“You dance beautifully. You and my husband make an enchanting couple.” Her eyes were bright with fever, her smile genuine.
“I enjoy dancing. I’m sorry you don’t feel up to it.”
“I haven’t recovered from an illness.” She continued to grasp Agnes's hand. “I’ve suffered from it off and on these past twelve months.” The doctor turned his head away, watched the fiddler rosin the bow.
“But I’m much better this evening.” Mrs. Robinson shifted to face Agnes. “I enjoyed talking with your cousin. She seems in good spirits.”
“She improves daily.” Agnes searched through the crowd until she spotted Tom’s red hair blazing among a cluster of young couples, Elizabeth on his arm, smiling at his stories. “She’s changed, though. She’s not as lighthearted as she used to be.”
“The time is yet short. I expect she’ll soon have other children.” Agnes looked up at the doctor for confirmation, but his attention was elsewhere. “I’d like to know her better. I fear we must hurry the acquaintance, though.” She withdrew her fingers and picked at the black velvet ribbon that circled her wrist. Her husband laid his hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sure you’ll soon be in health again,” Agnes said.
Mrs. Robinson laughed. “Of course you’re right,” she said. She patted her husband’s hand. “Isn’t she, Jabez?” He smiled down at her, his face shadowed by the tilt of his head. Her eyes shone as she gazed around the room, over the gathered company, at the knots of farmers and shopkeepers, women and children. “But here I’ve brought a touch of gloom to your evening, my dear Miss Canon. And you’ve been dancing so well. You must be enjoying this after such a trying winter. The young Irish boy is enchanting … I’ve heard of such characters roaming about the west, children singing for their supper. Do bring him to me, Jabez.” The doctor nodded and stepped away to fetch the child.
Agnes moved from her hay bale to make room for the boy, who looked down at his hands while Mrs. Robinson asked questions about this and that, and he mumbled “Yes’m” and “No’m” and refused to look at his questioner. It ended when she pressed a coin into his hand, which he clutched and after shooting a glance at the fiddler, plunged into his pocket. As the old Irishman drew the bow across the strings once again, she looked up at Agnes. “Do come see me, Miss Canon,” she said. “I so enjoy talking with you. I don’t expect to get out much for a time.”
Agnes said she would and shook her hand. Mr. Beaton claimed her, then, and for the next round of dance, the fiddler launched into a frisky tune, and soon after the Robinsons said their good-byes and left. The evening concluded shortly thereafter with a gentle dance, the tune a remnant of that music of fifty years ago. Doctor Norman and his wife stepped through a dignified set, a stately forward and backward movement, light touch of the hands, a curtsy, raising memories of a time when the century turned and drawing rooms were filled with young ladies in high-waisted narrow silks and gentlemen in knee breeches.
13
Agnes began to call on Mrs. Robinson, sometimes with Elizabeth, sometimes alone. School recessed for spring plowing, and she required a pasttime, Elizabeth required diversion. Agnes wasn’t proud of her reasoning, but she hoped Elizabeth’s association with someone truly ill would shake her out of her melancholy, a strategy that proved successful. And perhaps she sought more conversation with the doctor, a motive she kept strictly to herself.
On their first visit they found Mrs. Robinson in her parlor, a copy of Wieland open on her lap, a sad and bloody novel for a woman in her situation, Agnes thought. She wore a heavy wool morning dress and a shawl about her shoulders though the room seethed with an over-generous wood fire. She didn’t rise when they came in, but held out her hand with a happy smile.
“Miss Canon, Mrs. Kreek, how wonderful of you to visit me!” She waved her hand to the settee. Her girl, a young farm woman hired by the doctor to cook, took their cloaks and the basket of tarts Agnes had purloined from Nancy’s pantry. “It’s been so long since I’ve had the pleasure of talk with ladies.” She wriggled into the nest of her chair like a child delighted with new playmates.
