I sobbed at that, though whether in sorrow or a kind of relief made of knowing what could be known, and that they did not lie unburied, I cannot tell. All I can fathom is that the Saltonstalls circled me in their arms as I wept, and that I felt their affection and concern as a further anguish, a measure of what I had lost.
That hour was another of those flashing rocks, breaking through the stream of hours. To me, it is like the stone set up by Jacob in the wilderness for a memorial of a day where something enormous occurred.
But I had a great deal to muse on during this time, much of it pointing ahead to the future and not backward to the day I rode to Falmouth. It is ever a wonder how life keeps unreeling, and disasters do not make a stop for us to sit without stirring forevermore.
One morning several weeks into our visit, I found Elizabeth Saltonstall alone by the fire, working on a loose gown for her daughter’s child.
“I wanted to speak to you about something,” I said. “Because I have no mother to ask.”
She set down the garment and looked at me. “If I can stand as a mother to you, young Mistress Charis Herrick, I will endeavor to do so,” she said.
Sitting down beside her on the bench, I thanked her again for all her kindness and generosity to me. “But what is it you wish to ask?”
“My time has not come,” I said.
“Your courses? Not at all? I never thought to ask about such things.” She picked up the little garment and turned it over in her hands as if inspecting it for an answer. “Where there is no red flower, there can be no fruit,” she said.
“No, I mean this month,” I said. “Until now, they have been the same. Sparse but the same. And once per moon.”
She reached over and put her hand on mine. “Ah, I see. I did not think this would come so quickly. Are you sure?”
“My skin has a—a fragrance. Something rich. More than that, I find myself drowsy by mid-morning and can hardly keep on with work.”
“You were nodding when we stitched on linens yesterday afternoon, but I thought it was because the newly married do not always care as much for sleep at night as those of us who have been long wed.”
She lifted her hand away from mine, and when I looked, Mistress Saltonstall was smiling as she returned to her needle. “We shall have to send you to Andover with infant garb,” she said. “I believe you will be content in this marriage. You may both jog on in harness and be happy, it seems to me. Your Jotham Herrick seems a fine man of education and many talents. Mr. Saltonstall says that he has been useful to his town with the militia and with governance, and to ours, for that matter.”
“I am more at ease than I have been for a long time. . . since that terrible day at Falmouth,” I said.
“That is best, to find contentment and make another life with family, as you now are beginning to do. It helps with loss, and that remorse you have suffered on account of your sister. But I wish you were here in Haverhill; I hope Goody Holt and her daughters will not prove a thorn to you. And I would be cautious even of your friend. I did not care for what you told of that house, and feel pity for the two who must still work for that tyrannous woman.”
“Bess and John,” I said.
“Yes. I am glad you are free of her. And even more pleasant, your babe will be born at the close of summer and not in winter. I have long thought it cruel and killing that the midwife bears the poor infant to the meetinghouse in his wrappings, no matter if the sky blusters and pelts ice or brings extraordinary storms of snow. Surely a goodly number of our babes wither and die after such a wretched airing. And often the ice must be chopped in the christening bowl, and the little ones shrink away from the wet and cold, so benumbed that they cannot cry out. They fade like flowers in only a few days.”
Here she nipped her thread and held the linen up to the light, examining the gown for flaws. This care for her labors reminded me of the work in my lap, and so I began to mend a pair of breeches as we talked. “I had not thought of the season, but you are right. We must be hardy to survive our start in the world.”
“Would the women had the rule of such things,” Mistress Salton-stall said, “although perhaps not your Goody Holt and that unfortunate Lizzie!”
“Lizzie Holt did not like me. I was sorry but could do little to change her mind. To confess the sad truth, she was somewhat of a lammock, ever lolling about and fretting. With her, every day was much of a muchness with the last, as almost nothing pleased her. But Bel Holt was a friend to me and my interests.”
“She was good to you, it seems. Yet I still suggest that you tread with care.”
