Charis in the World of Wonders

by Marly Youmans

  “I am sorry for your losses,” Goody Holt said at last, though she did not sound at all regretful. “But this is a strange way of finding a seamstress. And a servant who comes from a fine family and knows languages is nonsensical. Like sending cavaliers in feathered hats to muck out a public stables.”

  As if somewhat pleased with her own cleverness, she nodded and brought my sampler closer to her eyes. I was emboldened to explain.

  “Goody Holt, I simply wished to part from my friends awhile in order to earn something rightfully my own, now that my family’s wealth is—”

  She raised her chin, and my voice faltered.

  “Please address me as Mistress Holt,” she pronounced slowly.

  I was silent, startled by her manner.

  Do not be angry, I told myself. Anger is a runaway horse, and I will tame and rein in and ride that shadowy beast. I will be strong, for surely I am a young woman with some abilities, some knowledge, and some memories of those worthy to be called by the title of Mistress.

  She looked me over, starting with the coif and running her eyes over the camlet cloak that hung loosely at my back, for the day was not so cold that I needed wrapping. Her eyes studied my waistcoat, the hat and bonnet in my hand, and the feuillemorte gown. At last they found the way to my feet.

  “I do not care for philly mort,” she said.

  Pinching a corner of my sampler between thumb and forefinger, she extended it toward me.

  “You are a deal too fine for a seamstress,” she said. “If you have something more suitable to your current station, I should prefer that you wear that.”

  Perhaps I should not have been surprised, but I was. A flush—hated ink of roses, ink of wine—tingled on my face.

  “I do not believe,” I said, “that I have changed station in life. My ancestral kin are still who and what they were. My education is still what my father gave me in remembrance that Lazarus’ sister was found worthy to study at the feet of Jesus! For are we not acceptable as actors in the great drama of salvation? If you have no wish for my abilities with the needle, I can return to Haverhill.”

  And I will be more, I thought, remembering the words murmured to Mistress Saltonstall when I swam up from sleep.

  I should like to say that my voice did not tremble with a note of anger by the close of that speech, but I fear that it did.

  Goody Holt was still holding the sampler as if it were a length of befouled linen. I took it.

  The tanner’s widow daunted my assurance, not entirely but enough that I stepped back, pressing against the door. But I remembered what I had done, riding alone through the wilderness and crossing stream and river; I stepped forward again.

  “That word drama smells of the theatre.” Goody Holt smiled; the change in expression did not soften the look of the harsh lines carved beside her mouth.

  “It was not meant so,” I said, and thought privately that Goody Holt’s world would contain little in the way of revels of any sort. There would likely be no riddles and no poems here. She ignored my reply.

  “I will recompense you by the week,” she said. “This letter says that you are uneasy in your slumbers and cry out. I will have your bed carried up to the garret so that you are separated from me and my daughters. We cannot have our sleep jarred and jangled. There is a hearth. You should be warm enough.”

  Not knowing what to say, I gave a little half-curtsey. She was my elder and, at least for now, had the upper place.

  She did not return my politeness but stood frowning, her eyes on the letter.

  Finally she turned away, calling for someone named John, and vanished into the gloom at the rear of the hall. In only a few minutes, a narrow bedstead, a woolen mattress sewn up in a canvas tick, tow sheets, and a rollipoke of chaff for a pillow were bundled up the stairs and installed in the garret. I followed the sound, taking with me my sack with Mother’s blanket and some of my goods. Goody Holt—Mistress Holt—was standing over the rope bed and mattress, supervising John and the woman who had answered the door as they tugged at the sheeting and coverlet. The bedclothes were poor and coarse enough, so I was glad that I had brought a better covering of my own.

  She spoke, her back to me. “We have already had our meal, but Bess may find you some scrapes and leavings.”

  Some scrapes and leavings. I did not have presence of mind to respond, but Bess gave me a little smile that said she knew how I felt. She was prettier than I had thought before, with more of a spark of warmth. No doubt life with Goodwife Holt could make anyone look subdued and wan, I reflected.

