A slender metal sign hung by the door: Jothan Herrick, Smith in Silver and Gold. All manner of Silver Work Vessels, as pepper boxes, flagons, cavale cups, beakers, mugs, canns, tankards, &c. Chafing dishes and such larger pieces upon request. Harnesses, hilts for swords, buckles, buttons, and all other kind of GOLDSMITH work. Engraving. Creation. Repair. Exact copies. Special Commissions. A hallmark of a small box with the initials I and H was stamped at each end. I admired the grace and flourishes of the lettering, evidence of past study with a master.
How lovely it must be, I considered, to smooth raw metal into objects of usefulness and beauty.
My vigil was longer than promised. I was feeling quite numb and had begun shifting from foot to foot long before the shop bell tinkled its welcome notes.
Glancing to the door, I recognized the face that had twice or thrice looked into mine at the meetinghouse and supposed those pleasant features must belong to the goldsmith. He had one arm flung forward as he ushered the women from the shop and onto the bricks set like an island in mud.
He appeared to be answering a question from Goody Holt.
“As the whitest silver is the fairest and best,” he was saying, “the gold of the deepest yellow is most queenly and royal, and the more the gold inclines to a red or pale yellow, the less perfect it is, though some have a liking for those tints.”
Goodwife Holt elbowed her eldest daughter.
“We are obliged to you, Mr. Herrick,” Lizzie Holt burst forth. Her tiffany hood askew, she looked overheated and scarlet-faced.
Bel glanced at me, her mouth turned up at one corner.
Her mother slapped at her hand by way of a reminder.
“Yes, thank you kindly for your service,” Bel said, mumbling not so much to the smith as to the ruts in the road.
“I will send my daughters with a servant to retrieve the spoon in a few days,” Goodwife Holt said. She nodded to confirm her words.
But she lost much of her dignity when a teasing wind caught up her big-brimmed wool hat and bowled it across the ground.
“Catch it, catch it,” she shrieked, and clutched at her coif and bonnet.
The daughters set off after the runaway hat, Mehitabel laughing as she skipped away.
The goldsmith glimpsed me standing by the window and looked startled. Again, he seemed to know me, and this time he slipped past Goodwife Holt and came close to me. With only a short bow, the goldsmith began speaking. “Pray excuse my boldness and hasty lack of introduction, madam, but I knew your brother Joseph well—we were at college together for a year when we were both fourteen. Indeed, I remember seeing you there with your father. And I have something of Joseph’s that should by rights be yours.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly bereft of all words.
My eyes met his, so pale a gray that it seemed to my fancy almost silver and that he was bound to be a metals smith by nature. And his hair was a rich yellow, the color of straw spun into gold in the German story. A slim, neat figure in his deer-colored breeches and stockings, linen shirt, and gridolin waistcoat: the needleworker in me approved. I thought him pleasing in the way of one of his own creations, with good lines, shapeliness, and light like the glinting sun. He might have been a royal in disguise, tumbled from some fantastic Goody Waters tale.
“Joseph,” I said, and it was strange to me to say his name aloud, though many nights I lay in bed counting over the family names.
To me, the high, sharp cheekbones made the goldsmith seem older than Joseph had looked—though Joseph had stopped growing older for me on the day he disappeared. By this time, I had almost given up on the idea that any of my family had been taken for ransom. One stubborn thread of hope still held.
The tears came into my eyes, though I had promised myself never to cry when near the Holts.
“You look very like him, you know,” the goldsmith added, catching up my hand as if he meant to comfort me. Like a stream of sparkles, his touch shot through me.
A pulse flittered at my neck, and my breath quickened.
“Do I?”
“Yes,” he said, and stared into my face as if he could conjure Joseph’s features from mine.
“A possession of my brother’s,” I said, suddenly longing to have a memento of my family, something to say that they had been more than a long, complicated dream that had dissolved upon waking.
He bent forward and whispered near my ear before releasing my hand. Even after, the fingers still tingled from lying against his. For was that not forward of him, and too yielding of me?
“Pray you, pardon my temerity. But do come without them if you can.”
The others surrounded us, a blur of dark crimson, russet, and indigo, and he was busy thanking them for their custom and promising to do the work with swiftness, though his eyes flew to mine, as quick as birds that swerve and light and are gone. Goodwife Holt pushed me, so that I stepped back and stumbled and dropped the basket. She jabbed a glance at me and turned, moving between me and the goldsmith and pulling the girls close.
“She is nothing,” I heard Lizzie Holt say.
Bel wrenched her arm from her mother’s grasp and came to me, seizing my hand.
The goldsmith watched all without comment, though his mouth was no longer smiling.
After he returned to the shop, I glimpsed him by the window. He seemed to bow, his face and form made rippled by the glass.
“Here to me, Bel,” Goody Holt commanded.
She must have wholly forgotten the remainder of her errands, for I carried the basket to the house, trailing the others. In the sewing room, Bel told me that her mother had insisted that they charm the goldsmith, who was a town officer as well as a craftsman and small importer.