“Without her kindness, I would have climbed on Hortus and come back to you in the first week! She would never harm me.” But as is the way with mortals, who are so quick to record the ill and not the sweet, I recalled how she had warned me that Goodwife Wardwell was her dear friend, not mine, and how easily and often she spoke against her own family. Brooding on what chafed our friendship, I pricked my finger with the needle.
“You found an ally there.”
I leaned forward to flick a droplet of blood into the flames and pressed my thumb against the wound. “Bess and John were friendly to me as well, but I could not spend time in their company without angering Goody Holt to hornet sharpness. In truth, I often depended on my horse for a dose of affection—whenever Hortus was in the pasture or stall, I would seek him out.”
“You would have been quite welcome to gallop back to us on your horse,” Elizabeth Saltonstall said, and passed me a snippet of linen for my finger. “But you might have clean missed Jotham Herrick. So I suppose it was worth enduring a few Lizzie-tribulations to have been found by him.”
“Goody Holt was my main trial,” I said, “but now that she is no monarch over me, I am willing to think of her as one who means to do well but does not know how to rule her subjects. Someday they will all be free, and that will be a holiday of merriment for her kingdom.”
Nabby called us to the table, where tea waited, and where Eliza Dennison was already seated with her boy on her lap, singing a little song. Damaris Hathorne was bent over the fire to warm her hands and, upon catching my eye, sprang to me and girdled my waist with her arms.
“I have been so glad you are still here,” I said to her.
“And I, you.”
She led me to a chair and surprised me with a pair of knitted stockings.
“How you spoil me,” I said, admiring the work and promising to wear them on the morrow.
“So that you will want to stay,” she said.
The glittering rocks in a stream. . . Streams are often hard to navigate, and slick stones can be treacherous, but the stones set up in my memory are often beautiful.
One such hour was when I placed Jotham Herrick’s hand on my belly and told him the news of my body, and how he was as amazed as if no man had ever planted his seed in a woman before. I had feared he would be disappointed that a child came to us so soon, as it is the way of our people to yield up many of the joys of the bed once a babe is conceived. It made me laugh with pleasure to see him stand so still, his head cocked slightly as if listening for further astonishments, before he slipped his arms around me and held me close.
“If ever two were one, then we,” he whispered.
“If ever man were loved by wife, then thee,” I said, answering the words from Mistress Anne Bradstreet with the following line of the poem.
In that golden moment, I knew what it meant to be a flourishing tree “planted by the rivers of waters,” my limbs tangled with another, the sap rising in me and breaking forth into leaves.
Stitching with Eliza Dennison and Elizabeth Saltonstall—Nabby coming in and out with hot drinks—sometimes sitting on a bench by the fire with Damaris to crack nuts and throw the hulls into the flames, the hard shells turning to coal so that the hearth looked like a bed of fiery flowers: this is one long memory of December and early January days. We spun thread for the weaver and hemmed bed linens and made clothes for the babe-to-be an
d for Eliza, who not only had the child to clothe but also would be marrying again.
Six weeks of what was mostly contentment seemed to flash by so quickly! Too soon, we were calling out our “Pray remember us,” “God bye,” and “Fare thee well.” We promised another visit and even talked of changing our residence to Haverhill, and whether that could be to Jotham Herrick’s advantage as a smith in metals. But he had been voted a selectman in town meeting the year before and now held a second town office and also was a sergeant in the militia, so we did not think on Haverhill for long.
Our way home was comfortable, as we waited for a blue sky and were accompanied on the road by one Goodman Andrew Peaslee, who rode pillion behind my husband in order to return the horse Mr. Herrick rode from the Saltonstalls’ seat. Both horses were weighted down with gear for the militia in Andover. Horses were rare in the colony, and we left the major without transportation for a few days, but he was in this wise saved a journey by Goodman Peaslee, a private in the Haverhill militia. We had little difficulty and the fresh feeling that all that lay before us would be fair skies, though by the time the early dark came, the clouds were low hanging, and it had begun to snow. That night we made a bed for our guest in an upstairs chamber and stabled the horses, and it proved three days before he could return to Haverhill in safety. We sent him away with thanks, the Mi’kmaq coat he had admired, and a meal for the road, along with a letter and the gift for our hosts of tiny silver spoons for salt cellars, each handle incised with a minute Saltonstall, and all packed in a small wooden box with a silver latch.
