Ash saw Fanny’s difficulty and hurried forward. By now the woman was red in the face and the child was in a fit of giggling. Tears ran down her cheeks. Ash gave her a hard pinch on the arm and she stopped. His walloping voice sobered the young woman, and she began to explain something to him.
“You understand her?” Fanny said.
“So can you, if you listen,” Ash replied. “It’s only north-country speech.”
Fanny had no trouble understanding the young woman now. Then, suddenly she became shy, as if she spoke Fanny’s language too badly to be understood, and would only answer Fanny’s questions through Ash.
“Why was she shouting at me?” Fanny asked.
“Why were you shouting at this young lady?” Ash interpreted.
“We always yell like that the first time at strangers,” the young woman said, holding a muddy hand over the mouth of the child, who had started to giggle again. “It makes us laugh.”
“Ah,” said Ash, smiling fondly. “It’s the village joke.” He turned to the woman. “Do you do this to your neighbors too—shout at them in that ghastly burr?” The other towns in the valley had mostly been settled by people from East Anglia, Sussex, and Kent.
“When they come. But they don’t.”
The young woman’s name was Hepzibah Clum. The child was called Totsie, and she was Hepzibah’s sister, not her daughter.
“Why ‘Totsie’?” Ash asked.
“Because Dadda gave her tots and she got drunk on cider when she was just walking.”
Ash was amused, laughing, a new condition in Fanny’s experience of him. He liked country people. As a young undergraduate, the summer before he had taken holy orders, he had walked through Yorkshire all the way to the Scottish border, getting lost on the moors and preaching from stiles to little bunches of yokels. He had preached a sermon in Latin from Hadrian’s Wall to a couple of shepherds who congratulated him afterward: “Finest English we’ve ever heard, sir.” Ash thought the joke was on the shepherds until he’d walked along thinking for a couple of miles.
Now, as they sauntered into Alamoth, Ash asked Hepzibah Clum question after question. Yes, that was the same pillory where the Abenakis had set fire to Captain Pennock.… Yes, that was Pink Brook that had run red with English blood.… The church was new, but look—they nailed some of the charred clapboards back on when they rebuilt it as a reminder of the day the Lord took His vengeance. Hepzibah answered Ash’s questions about the Indian attack in monosyllables, eyes downcast.
Nothing in Alamoth was painted. All the houses were made of overlapped whipsawed hemlock boards nailed to rock-maple beams. The ages of the houses and sheds could be told by their color. New structures were as white as fat in a butcher shop. Then, year by year, the clapboards grew darker until they became silvery gray when they were old. There were few such gray buildings in Alamoth—the tavern, which the Abenakis had spared, two walls of the Manor, a few cottages and barns, the rail fences around the common.
The working day was coming to an end. People and animals were all mixed up together inside and out. Inside cottage doors, girls were milking red Devon cows and smelling the milk to see if it was sour after the thunderstorm. Chickens perched in the windowsills. Pigs rooted and rolled in the wallows left by the rain. Alamoth seemed to be a very industrious place. Smiths, carpenters, masons, coopers, tanners, and half a dozen other trades worked busily in shops along the single street. A breeze came off the river and a tavern sign squeaked overhead.
Rose rode through the scene with her head in the air. The village women shuffled their feet and picked up the corners of their aprons and the men took off their hats as she passed.
The Manor, Captain John Pennock’s house, placed in such a way that it was visible from every point in the village, stood on a knoll in a grove of ancient trees. It was a plain rectangular building with chimneys at either end, seven upstairs windows on the long side of the rectangle, and a doorway that was somewhat too tall for its width, like a gravestone. The lintel was carved like a gravestone, with cherubs holding an orb on which, as the Manor’s new residents already knew, John Pennock’s Cromwellian motto had been chiseled.
“That there’s the Manor,” Hepzibah Clum said in a solemn voice. “Captain Pennock died there all alone. We could hear him yelling all night long, giving orders to soldiers. Nobody’s been inside since then except Magpie and her nigger, before she sold him.”
