The Heretic's Daughter

by Kathleen Kent

  MOST EVENINGS MARGARET and I sat side by side for many hours repairing torn winter clothing, watching Hannah play with the odd bits of yarn or thread too short for use. Margaret’s fingers were very nimble and at times I pretended to drop a stitch or lose my place on a piece of cloth so that she would fold her hands over my two clumsy ones and guide them into an orderly procession of stitches once more. She never called me to my mistakes but always praised me for my own poor efforts. As we sat together, our heads bent, our lips scarcely moving, we told each other secrets. We thought ourselves clever and undetected, but once Aunt surprised me by saying, “How many times as girls have your mother and I sat as you and Margaret do, telling confidences, whispering our hopes. . .” She pulled impatiently at a tangled thread caught in Henry’s shirt and smiled.

  “My sister could tease out a knot the size of a raisin with more patience than I’ve ever seen.” I mulled over for a moment who she might mean, for I knew she had only one sister: my mother. I could not imagine the gentle seamstress described by Aunt as the same woman who could see from the back of her cap my misdeeds at two hundred paces.

  Without thinking, I asked, “Why do we never see you, Aunt?” Her smile faltered, and Margaret tapped at my foot for silence. Aunt called for Henry to come and put back on his mended shirt. He had been sitting at the fire shivering under a blanket, and, as she pulled the cloth over his head, Aunt said softly, “I will only ever say the discord is not between me and your mother. I love her well and would see her more if I could.”

  Towards dusk I followed Henry out to the barn and asked him about the chasm dividing our two families. He crossed his arms and sniffed. “Your father thinks my father cheated him out of some land. But that’s a lie and I’ll knock to ground anyone who says it’s so.” Whatever reticence I may have felt towards my father for his stern and distant parenting, I could not imagine him as dishonest in any way. But it was a charge against Father that would not be answered for many months. I shook my head and asked, “But what has that to do with Aunt and my mother?”

  “Where the husband goes, there the wife is bound to follow,” Henry replied with a huff. He said it with all the authority he could gather, but I knew he was quoting some homily he had overheard. “My mother takes her husband’s lead. Something your mother will never do, which makes her trumped-up and loose —” He was greatly surprised when I shoved him backwards into the stalls. He was not stout but he was taller than me by a head and wiry. It was one thing for me to think badly of my family, but another entirely for my cousin to speak ill of them. I left him open-mouthed and swearing, and later, when he came in for supper, I fingered chicken droppings into his stew.

  MARGARET AND I traded scandalous stories whenever we could. Whenever she caught us, Aunt would gently remind us that gossiping was a sin, and so our stories were traded with caution. Margaret’s secrets were more interesting than mine, she being two years older and more experienced in the world than I. She seemed to know many unsavory things about her neighbors, but endlessly fascinating to me was her knowledge of the Invisible World. She knew how to tell a witch by the markings on her body. A witch’s teat could be disguised as a mole or any raised pustule on the skin. A witch could not say the Lord’s Prayer in full without stumbling over the words. A witch would not sink if thrown into a body of water but rather float upon the surface as though liquid could not tolerate the pollution of its element. And as I myself would sink like an anvil if thrown into the sea, I did not doubt her wisdom. When I asked her how she came to know such things, she responded that her father, being a man of science, had shared with her this knowledge, for where there are women, there are witches.

  “And,” she said, her eyes lost to the lengthening afternoon shadows, “I have felt them flying above the roof when the hawkweed root grows under the moon.”

  I wondered aloud if there were witches even now in Billerica. She leaned closer to me and said, “You can be sure of it.”

  I told her then what little I had heard in the marketplace or on the streets, and if I expanded upon the truth, it was only to bring piquancy to the tales, like cloves added to meat. I did not want my cousin to think of me as an infant who did not know how the world moved. It was my first taste of sharing and holding secrets with another girl. Through the many years since that time, I have learned that women show their true selves in a different way.