The choosing of a gift made me remember a wild thought that had flown through my head when, the day after we were married, I walked through the shop and admired the silverwork and the few gold items that could be shown to anyone who inquired.
And so I asked Jotham Herrick a question, catching him—as is a woman’s wisdom—at a peculiarly propitious moment when I thought he might well grant me even the moon and stars. “Will you teach me?”
“Teach you what?” His head rested close to mine as he looked at me.
“Teach me how to turn a block of silver into a vessel or a spoon, which I suppose is a little bowl with a handle.”
I put my finger to his lips so he could not answer yet. “You have no apprentice. All you have is the boy who comes to pound the silver into submission. But I could be your secret apprentice. I could. I am handy.”
“You are a fast learner,” he said, and pulled me closer.
“I want to work with gold someday, as you do—not because it is valuable to men and not because it would satisfy me to do so but because gold is pure, perfect, and untarnishing. Thread and cloth rot or are chewed by moths.” I laid a hand on his cheek as I spoke, musing as I had often before that my husband was golden, golden. “Gold is spiritual and miraculous, a substance that might have belonged first to paradise, and that may cobble the streets of the New Jerusalem.”
His forehead touched mine, and we stared at each other, content.
He said yes, but the estimable Mr. Herrick—who often spun thread by the hearth—declined to make a swap and learn to sew linens and garments. Because then, he said, his doom might be to stitch his own clothes.
Not that I was not busy enough in my days as a new wife, and it was some time before I did more than polish silver. But I had the promise and was determined to learn. Nor had I forgotten the desires that once made me vie with my brothers. Jotham Herrick owned a few school-books, and at night after the shop closed, we sometimes sat over Latin or Greek, translating together.
“I have an unusual wife,” he told Mr. Dane when we met him in the street on the day when the snow stopped falling. “She knows a smattering of Latin and Greek, and she wants to learn everything.”
“You are an unusual goldsmith, you with your Harvard studies. And we colonists of the wild are, in fact, a wonderfully literate people,” Mr. Dane said, and did not condemn me for wanting what my brothers had possessed, back when we were all together. “The eager mind should be fed, for godliness and reading are as one. In time, surely she can teach the little Herricks when they come.”
At that, Jotham Herrick and I exchanged a glance, secure and happy in our secret.
The whole town seemed out and about that afternoon, everyone glad for a clear sky and new-stamped paths in fresh snow without the filth and mud that would come.
I glimpsed Goody Holt but suspect that she darted into a shop to avoid us, though it was nothing but a lean-to where Goodman Granger sold crudely forged tools for the field.
“She did not wish to bid me good morrow, I suppose, because she did not wish it, nor anything more to me than grief,” I said.
“Perhaps she wanted a hoe to begin working in the snow fields! You have no need to worry about her.”
“No,” I said. “Why do I even give thought to her?”
As we were walking down a snow-path with parcels of rye and corn in our arms, part-payment for repair work Jotham Herrick had finished some months before, I heard a voice calling my name.
“Charis! Mistress Charis Herrick!”
Turning, I saw Bel Holt floundering through the snow, her cloak flapping wide and her cap and hat askew. “You are home!” She embraced me and my burdens as if she had not seen me in years, and bobbed a curtsey at Mr. Herrick.
“I am home. And how—”
“And I am married,” she announced. “I am married to Richard Dane, and you must come and see me, and I, you.”
“How wonderful,” I exclaimed. “May you have many years together, Goody Dane!”
“Yes,” she said, bouncing a little with suppressed pleasure. “He is well pleased, and so am I.”
