room, but curiously, her grandmother appeared to believe her.
When Jane said later, “We’ve enough grease for candles now,” her grandmother said, “Why take the trouble? The mice will only eat them once we’re gone.”
IN HER GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE Jane found moments in which the only sound about her was the hissing of the fire. Jane had never experienced such silence in town or, indeed, in her father’s house; the silence fueled her, repaired her frayed edges, rested her mind, but it did not seem to have the same effect on her grandmother. She sat down, got up, climbed the stairs to peer out at the ice five times a day or more.
Jane had worked three more days for Granny Hall and the ice hadn’t budged when the letters came, delivered by the hand of Seth Cobb, another shipmaster from the village. Cobb was a sociable man with easy, engaging ways; Jane was surprised when her grandmother began to beat him with questions even before a proper greeting had been exchanged.
“These letters came by sea? The shore has opened?”
“No, indeed. They came by road. I met them at Yarmouth.”
“But you sail soon?”
Cobb looked with understandable puzzlement at Jane. “No one sails. I must be in town a week next and plan to travel overland.”
Jane’s grandmother stood in silenc
e, staring at the letter in her hand. It was left to Jane to offer up their fire and refreshment, both of which Cobb seemed to sense it best to refuse. Once he’d gone Jane’s grandmother stared a moment longer at the letter before breaking the seal. When she’d finished reading she handed it across. “I feared such a thing,” she said. “I feared it as soon as I saw the ice form.”
Jane read the letter in her own alarm but had some trouble accounting for her grandmother’s concern; her grandfather called it a common distemper and only mentioned it by the way toward the end of the letter: Being kept within doors several days by a common distemper I managed to miss the worst of the weather . . .
Jane looked up from her reading. “A common distemper, he calls it. No doubt nothing more than his usual winter congestion.”
“Or a lung fever.”
“Lung fever! He gives no hint of a lung fever.”
“He would hint at nothing! Only think of the look of him when we left. He works himself to illness. I know him. Indeed, I knew this would come.”
“But look what he says—he was kept within doors a few days only.”
“And which few days was that? Perhaps he wrote in the throes of it. Perhaps he’s not yet recovered.”
“But look at the date of the letter. Surely by now he’s recovered.”
“Or dead. And when should a letter with that news reach me?”
Jane’s grandmother got up and climbed the stairs. Jane followed and found her as she knew she’d find her, peering out the window at the ice-choked bay and breathing deeply, as if she were suffocating under the weight of it. Jane looked out at the sea with her; she could glimpse a narrow ribbon of blue on the horizon, but no motion in the ice. This time, she stayed silent.
JANE HAD RECEIVED a letter too. My Darling Jane, Henry had written, and Jane knew the rest without reading on. He had not enjoyed a day since she’d left town. He could not rest for thought of her. He must beg that she return to town and marry him without delay. He added: Town is much the same since you left it—the deficiencies of the Massacre trials continue to be the first subject. Mr. Sam Adams and Mr. John Adams each walk about in a fine heat but for contrary reasons. He signed it: Your Greatest Admirer—HK.
The letter worked a curious spell on Jane; she sat down in all conscientiousness to contemplate the advantages and disadvantages of marriage to Henry Knox, but in turning her mind to Henry now she discovered how completely he had been absent from her thoughts since she’d arrived at Satucket. She was able to draw up his physical form easily enough, but she couldn’t seem to hear him. She turned again to the letter and reading it a second time was reminded of a long-ago letter from Phinnie Paine, in which a question had arisen in Jane’s mind whether she was indeed first in his thoughts. Even in Henry’s letter proposing their marriage, the politics of town had intruded.
Henry’s letter proposing their marriage. This was what Jane was to think about, and again she tried to do so, but again found herself thinking of Phinnie Paine, of the no she’d delivered to him with such ease. Was this a sign, the fact that she hadn’t yet managed to offer that word to Henry? Had the comet indeed been a sign? And what if she did offer another no to Henry? Was that what her life was to be, a series of nos until nothing but the life of an Aunt Gill remained? But as Jane sat and thought more she realized that her view of Aunt Gill’s life had somehow now changed. Aunt Gill had believed in a thing and had set about to be of use to it. She had been of use to it. And was that not all Jane had asked?
JANE WAS IN HER shift and readying for bed when her grandmother burst through her door in her own shift, her shawl wrapped around her, her gold and silver hair let down out of its knot and streaming behind. “When did Cobb say he must to be in town?”
“A week next.”
“And how does he travel?”
“Overland.”
“Yes, yes, I mean by horse or by carriage?”
“He didn’t say.”
“We must find out. We must find out if by carriage, and if so, what room there is in it. You must take him a note in the morning.”
