Charis in the World of Wonders

by Marly Youmans

  “A coppet young lady,” Nabby said.

  “Coppet,” I repeated.

  “Oh, she was a saucy one, full of humor and good spirits. But soon she was taken down. And though I nursed her as if she were my own sister, she sickened so fast that she seemed almost to run toward the burying ground.”

  The waistcoats of the dead traveler went to a Haverhill tailor for renovation. Soon I was the possessor of a silk gown of dull blue, a close-fitting gold-yellow jacket to accompany a sadd-colored wool skirt of feuillemorte, along with an indigo skirt and light-colored jacket of pale muted rose, a color that would never have been useful to me near Falmouth, and a wealth of hose (both knitted and sewn cloth), wool petticoats, chemises, and coifs. I even owned a white Flemish lace whisk with velvet knots (old-fashioned but lovely) to wear with my new blue gown, as well as cambric falling bands. For out-of-doors, there were a few simple bonnets to wear over a coif and a felt hat for colder weather. When Eliza presented me with the poor deceased young woman’s cloak, a camlet of grain scarlet on one side and russet camlet on the other, along with a black silk hood, I felt as fine as some prosperous English tradesman’s wife who sits by the shop door to vaunt her duds and so lure in the customers.

  “You have made me as rich to the eye as I was poor.”

  It seemed that I should never be done thanking Mistress Saltonstall.

  “The sumptuary laws are not what they were, with their rulings against fallals—ruffs and wide, slashed sleeves and immodest hair,” she said. “I feel sure she would have been taken to court for the silk hood and the blue gown with gold threads in the warp, our townspeople having a strong spirit of interference. But the garments will probably pass now, though I would take care not to flaunt them.”

  “You are too generous to me,” I said. “You are like the linden tree that grows out of the mother’s grave in the German story and speaks through a bird and the blowing leaves, and tosses down dresses like the moon and stars and sun.”

  “I don’t know that tale,” she said.

  “Goody Waters told it to me, back in Boston. Her mother’s people escaped to Germany and lived as exiles there for many years. And I suppose one of them had a love for the stranger fancies of the Germans and handed them downward. So Goody Waters learned curious stories from her grandmother, and she passed them to me. I never heard the like of them anywhere.”

  “Her mother’s family must have had many adventures,” Mistress Saltonstall said. “The godly have been well traveled, then and later. I do not envy our people who sailed to Ireland or the Rhineland or the West Indies. But perhaps they would not envy us either. What happened in the story?”

  “The girl’s mother died, and the father married a cruel widow-woman with two daughters no better than she. But a white bird and the linden tree on her mother’s grave helped her. She wore a dress that glowed like the moon, and a prince fell in love in raptures over her just as soon as he saw her. Then she wore a gown that glittered like stars. And next, a gown yellow and shining like the sun. And she marries the prince. There was more to it, but I cannot conjure it now.”

  “Well, you have your three sets of duds, at least,” Mistress Salton-stall said, “though there is a great dearth of princes in New England.” I thanked her again.

  “You will do,” she said. “There are some shoes to try, and you must plait a summer hat. And aprons must be sewn, but you will pass muster.”

  Mistress Saltonstall gave me a copy of Mr. Herbert’s The Temple as well, when she learned that I loved poetry and would treasure it, and a little memorandum book with poems by Mistress Bradstreet copied out in gall ink.

  When I protested at their generosity, the Saltonstalls told me that a collection was being taken up in town, and that I would have coins of my own, but that they were glad to restore me to my rightful rank in the world. In truth, that feat was an impossible one to perform, and yet they were concerned that I still be welcome among others of the same background as my family.

  Major Saltonstall ordered a small paneled coffer to be made for me, and eventually my old and new worldly wealth was placed inside. He was considerate of me in another manner, writing letters to friends in Boston and on the General Court with news of the massacre in Falmouth, as well as information as precise as I could give about the location of our house and the little green room. Word came that Major Church, who had defended the fort the year before, would be sent to bury the dead and examine the inland site where our houses stood. To send a description was the best Major Saltonstall and I could do for Mary, although perhaps I would never know if she was buried aright.

  The major also wrote to find out if any of my kin still lived, perhaps taken for ransom to Quebec, but no news came to give me encouragement. The list of known names—Clark, Baker, Morrill, Ross, Brackett, Denis, Alexander, Swarton, Cary, Yorke, Souter—never held mine.

  “Do not give over hope,” Major Saltonstall told me. “Letters are slow, and queries must be investigated. All such inquiries take more time than we would like.”

  In the day, I was able to visit Hortus, pace the grounds in sunny weather, and work in company with the women of the house. Little John Dennison staggered about, leaving damp handprints on my skirts and making us laugh with his few words. Peeping into a Hebrew text, I found myself longing for fresh exploration. I discovered grammars in the family library and made a review of my Latin studies and wrote down what I could remember of a Greek poem my father had taught me. I pored over a commonplace book made by some Saltonstall ancestor, its pages decorated with vivid drawings in colored ink and crowded with poems and passages.