  “Pray pardon me.” Her whisper as she passed close by told me she was more mannerly than her mistress.

  “After that, I will show you where you may carry out your sewing duties. You will find plenty of linen and silks and wools from England.” Goody Holt gave me a nod and ordered the other two out of the chamber.

  I say chamber, but it was no chamber. The bed was set close to a chimbley hole without mantel, the floor wanted sweeping, and above me were rafters, thatch, and a few bright winks of late afternoon sky.

  In a few minutes, John was back with my coffer, which he set down carefully and gave an admiring pat. His blue eyes took in the scene of me on the edge of the bed, the crude hearth, and the bag. John seemed cheerful, perhaps in spite of the dour face of his mistress. He was not a handsome-featured man but strong and well made, and he still owned all his hair, though I guessed him to be past forty.

  “Good luck to you in this house, Mistress,” he said to me, giving me a smile. “We are glad to meet you, yet sorry you are stowed in such a place. I would not like to see a daughter of mine in such straits, and I can see with my own eyes that you are used to better.”

  He looked more keen or at least happier than poor Bess, and I thought that he might be able to advise me.

  “It’s just for three months,” I said. “My family—they are all killed by Indians in the northern wilderness—and I thought it would be right to earn a wage and not be so dependent.”

  “I am sorry to hear that piece of news,” he said, tilting his head and looking at me with what I thought was pity. I felt glad to see his sympathy because it meant that he might be a help to me.

  “Is she a good mistress?” I whispered, though there was no need—who would have bothered to climb those narrow, crooked steps to spy on me?

  Still, he went over to the door and glanced down the stairs, and came back to me, crouching on his heels.

  “She will pay you well enough, for that is part of her view of herself as a great lady. And do not mind her manner, which is often crabbed and choleric. ‘Tis just her disorderly humors, and she cannot help her way, I have come to see.” He shook his head slowly. “The mistress is not the most godly of women, but she has her virtues.”

  “And you are content here?”

  John shrugged.

  “The old man supplied my passage, but he is dead, and I have yet 337 days and some hours to go until my indenture is up. People say that Goody Holt insisted that she, too, must have a servant, and so it was that I met Bess on board the ship to Boston. We will be her first and last servants, I imagine. I jog along with her well enough, and on the day when we are done, Bess and I shall marry. We have talked to a few of the selectmen about the old tann-house, or else a parcel of land east of the meetinghouse where we may live and have a shop and workrooms, please God.”

  “You have a trade?”

  “I learned the tanning trade from Goodman Holt, who learned from his father, who had been a tanner in England before he sailed to Massachusetts Bay and was given land of his own. Goodman Holt was not a strutting man, and not too proud to get his hands dirty in the work. Most think it a filthy job, I suppose, but he never minded. And he was never called Mr. Holt, and she was always Goody Holt. Now she wants to forget the trade and the tann-house and purchase herself more dignities. She sold the tann-house and land when her husband had not been dead a month. There’s naught but hay there now.”

  He
put one knee down to the floor to steady himself.

  “She seems so high-handed and angry,” I said in a low voice, and immediately regretted the words.

  “My Bess says that Goody Rachel Holt has forgotten that she abides in the New World, where such things as titles matter less than in the Old. Not that there aren’t well-born families and some who are but tradesmen and even a few unfortunates who need help, but there are mighty few fancy lords and ladies here. No offense to you, mistress, for I can see that you come from good stock and are not accustomed to bedding down in a garret.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but how much can being from a well-regarded family matter in a wilderness? It didn’t keep my kin from destruction.”

  He nodded. “We are far from England, where I went to a bit of school and learned to bow to my betters. Many a family in Andover sups with its day-laborers—for who are they but neighbors, to be helped out in turn?—but not the lady madam of this house. Keep up her dignity, and she will be composed enough.”

  Keep up her dignity. I wondered if that meant losing my own. I reflected that the Saltonstalls were fine people, and yet they often depended on bartering corn for work and the hiring of the occasional laborer like Lud or Nabby, although they held lands in Ipswich and Chebacco that were stewarded by others. And whenever militia men were quartered at the house, Mistress Saltonstall cooked their meals herself.