Hepzibah’s eyes were round with reverence. Rose overheard her words.
“We do not call it that,” she said to Hepzibah.
“Don’t call it the Manor?” Hepzibah said. “What do your ladyship call it, then?”
Rose had not decided what to call the house now that it was hers; she had decided to rename it just the moment before. Hepzibah, jogging along beside the horse, breasts bouncing, clearly expected an answer. Rose rode on in silence, her eyes fixed on the Manor. A kind of washed light suffused the landscape after the rain so that it looked like a painting of itself. In Rose’s eye, the Manor was a mellower color than the other buildings. Perhaps, she thought, it had been made of rarer woods.
Rose had been prepared to be disappointed by her new house. How could it be anything at all if it was in America? But she was not disappointed. The Manor was not Whitehall Palace, or even Lockwood Hall, but it was five times as large as any other building in Alamoth, and at least double the size of any house in Boston. And Rose, who had been made to have babies she didn’t want, Rose, who had been forbidden to light candles in Lockwood Hall, Rose, who had been made to stay upstairs in her tiny bedchamber except when Sir Cecil wanted to show her off like an Arabian mare to people like Oliver Barebones—Rose was mistress of this house.
“Not ‘the Manor,’” she said to Hepzibah. “Rose Manor. That is the name by which my husband wishes the house to be called from now on.”
Magpie awaited them at the gates. Rose had expected her to be dressed as an Indian, but she wore ordinary clothes.
“Ah,” Rose said. “The Indian slave. Is it true that you sold your husband in the Indies?”
Magpie was silent.
“No reply?” Rose said. “Very well. We have a long time before us.”
She gazed down haughtily on the stunted Indian girl. Magpie walked ahead of them as they passed down the avenue of trees that led to the Manor. She unlocked the double door with a large key, lifted the latch, and threw the doors wide open. Magpie was not as Oliver had described her or as Fanny remembered her. She had been a memorably bright and comical child, but now she was withdrawn and unsmiling. Oliver supposed that she must be in her twenties by now, but she did not look like a young woman. She had a hen’s torso and spindly legs and arms, like an old woman who had always drunk too much.
Oliver wanted to talk to her, to tell her who he was and ask her if she remembered Fanny, but he was interrupted by a shriek from Rose.
“Husband!” she cried.
15
The Manor was full of cats. The poisonous stink of their droppings, stronger than that of any other animal, spilled through the door. Rose yanked on the bit and her horse neighed and backed rapidly away, then wheeled and galloped up the street, scattering pigs and dogs and splashing mud on Hepzibah Clum and the others who had followed Rose home.
Holding the plunging horse, Rose pointed her whip at Oliver. “Cats!” she cried, her voice breaking with anger and accusation. “I won’t have cats!”
Oliver followed Magpie inside the Manor. Cats scampered away in every direction, paws thumping softly on the bare wooden floors.
Magpie watched them calmly.
“Captain Pennock said someday we’d need the cats,” she said. “He said someday there will be rats, they’ll come over on ships with the people because there is one rat for every person. It was not natural, he said, that there weren’t any rats in America.”
“Captain Pennock said that?” Oliver replied, glad of the chance to speak to Magpie alone. “Do you know who I am?”
Magpi
e looked into his face. “You are the same.” “Not you.”
The smell of excrement and urine was overpowering. Oliver had never experienced anything like it.
“Your mistress will faint if she smells this,” he said. “Open all the windows.”
Oliver opened the first one himself and stuck his head out to get some fresh air. He could hear the windows being put up all over the downstairs, and then the patter of dozens of paws as Magpie went upstairs. Cats poured down the staircase but stopped when they saw Oliver and gathered into a furry mass before they scampered back up the stairs.
Oliver had always liked cats. He tried to count the ones he could see, or at least estimate their numbers, but there were far too many of them. A dozen or so leaped out the open windows.
“Well done,” Oliver said to Magpie. “Now chase out the rest.”
Magpie looked around at the multitude of cats. “How?” she asked.