They chatted about the weather, which led them to comment on Mrs. Byrd’s carriage as it passed by splashed to the sideboards in mud, then to the doctor’s rushing off that morning in his buggy through the puddles to tend a suspected case of the measles. At that point the servant brought in a pewter tray with coffee and the jelly tarts arranged on a plate of bone china, and Mrs. Robinson poured and passed. Then they went back to the measles, which led them to the topic of their health: Agnes’s (“Excellent, thank you”), Elizabeth’s (“Improving daily, I thank you”), and Mrs. Robinson’s (“Not sanguine, I’m afraid”). Mrs. Robinson studied her hands, clutched in her lap, then looked up at Elizabeth, her face open and cheerful, as if they talked about how to bake a cider cake. “The doctor has little hope for me, so I’m doing my best to prepare.” She smiled.
Clumsy as always, Agnes said, “By reading Wieland? A book about child murder and suicide?”
She laughed, not the least offended. “It’s a bit grim for my situation, I suppose. But the spirit world is often in my thoughts, and death isn’t something that frightens me.” She pouted at the book on the side table. “But these are particularly vicious deaths.”
“I’ve never read it,” Elizabeth said.
“Don’t,” Agnes said. “It’s not something one reads when one’s recently lost….” She ducked her head. It seemed she could say nothing without blundering.
Elizabeth patted her hand. “Recently lost a child. I know, dear, don’t fret. We can’t avoid the fact forever.”
“My dear Mrs. Kreek,” Mrs. Robinson said. She swung her feet from the footstool and leaned forward. “I’ve thought many times since that awful night that you would find comfort through the use of a medium.”
“A medium what?” Elizabeth asked.
“A medium … you know … one who speaks to the spirits?”
Elizabeth and Agnes looked at each other, then back at Mrs. Robinson.
“Oh, I know,” she said, her pale features flushing. “It’s difficult to believe at first, unless you’ve experienced it.” She leaned back and laughed. “I began to patronize a medium in Ohio while Jabez was gone to the west. I was terrified, you see, that something dreadful would happen to him, and I would never see him again. Then I met a woman who speaks to the departed and thought I’d try it so that even if he were taken from me I wouldn’t lose him.”
She paused, her gaze on the rain that trickled down the window glass to pool in a depression on the sill. The wind gusted and a branch of lilac rapped on the pane.
“And have you attended a … what is it called? … a séance?” Elizabeth appeared intrigued.
“Several. I was never successful in contacting my mother—she’s the only person I really wanted to speak to—but several others spoke to loved ones.”
“And what is it they say?”
“They talk about the next world, who else is there, whether they’re happy.” She looked up. “They all seem to be happy.”
“I’ve read there’s a great deal of fraud among mediums,” Agnes said.
The front door opened and closed, and they heard the doctor’s step in the hall. A gust of wet air shivered the fire. Mrs. Robinson touched a finger to her lips and raised her eyebrows. “We’ll change the subject, now. My husband will laugh at me.” She turned anxious eyes to him.
The doctor greeted them absentmindedly and disappeared into his surgery. They spoke no more of spirits, and soon after, Agnes and Elizabeth took their leave.
“Well, what did you think of the spirits, Agnes?” Elizabeth asked as soon as the door closed behind them. She tugged her hood close about her against the rain.
“I tend to agree with the doctor.” Agnes said. “It’s a passel of nonsense, but if it makes her feel better about her illness, there’s no ha
rm.”
“I liked the idea. Do you suppose I can contact my baby?” Her smile was wistful, but she winked at Agnes.
The gloomy day beamed bright again. Elizabeth would be well.
Over the next few weeks, Elizabeth grew stronger as Eliza grew weaker. Agnes continued to call during the morning hours when the doctor attended patients, and Eliza was alone. Agnes was drawn to her, like a dull moth drawn to a guttering candle. Eliza often lounged in a dressing gown, stretched against pillows or writing letters at a delicate desk, her girl bringing her coffee or tea. One day late in April, Agnes found her on her knees before a leather and copper-studded chest tucked in the corner of the parlor. A swath of fine black lace flowed from her hands, a bolt of intricate tracery that shadowed her bare forearms like spider webs.
