The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  “We’re all to be like appendages?” said Caroline.

  It would be best, she thought, if she could reach a calming verdict within herself about David: that conspiring with him was only a small, inconsequential pleasure, and that the moment on the road from Ashwell could not have meant what she’d at first thought and was only a comradely expression of affection between her father’s foot soldiers. This was true even if David himself had thought he meant more by it (because he had sighed, he had walked away, he still didn’t seem quite easy with her). He was living in their world now, with its limited cast; if she had his attention, she had it by default. She would be glad later if she kept hold of herself now.

  As Caroline left the barn, a blur came at her, then deflected—a trilling heart, perching now above the door behind her as if the building belonged to it, hop, flutter, settle. She’d cried out: she glanced into the dim doorway, but it seemed her father and David hadn’t heard. The bird, one of the duller red-brown females, had a tuft of twigs and grasses in its beak. A strong beak, it seemed: one or two of those twigs were thick as finger bones. Wasn’t it too late in the season for nest building? The bird seemed to watch her. Had it wanted something, flying at her that way before changing its course? Her fingers curled into her palms, seeking protection.

  * * *

  *

  Midmorning, the carriages bearing their students began to reach the farmhouse. One by one they climbed out, into the Hoods’ lives, and then their mothers and fathers, all eager to shake Samuel’s hand. Caroline tried to read the faces of the girls themselves but found them closed, tipped down in a pantomime of obedience that unnerved her. It screened something she would rather have seen outright. Given how well she knew the names on their list, and how few of them there were, Caroline found it surprisingly difficult to keep the girls straight. Livia had white-blond hair, and Julia a serious, narrow face, but somehow these and every feature seemed shiftable and just as easily attached to different names instead. The girls settled into the farmhouse, two to each subdivided bedroom (the requisite walls had been in place, leaning slightly, since Birch Hill). The parents then drove off again. Their daughters had been delivered efficiently as parcels.

  Lessons were supposed to begin immediately—that had been important to Samuel—but Eliza Pearson, final arrival, failed to actually arrive. Caroline watched her father begin to hope she wouldn’t. Mrs. Sanders, who had come to cook and clean for them after Mrs. Wilmer died and whom they’d hired now, along with her husband, for expanded duties, led the rest of the girls to the barn. David followed.

  Samuel planned to give the only lesson of this first day. He sat in the study, shuffling his notes, and Caroline waited with him because she couldn’t bear to leave him alone just now. A woozy nostalgia for this quiet, the sound of sitting in a room alone with her father, swelled in her chest. How could she have considered the number of students small? Eight new faces she’d have to look at over meals, eight new treads going up and down their stairs. Eight pairs of eyes on every shabbiness. Eight notes of laughter that would greet Samuel’s kind of words, so beautiful but pitched so high above the girls’ heads, and so would the whole scheme crumble into dust, and maybe her father with it.

  Or seven, if Eliza did not come, if the universe undid what Caroline had done in inviting her here.

  But now, the rattle of an approaching carriage. Samuel flinched, then met Caroline’s eyes. “We won’t mention she’s late,” he said, and stood, pinching the seams of his trouser legs.

  The dust of their road clung to the carriage’s gleaming sides. The driver tipped his hat, then went around to the back and handed down Eliza in a green traveling suit. Caroline waited for the driver to hand Mrs. Bell down next, or for Mr. Bell to clamber out, but no one else emerged. Eliza scanned her surroundings with the wonder of a child entering a fairy tale—and she was a child, of course.

  What else would she turn out to be?

  The driver hefted a trunk into their grass.

  “Miss Bell? We’re very happy you’re here,” Samuel said. “I’m Samuel Hood.”

  “An honor to meet you at last.”

  Caroline’s head began to swim: she’d been holding her breath. But if Eliza believed Samuel was the serpent from her father’s book, she hid it. She allowed him to press her hand and met Caroline’s gaze as none of the other girls had done. “Miss Hood, a pleasure to see you again.”