Oliver looked out the window. Rose was still seated on her horse at the other end of the village. Even at a distance of a hundred yards or so, Oliver could see how angry the cats had made her by spoiling her arrival at the Manor. Even Rose would never get rid of them all. Oliver grinned, imagining the war to come between Rose and John Pennock’s cats.
“I don’t care how you do it,” Oliver said. “Go find someone to help you.”
Magpie left. Oliver, staying near the window for the sake of the fresh air, watched her as she trotted down the sloping Manor path toward Rose and the crowd that had gathered around her. Rose was talking very rapidly, spitting words downward from the back of her horse at Gustavus Hawkes, who stood at her stirrup with his musket cradled in his arms. As Hawkes listened, a smile broke over his face. His movements became brisk. He slapped Rose’s horse on the rump as though he were giving Rose herself a companionable swat on the backside, and strode toward the house, whistling up his dogs. The big placid wolf dogs and the small noisy ones frisked around him.
What happened next took Oliver by surprise, and it happened so quickly and produced such a racket that he could not have interfered even if he had wished to do so. Hawkes led the dogs straight into the Manor. They paused and whimpered when they smelled the ammonia and digested meat of cat droppings. Hawkes made several loud kissing noises. The dogs looked up at him with loving eyes.
“Cats,” Hawkes said. “Cats! Sssssic ’em!”
The dogs burst into motion, knocking over chairs and tables as they coursed through the house.
The few cats left downstairs shot yowling out the windows, as if (Oliver thought) they had been kicked through a set of goalposts. It brought back vivid memories of the white cat going through Henry’s window at the wedding feast, and Oliver laughed out loud, thinking, as he often did, how Henry would have enjoyed this scene. The dogs, barking hysterically, galloped up the staircase; the sound of their toenails skidding over the board floors came through the ceiling. So did the padded scurrying whisper of dozens of cats’ feet. Cats poured down the stairs and out the open windows.
Pennock had built the Manor in a grove of ancient white oaks. The trunks of these huge trees were some distance from the house, but their branches were themselves as big around as ordinary trees, and extended twenty or thirty feet outward from the trunks. As the dogs chased them through the upstairs, the cats began to leap out the upper-story windows into the trees. From outdoors, where Fanny and most of the village were standing, it was a dreamlike sight. The house seemed to be sneezing cats. They would fill up a windowsill, black ones with white faces and boots, striped yellow ones, and tabbies, every one of them descended from Pennock’s original three cats. Then all would spray outward like globules of fur, and float downward toward the leafy sanctuary of the oaks. Most landed in the trees, but some fell out, clawing frantically, and others missed altogether. The ones who hit the ground mostly ran straight back into the Manor, to be chased out again by the dogs. But the rest stayed in the trees, stalking with arched backs up and down the branches and yowling at the wolf dogs, whose good-natured tufted faces and lolling red tongues appeared every now and then in a window frame.
Rose, seated on her plunging horse, watched this scene in fascination. Why hadn’t the Gypsy crone foreseen this plague of cats? How could any fortune-teller not predict such an event? Rose had already all but stopped believing in the bear that was supposed to control her fate.
Her anger subsided. She realized that the cats had made it impossible for anyone in Alamoth ever to forget the day she arrived. If gossip traveled in America at the same speed as in England, they’d know about this in Boston next week. Rose had driven out the cats. She could never have done it, she knew, without Edward Ash, who had explained so much to her about God’s purposes. That was why she had known what Hawkes and his dogs were really for.
Never in her life had she felt so calm or so powerful; she thought that anyone in America, except Ash, of course, would do whatever she told him to do. She kicked her horse into motion and rode toward the house. Hepzibah Clum stood next to Fanny, looking upward openmouthed at the cats in the oak trees. Rose knew that she would need servants to clean up the manor.
“You,” Rose said, poking Hepzibah with the green switch she was using as a riding whip. “What’s your name?”
Hepzibah told her.
“I’ve never heard that name. I need you and two more like you. Find them and bring them back here.”
