Love's Pursuit

by Siri Mitchell

  I sat, babe clutched to my chest, rocking, straining, swaying back and forth. Back and forth. As if my rhythm could somehow guide breath in and out of his body.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  Only Nathaniel slept. He could sleep through anything.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  Mary stirred the fires and added some logs to them.

  Father, kneeling at the bench, praying with his head in his hands, began to snore. He woke when his head slipped from his fingers and struck the bench. He gasped. Then he looked, misery writ upon his face, at his hands. At the bench. At his knees. “I could not keep watch with you. Not even for one hour.” Brokenly, he began to weep. “If only your mother were here.”

  I reached out a hand and patted him upon the back. “There would be naught for her to do.” What had she done for little Bess that had proved to be of any good at all? In all of the potions, all of the poultices, all of the cures that she had made, not one had been of any use.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  Father gave up on his prayer and slumped forward to the table. He fell asleep, head resting in the crook of his arm. And soon, Mary joined him.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  I desperately wanted to stop, but I feared that if I did, then the child would cease his breathing. I shivered from cold; my thighs ached with the motion of pushing back and forth, my arms from the burden they held.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  Daniel moved to the wall, removed my own cloak from its peg and then wrapped it around me. When that did not stop my quaking, he drew me up with a hand at my elbow and he led me to the settle. I placed myself there, tried to rock as before, but I was confronted with the stiff back of the piece and could not do it. I nearly wept in frustration.

  He placed an arm about my shoulder and drew me to his chest.

  And so we sat there, the babe, Daniel, and I. Waiting for death, praying for salvation.

  The lift of Daniel’s breath against my hairs highlighted the impossibly shallow breaths of the babe in my lap. Finally, I could listen to his gasps no more.

  “ ‘I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisesome pestilence.’ ”

  The child’s body went stiff with the effort of breathing.

  Daniel’s arm tightened about my shoulder.

  Trying to stifle a sob, I continued, speaking through clenched teeth. “ ‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night . . . nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness. . . . A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. . . . There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.’ ”

  I felt Daniel press his lips to my hairs. “ ’Tis a gift, a faith like yours.”

  Faith? Like mine? But I did not have any. I did not believe it. Not any of it! Those words promised no evil should befall me, neither should any plague come near my dwelling. But it was here. It had befallen us. There was a very real terror in this place this night.

  How could I make God my habitation? A God who commanded of us all faith, all hope, and all loyalty—and then held His favor far beyond our grasp? What good was faith? What good was hope? But if I did not believe those words, if I could not put my trust in them, then what did I believe? Where could I turn?

  If God was not on my side, then all was truly lost.

  It was not so much faith that kept me rooted to the Holy Scriptures. It was a lack of any other option. If I did not believe this, there was nothing else to believe in.

  Faith?

  I had none. I merited no special favor from God; I could command from Him nothing at all.

  28

  THE NEXT MORNING WE understood that the Angel of Death had passed us by. And we all of us, tired as we were, rejoiced in that fact.

  “Give us some butter, Susannah.”

  I felt an eyebrow rise at Father’s request, but why should we not have a taste of sweet butter when we could so easily have been drinking of tears instead? I had just returned from the lean-to when a knock sounded at the door and it opened forthwith.

  ’Twas Henry Clarke, Abigail’s husband, with skin as gray as ashes and the bruises of circles beneath his eyes. “I’m to see you for a . . . coffin . . .” His voice caught on the word even as my own breath stopped itself up in my chest.

  “Abigail?”

  His eyes met mine. “ ’Tis our babe . . . our son . . . got taken with the strangling . . .” He turned away from us, but our ears heard what he tried to hide from our eyes.

  Father placed an arm about his shoulders and directed him out- of-doors. Perhaps the Angel of Death had passed us by, but it had stopped at another’s house instead.

  It was several days before I could leave the child’s side. Fear of death had left us, but the child had been broken and we did not yet know if he would strengthen or simply linger in weakness until another sickness took him from us. But as soon as I could, I took some of our best preserves and paired them with a basket of biscuits.

  “Mary, watch the child. See that he stays warm. Set the day-girl to sweeping the floor. I am going to Abigail’s.”

  I nearly ran to her house. When she opened the door, I wanted to throw my arms about her neck and weep with her. What I did instead was offer her the preserves and the basket.

  She only looked at them.

  I held them out toward her once more.

  When she failed to take them, I walked past her into the house and set them on her board, which was already laden with food.

  Goody Baxter and Goody Ellys were sitting on the bench. They had been conversing as they knit, but now they abandoned their labors and turned toward us.

  I ignored them and did what I had longed to do. I comforted my friend, enfolding her within my arms.

  But her own did not rise around me.

  “I am so sorry, Abigail.”

  “He was never the same. Not after that . . . witch . . . brought him up out of the wood.”

  I did not need to guess of whom she spoke. I had only heard her speak with such venom of one person: Small-hope. I looked beyond her at Goody Baxter and Goody Ellys. They were both staring at us with rapt attention. I smiled. Tried to choose words that would soothe. “You cannot mean it.”

