When Pennock found her in Two Suns’s village, she was grinding corn on a stone with the children of Talks in His Dreams’ other wives all around her, and she looked to be seven or eight months pregnant. She had come from a family in which all the girls were pretty, and she had been the prettiest of all the Clum sisters. She was still comely, but she was so much an Indian now, in dress and manner and vacant mind, that you hardly noticed the color of her hair and skin.
“Well, yes,” she said in a resigned tone of voice when Pennock asked her about religion. “I became a Catholic when I married. The Abenakis believe in it, you see, and what would the children have thought? ‘They’ll never obey a woman who’s going to hell,’ Talks in His Dreams said, and I couldn’t argue with that.”
“What about their immortal souls?” Pennock asked. “What about your own?”
“One doesn’t hear quite so much about that here,” the young woman replied.
“You are content to live among these savages?”
The young woman dropped her eyes. “They have their own ways,” she said.
“But surely you must miss your own people?”
She looked up at him with a slow countrywoman’s grin. “I do wish they’d stolen my sister Hepzibah too,” she said. “We always had good times together.”
Two Suns greeted Pennock outside his lodge and offered him food. Pennock, who had visited dozens of Indian villages, knew that he must eat when asked to do so, so he sank onto the ground beside the old Indian with a groan. The women brought them corn cakes and bits of meat. Like most Indian food, it tasted of singed fur and was hard to chew.
After they had eaten, Two Suns lighted a long clay pipe, puffing energetically until the burning tobacco glowed in the bowl, and handed it to Pennock. The two old men finished the pipe, passing it back and forth, before Two Suns spoke. He told quite a long anecdote in Abenaki, pausing now and then when he came to one of the good parts to laugh in a sharp barking way.
The French ensign pursed his lips before interpreting.
“Two Suns says he remembers you very well and wonders if you remember him. To refresh your memory, he tells you that he is the man who tripped up your horse with his musket during the fight at Alamoth. It was he, also, who locked your neck in the pillory and burned you in the fire. He is delighted to see you. You are the bravest and the most famous enemy he has ever had. He also speaks well of your wife.”
“I remember him,” Pennock said. “Ask him if he knows anything about my daughter.”
The Frenchman asked Two Suns this question. Two Suns replied at great length, but without the laughter. A row of women and girls stood behind Two Suns, listening intently to what he was saying. Occasionally they grunted in unison or uttered a peculiar high-pitched series of yips. There were ten or twelve of these females, all standing in full view of John Pennock. When Two Suns finished, the ensign turned back to Pennock.
“Two Suns says that the only girl of that age he knows about is his own daughter, who was lost among the English for a while but is now an Abenaki again. Her name is Squirrel. That is her, standing next to his wife, Thin Ice—the fat woman who fed you the porcupine meat.”
Pennock, squinting, looked at the girl. Two Suns watched him, then asked a question.
The ensign translated. “He wants to know your daughter’s name.”
“Thoughtful,” Pennock replied, looking at Two Suns again, but not at the girl. “Is his daughter a Catholic?”
“Oh, yes, like the others. He told me a lot about her. She was educated by the Ursulines.”
“She’s a nun?”
“No, she’s too young. Besides, her mother needs her to help with the work.”
“Is his daughter as happy as all the rest of the Abenakis?”
The Frenchman talked to Two Suns and interpreted his reply.
“Happier, he says, because she is with her real mother. He wants to know if the big dogs that killed Yellow Rain are still at Alamoth.”
“Yes,” Pennock replied. “It’s the only place you will find them, besides Ireland.”
In the pine grove, Magpie stopped talking.
“Magpie, this is very important,” Oliver said. “Was Thoughtful there that day?”
“Captain Pennock did not see her.”
“Did you see her?”
Magpie was silent for several moments. Oliver, who was not usually alert to the sounds of nature, heard the wind murmuring in the pines and the calls of the many kinds of birds that lived in the big trees.