  “Your parents aren’t with you?” Caroline asked. She couldn’t get past the feeling that they must be hidden away somewhere—still in the carriage, or up Eliza’s sleeves.

  “They’re spending a month on the Continent, and it’s a scramble to get ready. They thought I might manage. I’m late, I think. I’m sorry. I’ll go right in, shall I?”

  Without waiting, she followed the sound of the other girls’ voices toward the barn, leaving the driver to wrestle the enormous trunk up the farmhouse steps. It seemed very heavy. Caroline imagined the Bells’ bodies curled inside.

  “She’s very like him,” Samuel said, in the tone he used to address himself.

  Eliza had found an open seat in the circle. The other girls were still talking, still laughing—angled toward one another, not toward the front of the room—but Caroline saw them stealing secret glances at Eliza, drawn by her lateness, her clothes, her way of holding herself. Eliza sat still and faced forward. At the back of the room, David was reading with a suspicious degree of absorption. Caroline wondered if he had failed to stir himself to quiet the students because he feared they might not quiet if he asked, and then what would he do?

  Samuel didn’t tell the girls to hush either. He strode slowly through the center of the circle as if the noise weren’t his concern. When he reached his desk, he put his book down, turned to face them, and waited. His quiet was catching: soon he had all of their eyes. Though of course Eliza hadn’t been making noise to begin with.

  “Thank you,” Samuel said, and lifted his book again.

  Caroline sat down beside David, watching her father.

  “I thought for a long time about how best to begin with all of you,” said Samuel. “How to explain to you the nature of what I hope this school will accomplish. Difficult, to decide the right way to take such a large and dearly loved plan and show it quickly, to best effect. You will certainly encounter this feeling in your own lives, if you haven’t already—I have every confidence those lives will be passionate and full.”

  The girls measured Caroline’s father silently.

  “In the end, I decided on just a very few prefatory words before we take up our work. Look to your left, please.” Coiffed heads turned. “Now look to your right. These are to be your companions. You are now one tribe. Together, you will voyage into extraordinary new territory. I can fix my hopes no higher than to wish that in the end, our experiment might live up to the rarity that already exists within each one of you.”

  He knew so little about them, rarities or otherwise, but they watched him now with less guarded interest. Who doesn’t want to hear that she is as special as she has suspected all along?

  “Now onward, my comrades in arms!” Samuel said, jesting and not jesting, and showed them the cover of the book he held. “Who has read The Pilgrim’s Progress?”

  Several said they had, Eliza not among them.

  “We’ll consider you our resident Bunyan experts. But you might find that on this tour the landscape strikes you differently.”

  Then he read to them from the beginning, Christian’s attempts to convince his family that their city will soon burn. Her father’s voice on the old lines: if Caroline had closed her eyes, she might have been eight years old, drowsy by the fire in the study. “ ‘At this his relations were sore amazed; not for that they believed that what he had said to them was true, but because they thought that some frenzy or distemper had got into his head.’ ” Samuel looked up. “Why do you thi
nk Christian’s relations didn’t believe him?”

  No one volunteered an answer. They all seemed to be wondering if this were a trap—if he might reprimand whoever responded for the disobedience of speaking in the classroom.

  “Come,” Samuel said. “None of you has ever tried to convince someone of something and failed? Raise your hands if you have ever told a truth that was perceived as either a lie or a mistake. Go on, raise them.”

  Hands, a few at first, then more, crept up. Eliza sat still.

  “Why weren’t you taken at your word?”

  Rebecca Johns, who had tidy braids and a small frown that seemed permanent, said, “Because the truth sounded far-fetched.”

  “And that’s part of the trouble here too, don’t you think? Though I doubt, Miss Johns, that your own claim sounded as far-fetched as a prediction that a standing city will be consumed by fire. Yet doesn’t it seem that the benefits of belief in this case would outweigh the costs? If there might be a fire or might not be, what does one lose by guarding against it? Think of this in your own lives, in your own homes. Imagine you’re told such a thing. Wouldn’t you gather your possessions, prepare to leave?”

