“The danger is past,” Ash said. “God has sent His snow to protect the English from the French and Indians. As in David’s song of deliverance, ‘the Lord had delivered him from the hand of all his enemies.… And he said, The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer.’”
It was also an article of military faith, laid down by John Pennock, that no body of men, not even the Abenakis, could march four hundred miles through deep snow, fight a battle, and then retreat another four hundred miles to their base. Everyone in Alamoth believed this.
The cycle of storms lasted exactly a week, from Sunday to Sunday. Ash had constructed a device outside the library window to measure the snow.
“This is remarkable,” he said to Fanny. “The amount of snow that has fallen in the three storms is precisely three cubits, a very clear indication of God’s intentions.”
Having decided that it would be impious to record its depth in any but biblical measure, Ash had redefined the cubit. The term, he explained, was derived from the Latin cubitum, meaning elbow.
“In Hebrew and Greek, the word means forearm,” Ash said. “Why the Romans did not call it bracchium, I do not know. The cubit mentioned in Matthew and Luke is based on the length of the forearm from elbow to fingertips. The Roman cubit was just above seventeen inches, the Egyptian over twenty inches. I can’t discover why they were different.”
By measuring the forearms of everyone in the village and averaging their length, Ash had created an Alamoth cubit of exactly eighteen inches.
He and Fanny had been spending time together studying medical texts, because Oliver had assigned her to assist Ash in case of Indian attack. With Ash as her teacher, Fanny studied the techniques of amputation and probing for bullets, memorized the names and locations of all the arteries and veins and nerves, learned the purposes of the surgical instruments, practiced sewing up wounds on the shaved skin of a calf.
“You have the touch,” said Ash, watching her. “You shall sew up all the wounds and hardly leave a scar.”
As long as he and Fanny were concentrating their minds together, Ash seemed to forget his passion for her. In the pauses, he remembered what he felt and a look of deep melancholy came into his eyes. Knowing these signs, Fanny left Ash the moment their work together was finished.
With the help of Hepzibah Clum and two or three other women detailed as nurses, Fanny and Ash made arrangements to convert the church into a hospital. It was now stocked with bandages and lint and bedding and a table that could be used for operations.
Before the ground froze, Ash caused ten graves to be dug in the churchyard and covered up with boards. These were soon concealed by new snow. Ash showed Fanny one of the open graves, casting the boards aside in a flurry of snow.
“There may not be as many dead as we have provided for, but it is well to be prepared,” Ash said. “Disease breeds in the dead.”
On seeing the empty grave, dusted with bone-white snow, Fanny turned her head aside, reminded of Saint Andrew’s churchyard.
“I’m very sorry if this worries you,” Ash said. “But you must know every preparation made and the reason for it. If I am killed or captured, you must carry on. There is no one else.”
Suddenly he stopped talking and stared dumbly around him out of his red-rimmed eyes. In the pale light of the winter afternoon, he looked pinched and worn-out. He pointed to the snowdrifts that buried the village to the top of the palisade.
“Snowbound,” he said. “We are imprisoned together—the one who loves and the one who will not permit herself to be loved.”
The wind came up, driving the snow so that it stung the skin. Fanny turned her face away and wrapped her scarf around it.
Ash was trembling. “Who is the man you are waiting for?” he asked.
He was whispering. It was startling to hear him speak in such a tone of voice.
“Who?” Ash said. “Is he young? Rich? Poor? How do you know him?”
Another snow-filled gust struck them. Fanny turned her back against it. When she turned around again, Ash was running toward the Manor, stumbling and falling down in the knee-deep drifts.
The weather turned very cold. Thoughtful found snowshoes in a storage room at the Manor and taught Fanny how to walk on them. The woods were astonishing in winter, when it was much more difficult for the animals to hide. The surface of the snow was covered by the lacy pattern of tracks left by birds, squirrels, rabbits, and the predators. They heard a baby howling in a grove of trees and a moment later came on the torn remains of a rabbit and the tracks of a cougar.
