She dropped the copper bucket into the well, and the windlass clattered as the rope unwound. A muffled splash. She waited a moment for the bucket to fill, then wound it upward. It arrived brimming. She meant to pour it out into the wooden bucket she brought with her, but instead she brought the copper bucket to her lips and drank from the cold heavy load of water that it bore. So many years she had waited to taste that water, the water that Alvin tamed the night he tamed himself. She had been so afraid, watching him all night, and when at last in the morning he filled up the first vengeful hole he dug, she wept in relief. This water wasn’t salty, but still it tasted to her like her own tears.
The hammer was silent. As always, she found Alvin’s heartfire at once, without even trying. He was leaving the smithy, coming outside. Did he know she was there? No. He always came for water when he finished his work for the day. Of course she could not turn to him, not yet, not until she actually heard his step. Yet, though she knew he was coming and listened for him, she couldn’t hear him; he moved as silently as a squirrel on a limb. Not until he spoke did he make a sound.
“Pretty good water, ain’t it?”
She turned around to face him. Turned too quickly, too eagerly—the rope still held the bucket, so it lurched out of her hands, splashed her with water, and clattered back down into the well.
“I’m Alvin, you remember? Didn’t mean to frighten you, Ma’am. Miss Larner.”
“I foolishly forgot the bucket was tied,” she said. “I’m used to pumps and taps, I’m afraid. Open wells are not common in Philadelphia.”
She turned back to the well to draw the bucket up again.
“Here, let me,” he said.
“There’s no need. I can wind it well enough.”
“But why should you, Miss Larner, when I’m glad to do it for you?” She stepped aside and watched as he cranked the windlass with one hand, as easily as a child might swing a rope. The bucket fairly flew to the top of the well. She looked into his heartfire, just dipped in, to see if he was showing off for her. He was not. He could not see how massive his own shoulders were, how his muscles danced under the skin as his arm moved He could not even see the peacefulness of his own face, the same quiet repose that one might see in the face of a fearless stag. There was no watchfulness in him. Some people had darting eyes, as if they had to be alert for danger, or perhaps for prey. Others looked intently at the task at hand, concentrating on what they were doing. But Alvin had a quiet distance, as if he had no particular concern about what anyone else or he himself might be doing, but instead dwelt on inward thoughts that no one else could hear. Again the words of Gray’s Elegy played out in her mind.
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stay;
Along the cool, sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Poor Alvin. When I’m done with you, there’ll be no cool sequestered vale. You’ll look back on your prenticeship as the last peaceful days of your life.
He gripped the full, heavy bucket with one hand on the rim, and easily tipped it to pour it out into the bucket she had brought, which he held in his other hand; he did it as lightly and easily as a housewife pours cream from one cup into another. What if those hands as lightly and easily held my arms? Would he break me without meaning to, being so strong? Would I feel manacled in his irresistible grasp? Or would he burn me up in the white heat of his heartfire?
She reached out for her bucket.
“Please let me carry it, Ma’am. Miss Larner.”
“There’s no need.”
“I know I’m dirtied up, Miss Larner, but I can carry it to your door and set it inside without messing anything.”
Is my disguise so monstrously aloof that you think I refuse your help out of excessive cleanliness? “I only meant that I didn’t want to make you work anymore today. You’ve helped me enough already for one day.”
He looked straight into her eyes, and now he lost that peaceful expression. There was even a bit of anger in his eyes. “If you’re afraid I’ll want you to pay me, you needn’t have no fear of that. If this is your dollar, you can have it back. I never wanted it.” He held out to her the coin that Whitley Physicker had tossed him from the carriage.
“I reproved Dr. Physicker at the time. I thought it insulting that he should presume to pay you for the service you did me out of pure gallantry. It cheapened both of us, I thought, for him to act as if the events of this morning were worth exactly one dollar.”
His eyes had softened now.
Peggy went on in her Miss Larner voice. “But you must forgive Dr. Physicker. He is uncomfortable with wealth, and looks for opportunities to share it with others. He has not yet learned how to do it with perfect tact.”
“Oh, it’s no never mind now, Miss Larner, seeing how it didn’t come from you.” He put the coin back in his pocket and started to carry the full bucket up the hill toward the house.
It was plain he was unaccustomed to walking with a lady. His strides were far too long, his pace too quick, for her to keep up with him. She couldn’t even walk the same route he took—he seemed oblivious to the degree of slope. He was like child, not an adult, taking the most direct route even if it meant unnecessary clambering over obstacles.
And yet I’m barely five years older than he is. Have I come to believe my own disguise? At twenty-three, am I already thinking and acting and living like a woman of twice that age? Didn’t I once love to walk just as he does, over the most difficult ground, for the sheer love of the exertion and accomplishment?
Nevertheless, she walked the easier path, skirting the hill and then climbing up where the slope was longer and gentler. He was already there, waiting at the door.
“Why didn’t you open the door and set the bucket inside? The door isn’t locked,” she said.