  Felicity Ridell spoke next. “I don’t think I’d want to.”

  As she watched and listened, Caroline found that the girls were coming into focus for her. Felicity was small, sharp-featured—the bridge of her nose delicate as an ornament—and sharp-eyed. Caroline was starting to feel sure she could never confuse her for any of the others.

  “Just so, Miss Ridell, and that’s related to the cost, I think. The belief that one’s home, everything one has worked for, might be so vulnerable—the fear that occasions is itself a very great cost. Can you all understand that?”

  “Yes,” said Tabitha Seward, nodding decisively. Samuel waited for Tabitha to continue, but nothing else followed. She only watched him with a dull expectance. Caroline began to have a sense of Tabitha too.

  “Well then. Good,” Samuel said. “It’s too great a cost, perhaps, for poor Christian’s relations to face.”

  Eliza put her hand up.

  “Miss Bell?”

  “I noticed you didn’t raise your own hand, sir,” she said.

  The room pulled in its breath.

  “Pardon me?” Samuel said.

  “When you asked who’d told a truth that had been disbelieved, you didn’t raise your hand. Can it be the case—excuse me, sir—that you never have? I was just thinking—back when you and my father and the others saw the trilling hearts for the first time. People can’t possibly have believed you right away, can they?”

  No extra emphasis on my father because none was needed. Caroline realized she’d been waiting for this, for Eliza to announce herself, for her to lift her chin—here, where she must feel herself to be standing inside her father’s book—and say his name.

  “Your father?” Rebecca asked.

  “Yes, Miles Pearson,” Eliza said.

  “Not the author.”

  “Of course the author.” A casual slicing; Eliza hadn’t even turned her head. Rebecca sat back in her seat. “Sir, forgive me, but it just seems that people must have thought you were lying.”

  This perhaps was when Caroline made her first mistake with Eliza—or her first after allowing her out of her carriage, after opening Eliza’s letter, after telling Eliza they had space for her here, after stopping, on the street in Ashwell, when she’d heard Eliza call. In this moment she might still have summoned Mr. Sanders to lug Eliza’s trunk back down the stairs, put her into their carriage, drive her back into town, and leave her wherever in Ashwell a young girl could safely be left. She might still have lifted every touch of Eliza out of their lives like the lifting of a stain.

  But here it was, the test Caroline had wanted. She wanted now to see what her father would do. Now that he had listened to this girl raise a question he had not planned for her, about the father whose name he had banned from his house. Now that he had heard her find a voice and use it to call him a liar.

  Samuel’s brow knit. “Do you know, Miss Bell, I honestly can’t remember. The sure sign, in my long experience, of a thing not worth recollecting.” He opened his book again.

  * * *

  *

  The next morning, Caroline awoke to a gray sky and the unaccustomed sounds of the girls stirring in the rooms around her: feet on the floorboards, a window opening, a high-pitched laugh. The second day was hers and David’s—Samuel had bestowed it upon them, biblically, weeks ago. David would teach this morning and she would teach this afternoon. It had seemed a simple enough thing when her father had said it.

  The girls arrived for David’s lesson well wrapped against the new chill and expecting to be taught by Samuel. David strode through the circle to take his place. Caroline and Samuel watched from the back of the room, and Caroline saw the girls noticing David’s height, his breadth, the set of his jaw, his relative youth, and she thought for a moment things might go well for him. Then he began to speak.

  “My name is Mr. Moore. I will take the lesson this morning, on natural history.” He seemed to peer at the girls from a distance, his face hard. They caught one another’s eyes; he was turning himself into something they had to decide about.

  David moved from desk to desk, placing a blank journal before each girl. Caroline knew he’d envisioned this bestowing as a joyful ceremony, but there was haste in the motions of his hands. “Part of your education here will concern the inexhaustible variety of creation that surrounds us. We have a duty to study and reflect upon that creation. Our first lesson will therefore take place out of doors. All you will need is a pencil and the book I’ve just given you.”