Thoughtful led, moving silently over the top of the snow. They ran for half an hour, then walked for half an hour. The two girls, moving at a lope, skirts pulled up, stockings flashing, passed among the trees. Their bodies dripped sweat even on the coldest day. Finally Fanny was able to keep up this pace for hours at a time.
“Good,” Thoughtful said. “You’re beginning to be an Abenaki.”
Thoughtful was eager to teach. She pointed out a feathery patch of snow, plunged her hands into it, and captured a grouse just as it exploded into flight. She rigged nooses in deadfalls and captured rabbits. She pointed out the ragged toothmarks of a deer on a stand of young willow and aspen. Thoughtful touched the torn browse, touched her top teeth, reminding Fanny that deer ripped their forage because they had no incisors on top, while rabbits nibbled it off evenly.
Then, very slowly, she moved into the thicket. There were no other sign—no tracks, no droppings, no indication that deer were present. But in the center of the thicket a dozen deer were huddled together. Immobilized by the snow, they did not flee or even try to move. Every bit of bark had been stripped from the limbs of the saplings all around them so that only bright polished yellow wood showed. Thoughtful took the ear of a doe gently in her hand. The deer panicked, eyes rolling, spindly legs churning.
“We are not hungry today, sister,” Thoughtful said to the doe.
The animal tried to escape.
“She doesn’t believe me,” Thoughtful said.
Fanny and Thoughtful came to the edge of the woods. Oliver’s great naval firs stood behind them, bent under tons of snow. They were standing on a bluff above the river.
It was frozen now, and people were skating on it. Fanny recognized Rose among the skaters. She wore her fur-lined cape, a very pretty garment for skating. It swung when she stroked, flared when she turned; she was the best and most graceful skater on the river.
A bonfire, burning on the ice, sent a plume of smoke into the cloudless sky. The frozen river, perfectly clear of snow, gave off a dull metallic glitter. The air smelled of ice.
Fanny, mildly hypnotized, washed her face in snow. Because the waters of the river were sealed beneath the ice, the silence was absolute. The skaters’ voices drifted across the snowfield, amplified and undistorted like voices coming over the water.
All around, even and unmarked, lay the snow, like a vast prison of space.
“Snowbound,” Fanny whispered to herself.
2
Oliver had noticed Hepzibah Clum on his first day in Alamoth. Her bouncing figure and her happy nature reminded him of the girls at the Widow’s.
A week or two after she came to live in the Manor, he showed her the hiding room.
“In case the Indians attack I want you to come here and hide,” he said. “Meantime, I want you to bring a bottle of rum and a pitcher of ale down here every night to keep the provisions up to standard. Come late, after everybody’s asleep, so nobody sees you. You can keep a secret, can’t you?”
Hepzibah looked him in the eyes until they were both smiling, then nodded her head. After that, they met in the hiding room nearly every night when the house was asleep.
“How old are you?” Oliver said at the end of a week. “Eighteen.”
Hepzibah, wearing a shift, was straddling his lap as he sprawled on a chair. Oliver hefted her globular breasts. “How long have you had these?”
“Since I was twelve.”
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“Then I wasted six years in London when I should have been in America.”
“Nobody should be in America,” Hepzibah said. “Why not?”
She giggled. “Too little of this. Too many Indians.”
Hepzibah was terrified of the Abenakis, but she understood Thoughtful. Hepzibah’s own sister, the wife of Talks in His Dreams, looked on herself as a member of the tribe that had captured her. She had four children, all males, a fact that made Talks in His Dreams the envy of other men. Hepzibah knew these facts because Fanny had brought her news of her sister; she had long known that she was alive, and that she would not come back to Alamoth, as a result of the report John Pennock had brought back after his own journey to Canada.
“Does that trouble you,” Oliver asked, “having little red nephews and a papist for a sister?”
“That’s better than being lost and dead like my brothers,” Hepzibah replied.
“Maybe Thoughtful will persuade this fellow she’s married to to let your sister come for a visit.”
