“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.” She didn’t want to sound hurt by his lack of enthusiasm. “I just thought you’d like some coffee. It’s getting cold in the car.”
“Yes,” he said finally, “I’d love to come in.”
When they were in the house Sarah went into the kitchen and brewed some coffee. James went straight to the bookcase to see what books she had, and then he looked around at her furniture, simple and modern, and said hello to her cat Tillie. Tillie had quite a reaction. She spit, hissed, and leapt to her feet, and if she had a tail it would have ballooned in fear. She looked like a picture of a witch’s cat on Halloween, her black fur sticking out in every direction. She ran to hide under the bed.
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “She doesn’t usually act like that.”
“Cats tend to have trouble with strangers.”
He picked up the book Sarah left on the glass end table. “Persuasion by Jane Austen,” he said. “One of my favorites.”
“It’s one of my favorites too. I’m reading it for the fourth time.” As she rinsed out the coffee grinder it occurred to her. “How funny,” she said. “You have the same last name as Anne Elliot’s love, Captain Wentworth.”
James sat on the sofa and looked at her. “Yes, there is quite a coincidence there.”
“Persuasion is such a romantic story, isn’t it?” she said. “I love how Anne Elliot falls in love with Frederick Wentworth, but she’s persuaded by her family that he isn’t good enough and she breaks off her engagement from him. Years later he confesses that he still loves her, she admits she still loves him, and they come together again. It’s one of my favorite endings.”
She thought he was going to say something, but he stayed silent, staring at her.
“How lucky they were,” she said, “to have a second chance at love. Not many people get that.”
“I think everyone wishes they could have a second chance with the one they love,” James said. His voice was small.
She got their coffees and hovered near the sofa. She was enjoying their time together and didn’t want to scare him away. He seemed so pensive since they talked about Persuasion. She decided to sit on the sofa beside him, close but not so close. He sat his coffee on the glass table while she sipped from her mug.
They spent the next hour talking about Jane Austen, and James knew so much about her, even her personal life, almost, Sarah thought, as if he had known her. He knew what she liked to eat, how she spent her days when she wasn’t writing, whom she visited, whom she loved. It was late and Sarah was tired, but she had that schoolgirl crush feeling overpowering her again and she didn’t want him to leave. She thought she should get herself more coffee—a caffeine boost was just what she needed. She reached for James’s mug and realized he hadn’t touched it.
“You didn’t drink your coffee.”
“Actually, I don’t care for coffee. I just wanted to spend more time with you. But I’ll get you another cup since you look like you’re about to fall asleep on me.”
He went into the kitchen and she heard him rattling with the coffee pot, pouring the liquid into her cup. She was tired, it was late for her, so she put her head against the sofa and closed her eyes. She would rest until he came back. She was glad he didn’t want to leave.
She must have fallen asleep. When she woke up she was in her bed, still dressed, covered with her blankets. Through the curtains she could see the pink sun peeking awake in the fading night sky. It was dark in the bedroom, but she could see James’s shadow by the door.
“James?”
Instantly he was by her side.
“What is it, Sarah? Are you all right?”
“Are you leaving?”
“I have to leave. But I’ll see you tonight. If you’d like that.”
He kissed the top of her head, through the thickness of her hair, then left, shutting the door behind him. She thought she must have been dreaming. If only he would kiss her somewhere besides the top of her head. She didn’t know if she answered him before she fell asleep again.
I am in the kitchen cooking supper, stirring a pottage in the cauldron in the hearth. My husband comes in and sits at our table, and he watches as my hands land in fists behind my hips as they try to support the weight of my aching back and bulging belly. Although I cannot see his face in the shadows I can feel the agitation in the air. He puts his arms around me and holds me to him longer than usual, as though he does not want to let go, as though he wants to keep me safe. As though he wants to make everything wrong go away so we would always be as we were at that moment, content in our lives together. As I pull away I sense something in his manner and I look at him carefully.
“What troubles you?” I ask.
He seems to wonder how to tell me. Then he says, “They’ve arrested Rebecca.”
“Our Rebecca?”
“Aye. They’ve arrested her for a witch.”
I am stunned, as though I have been shot by a native's poison-touched arrow. I step away from him and my mind feels muddled. I wish I had not heard what he said. I feel my hands flutter around me as though I am trying to capture some words that might make the nonsense make sense. “Of course she is no witch,” I say. “Someone must speak for her. They must know she is no witch.”
“They should know, but they don’t. She’s been accused so she’s been arrested.”
“Who would accuse her?” I can hear the near-hysteria in my own voice. “Who would accuse someone as good as our Rebecca of such a crime?”
“The afflicted girls,” my husband says.
The sense of anguish is too much and I look at the pots and pans lining the shelves on the wall, the scrubbed vegetables on the table, the cauldron in the hearth. I can tell he is as pained by the news as I am and I wish he had not told me just so I would not have to feel the way he feels then.