Jotham Herrick nodded over our packages and congratulated her on the marriage. She seemed almost to quiver with excitement, her cloak trembling as she spoke. “Mr. Barnard said that we must have been destined to be together. But I had a hand in bringing it to pass, you know. Remember that day when Lizzie Holt bossocked on the ground in her mad fits?”
“You certainly did help,” I said. “But perhaps that too was meant to be. And what of Goodwife Wardwell? We ought to sew for her again. Has the child been born?”
“Oh, yes, I was there when trouble came upon her. Not an easy birth,” she said, looking around and lowering her voice. “Though she was prepared with plenty of birthing linen, and groaning beer and cakes for the women. All that part was well enough. But the rest—”
Jotham Herrick stepped away from us and greeted a militia officer wading through the snow. He stood talking with his back turned, mindful of our privacy.
“She was quite torn,” Bel whispered. “There was a great deal of blood, more than seemed right, and she looked to be washed clean of life.”
“I am sorry to hear that she was hurt,” I said. A nervous pang needled through me that must have been as much for myself, as yet untried in childbirth, as for Phoebe Wardwell in her down-lying.
“Yes, it was enough to make me fear. But the midwife carried the babe upstairs to the loft with silver and gold in his hands to make him rise in the world and be rich, and she put a scarlet cloth on his head to keep him from harm. The women bore up Phoebe as well on a plank, to sleep out of the way in quiet while the room was scrubbed.”
“Silver and gold in his hands. I am not much governed by superstition, but that seems a fair, pretty way to wish prosperity on a baby,” I said.
Bel—Goody Dane—gave me a look, as if wondering, but I only smiled and asked if Phoebe Wardwell was mending.
“She has been in a sad case, I find. The newborn, Josiah, was put out to nurse for several days and then was taken to the house again. The poor thing mewled terribly at the christening, for the water had gone hard, and underneath was nothing but ice water with crystals floating. When they brought the babe afterward, Phoebe Wardwell turned away from him and had to be coaxed. And she has been slow to heal properly, the midwife says. All the same, there was a feast for the attending women at the house when the boy
was two weeks old, with beer and cakes, beef and fowls, bottle-birds and tarts. I believe that she has found her duty and fondness for the child.”
“I would like to visit her again.”
“She is my dear friend, not—what am I saying? Yes, we should go,” she said, nodding at Jotham Herrick as he came up and took my arm. “Soon.”
His farewell to her as Goodwife Dane made her laugh. She was the same Bel I remembered, warm hearted and well satisfied with her change in fortune.
All that day my mind kept returning to Phoebe Wardwell, wondering if I could be of any use to her but also fearing to be like her, made queer headed by the suffering of a lying-in. I recalled that Mr. Dane’s favorite philosopher said, “A quiet mind cureth all,” but how to get it to return when flown? Both ministers often spoke on the need of wives to prepare for death in childbirth. Poor Phoebe. When the snow on the road was packed firmly, I would visit her again.
I delighted in snowy weather, especially when the sky lowered and made the dark arrive early, for then I was alone with Jotham Herrick for a whole day, and we would meet and meet again, rehearsing our love in the little passageway behind the front shop, clinging together as though we had never embraced before. When it grew dark and we shut up the shop and ate our last meal of the day by firelight, we would reminisce and look forward at once, for it was a constant pleasure to remember that what we had been was being transformed. And who knew what we would be?
Inside the hangings of our bed, we were as one, the selvage between us like a glittering, burning edge where we were forged and welded together. We never tired of marveling at the sweetness of being found, each by the other. Nor did we regret having become fruitful and barred from full pleasure so soon because we each had longed for family.
“Forgive me for asking you to come alone to the shop,” he said to me, once when we were lying together. “You might have been punished.”
“I do not regret it, though I was afraid for a week.”
“I was also, fearing that one quick, thoughtless request might cost so much,” he said.
Charis in the World of Wonders Page 21
