Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  The light was still dim, and several minutes passed before Fanny located Ash, who lay on his stomach with his knees drawn up under him in a peculiar childish position. He now read himself to sleep at night instead of praying, and books were scattered around him on the waxed floorboards. He mumbled in his sleep, trembling slightly from the cold. A west wind moaned down the chimney, and as the sun grew stronger, lacy patterns of frost appeared on the windowpanes and then evaporated.

  Fanny sat down in a chair by the fireplace and waited for Ash to wake up. The windows, which faced the east, filled the pale glow of first light, then with pink, and then, as the sun rose above the ridgeline, admitted horizontal shafts of sunshine that illuminated the many portraits and paintings of dark northern landscapes which hung, frames touching, on the solid back wall. For many minutes, Fanny watched the light move from one Pennock face to another, disciplining herself to look only at the pictures that the sun touched. It was like watching the minute hand of a clock in order to see it move. She missed the ticking of clocks; there were none in the Manor. John Pennock had believed that the mechanical telling of time distracted the mind from God, who made the passing of the hours evident by the movement of the sun and moon, the gathering of shadows, and variations in temperature.

  “Fanny,” Ash said.

  Fanny looked away from the paintings, parting her lips to say “good morning,” but Ash was in the same contorted position, breathing like a person asleep. She realized that he was talking in his sleep. His voice was no less strong than when he was awake, but the words were unintelligible. Fanny tried to sort them out. At first she could make no sense of it, but then she realized Ash was speaking Latin and made out the words: “Sciuris mortuus est … mortuus est …”

  Fanny giggled. What else but Latin would Ash speak in his sleep? He rolled his tongue in his dry mouth, coughed violently, and opened his eyes.

  “What do you mean, the squirrel is dead?” Fanny asked.

  Ash lay motionless, staring at Fanny, who was just being reached by the light. He had been dreaming his usual dream about her, but he realized after only an instant of doubt that the slight figure seated in the high-backed chair was not the inert nude in his dream but Fanny herself.

  Waking from his dream, Ash was still in a state of desire. He sat up, hoping to conceal this from Fanny. He found it difficult to breathe. He had used his coat as a pillow and his face was marked by the buttons, two spots of dull red among the stubble on his whey-colored cheek.

  “What?” he said. “What squirrel?”

  “You were talking in your sleep. I thought you said Sciuris mortuus est.”

  “Your Latin is better than my memory.”

  “You don’t know what you meant?”

  “I must have been dreaming.”

  “You do know what Thoughtful’s Abenaki name is.” Why was she asking these obscure questions?

  “Do I?” Ash said. “It’s very early in the morning, Fanny.”

  He covered his mouth and coughed again, pressing a forearm into his bulging lap to suppress the sympathetic spasms that this created.

  “Squirrel,” Fanny said. “The Abenakis call her Squirrel. You were saying Sciuris mortuus est as you were waking up.”

  Ash nodded. “Perhaps I was. But my dream had nothing to do with Thoughtful Pennock, I assure you.”

  Ash’s flesh would not subside. He could not move until it did. He searched the room for a means of diverting his mind. The sun flashed on a pair of crossed German rapiers mounted above the mantelpiece. These weapons were as plain as butcher knives—no elaborate basket to protect the hand, no engraving on the blade, just hilt and edge and point. They were nevertheless quite beautiful in a stern Lutheran way. Their purpose, the infliction of death, was much more unhypocritical than in English weapons. Ash concentrated on them, requiring himself to think of nothing but what his eyes beheld, an almost impossible task for him. Finally the rapiers became abstract objects, mere strips of shiny stuff that his conscious mind could not put a name to. His excitation passed. He stood up, ran his hands through his hair, and put on his coat. It was badly wrinkled.

  Fanny watched him with curiosity, as she always watched men in their unguarded moments. Opening his surprised eyes and unfolding his limbs, Ash had seemed to be positively afraid of the morning. Gradually, however, he became himself again—the old Ash having taken shape out of the bewildered stranger she had watched regain consciousness. This composed, friendly Ash seemed to be waiting for her to say something to him.