“I’m certain she’ll be cleared at her trial,” he says. “All the evidence shall come out then.”
“The false evidence,” I say, “from those horrid girls. You know as well as I how rarely anyone is ever found innocent at their trials no matter how innocent they may be.”
I am at a loss for what to say and my hands continue to flutter at my sides. After struggling to hold back my tears I turn back to the pottage in the cauldron and stir some more, only now my stirring is agitated, as if I am trying to vent the frustration I suddenly feel.
“I think we should go back to England.” My husband says the words quickly, as if he has to say them before he changes his mind. “My father said he would pay for our voyage and give us money enough to get settled and assist me in starting a business there. Or, if we decide to go to Cambridge, he shall assist us while I continue at university.”
His face is still a blank slate. I cannot tell if the idea of returning to England pleases him or not. I wipe my hands on the rag on the table and walk to him.
“I thought you were happy here,” I say.
“I was. I am. But I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t understand how someone like Rebecca could be arrested. I don’t know the facts from all the cases, and I don’t know that all the people accused are innocent. Perhaps there are such things as specters and other unnatural beings. I know nothing of the super-natural world. But I know that some of the accused are innocent, and as long as innocent people are condemned then Salem is not a safe place to live.”
I stare at the woven rug beneath my feet while I consider. My hands go instinctively to the bump where our baby waits.
“If we leave on the next crossing I’d give birth on the ship,” I say. “Those ships are horrid enough. They’re overcrowded and the food is barely edible and the air is foul. There’s so much death. I saw two newborns and so many others die on my voyage here.” I walk to my husband and stroke the worried crease be-tween his eyes. “Let us wait until the baby is a few months old and we know she’s healthy. If things are still difficult then, we’ll leave.”
He takes my hand and kisses
it. He seems relieved that at least we have a plan, a way away from the hysteria. Patience, our helping-girl, comes silently into the room and giggles when we kiss. Then a dawning crosses as a smile on his lips.
“She?” he asks.
“Aye. I’m hoping for a girl so I think of her as she. We’ll call her Grace. Though I’m certain you wish for a son.”
“I wish for a healthy child who shall not have to live in fear.”
I smooth the crease that sits stubbornly in lingering concern on his forehead and he seems better. For that moment I allow myself to believe that everything will be all right, but I am anxious.
CHAPTER 10
The next night James arrived at the library with a smile. Every night he was arriving with a smile. Sarah wanted to think she was the reason for his happiness, though she wasn’t sure. He hadn’t said so in words. But James said a lot without words. He could be so quiet at times, content merely being there. Sometimes, when Sarah was working, checking the databases or helping students or professors, James would sit nearby and watch her. He didn’t pretend to have a task at the computer. He didn’t pretend to correct papers. He watched her and he didn’t seem to mind if everyone saw him.
A week later at closing time he found her near the librarians’s desk and presented her with a book, a well-kept older edition from days when bookbinding was an art. She turned it over in her hands, feeling the indentation of the title on the cover: Several Poems Compiled With Great Variety of Wit and Learning by Anne Bradstreet. Sarah was touched by his thoughtfulness. As much as she loved to read, no one had ever given her poetry before.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve never read Anne Bradstreet. It seems appropriate, reading her in Salem. She lived here during colonial times, didn’t she?”
“For a while, and not very well, I’m afraid. The Bradstreets lived with Anne’s family, the Dudleys, in a sparse house with barely the basic necessities. In winter they all lived in one room, the only one with heat. She was the first woman published in colonial America, and it’s rumored that King George III had a vol-ume of her poetry in his collection.” James looked at the book, then at Sarah. He stared at her so hard it was as if she could feel his hands on her shoulders pushing her somewhere, toward something. But where?
He opened the book to the page he tabbed with a sticky note. “She wrote one of my favorite poems—‘To My Dear and Loving Husband.’ He closed the book and pressed it into her hands.
“I’m not familiar with it,” Sarah said. James cleared his throat before he began:
“If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can…”
Sarah clutched the thin volume close to her chest, staring at the librarians’s desk, hard, as if the formica top were speaking to her, whispering the answer to a long-held question. She heard words, phrases, echoing from somewhere. She wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t like being haunted or chased or dragged away by chains. It was as if she suddenly remembered something she had forgot-ten. She said:
“…Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.”
James bowed his head, looking first at the floor under his feet, then at Sarah. She had never seen such a strong-looking man seem so vulnerable, as if he held his heart out to her in his hands, as if his heart was hers for the taking.
“I thought you weren’t familiar with the poem, Sarah.” His voice was gentle, barely audible above the whispers in the library.
Sarah shook her head. “I’m not.”