“He went to college for a year with my brother Joseph.” I sat with a gown on my lap, the work untouched. Joseph, Joseph. My dear brother. What could the goldsmith have to give me? It would not be easy or, indeed, entirely proper to venture alone, but I did not fear him. The shock of his touch lingered, a memory to my fingers.
“They say Jotham Herrick only became an apprentice to Mr. Dummer in Boston after his father died,” Bel said. “I have heard tell that he did not need to be put to apprenticeship as a mechanic but chose out of his own deep desire to work in gold and silver. At least, that is what Goodwife Rebecca Osgood told our mother, and she ferrets out the news about all the men of marriage age. Mother is set on him for Lizzie, though a goldsmith is not quite as high as she likes. But since he is a college-trained town selectman who might have been a minister and is considered to be promising, that makes up for some lack in her mind.”
It made me sad to think of the silver-and-gold man with Lizzie Holt, so flint-faced and demanding.
“Mayhap she will not have her way,” I said.
“Mother does often manage to get her desires, but Mr. Herrick likes you better than Lizzie. He observed you quite closely,” Bel said. “And he has looked at you often in meeting.”
“I—I do not know.” But I remembered the silver in the window and his pale eyes and golden hair, and how there was some secret between us. Joseph.
“I do,” she said. “And I think that another way—a way where my mother does not have all matters as she wishes—is good.”
“Bel Holt, I have no family to smooth the path and encourage courting, no place to meet with someone, and no fortune to bring to a marriage. Unless a man be bold, honorable but impetuous, and also sacrificial, there can be no Charis-courting. And how many men are all those things?”
“Few, I suppose, though it is a mighty shame.”
“Perhaps you want to get your own way,” I proposed, my mind resolutely turning from the face of Jotham Herrick and the feel of the slender, capable fingers pressed next to mine.
I gazed at Bel, wondering if she had the strength to defy her mother in such an undertaking. Most of our people have wished for happy marriages, for love, and joy in bed. That is a kind of innocence in them, to believe in true love between man and woman, a reflec
tion of the union between the divine Christ and his bride, the Church. And in this they seemed curious to the nobility in England, who jockeyed for position and advantage in marriage like Newmarket riders racing for some royal purse.
“Is there someone you fancy?”
Bel, who usually seemed self-possessed and unflappable when we were alone, blushed. “I like one of the Dane men. And he likes me, too. He’s round like me,” she said. “He says we will trundle on finely together.”
“That is comical but sweet,” I said.
“Not many of us are round,” Bel said. “And so we ought to go together. Apples in a barrel of beans.”
“But your mother—”
“She does not care for him, even though he is a Dane. She wants a good name but more than that; he is not high enough for her regard. She wants someone with a rank in the militia, or who holds an important town office. Something like that. She has fantasies of our being married to men on the General Council or to ministers. My mother would rather marry us to some princox or mean-spirited old man, so long as he had gold and a Mister or captaincy before his name.” Bel wound a sky-blue ribbon around her finger, staring but not seeming to see what was before her. “But we are the daughters of a tanner, so why should she be displeased? I shall sue her, you know, if she does not give me her consent. The courts say what she does is forbidden—to refuse permission for no sound reason—and Richard Dane is as good as we are. His family name is better. Pah!”
Goodwife Holt and Lizzie appeared at the narrow door, each jostling the other but neither wishing to give place. At last the elder woman hunched the daughter aside, thrusting with her elbow.
After straightening her coif, knocked askew in the struggle, she spoke. “How proceeds the sewing?”
“Well. Quite well. I thank you.” I lifted the needle and pricked the air to show her that I had not forgotten the business I was about.
“I have determined that I do not care for the zaffer-blue bodice and skirt,” Lizzie said. “You may make it over for sister Bel. Or for that matter, Bess.” She frowned at me.
But if she thought to strike sparks from me over my handiwork, she was wrong.
“Bess could well use a new gown,” I said, “or I could redo the waist for your sister.” I was careful not to call my friend Bel in front of her mother, fearing that she would forbid any intimacy between us.
“No, indeed, no, certainly not Bess,” Goodwife Holt said with considerable sharpness. “You must keep the garment, Lizzie. That is sure. A gown of watered paragon is no rag.”
“It does not suit me!” Lizzie shook out her skirts as if ridding herself of an annoyance and flounced away. Her heels clack-clack-clacked on the stairs. When the sound had died away completely, Goodwife Holt spoke up again. She had been fingering a piece of camlet and no doubt meditating on what she would say next.
“In future days, Charis, I would prefer if you would not be so very pushing in nature. Do not thrust yourself forward when we are with townspeople.”
“She did not put herself forward, Mother,” Bel said. “She did not.”
“Do not contend with me,” began Goodwife Holt, but her daughter pressed on.
“And the family was much approved in the colony. She is no servant to be shooed and scolded.”
“They were well enough,” Goodwife Holt said grudgingly.
“Among the first families of the colony, you mean,” Bel told her. “Such standing is known even in Andover. You make us look ill-natured to declare otherwise.”
“Mehitabel Holt,” I said in a low voice. “Please do not defend me.”