Rose caught Fanny’s eye and gave her a long look, rolling her own eyes upward at the cats. She mouthed a silent word: “Witches.” Then she started shouting at Oliver to close the windows so that the cats could not get back inside.
When Rose dismounted at last, the villagers hung back, gazing at her. They had, Rose knew, never imagined that such a person as herself existed. She handed the reins of her horse to a young boy, as if he had been born to serve as her groom, and strode into the Manor, shutting the door behind her. Hawkes’s dogs had killed a certain number of cats. Rose regarded the shredded remains with satisfaction.
Only a few kittens remained alive, hidden in nests in the attic and cellar. The dogs sniffed them out and Hawkes gathered them up, dropping them into a porous sack. When the sack was full, he left with his dogs frisking around him.
Twilight was falling. The cats were beginning to climb down out of the trees. Fanny did not want to go inside; she had already heard too much noise. She walked away by herself beyond the end of the village. Halfway up a steep hill behind the Manor, she found the source of the brook that ran through Alamoth, a spring gushing out of a wall of rock.
She drank and washed her face and hands and wished for a bath, then followed the brook down toward the village. It grew larger as it descended, with knee-deep pools of clear water lying under grassy banks. Fanny paused by one of these, behind a screen of willows, and thought again about a bath. Her body was sore in its creases for having gone unwashed for such a long time.
Fanny heard cats mewing. The sound was loud, yet not loud. She had never heard anything like it. She listened intently, trying to discover where it was coming from.
Making no noise at all, Thoughtful Pennock stepped out from behind the willows. She lifted her skirt and tied it around her waist. She wore no petticoats and her legs were bare. She waded into the pool and pointed downward. The mewing was coming out of the water. Hawkes’s gunnysack was full of kittens, swimming up into pockets of air and crying as they drowned.
“Help me,” Thoughtful said in French. “He’s filled the sack with rocks.”
Fanny waded into the pool and the two girls dragged the heavy sack onto the bank and opened the neck. Many of the kittens were dead, but some were still living. Thoughtful picked up one of the little animals. Its fur was soaked and it shivered in her hand. She put it inside the bosom of her dress to warm it.
“Pauvres petits,” Fanny said.
Thoughtful peered into Fanny’s face. “Tu parks français?” she said. “Good. Now I can find out who all you people are.”
16
&
nbsp; “‘Thoughtful,’” Thoughtful said. “What name is that in French?”
“Pensive,” Fanny replied.
“Pensive? That’s not a name, it’s an adjective.” “In English it’s a proper name.”
“Is it normal for the English to give a child an adjective for a name? Are there Jolies and Petits and Rouges?”
“Not yet,” Fanny said. “Thoughtful is a name used by the Puritans. They often name their children for the virtues.”
“Puritan? You mean Protestant?”
“The most Protestant of all Protestants.”
“Oh la-la!” Thoughtful crossed herself. “What next?” “What do you want to know?”
“Your story. Who are your people, where do you come from? Who are the ones who came with you?” “Nobody told you?”
“Magpie told me in signs, but she’s afraid of you. She thinks you’ll find out she can sew and take her back to London and sell her. That’s why my dresses don’t fit me. They belonged to Strong Woman.”
“Belonged to whom?”
“The Englishwoman who was my mother before I was an Abenaki.”
“Hope Barebones, the wife of Captain John Pennock. She was your mother.”
“I know. It’s in my story. I am as tall as she was, but she was stronger. Magpie won’t make the dresses smaller because then you’d know she can sew. Now tell me all the names.”
Fanny told her about John Pennock’s will, about Magpie’s visit to London, about London, about her father and mother, about Oliver and Rose. Thoughtful listened politely.
“Is that all?” she said. “There must be more names. What are the names of the rest of the family—all of them? What are they famous for?”
“They’re all famous for their names. Your maternal great-grandfather was called If-Christ-had-not-died-thou-hadst-been-damned Barebones. You have a first cousin once removed called Praise God Adkins.”
Bride of the Wilderness Page 26