“Captain Pennock always told me that he would give me Coffee if we found his daughter,” Magpie said at last. “When he died, he gave me Coffee.”
18
Magpie’s account of John Pennock’s visit to the Abenaki village did nothing to change Oliver’s mind about Thoughtful’s right to inherit her father’s estate.
“The old man made a mistake,” he told Rose. “Maybe it was a mistake of the heart, but it was a mistake.”
His obstinacy was like a great weight lying on Rose’s chest and pressing the air from her lungs.
“Mistake of the heart, mistake of the heart, that’s all you know how to say,” Rose said, barely able to breathe as she talked. “How do we even know she’s who she says she is?”
“She’s never said,” Oliver replied. “We’re the ones who say that she’s Thoughtful Pennock, and we’re right. Just look at that picture. ”
An oil portrait of eighteen-year-old John Pennock hung in the hall. Wearing a breastplate and a steel helmet called a lobster-tail burgonet, he looked straight at the painter, his wiry red hair escaping from the helmet to form a fringe around his face. Thoughtful looked like his female twin—the unruly curls, the candid eyes, the skeletal forehead and cheekbones, the captured light beneath the freckled skin.
“Suppose she is John Pennock’s daughter,” Rose said. “If so, he saw what she was in that Indian village.” “Oh? What was she?”
“A papist for one thing, a savage Indian for another. The two things Captain Pennock hated most in this world.” “But we do know that he found her.”
“Then why didn’t he bring her home, if he’d spent so much time looking for her? He didn’t want what belonged to his family to fall into the hands of an idolatrous savage, that’s why.”
Oliver’s face broke into a benign smile. “Then he did his daughter a very great wrong. I must write to Lebbaeus Williams and see what is to be done about it.”
Rose could not believe her ears. “Write to Lebbaeus Williams?” she cried. “See what is to be done about it? Nothing is to be done! That girl has no right to anything under the law. Williams has already said so.”
Rose gestured violently and her face flushed a deep red. Oliver had never seen her so alive. He gave her an easy smile and spoke to her in a tone of exaggerated reasonableness. “So he did. But that was before he was in full possession of the facts.”
“Don’t use that tone of voice,” Rose said, “as though I’m the one who’s mad. It’s you that wants to give away ten thousand acres to a girl who can’t speak a word of English, who says the rosary in front of everyone as if she couldn’t be hanged for it, who doesn’t even wear petticoats. Williams’ll have you locked up for a lunatic.”
“Better mad than greedy,” Oliver said, calm as before. “After all, dear wife, we were all right before we had all this.”
“All right?” Rose cried. “You think we were all right? Alfred Montagu almost pulled our house down around our ears and drove us out of England as paupers.”
“Hardly paupers. We still have the Pamela—and the whole wide world.”
“The whole wide world? The Pamela? We’ll never see the Pamela again—your dago is gone forever and your ship and your lobsters are gone with him.”
“Peters may be a dago, but he’s honester than any Englishman I ever knew except Henry Harding. You’re wrong about him, just as you are wrong about John Pennock’s will.”
Rose stared into his face but saw no glimmer
of good sense.
“You can’t be serious,” she said at last. “You wouldn’t give away everything, not the whole ten thousand acres, not the Manor, the fir trees.…”
“Of course I’m serious, dear wife,” Oliver replied. “Never more so.”
Oliver was happy. A burden had been lifted from him. He took off his wig and twirled it on his finger and gave Rose a broad slow wink. Then he went into the library and began to write his letter to Lebbaeus Williams. It was a long letter; Rose’s bedchamber was directly above the library—they were the two biggest rooms in the Manor—and she heard his quill scratching on the paper long after she went to bed.