“Begging your pardon. Miss Larner, but this is a door that asks not to be opened, whether it’s locked or not.”
So, she thought, he wants to make sure I know about the hidden hexes he put in the locks. Not many people could see a hidden hex—nor could she, for that matter. She wouldn’t have known about them if she hadn’t watched him put the hexes in the lock. But of course she couldn’t very well tell him that. So she asked, “Oh, is there some protection here that I can’t see?”
“I just put a couple of hexes into the lock. Nothing much, but it should make it fairly safe here. And there’s a hex in the top of the stove, so I don’t think you have to worry much about sparks getting free.”
“You have a great deal of confidence in your hexery, Alvin.”
“I do them pretty good. Most folks knows a few hexes, anyway, Miss Larner. But not many smiths can put them into the iron. I just wanted you to know.”
He wanted her to know more than that, of course. So she gave him the response he hoped for. “I take it, then, that you did some of the work on this springhouse.”
“I done the windows, Miss Larner. They glide up and down sweet as you please, and there’s pegs to hold them in place. And the stove, and the locks, and all the iron fittings. And my helper, Arthur Stuart, he scraped down the walls.”
For a young man who seemed artless, he was steering the conversation rather well. For a moment she thought of toying with him, of pretending not to make the connections he was counting on, just to see how he handled it. But no—he was only planning to ask her to do what she came here to do. There was no reason to make it hard for him. The teaching itself would be hard enough. “Arthur Stuart,” she said. “He must be the same boy that Goody Guester asked me to teach privately.”
“Oh, did she already ask you? Or shouldn’t I ask?”
“I have no intention of keeping it a secret, Alvin. Yes, I’ll be teaching Arthur Stuart.”
“I’m glad of that, Miss Larner. He’s the smartest boy you ever knew. And a mimic! Why, he can hear anything once and say it back to you in your own voice. You’ll hardly believe it
even when he’s a-doing it.”
“I only hope he doesn’t choose to play such a game when I’m teaching him.”
Alvin frowned. “Well, it isn’t rightly a game, Miss Larner. It’s just something he does without meaning to in particular. I mean to say, if he starts talking back to you in your own voice, he isn’t making fun or nothing. It’s just that when he hears something he remembers it voice and all, if you know what I mean. He can’t split them up and remember the words without the voice that gave them.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
In the distance, Peggy heard a door slam closed. She cast out and looked, finding Father’s and Mother’s heartfires coming toward her. They were quarreling, of course, but if Alvin was to ask her, he’d have to do it quickly.
“Was there something else you wanted to say to me, Alvin?”
This was the moment he’d been leading up to, but now he was turning shy on her. “Well, I had some idea of asking you—but you got to understand, I didn’t carry the water for you so you’d feel obliged or nothing. I would’ve done that anyway, for anybody, and as for what happened today, I didn’t rightly know that you were the teacher. I mean maybe I might’ve guessed, but I just didn’t think of it. So what I done was just itself, and you don’t owe me nothing.”
“I think I’ll decide how much gratitude I owe, Alvin. What did you want to ask me?”
“Of course you’ll be busy with Arthur Stuart, so I can’t expect you to have much time free, maybe just one day a week, just an hour even. It could be on Saturdays, and you could charge whatever you want, my master’s been giving me free time and I’ve saved up some of my own earnings, and—”
“Are you asking me to tutor you, Alvin?”
Alvin didn’t know what the word meant.
“Tutor you. Teach you privately.”
“Yes, Miss Larner.”
“The charge is fifty cents a week, Alvin. And I wish you to come at the same time as Arthur Stuart. Arrive when he does, and leave when he does.”
“But how can you teach us both at once?”
“I daresay you could benefit from some of the lessons I’ll be giving him, Alvin. And when I have him writing or ciphering, I can converse with you.”
“I just don’t want to cheat him out of his lesson time.”
“Think clearly, Alvin. It would not be proper for you to take lessons with me alone. I may be somewhat older than you, but there are those who will search for fault in me, and giving private instruction to a young bachelor would certainly give cause for tongues to wag. Arthur Stuart will be present at all your lessons, and the door of the springhouse will stand open.”
“We could go up and you could teach me at the roadhouse.”
“Alvin. I have told you the terms. Do you wish to engage me as your tutor?”
“Yes, Miss Larner.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a coin. “Here’s a dollar for the first two weeks.”
Peggy looked at the coin. “I thought you meant to give this dollar back to Dr. Physicker.”
“I wouldn’t want to make him uncomfortable about having so much money, Miss Larner.” He grinned.
Shy he may be, but he can’t stay serious for long. There’ll always be a tease in him, just below the surface, and eventually it will always come out.
“No, I imagine not,” said Miss Larner. “Lessons will begin next week. Thank you for your help.”
At that moment, Father and Mother came up the path. Father carried a large tub over his head, and he staggered under the weight. Alvin immediately ran to help—or. rather, to simply take the tub and carry it himself.