  “Her business in this portion of her life is to marry off her daughters. She has not said so, but I have eyes. She is anxious that they be wed, and tied to something better than a tanner. That is, if she can manage it. Mehitabel Holt is the younger, and can be as shy as a fawn around strangers. The eldest Holt daughter, the one who resembles her mother, is called Lizzie.”

  Mehitabel Holt. Lizzie Holt. Would they be friendly to me? Did it signify?

  “And what should Bess and I call you?”

  “What? Oh, I hardly know who I am now.” A servant? The child of a fine family? No one?

  “I expect you are a young woman who has prospects and a future,” John said.

  “My name is Charis.”

  I gave my first name only, as if but a poor servant, and I suspect now that I gave it so in bitterness of heart. But he proved more gracious than I was at that moment.

  “Oh, that’s a beauty name, mistress,” John said, “a sweet name. Your father and mother gave you something there.”

  A voice called for John. He jumped up, bowed to me, and was away.

  But he turned back, leaning into the room.

  “Mistress Charis, I will fetch you wood for a fire, and a floorcloth and something to sit on, whatever she will let me have. Some rushlights and a holder. But Bess will broom down the cobwebs and sweep and wet the boards against the spar-dust.”

  Hearing a shout, he withdrew abruptly with a hasty “by your leave” before I could thank him and clattered down the stairs once more, leaving me in the lonely domain of the garret.

  Soon afterward, Goodman Foster paid me a formal visit in the hall-chamber downstairs, for it was his job as constable to report newcomers to the magistrate. He was not a grave-looking man, but his brass-tipped staff, the sign of his office, had somehow a funereal air and made me feel subdued and weary. He asked me a few questions and told me to repeat the pledge required of all new inhabitants.

  The words I had to say were almost the same that I had recited before Goodman Sterling, the constable of Haverhill, while still keeping to my bed, for Mistress Saltonstall declared that I was not strong enough to rise and journey into town. Now Goodman Foster offered me a book, pointing to a place and asking me to read the words.

  “I acknowledge myself subject to the laws of this jurisdiction of Andover in Essex during my residence under this government, and do here swear by the great name of the everliving God, and engage myself to be true. . . ”

  I paused here, wondering what it meant—had I not been true before, that I needed to pledge so again?

  Goodman Foster lifted an eyebrow but said only, “Go you on.”

  “And faithful to the same, and not to plot or continue or conceal anything that is to the hurt or detriment thereof.”

  “You read well,” he said.

  “My mother taught me,” I said, not so much to inform him of what he would already assume, but to tell myself that she had been, that she had cared for me to learn and read.

  He had me sign a page in his record book and wrote his name below: pledge witnessed Ephraim Foster Constable of Andover. Evidently the Saltonstalls had secured my entry into Haverhill by the payment of a bond meant “to secure the town from charge,” and this promise had now been transferred by letter to Dudley Bradstreet, Magistrate of Andover. I had not realized their kindness in this matter and now had yet another reason to feel gratitude to them. This further evidence of my dependence unsettled me and made me long to return to such friends.

  That night I slept more uneasily than ever, in the bottom of the night going to sit by the coals after being wakened by a noise like the firing of a musket. Such dreams or warnings had happened before; my head knew that no shot had been fired when I woke, my heart springing in my chest as if to pelt away, back to Haverhill. I could not sleep, astir over whether I should leave or remain. The dust, swept by Bess, seemed to have left its delicate sigil on the air. My throat was raw from breathing in the particles that had floated up from the broom. Eventually the upset in my mind grew quieter, and I sat thoughtlessly by the fire a long time before stumbling back to bed and wrapping myself in my mother’s blanket. I dropped to sleep remembering that her fingers had spun every thread. That seemed a way of touching and greeting her, and as if she were near.