“Agnes, look at this.” She held it up. “Spanish lace from Mexico City. Jabez brought it to me from his time in the army.”
The shawl was exquisite, soft as eider down. Exotic.
“And these.” She pulled from the chest a handful of silver and turquoise, the finest jewelry Agnes had ever seen, necklaces and armlets and brooches. “Indian, from the southwest. He was there as an army doctor, you know, back in forty-six.” Agnes hadn’t known. “Then later he traveled to California and worked in the gold fields.” She slipped a circlet of silver, dull and blackened with age, over Agnes’s wrist. “We were apart for ten years.”
Agnes twisted the bracelet to study the deep etchings. It was lovely. “Such a long time.”
“I had no choice. My father refused his permission.”
“Your father didn’t care for him?”
“On the contrary, he cared for him very much. Jabez came to my father as a student.” She stroked the lace as if it were cat’s fur. “But he hadn’t earned his medical degree, and my father wasn’t certain he would ever make a proper living to support a wife.”
“So he sent him away.”
She laughed. A harsh sound, unbecoming. “They had a vicious row. Much too much alike, those two. Father knew Jabez was a rogue, a wanderer. And he was. He wandered into the army, through the camps, all about the west, before he finished his schooling and came back for me.”
“You waited.”
“Yes, ten years. And now it’s too late.”
Agnes was impatient with her. “You give up too easily. You resisted the cancer once before. Do it again.” She tossed her head and stared out the window. What a trial she must be to her husband, Agnes thought. And I don’t care if that’s mean.
“Agnes, please. You’re strong. You don’t understand weakness.” She turned back to the trunk. “Here.” She handed her a bundle of letters tied with a velvet hair ribbon. “Here’s the record of those ten years.”
Agnes wouldn’t take them. “Those aren’t for me to see.”
“I suppose not.” She set them on a table next to an untouched breakfast tray and stroked the black lace absently, eyes turned inward to a distant memory. She seemed weary, enervated, her dark eyes shadowed, her skin pasty. Agnes left soon after, both of them vaguely dissatisfied with the other.
When next she visited Eliza, the trunk of memories no longer haunted the parlor, but the stack of letters covered the table at her elbow and littered about her chair like fallen leaves. She half-reclined against a mound of pillows, a quilt shielding her from the April breeze that puffed lace curtains.
Without greeting, she handed Agnes a letter and picked up another. “Read that one,” she said, her voice weak. “He’s had so much opportunity. How fortunate for men to be able to move about the world on a whim.” Eliza seemed unconcerned about sharing private correspondence, and Agnes wanted very much to know more about him. So she read.
December 12, 1848
My dearest girl. We’ve rounded the horn, and saw Fuego in the distance. I can tell you that the storms of this voyage are not much exaggerated. They come up with the suddenness of a tiger, lying in wait behind mountainous seas and under lowering skies, until they leap upon this tiny chip of a boat without warning. We encountered three such storms before we fully rounded the tip of the continent and made way up the western coast. I’ve treated three cases of scurvy with little patience for those who refuse their limes, set two broken bones, pronounced a boy of sixteen dead after a fall from the mast and watched as his body, sewn into his hammock, slid into an icy sea. These among a host of minor ailments and mishaps.
The coast itself is a jewel-green belt of trees and mountains, with a strip of pearly white beach bordered by the deep green and turquoise of the ocean. We put into Valparaiso for water and supplies and I found for you a beautiful rosewood box inlaid with abalone, made by the native people of the region. We followed the coastline north in calm weather and you filled my thoughts as the moon turned from half to full and began again to wane. We have touched down in a tiny harbor in Peru, with two weeks yet to go before California and I mail this now, hoping it reaches you with all my love,
Jabez Robinson
This was wandering on a grand scale. Even John Jackson, in Agnes’s opinion the epitome of the adventurer, foundered in comparison.
“I don’t know what happened to the rosewood box,” Eliza said. She handed Agnes another letter. “Here you see what a talented doctor he is.”
April 16, 1849
Grass Valley, Calif.