Jane looked at her grandmother in surprise.
She said, “I no longer have the will to be apart from him.”
And there, so simply, so clearly, was Jane’s answer for Henry, without a father to demand it, without a comet to signal it. She could not, she should not, marry any man she could so painlessly leave behind.
Jane’s grandmother returned to her room. Jane burrowed under her coverlet but soon tossed it back again. When she knew the thing to do she needed to do the thing. She returned to the keeping room and went through the old routine—blowing up the fire, lighting the candle off the coal, setting the inkwell on the hearth to thaw, laying out paper and pen—and as she did those things she thought how this was to be a part of her life now, no matter whether she lived in Satucket or town, that “home” was now a fractured thing, that someone she cared about should always be away from her, and only letters would allow of an exchange between. Might she one day become her brother, who could forsake a home for a cause? Or her grandmother, who it now appeared would at last forsake her home for a husband? Yes, Jane thought, she might do such a thing. But not for Henry Knox. She picked up her pen.
Dear Henry,
No doubt you ask me to be your wife because you believe me to possess those qualities you should require in a wife, but as I have not yet determined for myself what those qualities should be, or, indeed, what qualities I should require in a husband if I should indeed require one, I must refuse your kind offer. Please know that I shall long treasure the honor of your proposal and shall remain always,
Your friend,
Jane Clarke
THE NEXT MORNING JANE set out to be of use to her grandmother with the call on the Cobbs but was disappointed to discover that already her new philosophy had failed her—she wanted to be of use to her grandmother and secure her a carriage ride to town, but she did not want to get into that carriage herself. She trudged on, with her heart trailing behind. The Cobbs lived along the shore road that ran from the landing to the meetinghouse, no great walk for Jane in easy weather, but hobbling over great chunks of ice and potholes made it another matter. Indeed, it was hard to look at the bare fields covered in their silver-gray sheen and remember the summers she’d spent there watermeloning.
Mr. Cobb read her grandmother’s note and passed it to his wife. She said, “Well, of course, Seth, you must take the carriage and bring them with you. Poor Mr. Freeman.”
By the change in Mr. Cobb’s features it seemed clear enough to Jane that he’d harbored no intention of bringing the carriage, but by a hasty adjustment it became equally clear that he would do so. “Indeed, I should be happy to carry Mrs. Freeman to town.”
“And Jane,” his wife added.
And Jane.
The plan was laid out for the next day’s departure, and Jane thanked both Cobbs heartily on behalf of her grandmother, but there in the shadow of the thing all the noise and anger and dirt of town came crashing back at her, a great bleakness opened inside her. She must return to town and fall again on her grandparents’ mercy for her keep until she might find some reasonable employment, perhaps with another Aunt Gill, perhaps, if she were lucky, with someone truly ill.
And there Jane remembered Granny Hall.
THE OLD WOMAN SHOWED little surprise at Jane’s appearing unsummoned. She said, “Wood first. Then I’ll need a syrup of vinegar and onions for Mrs. Hopkins.”
Jane said, “I’d be happy to do those things. I’d be happy to come every day and work at whatever you wish, and I shall only charge you a shilling a day for it.”
Granny Hall closed her eyes and tipped her head to the ceiling. She let out a sound like a crow, which Jane didn’t at once identify as laughter. “More like I’ll charge you a shilling a day for the teaching.”
“Without the expense of my keep and care?”
“You would keep yourself! Where? In your father’s barn?”
/> “I would keep myself at my grandparents’ house and look after it while they’re gone. But I suppose ten pence, with the noon meal provided, would keep me fed and warm.”
The old woman studied her. “Six pence.”
“Eight. And the meal.”
The old woman turned back to her kettle, which was all Jane would get for a nod on the deal.
Jane collected the wood. She made up the syrup, carried it to the Hopkins house, and administered it to Mrs. Hopkins, who was so glad to see Jane she gave her an extra twopence of her own, making up for the first day’s twopence Jane had lost in her deal, which Jane decided to take as her own kind of sign. She left the Hopkins house feeling both heavy and light—eight pence a day was in fact more than she had expected to receive from Granny Hall, and the work would be much as she had expected, but she felt the weight of it just the same.
WHEN JANE RETURNED SHE found her grandmother bent over the oven, scraping a spill off the bricks. Jane took the knife from her and began to chip at the mess, explaining the arrangement with the Cobbs as she worked. She looked sideways and saw her grandmother’s shoulders loosen in relief. Jane continued, “I wonder what you should think if I were to stay behind in Satucket. I might keep the house for you till your return, put in your garden for you once it thaws, perhaps get in some chickens. I’ve spoken to Granny Hall and have work there if I wish it.”
The Rebellion of Jane Clarke Page 24