  “Isn’t it cold,” she asked, “sleeping on the floor without a cover?”

  “Not cold enough. Why are you here, Fanny?”

  “I want to talk to you.” She spoke in a low, barely audible voice. “Let’s walk outside.”

  “Why outside?”

  Fanny pointed upward. Rose’s bed stood almost directly above their heads. Ash nodded. He collected the books he had been reading, all of them Henry’s, and put them back on the shelf. Fanny went and stood at the door that led into the central passageway.

  Ash shook his head, put a finger over his lips, and gestured her to come close. He spoke to her in Latin.

  “There’s another way,” he said. “Do you know about Virgil? Second shelf, bound in blue leather, first three volumes on the left … so!”

  He removed the books from the shelf, put them under his arm, took Fanny’s wrist, and guided her hand into the empty space where the books had been. She felt a latch and lifted it. A section of the bookcase about three feet wide swung outward, revealing a narrow flight of stairs that led downward into darkness.

  Ash lit the stub of a candle from the last coals in the fireplace and led the way into the passage, a narrow corridor passing between two stone walls. Fanny could stand up in it, but Ash had to stoop in order to pass beneath the ceiling, which was constructed of the large flat rocks that were common in this country. After a dozen steps, they came to a right-angle turn and then to another. Both were fitted with heavy frames and stout oak doors bound with riveted iron strips.

  “Firebreak,” Ash said, speaking English now. “If the Manor is set alight, you can close the doors, run to the end of the passageway, and survive the smoke and fire in this chamber.”

  They stood now in a square stone room furnished with a rough table and chairs and a row of bunks. Water, evidently piped in from a spring, ran through a stone basin in one corner, and out again through a drain. Everything was covered with glistening green mold. Kegs and crocks containing corn, potatoes, apples, salt beef, and salt pork stood along the walls. Two hams and a long rank of smoked salmon hung from hooks driven into the stone ceiling. There were two low, narrow alcoves like bread ovens with beds in them.

  “John Pennock had this hiding room built after the attack by the Abenakis,” Ash said. “The whole household could remain here for days, even in winter; as it lies below frost level, there is no danger of freezing even in the coldest winter. There are ducts for fresh air and an exit beyond the walls of the fort. Had this place existed when the Abenakis attacked, Thoughtful would have grown up in this house as a Protestant with a mother and brother instead of in Canada among savages.”

  “And we would be in England. How did you find out about it?”

  “Its existence is a great secret, only revealed in a sealed codicil to Pennock’s will. Only you and Oliver and I know about it.”

  Fanny looked around her, saying nothing. Ash had been surprised, when she was his patient aboard the Pamela, by her habit of falling into a silence as soon as she understood what was said to her. She simply listened to the words, understood, and waited for the next subject to be introduced. That was what she was doing now. It was disconcerting to encounter a female who had so much intelligence. Because his head was bent beneath the low ceiling, Ash’s face was quite close to Fanny’s. It was chilly. His breath condensed in the air. Ash’s face, usually so ghostly, was tinged with color.

  He backed away and opened another low door. Fanny followed
him through it. They emerged inside a thicket of raspberry bushes. There was no outer door, just a frame of stones that looked like the mouth of a shallow cave.

  “It gives a very natural appearance,” Ash said, unable to restrain himself from stating the obvious. “In winter, of course, it would be concealed by the snow.”

  Again Fanny was silent. It was difficult to walk out of the thicket, or into it, because of the thorns on the raspberry bushes. Ash led the way, holding back branches for Fanny. By the time they emerged, his hands were covered with bleeding scratches, They were standing a few hundred yards above the village. Woodsmoke rose from the dozens of chimneys, saturating the air with its acrid fumes. Even now, Fanny could not accustom herself to the constant sight and smell of smoke and the prodigal expenditure of fuel that it represented. Above them in the higher meadows sheltered from the sun, the dying grass was white with frost. Mist hung over the river. The long narrow fields along the river were turning many shades of yellow and brown.