  Sharing secrets is the way in which women tie themselves together, for it reveals complicity and trust. Holding secrets shows trustworthiness and a sort of quiet defiance. It is a natural thing for a female to hold secrets within her breast until the time is ripe to release them. Does it not follow the way in which her body is formed? A woman is made with that dark and mysterious recess that can grow a child safely until the child is ready to come out onto the birthing bed. And like birthing, secrets present themselves in many ways. Some slip easily into the world, others must be torn out, if the body is unwilling.

  LATE IN JANUARY the snow stopped falling and the very air seemed to freeze around us. The drifts became fortresses of ice and the stream froze solid, so that we had to melt blocks of it in the fire for drinking and cooking. The animals could not be taken outside for long for fear of laming them and so became restive on their tethers. Margaret and I had come in early one morning for feeding but we were careful to stay away from the shuffling feet of the oxen and the cow. Bucephalus rocked to and fro in his stall, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. I had brought a bit of apple from the cellar to quiet him, and, as I drew near, I saw a man cowering in the straw.

  I stood for a moment in silence as the man looked fearfully at me from beneath bundles of cloaks and shawls. He was a young man, his face ruddy from the cold. But the flesh under his eyes looked scorched, the fluid pooling in the bottom lids as with a fever. I thought of my brother’s face flushed with sickness, the skin below his eyes gray and unwholesome. The man held his hand up, in supplication or in warning. Margaret had come to stand behind me, and I could hear the sharp sound of her breath. His lips tried to form words but he could not at first speak, as though his tongue were swollen to the roof of his mouth. Finally he said with great difficulty, “I pray thee have pity and give me water and food or I shall die.” He groaned and shivered beneath the straw. We began to pull away and he reached out to us like a man drowning. “Please, I will not harm thee. I will take food and rest awhile and then I will leave.”

  Margaret moved closer to the man and said accusingly, “You are a Quaker.” The man lowered his head, panting, but did not speak. “If my father finds you trespassing here, he will turn you over to the constable.”

  The man struggled to stand, pulling himself up by the stacked boards in the stall, but sank back down onto his haunches. I tugged on my cousin’s cloak and I whispered, “Should we not bring him food? He looks very bad.” Margaret pulled me away some distance so that we could speak without being heard.

  “Father says that Quakers are heretics and are to be shunned. And besides, this one may be poxed.”

  “Oh,” I replied, not knowing what a heretic might be. I looked over at the man and pitied his misery. Margaret suddenly grabbed hold of my wrists and, leaning closer in to my ear, said, “We shall help him. It would be our secret. We must not tell Mother or Father, for then we will surely be punished, and harshly, too.” I smiled at her and nodded. I was more pleased by the prospect of sharing this dangerous secret with my cousin than of helping the stranger. “We shall have to be very cunning. Mother keeps a close watch over the larder.”

  After the noon meal, Margaret told some fable about forgetting to put out grain for one of the animals and I was amazed at how easily the falsehood slipped from her mouth. We managed to take to the barn bread and meat and a cup of cider without being discovered but took care to stand well away from the wretched man. He was so starved that he swallowed his fill without his teeth so much as touching the food. He drank the cider and then fell back into the straw as though dead. We watched him sleeping
there for a while, listening to the coarse sounds coming from his windpipe.

  Margaret asked me, “Isn’t he handsome, though?” And I agreed, even though he looked to me like any other young man I had ever seen. We left him there in the stall, whispering to his sleeping form that we would return the next morning with more food.

  That evening Margaret and I lay close together in her bed, watching the last of the light from our nightly stub of candle, our feet and hands entwined as tightly as two cold-water eels. Aunt had become so attached to Hannah that she took my sister to sleep with her every night. Captured in the crook of my cousin’s elbow was a poppet that Aunt had made. It had black rope hair and a crimson skirt. The cloth had a soft sheen to it, so it caught the light, and the feel of it beneath my fingers was like the skin of a lamb newly shorn. Uncle had returned with the cloth from Boston, where many fine ladies wore skirts or bodices of such color. Aunt was too modest to wear such a fabric but took a small piece of it to make a skirt for the doll. Margaret whispered to me that her father had gotten very angry when he saw what Aunt had done and he took away the entire bolt of cloth. What was finally done with it, she did not know.