Although she came from a well-known Buckinghamshire family, Rose had been poor nearly all her life. She remembered feasts and dolls from her very early childhood, but after that she had always been slightly hungry and slightly ashamed; her beauty made people look at her, and when they did, they saw how cheap and wrong her clothes were. At Lockwood Hall, Rose had lived on table scraps after Robert was killed; Sir Cecil had even denied her her own candle so that she had to find her way through the dark to a dreary room under the eaves that no member of the family had ever slept in before. When Sir Cecil had thrown her into marriage with Oliver, Rose had expected that her life would become even worse than it always had been, and when Montagu appeared, she knew that she had been right. Except for her victory in bed over Oliver, she had been powerless all her life.
Now, miraculously, Rose was mistress of the handsomest house in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. For the first time, she had something to lose, and the situation was absolutely clear: Thoughtful Pennock had the power to take it away from her.
The prospect was unbearable. Like an old penniless aunt who inherits the possessions of a family in which everyone else unexpectedly dies before her, Rose was passionately attached to every single item in the Manor—jewels, silver, pewter, porcelain, swords, armor, guns, the portraits of the bony Pennock ancestors, the English bedsteads, commodes, clothes presses, glass-front bookcases, chests, tables and chairs, musical instruments, all gleaming with varnish and wax.
Though it was built of wood and groaned when the wind blew, the Manor was the only house Rose had yet seen in America that could be called an English house; everyone else, no matter how rich, lived all tumbled together in a medieval lack of privacy, with nothing good to eat and nothing beautiful to look at.
“Is Rose Manor not beautiful?” she said to Ash.
“It is plain and simple like its builder,” Ash replied.
In her heart, Rose knew that this was true by English standards. But there were no real Englishmen here in the wilderness to see the facts of the situation and make a point of them. As Rose understood from bitter experience, the whole idea of being on top in England was to have more of everything than your neighbors—land, money, influence, haughty children, glittering friends, servants, horses, works of art, beautiful women—so as to be able to impress your inferiors by making a show of possessions that they could never hope to match.
Rose certainly owned more of everything than anyone else for hundreds of miles around, and in the time that she had been at Alamoth, her manner had changed so dramatically that she had undergone a physical transformation. Always before she had slumped a little in her discontent, but now she held herself gracefully erect. The sullen expression she had worn in Lockwood Hall, where she had been a ragged bride and then a widow living on charity, and in Catherine Street, where she had been an unwilling wife, was replaced by a look of perpetual amusement—not quite a smile, but an aristocratic twinkle of superiority, as if nothing could ruffle the happiness that was her natural right.
She applied the lessons in posture and deportment that had been drummed into her all her life: bend from the hips, not from the waist; stand with the back arched so as to lift the bosom and the buttocks; let the left arm hang loose and lift the right arm languidly always along its whole length; walk with the foot fully arched; open the eyes wide and part the mouth slightly a long moment before forming the first word of a reply. Rose spoke and moved more deliberately, especially when she went for her daily ride through the village. The velvets and silks that Oliver had bought her in the first days of their marriage were too rich to be made into dresses in a place where there was no society and no possibility of one, so she had them sewn into riding habits that would have been considered daring even in Versailles. Here they were so astonishing that the villagers looked up at the sky or down at the ground when Rose approached, not knowing whether they were permitted to gaze at such a display of uncovered neck and bosom.
On the other hand, everyone greeted Thoughtful like a princess returned from exile. The village girls took her by the hand and walked along beside her, older women gathered around her in groups of three or four to stare at her while they told each other stories about her when she was a baby. Old husbands brought her gifts of fruit in the evening when they came home from the orchards and told her what a great man her father had been. It was maddening. Thoughtful’s birth had given her a power over these people; they did not care that she was ugly and ragged. She was the last of the Pennocks.
“You’d think she’d come back from the dead,” Rose said in disgust.
“She has, as far as they’re concerned,” Oliver replied.