  “It must have looked very much like this on the day the Abenakis came,” Ash said.

  Abruptly he began to describe the battle in minute detail from Pennock’s point of view, as if Fanny had never heard the story. “I have been reading Pennock’s diaries,” Ash said. “As he burned in the pillory that day he thought of God’s words to Abraham as Stephen recounted them on the day of his persecution: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall shew thee.’”

  Though he hardly spoke, now, to anyone else, Ash could not keep quiet in Fanny’s presence. She tried to catch his eye, to change the subject. He would not look at her, but examined the landscape as if he had never seen it before. Even when he was not talking to Fanny, he muttered to himself, a new mannerism. He repeated the Latin words he had spoken in his sleep. When he came back, he spoke them aloud.

  “I can’t remember the dream,” Ash said, “or why I should have spoken the words Sciuris mortuus est. In Catullus’ Carmina there is a similar line about a sparrow, ‘Passer mortuus est meae puellae.’ My mistress’s sparrow is dead, et cetera. Why should that line come to me in my sleep?”

  Fanny lifted her palms to stop his chain of thought and speech. “Never mind,” she said. “It’s Thoughtful I want to talk to you about.”

  “In what connection?”

  “In connection with Rose. What is a ligature?” “The surgical term?”

  “In terms of witchcraft.”

  “It deprives the male of his sexual powers, impotentia ex maleficio, usually by means of a potion. One seldom encounters it in England, but it is common in southern climates, where tempers are more amorous.”

  “Did you tell Rose about ligature as you told her about Satan and the Indians?”

  “Perhaps. It’s impossible to remember every question she asks.”

  “Rose believes that Oliver has one.”

  The corners of Ash’s lips twitched. “Oliver? Who is the witch?”

  “Thoughtful, of course. You heard Rose at supper last night. She doesn’t understand what might happen if she goes on with this silly nonsense.”

  “You think the works of Satan are silly nonsense?”

  “I think it’s silly nonsense to say that a kitten is a devil in disguise and that Thoughtful is a witch who has it for a husband.”

  Fanny was speaking to Ash in a level tone of voice, with no sign of temper, but with such determination that she seemed to be rooted to the ground.

  Ash said, “If Thoughtful is not a witch, then Rose can do her no harm by saying foolish things about her.”

  “No? How many witches have been killed in England?”

  “No one knows. Perhaps thirty thousand, including Scotland. The Scots were very active witch-hunters but compared to the Continent the total was modest. In Saxony a single judge, Benedikt Carpzov, is said to have burnt twenty thousand witches.”

  “Rose must stop this nonsense,” Fanny said. “She doesn’t understand what can happen if she goes on.” “Doesn’t understand? You think that?”

  Ash looked down at Fanny, the straight white part in her glossy hair, her eyes shining with love for her friend, Thoughtful, and with ferocious disgust for Rose Barebones’ accusations.

  “If she does understand,” Fanny said, “then it is worse yet. You can’t want what will happen to happen.”

  “If Rose is misbehaving,” Ash said, “then her husband should command her to stop. Speak to him.”

  “She won’t listen to Oliver. It’s you she listens to. If you tell her to stop, she will stop.”

  Fanny’s expression changed. For once she looked young, uncertain, supplicating. What sign was she giving him? If he gave Fanny what she asked for, what would she give in return? Suppose that Betsy died in childbirth? Would Fanny be his new wife? Ash realized—this was an entirely new thought—that he wanted to have a child by Fanny.

  This child was more vivid to him than the one Betsy was bearing him now, more real than his dead children, whose faces he could not really remember. He longed to see it, he imagined talking to it, smiling at it, teaching it Latin, looking on while Fanny taught it music. In his vision it had Fanny’s face and his mind. No doubt God, when He endowed him with such powerful fleshly instincts, had wanted him to have children. That was mere instinct, this was revelation.… Stop! Think about something else. He held his hands before his face and stared at the tiny beads of blood oozing from the network of scratches left by the raspberry thorns.