  In the morning I began my work, ruling over a small kingdom with goods and table and the unexpected luxury of a backstool with a feather cushion—though to Goodwife Holt I remained of no account.

  It was well for her that the colony’s sumptuary laws against luxury had softened, for I found waiting for me glossy lustring silks, ribbed grosgrain ribbons, taffeta ribbons, cotton calico, fine linen cambric, gauzy tiffany for hoods, cloth with satin-woven stripes, and pink and cream fabrics of mixed linen and silk.

  The stitcher in me took an intense pleasure in exploring such fabrics. I peered inside thick packages with fulled wool for cloaks that could be left unhemmed without fear of raveling. I discovered lengths made from spiral yarn, the wool and silk twisted together into one thread, the cloth more subtle than wool, more substantial than silk. Most surprisingly, skeins of silver and gold—the fragile metals wrapped around cores of silk yarn—lay among a jumble of thread, some spooled, some lying in loose hanks. I handled them in considerable wonderment.

  How can she afford such lavishness?

  Here was treasure, far more than I had expected to find and certainly more rich than any tanner’s wife could expect to own. Surely Goody Holt was daring the ministers to condemn her for dressing her daughters above their station with such brave metals and silks.

  “I want butted seams on wool, no plain ones,” came a voice.

  Turning, I found one of the subjects for my needle. She resembled her mother, her dark hair spilling from a coif that did little to soften the appearance of a long face, a more juvenile version of the crescent marks around her mother’s mouth, and skin that must have been assaulted by smallpox in some long-ago hour, for it was sadly pock-fretten.

  She was, I dare say, a pitiable sight, and it was not much of a prologue to our acquaintance.

  Still, I rose and nodded to her.

  “Good morrow. You are, I suppose, the daughter called Lizzie Holt, the elder sister?”

  This attempt did not remind Lizzie of her manners. Her face seemed to harden a little like a west-country flommery cooling and setting up in a bowl. Perhaps I had offended by calling her elder. I guessed her to be twenty-five or a bit more.

  “You may call me Mistress,” she said.

  I smiled in surprise at this juncture, which was a little wrong of me and clearly a misste
p, though she had no rights to the title—less than her own mother. Among us, Mistress and Mister were uncommon for those without birth and a better than ordinary education. My visitor showed her choler by flushing to the roots of her hair. She stamped her foot like a willful child. Unfortunately, the heel of one of her waxed leather mules came off when she did, so that she was forced to bend and rescue the errant heel and stand, one foot on tiptoe, glaring at me.

  Ignoring what made me want to smile, I glanced away at the heaps of materials, my lips curling up in spite of my good efforts.

  “What exquisite cloth your mother has ordered,” I said. “I will be happy to make you a gown or whatever you like.”

  She did not respond but turned and left the doorway with heel in hand and an odd, hitching gait as she moved away.

  Tempted to flare into laughter, I pressed a hand over my mouth. I did not want an enemy in this house. Surely my stay would not last a week if I could make no one here endure me save the servants.

  Startled, I realized that someone was watching me, for an eye and bit of hair and coif was visible near the door jamb.

  The eye stared at me and withdrew.

  I gazed at the empty air. What strange thing would happen next?

  The eye and bit of coif and hair reappeared, and the rest of the body followed. Where Lizzie Holt was tall, this one was short and shaped like a pudding tied up in linen cloth and boiled, with her cheeks speckled by pushes like bits of pink beef marrow and her eyes dented in, as if two dried plums had been forced into pastry. But unlike Lizzie, this young woman beamed at me. She had a beautiful smile, all sun and cherub’s bow, that seemed to wake up her whole face and make it attractive.

  “Pay no matter of mind to Lizzie Holt,” she said. “She is all dolor and doom and thunderclouds because Mother and Father had her sent out to Boston to learn manners and stitchery when she was sixteen, and instead she learned about the pox. And she has never, never gotten over it. Losing her looks, I mean. She managed not to die and to get over the pox ten years back. They sent her home when she was well but before she could acquire any better manners among strangers. Possibly the strangers could not bear the ones she had already.”