Neither Sarah nor James said much as he drove her home. They were parked in front of her house before she realized where they were. As the car clicked off, he turned to her with such need in his eyes that Sarah felt her heart stutter. She and James had shared something special in the library when she recited the lines from the seventeenth century love poem from a brilliant colonial woman to her dear and loving husband. How had she recited a poem she was sure she never read? Had she read it in college, in an early American literature class, and she had forgotten about it? Even if she did, college was so long ago, and she certainly hadn’t read it since. But somehow she knew the poem. It had been stored away in her somewhere. When she looked into James’s night-dark eyes she could feel that invisible, thread-thin line again, catching them up, pulling them close, not letting them go.
She had been so sure he felt the same way when their eyes locked. He smiled, as if he found something he had forgotten he needed, and the smile hadn’t left his face. Until now. Instead of kissing her, grabbing her, carrying her to her bed as she wanted him to, all he said was, “Let me walk you to your door. I don’t want anyone to steal you.”
In front of her house, he kissed the top of her head and turned to leave. But she did not want a kiss on top of her head. She wanted more. She followed him out to the street, and when they reached his car she walked close and pointed her face up the way she pointed her face up to the man in her dreams before he kissed her. She wanted James to kiss her. She wanted him to stay all night and make love to her.
She was ready to finally feel his lips against hers, but when all she felt was air she opened her eyes and realized, with a painful punch, that he didn’t feel the same way. She saw a stormy blankness in his nighttime eyes that told her he wasn’t inter-ested. He stood there, frozen, a look of real pain in his eyes as he searched her face, looking for his wife perhaps, or looking as if he had been mortally wounded by her desire for him. Without saying a word, without looking back, he jumped into his car and drove away.
Sarah walked into the house and stared, at the wall, at the blank screen of the television, at her cat, at the cream-colored wall. When the phone rang she was only half surprised to hear Olivia’s motherly voice at the other end of the line.
“How have you been, dear? I haven’t seen you since Hallo-ween, and I hardly had a chance to say hello, I was so busy with the customers.”
Sarah tried to be brave. She tried to keep the tears away. What did she have to cry about? James had never made any pro-mises, never even kissed her on the lips. Just the idea of kissing her sent him speeding away, his car brakes screeching on the pavement. Yet no matter how hard she squeezed her eyes, no matter how fast she waved her open hand in front of her nose, she couldn’t stop the internal thunderstorm from pouring like rain down her face.
“What is it, dear? You can tell me.”
“It’s James.”
“James? Jennifer said you two left the library looking very happy.”
Sarah wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I was hoping we had a chance, but it isn’t going to happen. I tried to kiss him, but he ran like he couldn’t get away fast enough. I don’t think he’s over his wife, and if he’s not over her then he’s not ready to move on. There’s no room in his heart for me.”
After an unsure pause, Sarah decided to share some interesting information she received via e-mail that morning. At the time, she sent a terse reply to her friend and deleted the message. Now, after James had run away, leaving her lonely and confused, she gave more importance to the news.
“I heard from my friend in L.A. She said my ex-husband misses me.”
Olivia sighed. “What do you mean?”
“She said he’s been asking about me. She said he’s been upset since she told him I was becoming friendly with a good-looking English professor. He told her he misses me and he’s thinking about coming to Salem to visit. He told her he wants me back.”
“You can’t go back to him, Sarah. You remember how unhappy you were.”
“I know I can’t go back to him.”
Sarah’s voice cracked as she said it, and she wondered if it were true. Could she go back to her ex-husband? Before that night she would have said there wa
s no way she would leave Salem and James for a husband she wasn’t happy with. But now, in the aftermath of a bewildered James, the thought of returning to Los Angeles wasn’t as ridiculous as it might have seemed even an hour before. Sleeping had become all but impossible in Salem. Her dreams were more frequent and frightening since she moved there. In Los Angeles they had been a nuisance. In Salem they were relentless. Her hands continued shaking for hours after she was jolted awake by tremors, her anxieties fragile until morning though she turned on the lights and rationalized the fear away by telling herself that nothing she saw was real. She was awake now and everything was fine. They weren’t simply haphazard, fluid scenes, these dreams, detached from reality. They were tangible, linear. Clear. Somewhere, deep in the hidden maze of her soul, she knew there was some misunderstood truth there, and she wanted to make sense of what was happening to her. The more she read about the Salem Witch Trials, the more she recognized the imagery in her dreams. It made no sense that she should dream about a woman from that time. Was she dreaming about her ancestor? She didn’t know.
She was tempted to finally confide in Olivia. Maybe she had nothing to lose by bringing her clothbound notebook to the Witches Lair and letting her Wiccan friends take a look. Maybe between them they could make the disjointed pieces fit. And didn’t Olivia say her friend was good at dream interpretation?
Olivia sighed. “Did you tell your ex-husband you won’t be getting back together?” she asked.
“I haven’t spoken to him since I left Los Angeles. I e-mailed my friend to tell her I couldn’t go back to him. She said she knew, but she wanted me to know I had options.”
“Things don’t always happen when we want them to, but everything will come together when it’s time. Trust that, Sarah.”
Her Dear & Loving Husband Page 10