“She wouldn’t come—she told Captain Pennock so. She’s afraid the English would keep her here. Nobody ever wants to come back to this life once they’ve been captured.”
“Nobody? Why not?”
Hepzibah giggled. “You don’t know? They say it’s the Jesuits. But it’s not—it’s this.” She moved her body up and down. “You can do as you like, with anyone you like. The Indians don’t mind. ”
One night as they lay talking, Hepzibah amused Oliver with tales of the old religion.
“What’s that?”
She tickled him. “You know—potions, spells, curses.” “You mean you’re a witch.”
“Not me. It’s to keep the witches off.”
As a child on Pennock’s estate an old aunt had taken her with her onto the moors to collect frog spit and worts and simples and taught her how to mix them into potions.
Hearing this, Oliver sat up. “Is it, now? Would it work on Rose, do you think?”
Rose had been suffering from headaches. They began with a numbness in the lower lip and spread up through the face and into the skull, producing the sensation that two heavy spherical stones were lodged in the brain, one behind each eye. The stones rubbed together, producing an unbearable screeching noise.
Rose was sure that the headaches, like their cause, Oliver’s ligature, were the result of witchcraft. After listening to her symptoms, Ash prescribed strong coffee and cold compresses to relieve the pain. He was fatigued by Rose’s obsession with sorcery. As was his habit, Ash dispensed a scriptural prescription also. He was out of patience with Rose.
“Ponder Jesus’ pain when the soldiers placed the crown of thorns on his head,” Ash said, “and smote him on the head with the reed, and mocked him.”
“What good will that do if I am under a witch’s spell?” Rose asked.
“Picture the Cross and our Savior’s poor body,” Ash roared. “That will drive the demons out!”
Rose needed a nurse, and on Oliver’s orders Hepzibah undertook her care. She brewed Rose’s coffee and tended to the cold cloths. Rose hardly ever came out of her room now. Hepzibah remained with her, brushing her hair, helping her in games of dress-up, coaxing her to eat supper from a tray.
Rose had not ceased wanting a child to inherit the Manor and the rest of John Pennock’s estate. She wandered the Manor at night, clutching a Bible for protection, hoping to surprise Oliver in sexual congress with a familiar.
“Do you think the creature comes to him in his sleep?” Rose asked Hepzibah.
“You shouldn’t worry yourself, mum,” Hepzibah replied.
When Rose’s headaches were at their worst, she distinctly smelled the spermy odor of coitus, and it was then that she would dash into Oliver’s bedchamber and strip the covers off him as he slept. Almost always she discovered him in a state of arousal.
However, as soon as he woke and saw Rose, even if she was naked and already in bed with him, the ligature would tighten and his male part would subside.
More often, Oliver wasn’t even in his bed. When this happened, Thoughtful’s cat was invariably absent also. The cat, Rose believed, turned into a succubus and seduced Oliver in his sleep.
“I smell its stink on him,” Rose said. “It smells just like a woman.”
Hepzibah did not scoff. She listened sympathetically, clucking and making mewing sounds of agreement.
One day she said, “You can do something about witches if you will.”
“Yes,” Rose said. “Hang them, burn them. But nobody will do it.”
“Let’s start with the headache,” Hepzibah said.
She told Rose what she knew about potions and spells. “Do you know one for ligature?”
“I was too young. But I know the one for the evil eye, and maybe that’s what gave you your headaches.”
“It is evil eye,” Rose said. “I’ve always known it. The Impostor stares at me just like a cat. She never blinks.”
The next night, when the moon was up, Hepzibah brought everything necessary for a potion against evil eye—half a cup of mother’s milk, borrowed from a cousin, and a cup of water from the river.
“The water has to come from a stream in which somebody has drowned,” Hepzibah explained.
The gibbous moon, white as snow, shone through the stripped branches of the oak outside Rose’s window. Hepzibah blew out the lamp, threw open the sash, and beckoned to Rose. She handed Rose the cup of milk and the cup of water.