  When I was alone, the faces of my kin came to me and made the tears prick at my eyes. What else could I do but pray that some lived, or that I would meet them again under the trees of paradise? They seemed to grow hazy in features, so that I could not call them to memory as cleanly as before. I made some little sketches of all my family, with notes on the color of hair and eyes and features. My thought was that someday I could have them painted as miniatures and keep them with me in that way. But I was a poor-enough limner.

  I sank so easily into the routines of the place, spending my days sewing for myself or for Eliza’s little one, playing with the child or trying to teach him a new word, setting the board for meals, joining the family for readings and prayers at morning and evening, or for lighter moments—telling riddles or reciting psalms and poems as we worked. Almost, it seemed a betrayal of my sufferings. At times, I felt a sudden need to be solitary and think on what had happened, to fling all my grief upward in a single, silent word: to resolve my mind in favor of goodness and in favor of life before I returned to the others.

  Always, the hall and parlor were hubs of activity. Often the dining board overflowed with people come to help with planting or visitors arrived to consult Major Saltonstall about militia business and important town or colony matters.

  “How did we ever do without you?” Mistress Saltonstall was ever thoughtful, always bent on making me feel that I had a role in the family. She asked me to teach embroidery stitches to a sent-out child who had come to learn knitting and sewing and improve her manners among strangers. Sending out was not much practiced in my own family once we moved from Boston, and I pitied Damaris Hathorne when she arrived in tears with her stern-looking father and a box of clothes.

  Damaris looked on me with some astonishment after Eliza told her my story, and said that she repented of weeping, for she would join her mother again in less than a year, but I could never do so.

  “It cannot be the same, but she has a new place here,” Mistress Saltonstall told her.

  When he was twelve, my brother Isaac lived with Dr. John Clarke because of weakness following a bloody flux, and there he learned a good deal about medicine that was helpful to us. But otherwise, we had not been put out, and I was glad of that, especially now. We had been together as much as was possible.

  At Haverhill, I was always aware of the need to make myself useful so that
I would not be a burden on the Saltonstalls. They were important people in the town and colony. Mistress Saltonstall was a Ward, daughter of the Haverhill minister and granddaughter of Mr. Nathaniel Ward, who wrote the colony’s code of laws in the Body of Liberties, and that fierce, thunderous book, The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America. The major descended from nobility and held various magistratical authorities and was even a member of the Court of Assistants for the colony. He led the Northern Essex militias of musketeers and pikemen. Between local courts and the General Court and being clerk of the writs, he was ever worrying over business high and low—sometimes on his doorstep, as when the wastrel Swan boys busied themselves with roguery, twisting off the tails of cattle, stabbing a neighbor’s horse with a half-pike, or ripping up rows of young fruit trees.

  The kindness the Saltonstalls showed me was always in my thoughts. For what was I now but an orphan of good birth but no inheritance save a horse and some land that men would now fear to settle?

  Thus, not being sent-out but homeless, I was conscious of my uneasy position in the world. Occasionally a sense of my own worthlessness would come over me. If a woman had no place, she floated in chaos: I was unmoored, a little boat that drifted on endless seas.

  I also was troubled by the sense of some hardness of spirit in hours when I forgot my grief and loss. This trial I kept to myself, just as—at other times—I kept my sorrow locked in the stronghold of my heart, my silence fortified and upheld by my childhood’s long schooling in patience and the bending of my will.

  A couplet would slyly creep into my mind: To find if woman owns a soul / Requires a lens and puissant thole. Then I would be glad that I was one of the godly, who were literate and admitted that those of the female sex possessed a soul. And I knew that as the women of the house worked together—often one read from the Bible, the poems of Anne Bradstreet, or some homemade family florilegium—they showed me in all their kindness how soul-deep their sympathies ran.

  I set myself to making perfumes when I saw that the family had none in hand, and busied myself with juniper, balsam, steeped gum dragon, clove water, and musk. My relief from memory and my pleasure lay all in talk or else in being occupied and so dwelling less on what had happened. When I pounded the ingredients into a submissive, sweet-smelling paste, I was also defeating something in me that wanted to revolt and cry out. As I rolled the paste into beads and pressed them between pairs of fresh-picked rose leaves, I became calm and almost content. I heaped them, baked to dry-ness, in baskets at each Dutch-tiled hearth, ready to be tossed onto a fire.

  My old life and my kin kept traveling steadily into the past as the spring gave place to summer, the old landscapes and features blurring until I feared to lose them entirely. I pored over my drawings and made more notes on faces—John’s flush along the throat and cheekbones when shamed, Isaac’s whorl of cowlicks, Joseph’s freckled nose, my mother’s long, narrow brows like the wings of swifts—to bring them back to mind, but it was like trying to catch silt in a sieve. Still, I sketched our house near Falmouth, and everything I could conjure of our fine place in Boston.

  At the end of high summer, when the goldenrod and asters bloom, a new chance came my way. Though content where I remained, I recalled daily that I had lost every means of succor and abided in the charity of others, however glad they were to provide for and keep me. Because of them, I now had a store of clothes and some coins from the town collection. And I had the golden, godly reputation of my mother and father that would be a key to unlock new friendships, I hoped, and might find me a settled place if I returned to Boston or journeyed elsewhere.