  My own doll was much plainer in dress but I thought it more skillfully made. Margaret, with her own hands, had sewn on the buttons that Tom had given me. The button eyes somewhat ruined the beauty of the doll’s face, giving it a baleful look, and they sometimes brought me anxious, terror-filled thoughts of my family dying of the pox.

  As we closed our eyes for the night, the rhythm of our breathing paced like two horses harnessed to a sleigh, I asked, “Margaret, how did you know he was a Quaker?”

  There was a gentle stirring next to me. “Because he said ‘thee.’ ”

  “Margaret, what is a heretic?” Next to the pleasure of tapping the wisdom of my cousin’s head was the loveliness of saying her name.

  “It is someone who goes against the word of God” came the answer.

  “And why is a Quaker a heretic?”

  Margaret did not answer right away and I thought she had not heard me, but soon I felt her breath stirring against my neck.

  “A Quaker is a heretic because he makes himself answerable to no body of church, only to the voice of his own conscience. Quakers believe God resides within them like an organ of the body and speaks to them, causing them to shake and tremble as with ague.”

  “And does God speak to them?”

  “Father says no.” She yawned and her leg came to rest over mine. “They are greatly persecuted. Would God speak to those so shunned by ordained ministers? Sarah, go to sleep now.”

  “Why, then, did you help him?”

  She opened one heavy-lidded eye and the corner of her mouth turned up in a way I had seen her father smile, splitting her face into two halves — the lighter, smiling half amused with the changes of the temporal world, the darker half looking sunk into the insensibility of a madwoman, or a saint, close to tumbling into despair or enraptured seclusion.

  “I wanted to help him, Sarah, because they told me to.” Her hand stayed cradled next to my face even as her eyelids began closing.

  “ ‘They’ . . . Margaret, who are they?” I blew gently against her face to rouse her and she opened her eyes once more.

  She slowly lifted a forefinger so that it pointed over my shoulder. I turned my head and saw only the heavy chest where we kept our few clothes. She pulled me closer and whispered, “The little people in the cupboard, Sarah.”

  I watched her drop into sleep, her skin blue-white in the dark, her eyes moving slowly beneath the lids. The hair on my arms rose as with a cold breeze, and I glanced fearfully over my shoulder but heard and saw nothing save the wind outside our walls and the shadows draping themselves into the familiar, unmoving shapes of benign slumber. Her madness was a secret I would gladly keep, and, before I joined her in sleep, I moved closer into her warmth and kissed her.

  The next morning we brought the man in the barn an apple and some bread. But he was not there. We searched every stall and climbed up into the loft but could not find him. And as snow had fallen during the night, there was not one track leading from the barn to signify that he had been real and not a straw man come to life through our imaginings.

  LATE AFTERNOONS, JUST before the evening meal, Margaret and Henry and I would have lessons in reading and writing and history. This was done for the sole purpose of learning the Scriptures. I could write only a few words, and Uncle asked me if Mother had ever bothered to teach me. I told him she had not, although the truth was that my mother had tried to teach me to read and write but my defiance, and her lack of patience, had combined to keep me ignorant.

  Margaret could read very difficult passages from the Bible. I would sit next to her, my chin resting in my hands, gazing at the movement of her lips as she pronounced the tantalizing and half-understood words of the prophets. The sound of her voice was like a gentle scarf being drawn across my ears. In the evenings, after the dishes and cups were wiped clean and the fire banked, Uncle would tell us stories of the first colonies and the time before, with the early troubles in old England. Soon, the shadows on the walls would become the murderous dancing of Indians who held aloft their bloody scalps. A falling branch upon the roof became the severed head of King Charles the First as it bounced down the scaffold steps at Whitehall-Gate. And with every telling Uncle’s tales grew larger and more expansive.