Dear Eliza, I am writing late at night in a canvas tent with rain rolling in beneath the flaps and turning the floor to mush. Lamplight flickers about me and shadows advance and waver and I can only wish that you were here to share this all with me, it is so lonely. Tonight I took off a man’s leg. It was crushed when timbers from a mining shaft collapsed. The hurry and rush for gold is such that men take little care how they construct their operations and I fear hundreds will die from accidents easily preventable.
The gore and blood and disease of the mining camps are equal to that I saw in the southwest during the war with the Mexicans, brought about by both greed and thoughtlessness. My patient this evening finally collapsed under the weight of laudanum and pain. Whether he will awake I do not know. I am the only doctor for nearly a hundred miles either direction and I see it all—accident, childbirth, all manner of disease. I dare say no professor in medical school back east shall ever have the temerity to refuse me my credentials after this. Tell your father I think of him often and wish for his assistance and advice daily.
With all my love,
Jabez
“He walked from his home in Maine to Philadelphia, only to be refused admittance to medical classes,” Eliza said. “I think he still carries the grudge. My father agreed to tutor him. He was an apt pupil, but not a satisfactory son-in-law until he had been … seasoned, I think Father said.”
“Did he ever approve of your marriage?”
“Only after Jabez returned home and took his degree.”
“Holt County must appear very tame to him after … after all this.” Agnes waved the letter.
“It’s a compromise. It’s not Worthington, Ohio. He can’t take me to California. He’ll surely go when I no longer hold him here.”
Agnes hadn’t the heart to chide Eliza for dreariness. She simply accepted what was. Soon enough her husband would be free to wander where he pleased.
Agnes visited Eliza daily after that. She seemed like spun sugar dissolving in the soft spring rain. Sometimes Agnes passed the doctor as he left to visit patients or returned with his arms full of hams or chickens or whatever payment he received for his services. He always threw her a grateful glance, never mentioned his wife, left her hurriedly with a few inquiries about her health and family. His energy and the space he filled in the world seemed to expand as his wife's contracted. Eliza and Agnes continued to read the letters, but only when they were alone, without Elizabeth or the occasional visitor. Agnes took to calling the doctor b
y his given name, in her imagination, fancying that she understood him, that they were in sympathy. She wondered what occurred to him when he returned after years away and found the fragile creature to whom he’d committed himself. His letters recounted operations and battles and fist fights, even murders, mixed among descriptions of a country so beautiful it stopped her breath to read about it. The words grew into a thread linking Agnes to Eliza, to Jabez, into the past, a continuity of lives, and it seemed Eliza bequeathed him to her so that the unbroken chain in which she was a necessary link remained whole.
May came in a burst of blossoms, apples and peaches and pears turning the plains and valleys into a paradise of bloom. The scents of the prairie, fresh turned earth and young grasses, the hurry of animal life, the newness of the breeze washed over the tiny community with the sound of birdsong, and in the small frame house on Missouri Street, Eliza quietly let go.
Agnes sat with her one morning as she lay on a cot in the freshness of the parlor, window open to the sound of bees busy in the apple tree, against Agnes's advice exposed to the spring draft. Propped on pillows so she could see across the fields, her papery hand held a letter, the one they’d read several times about Jabez’s boyhood in Maine, his father and all those sisters and brothers. Eliza loved it especially because it painted him as a child, and she liked to imagine a son of her own just like him. She lifted the letter in Agnes’s direction.
“If I’d had a son I would have named him after my father. Charles Wetmore. Charles Wetmore Robinson. Father would like that. I wish I’d had time for a son.” She turned to the window. “Agnes, have many sons. And let them be rogues. I like rogues.” She smiled, her look far away.
Soon Eliza slept, her breath deep, sounding stronger than it had for many days. Her chest rose and fell gently. Agnes leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. The hum of insects dulled her thoughts, the sunlight warmed the room and raised the sweet smell of lilac. She dozed and dreamed a forgotten dream, and when she awoke, she was alone. Eliza’s form lay yet on the cot, but a sense of solitude prevailed. Agnes sat for some time, then rose to find the doctor.
Agnes Canon's War Page 8