  “She cursed him. She must have.”

  Goody Ellys coughed. “Of whom do you speak?”

  I squeezed Abigail’s arm and then spoke past her toward the women. “ ’Tis grief that speaks. I know its sound. Our babe was touched with the same illness.”

  Stiffening, Abigail pushed me away. “Nay. Not the same. Not the same at all.”

  “Aye. The strangling sickness.”

  “But yours—” She choked on her words. “Your babe was not strangled.”

  “He might have been. But let us not argue. I simply wish to be of some comfort.”

  “Comfort? To me?”

  “Aye. As a friend.”

  “Friend!” She tried to laugh, but her mouth seemed frozen. “Oh, your life has always been so perfect.” She spat the words at me.

  “Perfect?” Surprise opened my mouth. And a pent-up frustration made me speak. “Let me tell you—”

  “Nay. Let me tell you, who are soon to be wed to the finest man in town . . . and who dangled John Prescotte from the crook of your little finger just the same. The one will take you to live in his great house. The other would have built a home for you. I did not have a row of men standing in line, waiting to ask for my hand. And I did not have a house. When I got married, we lived with Henry’s parents, he and I, sleeping in the loft between the barrels of grain and drying oak leaves.”

  “But—”

  “Nay. I do not wish to hear of your tribulations.”

  I latched on to her fore
arm and pulled her close. “But you have Henry. I would give anything to be marrying a man that . . . well . . . should there not be love at least—”

  “Love! Love is not for such as you and me. Love only serves to bludgeon the heart and drive one to weep. How can you speak to me of love when my poor sweet babe lies dead? When he has been torn from my breast? While he rests forever in the cold, dark ground?You will be wearing black every day of the week and having your every request granted by servants. Everything will change for you, and nothing will change for me except that I will have to learn to live without a child that I yearn to hold every moment of the day. Get you gone from here!”

  I looked over her shoulder at Goody Baxter and Goody Ellys. They had risen, coming to stand beside Abigail.

  “Leave me!”

  Goody Baxter grabbed my friend’s arm.

  Abigail threw her arms around her mother’s neck, weeping.

  Goody Ellys took my arm. “You had best do as she says.”

  “But I only wished to . . . how can she not remember that God’s victory is best accomplished in the grave? Why does she wallow in despondency when she ought to place her faith in the eternal resurrection?”

  Abigail responded to my words of comfort with a wail of grief.

  “She will want your words of consolation later, but now . . . ’tis only a mother who can know a mother’s grief.”

  Wolves were on the prowl. They rarely went near the smithery but confined their skulking to the area of the house. I saw their tracks when I worked outside to make soap or to accomplish the wash. I felt a kinship with the creatures. Though they left their signs about, they were seldom seen. And when they were seen they were hunted, driven off, and despised.

  I woke one night with a start. I lay still, though my heart thudded within my chest and my eyes searched for something amiss in the darkness. My ears told me that Thomas still slept. My nose told me the fire still burned within the hearth. But as I lay there listening, I began to discern a howling.

  The keening wavered, gathered strength, wavered once more, and reached a high echoing pitch before tumbling off into silence. It was the lonely that howled so. They ranged far, wolves did, and I had been told it was only a howling and an answering reply that could lead them back to their pack. And so I listened for the answer, trying to guess the direction from which it would come.

  There was naught but silence for quite a long while. I had almost given up on the poor wolf and determined instead upon sleep, but then the strange wavering howl began again. And it came from the very same direction.

  It was only then I understood it was no wolf at all but my neighbor, Abigail Clarke. Her howl was not one of seeking but one of grief. And so I pulled the blanket over my head and set my thoughts on sleep, knowing that she would never find what she sought, that there would be no answering howl come echoing for her through the night.

  I meant to return to Abigail’s several days after I had first visited her, but there were candles to be dipped and washing to be done.Ironing to be seen to and biscuits to be made. Shirts to be mended and warm caps to be knitted. Kisses to be stolen of a night. Of a sudden it seemed November was long past and December nearly over.

  I placed a tray of biscuits upon the table one morning, adding a cup of ale and a wedge of cheese.

  Father prayed a blessing over our bounty and then all bent to eat. All but Daniel. “Merry Christmas to all!”

  Father’s biscuit tumbled from his hand. Mary gasped.

  “What?” Daniel looked round. “Have I erred? ’Tis not this day?”

  “ ’Tis not any day! Not in Massachusetts Bay Colony.” Father retrieved his biscuit, a frown etched upon his face.

  “Not here? But for what reason? Was not our Lord born to die for all?”

  I leaned toward him. “Aye. But we are not meant to celebrate it.”

  “Then what are we meant to do? Mourn and weep?”

  Father sighed. “We are meant, Captain, to honor His birth by treating this day as any other.”

  “What, no goose? No pies?”

  “Nay.”

  Daniel looked round at the rest of us with narrowed eyes as if he suspected we were making sport of him. “Then what is there?”