“Now,” Hepzibah said, “put three drops of mother’s milk into the water by the light of the moon. Now look into the cup by the light of the moon. If the three drops of mother’s milk remain separated, you haven’t had the evil eye put on you. But if they run together on top of the water and make an eye, then you have.”
Rose stared down into the cup.
“The drops came together,” she said.
“Then it’s the evil eye for certain. Now say, ‘Get behind me, devil, get behind me, saint.’”
“Get behind me, devil, get behind me, saint,” Rose repeated.
“Quick, look straight at the moon as if he’s your lover, and drink half the cup—but only half.”
Rose drank, shivering in the bitter draft that came through the open window. The mother’s milk, oily and sweet, overwhelmed the taste of the cold water.
“Now,” said Hepzibah, “you must pour what’s left in the cup onto a living tree—the oak.”
Rose flung the water out the window. It splashed on a limb that nearly touched the house. The cats used to sit on the limb, staring through the glass, before the snow and the cold drove them away. Remembering the cats, Rose shuddered and slammed the window shut. She wondered through her pain if Hepzibah knew a ritual that would drive the cats out of the oak once and for all.
Her headache seemed to be reduced to two small, ice-cold pellets. They ran out of her skull, down her throat, along her arm, into her hand, and out the finger on which she wore her ruby ring.
“It’s gone!” she said, kissing Hepzibah.
“Do you think she’s really cured?” Oliver asked. “My old aunt swore by it,” Hepzibah said.
“Then let’s do more. What’s good for the way she feels about cats?”
“The only cure for that,” Hepzibah said, hanging over Oliver with her eyes squeezed shut, “is for the cat to turn into something nice.”
But as the days passed and Rose still could not dissuade Oliver from giving everything to Thoughtful, the headaches came back, as bad as ever.
On the night that Hawkes departed for Boston with Oliver’s letter to Lebbaeus Williams, the pain in Rose’s head nearly drove her mad. The screech of the stones rubbing against each other was unbearable, and the odor of sex was so overpowering that Rose imagined that it was seeping into her pores, into the strands of her hair, so that she herself would smell of it for the rest of her life.
Rose whimpered from the pain as Hepzibah, who had made love to Oliver in the hiding room less than an
hour before, applied cold cloths to her forehead.
“Shall we try the potion again?” Hepzibah asked. “I can fetch the milk from my cousin in no time, and water from the river.”
“It won’t work,” Rose said. “The Impostor is too strong for us.”
Rose reached out and touched Hepzibah. She had grown fond of her; it was such a relief to have someone about who believed what one said.
“It’s not your fault,” Rose said. “The spell would have worked with water from an English river. Nobody but Indians has ever drowned in the Connecticut—that’s what’s wrong with the potion, it doesn’t have the right things in it.”
She sat up. “Magpie,” she said. “Magpie can go after Hawkes and stop him.”
She ran down the passageway to Oliver’s room. Oliver was awake, sitting up in bed with a lighted lamp and a pitcher of ale beside him, a quill in his hand, and the many pages of a letter spread out on the coverlet.
“Hello, Rose,” Oliver said. “Another headache?”
“Thanks to you. I’m sending Magpie after Hawkes to bring him back.”
Oliver smiled at her.
“I thought you might,” he said. “So I sent her with him for a visit to her people.”
“Sent her with Hawkes?”
Oliver flinched, laughed, and reached under the covers. His big hand came out holding Thoughtful’s cat. He rubbed the animal against his cheek, taunting Rose, and then let it hop down onto the coverlet.
A musket, loaded with buckshot according to Pennock’s rule, stood against the wall. Rose snatched it up, pulled back the hammer with both hands, lifted the muzzle. As she carried out these actions one by one, she caught glimpses first of Oliver, whose face was lighting up with amusement as he watched her, then of the cat, which saw Rose and began to bristle.
Oliver’s mouth opened to form a word. The cat put back its ears and gathered itself to leap, as if it were about to turn into something else. Oliver spoke Rose’s name.
Bride of the Wilderness Page 34