  He knew all sorts of hand tricks as well. He could perform the secret manipulation of articles from one place to another, as well as the misdirection of our attentions so that these movements were not seen. He could cause a coin to disappear from his hand and make it reappear in a cup of cider at the far end of the table. He could pull a hen’s egg from the top of Henry’s head or a feather from the recesses of my ear. Once he clasped Margaret’s and my hand together and with a great flourish of his arms pulled from between our joined palms a piece of lace. It never occurred to me that Margaret might have assisted him by hiding the lace inside the fullness of her sleeve.

  Uncle spent many hours with us through the storms of January. There was nothing about which he did not have a strong opinion. It took only a few well-chosen questions for him to speak at great length on some piece of ancient history, point of law, the nature of man, or the mysteries of the divine. But as the month of February began and the cold hardened the snow on the roads, there was a tautness and a tension that seemed to grow within the Toothaker house. Uncle’s usual good-naturedness was by turns taken over by impatience and moody silences. He would stand by the open door, shifting from foot to foot, until Aunt called to him to close the door again. He would pace restlessly about the common room, agitated and short-tempered with everyone.

  Many mornings, Uncle left early astride Bucephalus and did not return until supper. At those times, after we had all retired to bed, the sound of Aunt’s weeping would work its way through the walls of our bedroom. I had, at first, imagined that her agony was over the fate of my mother and grandmother, as she had often prayed aloud for their deliverance from death. But soon I knew it was over Uncle’s continuing absences.

  Aunt’s only comfort at those times was in holding Hannah, who would sit on Aunt’s knee and call her Mama. The smile on Aunt’s face made me long to share my sister’s place on her lap, being stroked and coddled and made much of. In the mornings Uncle would sleep far past cockcrow, and Aunt’s gentle sadness would deepen and solidify around her like a crust. Upon finishing her work, she would tightly wrap a shawl about her shoulders and sit and stare into the hearth for hours at a time.

  Finally, in the first week of March, it seemed as though Uncle would not return at all. It was long past dark and we had shared a bleak and troublesome supper without him. When we had finished eating, Aunt perched at the edge of her chair, glaring at the door. Margaret, Henry, and I waited patiently for her to break her silence, sitting until our backs ached while trying our best to keep Hannah from fitful restlessness. The fire fell to embers before we heard the
sound of Bucephalus shaking his harness as he approached the barn. Soon Uncle walked into the house and saw the garden of statues sitting at his table. His hair was lifted about his head as if he had ridden into a high wind and his clothes were stained with some dark liquid. He walked to the hearth like a man walking the deck of a rolling ship at sea, and the smell from his clothes was sickly sweet, like flowers rolled in spices. He drank deeply from the water bucket, spilling most of it onto his vest. He turned to face us and laughed, puffing air through a closed, dry mouth.

  “It’s time for us all to be asleep. Mary . . . come now to bed.”

  Aunt stood up and, taking Hannah by the hand, walked to her bedroom, closing the door behind her. The click of a bolt lock being slid into place sounded loud through the common room. The three of us, Margaret, Henry, and I, were left sitting at the table, speechless and tense. Uncle stood for a while, his head down, muttering to himself. He grasped the back of a chair as though he would fall without it, but after a time he lurched his way to the table and sat down heavily next to me. His breath smelled strong and sweet and the whites of his eyes were veined with red. Margaret and Henry sat staring at their hands, their heads bowed as though waiting for punishment. Until that time I had never seen Uncle other than smiling and in a good humor.

  “Uncle, what is wrong?” I finally asked. “What has happened?”

  He faced me, his head swiveling ominously on his neck like a falling capstone, and said, “Magic, Sarah. I’ve been practicing magic again.” His words were indistinct and run together, as though his lips had lost their shape. He leaned towards me, putting one finger up to my mouth. “Husssshhhh . . . I’ll tell you a secret, shall I . . . Sarah? I’ve been trying to . . . disappear.” The word at the last was all but lost in his soured breath.