  A few lines in a letter from Pastor Dane of Andover to the major, which he read aloud by the fire, made me ponder a change.

  “Goody Rachel Holt is desirous of obtaining a fine-work seamstress for some three months, should you know any persons able and willing to spend so much time with her. She will board the woman and pay handsomely—in coin, mind—and has the cloth and needful wares in hand. I believe it is to equip her daughters with goods and clothes in preparation for married life. The Holts are a numerous family here, but Goody Holt is a widow unrelated by blood to other so-named families in this place; I do not know exactly what sort of taskmaster she might be but expect a strict one.”

  Major Saltonstall continued on to the end of the letter, but I could not listen. Was this a call for me to travel elsewhere? I would not be ashamed to work for another, though selling the labor of my hands was something that never would have occurred to me if my life had not altered.

  The next day, as we were sitting on a bench in the sunshine, I broached the idea of laboring for this Goody Holt.

  “Surely you should stay here,” Mistress Saltonstall urged me. “Your mother would be grieved to think that you were in such a post. You are no servant to labor for wages.”

  “But I would like to be useful, and have no other way of putting together coins for my future.”

  “We know nothing of this woman,” Mistress Saltonstall said.

  “I don’t like you to go,” Damaris said.

  “Nor I,” Eliza Dennison added.

  I knelt down and hugged John, who babbled at me and left a smear of damp on my gown, a token of his affection.

  “It’s not so very different from a daughter being sent out to another family to learn,” I said, looking up. “That happens often enough. And she does not pay by corn measure, as most do.”

  Mistress Saltonstall laid aside her sewing and continued.

  “Someday you will marry, Charis,” she said. “And we can help you to find someone of your own background who will suit you in education and manners.”

  My gaze rested on John, who kept on clutching at my skirts. I wondered. Before we moved north, my younger uncles had married. Aunt Mercy’s father had given extensive lands and a house as a wedding gift, all of which was sold before we moved. My aunts brought good dowries to their husbands. Perhaps any gold and silver had melted with our house. Perhaps the French were making free with those spoils.

  “But I have nothing to bring to a marriage.”

  “We can be a help. All will be well.” Mistress Saltonstall laid a hand on my arm and leaned forward, looking into my eyes. “And you have your own fine self to bring, Charis.”

  “Yes. I thank you.” I sat down again, lugging John onto my lap. His warmth soothed me, and the sweet smell of his scalp through the silky hair. Indeed, I was content with the Saltonstalls.

  Yet I kept on considering whether such work might not be gain for me, and in the end I persuaded them to let me go to Goody Holt for three months. Major Saltonstall knew a man in Andover who could stable Hortus and rent him out to some of those—most—who had no horse, and so I might also be making a few pence there as well, over and above the cost of his board and a proper saddle. At the end of the period, Hortus and I would return to the Saltonstalls’ seat, and they would consider further what was to be done with me.

  4

  The Frampled Household

  Andover, early September 1690

  From where I stood in the entry, my back to the door, I could hear Goody Holt. I listened closely, thinking that I could still fly to the stables for Hortus and ride back to the Saltonstalls. Though I did not know where my travel companions had gone, I could depend on myself. Didn’t I know how to brave the forest? And there were several ferries and a cleared road from Andover to Haverhill.

  “I am not well satisfied, Mehitabel,” she was saying. “Indeed, I am not. You went out in this slatternly way, and when you met him, you simply scuttled off like an unruly child. You did a disservice to me in doing so—”

  Here she must have been interrupted by the woman who had answered the door, a cowed-looking servant in wash-faded blue gown and a much-mended coif, though when she smiled, her face found its way to warmth. She had not spoken in answer to my words except to acknowledge my thanks and “Good health to you.”

  “Sammodithee,” she said, and left to announce my arrival.r />
  Now I heard Goody Holt complain at high pitch how someone had left unfinished the polishing of silver candlesticks and a two-handled bowl. She must have invested much pride in them, for she mentioned their value, the name of the maker, Jeremiah Summer, and the precise date when she had purchased them in Boston.

  I mastered the impulse to drag my coffer out the door and bolt to the stables, and only stood a little taller in my new leather shoes, a parting gift from Eliza and Damaris.

  When my mistress opened the hall-chamber door and came forward, I again felt frightened and found myself drawing a hand over my heart. How strange to be alarmed in the safety of rooms with English people! But all I knew of Goody Holt was that she owned this house, that she had been married to a prosperous tanner, and that she was speaking in a manner I did not admire.

  Her face was severely marked by years, with great parentheses on either side of her mouth and wrinkling under the eyes. I did not reckon her to be more than forty-seven or thereabouts. Under the coif, threads of white blazed through her otherwise dark hair.

  She strode through the front room and paused in the doorway to look down at me. To my surprise, she gave me not the least courtesy of a greeting.

  “You have no look of a servant, child.” She frowned.

  “No, I am not a servant,” I said with all the firmness and gravity that I could muster. “Nor am I a child any longer.”

  I handed her my sampler and the letter from Major Saltonstall. She read it, her lips pursed.