“However fine a family she had, what does she have now? A bit of made-over finery wrong for her station, a coffer, and a Norfolk County deed to some savage-held lands that no one will be foolhardy enough to settle again.” Goodwife Holt made a brute noise to emphasize her disapproval, a sound stranded between a grunt and a jeer. “And who would marry such a poor creature as that? She has little now and will no doubt have less as time passes.”
I made no response, staring at the pool of silk in my lap and wishing for her to be gone.
“That changes naught of who she is,” Bel insisted.
“Mehitabel, please,” I whispered.
Perhaps Goody Holt might have refrained from speaking if she had been aware that her words would make me muse more often of the goldsmith and wonder whether I had only dreamed a thread of liking between us. He had not seemed to regard me as “a poor creature.”
The next day Mistress Holt barred me from my midday walk with a feeble but firmly voiced excuse, but on the day following I crept out without telling anyone. The women of the family were entertaining the young pastor in the parlor. Evidently he was reading to them from Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft
and Possession, as he had promised when invited to partake of tea. I paused and heard him reading a passage about the Devil attempting to lure a boy in the colony, “telling him many stories of Dr. Faustus, and other witches, how bravely they have lived, and how he should live deliciously, and have ease, comfort, and money; and sometimes threatening to tear him in pieces if he would not.” And I slipped out the door.
The minister’s words lingered in my mind as I paused to listen before the house, so that I wondered if I could be like the boy, sliding into sin through the desire to “live deliciously.” But no voice called me back, and I shook off the thought. I had seen the work of Satan up close and knew something about the stamp of his presence. Still, the risk was high; I might be whipped for wanton dalliance if accused of visiting a man. And what else was I doing—was I, indeed, wanton? A memory of the face of the goldsmith and the spark of his touch had returned to me more than once when I was alone in the sewing room.
I kept my head down in passing the front windows.
As I walked away, I felt a twinge of sympathy: Bess was stirring a wooden tub of laundry outside the wash-house. She stopped to wipe her nose with the hem of her apron and did not see me. Behind her, the ever-escaping speckled pig rooted in a mess of corn stalks.
I hurried on, as quickly as if I had joined Mercury’s wings to my heels. Soon I reached the shop and glanced in the front window at the silver. The night before, it had rained, and I leaped a little wavering stream to gain the square of bricks set before the door. There I paused to look about me. All was the same, save for the borderline of the rivulet and a loud ringing noise that came from the side yard where a boy was hammering an ingot to flatten the silver.
I curtseyed when a finely dressed gentleman came out of the shop, his gaze bent on a handful of gold buttons. Some visitor from Salem, perhaps, one who could afford and merit cloth of deep black and a touch of lace. He hardly glanced at me but prayed my pardon and went on, the treasure now locked in his fist.
Once inside, I leaned against the door, the bell tinkling. Mr. Herrick must have passed into the back room, for the curtain was still stirring.
“I shall return posthaste—”
The sound of his voice startled me, even though I had come expressly to talk with him. Suddenly weak-limbed, for I had eaten nothing since a dish of tea with milk in the early morning, I longed to sit. Most of all, I wondered what he had to give me. What had my brother left with his school friend? The noise of the mallet from outside died away into silence and began again, beating faster than before.
The goldsmith ducked under the curtain and saw me and was still. “Ah,” he said.
“Mr. Herrick,” I said, and stopped there, not knowing what greeting suited the moment.
“I am right heartily glad—you found a way,” he said. “I was afraid Goodwife Holt would not let you quit the house.”
“Yes,” I said, “but I have the favor of a daily walk.”
“I am glad,” he said, though he looked solemn. “She has the renown among gossips of being the dragon of Andover. However it is, I have found her fair in her dealings with me.”
I smiled at this description but made no r
eply. John had once explained to me that Goody Holt resembled a porcupine, a curmudgeonly, waddling beast that was said to shoot its quills—barbed and magical—at anyone who strayed too near.
“Do you mind that we are alone? Not many come to the shop.”
“No,” I said.
He drew back the cloth and beckoned to me. The back room shone dully with metal—chargers and cups and some pewter plates—but we met beside the curtain in the shadows. His hair gleamed in the darkness.
“The first time I sighted you across the room, I recognized you,” he said. “I knew who you were, even though when I had seen you last, you were still small. I knew it in my bones. I knew it the way a touchstone knows the gold. And knew that I wanted to meet you.”
I didn’t speak but turned my head away from him.
“Forgive me for being rash and headlong, over-hasty,” he added.
The silver called to me, seemed to announce that here was one who was caught by beauty and who aspired to make marvels. The pulse at my neck quickened, whether it was from his words or from the strangeness of being alone with a man in the shadowy and silvery chamber.
When I met his gaze again, the goldsmith went on. “You don’t recollect me, but I feel as if I understand you—I felt so when I glimpsed you at the meetinghouse. I don’t know why that could be, except that I saw you and sensed that I would come to know you.”
“To be understood is sweet, and something I thought lost forever,” I said. “But how could that happen?”
Charis in the World of Wonders Page 12