  Ash heard Fanny’s voice speaking to him.

  “Will you do it?” she asked. “Will you speak to Rose, tell her to stop?”

  “God means Thoughtful no harm,” Ash said. “Her present trouble is part of His great design, and He will deliver her from it. I am sure of it.”

  Fanny’s heart sank. To a Christian like Ash, the gibbet was a glorious deliverance. Ash started to turn away, but Fanny would not let him go until he said more.

  “No doubt God’s eye is on my friend, as you say,” she said. “But will you explain that to Rose?”

  “I will speak to her. But it will do no good. She doesn’t believe what she says, therefore she will go on saying it until she has what she wants. It is unimportant. Witches are merely a contrivance to her.”

  “Will you say that, if necessary?”

  “If necessary.”

  “Then please be quick about it. There’s danger here, Edward.”

  Edward? Until now Fanny had never called him by his Christian name. Why did she choose this moment to do so? Something was happening that he did not understand.

  Ash had excluded the Scriptures from his thoughts for many weeks, but now he began to consider God again, and to wonder about His design for his life. Surely everything that had happened to him meant something, if he could only see the purpose. Why had he been brought together in the wilderness with Fanny, with Rose, with Oliver, with Thoughtful who had been rescued so providentially? Why had he been taunted by the sailors, and why had such a little thing as that separated him from God? Why were the signs of Satan being made so plain in Rose’s obsession with witchcraft?

  Could it be that all this, and especially his passion for Fanny, was not a sign of his downfall, as he had feared, but a temptation sent to fortify him for some mysterious future that God had had in mind for him all along? Of course it was. Ash’s faith, which had been driven out by lust, came back again. Lust had been a mere disguise! Fanny, whose beauty had made him blind to the intentions of the Lord, and now made it possible for him to see again. How symmetrical were the works of the Lord!

  Ash’s heart swelled with gratitude. All the prayers that he had not uttered in those long days and weeks swirled out of his soul and on to his tongue. He felt the pressure of all three hundreds of unspoken prayers as a dizzying physical force so strong that he lost his balance and staggered a few steps down the hillside.

  Instinctively Fanny seized Ash by the arm and was pulled down the slope after him by his greater weight. When they came to
a stop they had to hold on to each other for a moment to keep from falling.

  Having been unconscious or under the influence of opium while Ash carried on his great struggle with his own flesh aboard the Pamela, Fanny had never before seen him in a religious state. The change was startling. A moment before, he had been quiet and morose. Now he was jubilant, charged with energy, his mouth open, his chest heaving, his eyes glowing, as if he were on the verge of babbling and dancing. He was shuddering with delight.

  He looked into her face with an expression of such unguarded, exalted love that Fanny thought for a moment that he had lost his senses. She removed her hands from his forearms and stepped away.

  Ash stumbled after her, reaching out his arms.

  “There is something I must tell you,” he said. “You need not answer, you need not even believe what I say.” Fanny said, “It would be better not to say it.” But she knew that nothing would stop him.

  “I love you,” Ash said. “I have always loved you, from the first day, with a love so strong that my soul and my body have hardly been able to bear it.”

  Ash’s face glowed with happiness. Fanny knew that she must say something cruel, and say it quickly, or she would never escape from him.

  “I am sorry to hear that,” she said. “Because I don’t love you and never could.”

  The words had no effect. Ash went on smiling. “Of course you would say that,” he said. “I have a wife already. That is so. It is an impediment that no Christian could ignore, and I shall not ignore it. But one day I will be free. Something very powerful tells me so. And when I am, I will tell you everything that is in my heart, and you will know what love God can send into the lives of a man and a woman.”

  Ash squeezed Fanny’s hand. His palm was damp but cold, an unsettling combination of sensations.

  “I already know that,” Fanny said.

  “Then you have felt my love already!”