Rose spent a great deal of time alone, worrying about Thoughtful, in the big four-poster bed in the bedchamber where Captain John Pennock had slept and died. Sometimes she would lie down in the afternoon and close the curtains. Then the bed was like a rich little room, with the cheveron dancetty and the winged griffin of the Pennock coat of arms carved into the headboard, and overhead—a peculiar scene to find in a Puritan’s bed—a tapestry canopy depicting Paris in the act of judging three plump Flemish models who impersonated Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. The look on Paris’ face, wild and stupid, reminded her of the way both her husbands had looked when they saw her naked. There were two big mirrors in the room, and sometimes Rose stood between them when she was tired of thinking so as to look at herself, front and back at the same time.
Sometimes she could hear Oliver below her in the library, talking to Edward Ash about Thoughtful, or talking to Thoughtful while Fanny interpreted, or working on his letter to Lebbaeus Williams. Sound traveled upward in the wooden house, and of course Rose could hear every word that was said. Very little that she overheard was remarkable. Oliver and the others just kept going over the same ground: how Thoughtful had been captured, how she had lived, how she had been redeemed by Hawkes, what Thoughtful believed, what she deserved. The details of Thoughtful’s life seemed to exercise some mysterious power over the imagination, especially Oliver’s imagination. One afternoon Rose heard him talking quietly to Fanny—so quietly, in fact, that she had to get down on the floor and press her ear to the wood in order to make out the words.
“It’s very odd, Fanny,” Oliver was saying, “but I’ve come to love Thoughtful—love her as I love you, as a daughter.”
“What’s so odd about that?” Fanny asked. “She’s a lovable girl.”
“It’s more than just that. She reminds me of Henry. I feel when I see her that Henry has come back.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes, I do, Fanny. Look how everybody smiles at her. They can’t help themselves, just as they couldn’t help it with Henry. Don’t you see it too? You must, to be such friends with her—the two of you are like sisters.”
“Perhaps you’re right.”
Lying on the floor, listening to these words, Rose thought for a moment that she was truly lost. How could she combat the ghost of Oliver’s only friend? She got back into the bed, drew the curtains, and lay for a long while with her eyes closed. When she opened them again, the first thing she saw was Paris and the three naked goddesses. Hardly knowing what she was doing—she certainly had never done such a thing before—she stood up, took off her clothes, and looked at her nude body in the mirrors.
She smiled at her image because suddenly
she knew what she must do. She had the power to make him forget about Thoughtful, even to forget about Henry Harding. She would have a child by Oliver. A child, a son, was what all men wanted. Rose did not understand this, but she knew that it was true. Her father had hated his daughters, but her mother had always said that he might have loved them if they had had a brother to tease them. Even Robert, who had seemed to have no heart at all, had talked about nothing but the sons Rose was going to give him, even before she was pregnant. After she was with child, Robert had listened at her stomach to hear the baby gurgling inside, and felt it kicking, and even talked to it, hallooing through her belly button.
She assumed that a boy would look like its father. She did not see how she could ever love a child that looked like Oliver. Perhaps it would not look like him. Perhaps it would look like Robert. He must have left something of himself behind as a result of all those penetrations.
Rose did not want to have what must happen, happen more than was necessary. She would let Oliver do as he wished once, then wait a month for a result, then give permission again if she was not yet pregnant.
Oliver had not touched her since the day Henry was killed. He had left her alone aboard the Pamela. Since coming to America they had slept in separate rooms. In fact, Rose did not know where exactly Oliver slept at night. When she went to bed, he was always still awake, drinking rum, or talking to Ash, or listening to Fanny play one of her instruments, or playing draughts with Hepzibah. At Rose’s insistence—she said they needed twice as many servants as they had—Oliver had hired the Clum girl as a maidservant, giving her father ten acres of land and ten pounds, and paying Hepzibah herself six pounds a year, in return for a three-year indenture.
Rose always locked the door of her bedchamber, but Oliver had never tried to enter. It did not occur to Rose that this meant that his desire for her was any weaker than it had been in London. How could it be when it had never been satisfied?
Bride of the Wilderness Page 29