  “Outside?” shrieked Livia Bunting, who seemed to speak loudly or not at all. “We’ll freeze, sir, truly.”

  “I’ve worn my best shoes,” said Meg Sawyer. The others laughed.

  Eliza cast an eye on Meg’s feet. “You don’t think you could bear the loss?”

  Louder laughter as Meg’s expression changed. Caroline wondered how Eliza had already managed to gather in her fist the threads that led to the other girls’ hearts. A slight tug there, a repositioning there, and oh, there, a quick, sharp pull.

  David worked his mouth while they all waited for his words.

  “Miss Bell,” Samuel said, from his seat beside Caroline. But this wasn’t his classroom, not now, and his speaking didn’t help anything.

  In a reluctant clump, the girls followed David from the barn toward the crest of the big hill opposite the house. He walked too fast. Caroline and Samuel trailed behind the students.

  “Do you think he’ll manage it, Caroline?” Samuel said softly.

  She’d wanted this, wanted to grow a fear in her father, but now his fear infuriated her. “Early to despair, isn’t it? He hasn’t even started.”

  “You’re right, of course.”

  David stopped at the peak of the hill and waited for the girls to reach him. “As you can see, ladies—”

  “I wouldn’t mind being his lady,” Livia hissed to Meg, performance-patting her fuzzy halo of hair. Caroline was standing right behind them and could hear, knew this meant she should do something, was unsure what. “Do you think he wants one?”

  “—the property of the school consists of both meadow and woods, each with its own flora and fauna. For the next half hour you’ll explore these habitats and select a single specimen that interests you. When time is up, bring the specimen you’ve chosen back to the classroom. I will identify your specimens, and then you’ll draw them.”

  The girls wandered away. David was already striding back toward the barn, desperate, Caroline was sure, for escape.

  “I think I’ll get a bit of air, just while they’re hunting,” Samuel said. After all, it was from him that Caroline had learned her habit of walking their fields when most afraid.

&nbs
p; Caroline hurried to catch David. She matched his step. She thought of laying her hand on his elbow but didn’t. “I’m sure all will be well once they get back,” she told him.

  “All is perfectly well now.” He moved ahead. Back in the barn’s dim stillness, he opened a book and didn’t look up until the others returned, Samuel first and then the girls. They all took their places again.

  And then, a modest miracle: there came a glorious turning. For when the girls loosed their specimens on the desks, they somehow loosed David too. Tabitha had brought back a toad that tried to leap from her desk to the floor, to much squealing; David caught it one-handed and put it in a wooden box. “American toad, Bufo americanus,” he said.

  He grinned at all of them—the same delighted grin he’d given Caroline on the front steps the day she’d met him. Quick as that, they were won.

  He knew it too. He fanned out Meg’s wood sorrel plant on her desk, pointing out the heart-shaped leaves. He brushed at the fringe of grasses Rebecca had picked. He revolved Felicity’s King Bolete mushroom between his thumb and forefinger and pronounced it a fine fat thing.

  Samuel laughed with the others, and Caroline could hear his easing.

  David reached Eliza. She’d been sitting quietly, her body curled around her hands, which were cupped at her stomach. Now she held one out to show a trilling heart feather like a great red slash across her palm. Looking at it felt like looking at a wound. Caroline’s own palm pressed itself to her thigh.

  Eliza peered up at David, shyly but intently too, as if she were baring a more private stretch of flesh. “It was so strange,” she said. “I saw the bird, not the feather. It flew toward me, and then it waited while I came closer. I got so close I could almost have touched it. When it flew off, the feather was right there in the grass. I swear it, that bird seemed to want me to have this.”

  Her face shone, of course. Walking her dead father’s landscape, she’d found a proof of inheritance, sure as a lock of his hair. Caroline could see it all as clearly as if she’d been present: the bird waiting in the grass, fixing Eliza with its eye that saw in her—what? And then darting up into the air, having left this souvenir of itself for her to lay across her skin.