That was how Peggy saw her father’s face for the first time in more than six years—red, sweating, as he puffed from the labor of carrying the tub. And angry, too, or at least sullen. Even though Mother had no doubt assured him that the teacher lady wasn’t half so arrogant as she seemed at first, still Father was resentful of this stranger living in the springhouse, a place that belonged only to his long-lost daughter.
Peggy longed to call out to him, call him Father, and assure him that it was his daughter who dwelt here now, that all his labor to make a home of this old place was really a gift of love to her. How it comforted her to know how much he loved her, that he had not forgotten her after all these years; yet it also made her heart break for him, that she couldn’t name herself to him truly, not yet, not if she was to accomplish all she needed to. She would have to do with him what she was already trying to do with Alvin and with Mother—not reclaim old loves and debts, but win new love and friendship.
She could not come home as a daughter of this place, not even to Father, who alone would purely rejoice at her coming. She had to come home as a stranger. For surely that’s what she was, even if she had no disguise, for after three years of one kind of learning in Dekane and another three of schooling and study, she was no longer Little Peggy, the quiet, sharp-tongued torch; she had long since become something else. She had learned many graces under the tutelage of Mistress Modesty; she had learned many other things from books and teachers. She was not who she had been. It would be as much a lie to say, Father, I am your daughter Little Peggy, as it was to say what she said now: “Mr. Guester, I am your new tenant, Miss Larner. I’m very glad to meet you.”
He huffed up to her and put out his hand. Despite his misgivings, despite the way he had avoided meeting her when first she arrived at the roadhouse an hour or so past, he was too much the consummate innkeeper to refuse to greet her with courtesy—or at least the rough country manners that passed for courtesy in this frontier town.
“Pleased to meet you, Miss Larner. I trust your accommodation is satisfactory?”
It made her a little sad, to hear him trying fancy language on her, the way he talked to those customers he thought of as “dignitaries,” meaning that he believed their station in life to be above his. I’ve learned much, Father, and this above all: that no station in life is above any other, if it’s occupied by someone with a good heart.
As to whether Father’s heart was good, Peggy believed it but refused to look. She had known his heartfire far too well in years past. If she looked too closely now, she might find things a daughter had no right to see. She’d been too young to control herself when she explored his heartfire all those years ago; in the innocence of childhood she had learned things that made both innocence and childhood impossible. Now, though, with her knack better tamed, she could at last give him privacy in his own heart. She owed him and Mother that.
Not to mention that she owed it to herself not to know exactly what they thought and felt about everything.
They set up the tub in her little house. Mother had brought another bucket and a kettle, and now Father and Alvin both set to toting water up from the well, while Mother boiled some on the stove. When the bath was ready, she sent the men away; then Peggy sent Mother away as well, though not without considerable argument. “I am grateful for your solicitude,” Peggy said, “but it is my custom to bathe in utter privacy. You have been exceptionally kind, and as I now take my bath, alone, you may be sure I will think of you gratefully every moment.”
The stream of high-sounding language was more than even Mother could resist. At last the door was closed and locked, the curtains drawn. Peggy removed her traveling gown, which was heavy with dust and sweat, and then peeled away her chemise and her pantalets, which clung hotly to her skin. It was one of the benefits of her disguise, that she need not trouble herself with corsetry. No one expected a spinster of her supposed age to have the perversely slender waist of those poor young victims of fashion who bound themselves until they could not breathe.
Last of all she removed her amulets, the three that hung around her neck and the one enwrapped with her hair. The amulets were hard-won, and not just because they were the new, expensive ones that acted on what others actually saw, and not just on their opinion of it. It had taken four visits before the hexman believed that she really did want to appear ugly. “A girl so
lovely as you, you don’t need my art,” he said it over and over again, until she finally took him by the shoulders and said, “That’s why I need it! To make me stop being beautiful.” He gave in, but kept muttering that it was a sin to cover what God created well.
God or Mistress Modesty, thought Peggy. I was beautiful in Mistress Modesty’s house. Am I beautiful now, when no one sees me but myself, I who am least likely to admire?
Naked at last, herself at last, she knelt beside the tub and ducked her head to begin the washing of her hair. Immersed in water, hot as it was, she felt the same old freedom she had felt so long ago in the springhouse, the wet isolation in which no heartfires intruded, so she was truly herself alone, and had a chance of knowing what her self might actually be.
There was no mirror in the springhouse. Nor had she brought one. Nevertheless, she knew when her bath was done and she toweled herself before the stove, already sweating in the steamy room, in the early August evening—she knew that she was beautiful, as Mistress Modesty had taught her how to be; knew that if Alvin could see her as she really was, he would desire her, not for wisdom, but for the more casual and shallow love that any man feels for a woman who delights his eyes. So, just as she had once hidden from him so he wouldn’t marry her for pity, now she hid from him so he wouldn’t marry her for boyish love. This self, the smooth and youthful body, would remain invisible to him, so that her truer self, the sharp and well-filled mind, might entice the finest man in him, the man that would be, not a lover, but a Maker.
Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III Page 24