  “For dinner? This day? Porridge and perhaps a sauce of beans.”

  “On Christmas Day?” His eyebrows shot up in exclamation. “Give me one hour and I will come back with at least a hare.”

  “There will be no celebrating here. ’Tis the end of it.”

  Mary and the day-girl and I went about our business while Nathaniel and Father worked in the shop. I had no time for idle thoughts of Christmas and its revelries until after supper had been served and the Bible had been read. And then, when I stepped outside, it was only to go to the necessary.

  It did not much surprise me to see Daniel smoking by the house upon my return. ’Twas only then we were able to partake in sweet communion.

  “You people truly do not celebrate Christmas?”

  “Nay.”

  “I knew you did not celebrate Christmastide, but Christmas . . . ?” His voice had risen even as his words trailed off. He seemed deeply offended at our custom.

  “ ’Tis written nowhere that we are to celebrate our savior’s birth.”

  “ ’Tis written nowhere that we are to eat three times a day either. And still we do.”

  I put a hand up to touch his face, to try to ease the reproach of my words. “God has given us His Word. If we cannot find a thing within it, then that thing is something we must not do.”

  “I would rather do as it says than to infer those things it does not say.”

  “ ’Tis no inference, Daniel. ’Tis written . . . or not written . . . as plain as can be.”

  “Hmm. Then I suppose I could not interest you in this?” He pulled a scarf from someplace inside his doublet and placed it into my hands.

  It nearly slipped from my fingers, so delicate and fluttery it was. I held it up to the moon to better see it, and that wan light spilled through the fabric, obliterating the pattern from view. “ ’Tis lovely.”

  “And since it was meant as a Christmas gift, ’tis also completely inappropriate, or so I have just been told. I should reclaim it.” He closed a fist around one end of it and began tucking it back into its hiding place.

  “Do not be so hasty about it!” I pulled at the other end to wrest it from his grasp.

  He pulled back. Harder. And he pulled me right into his chest.

  “Nay?”

  “I want it.”

  “And in spite of all my best intentions, I want you . . . but we do not always get the things we wish for.”

  I stood on the tips of my toes to better reach his lips.

  He bent down and obliged me.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Finally, and with some regret, I broke away. “Thank you.”

  “ ’Tis I who should thank you . . . for kisses such as those.” He leaned away from me, pulled the tail of the scarf from his doublet and then looped it around my neck and fashioned the ends into a knot.

  I had never felt anything so exquisite against my skin.

  “ ’Tis silk.”

  I sighed and moved to undo the knot. “Then I cannot keep it.”

  “And whyever not?”

  “I am not fit to. Father does not make the money owning such a thing requires.” Of course, Simeon Wright probably did, but as soon as I thought of him, I pushed him from my mind. “I cannot wear it.”

  “Not even when ’tis a gift, freely given?”

  “Beneath the nose of Simeon Wright? Especially not then.”

  He frowned. Then he sighed as well and unwound it from my neck. “I will keep it for you, then. Just here inside my doublet.” He patted at a place near his heart. “That way you will always know where to find it.”

  And what would he do with it once I married Simeon Wright? If only I could choose! If I could choose whom I wanted to marry, then I would have that man
be Daniel. What could it hurt, then, to imagine? What could it hurt to pretend? Once I married . . . once I married Simeon Wright . . . there could be no more pretending. And I feared it might hurt quite a bit to imagine anything at all. But for now, for this moment and the next, Simeon Wright was not here and I was not yet bound to him for all time and eternity. And what should stop me from storing up memories?

  I had become a very hedonist! A seeker of happiness, a grasper of pleasures. But with Daniel . . . with Daniel . . . I lived for nightfall, for the few sweet moments when we could be together. Why could my life not be lived thus always? With Daniel?

  He kissed me once more and then let me walk past him and into the house.

  After a while, after I had joined Nathaniel and Mary and the babe in bed, he followed.

  I felt my lips curl as sleep hovered over me. What a lovely thing, to celebrate Christmas. But immediately I was overcome with guilt. What a vain creature I had become. Christmas was not about me. And not about Daniel. ’Twas about Christ and the reason for His birth. It was then I decided that it was no good having a Christmas to celebrate. It inspired too much in the way of confusion.

  29

  THE NEW YEAR HAD seen life change for some in Stoneybrooke Towne. Without access to the common for cutting wood, some were forced to throw a portion of their fall harvest onto their fires for heat. Others sacrificed their remaining corn cobs and still others the flax intended for spinning and weaving. But God had chosen to bless the Phillips. Little had changed for us.

  I rose each morning, determined the tasks for the day, and went about the doing of them without giving much thought to my approaching marriage, nor to the approaching change of the seasons, nor to Mother’s return. But though I wasted no thoughts upon them, the burden of those unspoken, unwanted events weighed heavy upon my heart.

  One forenoon, thinking on supper, I decided on serving a simple pottage and a pudding of Indian bread. With some dried blueberries mixed into it for a bit of cheer. It would be not unlike the previous day’s offering or the day before that, but no one would leave the table wanting.