The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  What, Caroline wondered, would the trilling heart want as payment?

  The other girls’ eyes were wide.

  “Well, the bird probably would have preferred to keep it, given the choice,” David said.

  “Almost like it knew,” Meg said. “Who you are. Who your father was.”

  “That would be a tremendous strain on the avian brain, Miss Sawyer,” Samuel said, but his voice seemed thin and slight, a cobweb over what was happening.

  “ ‘A place of marvels,’ ” Eliza said.

  Caroline wouldn’t place the words until that night, just before sleep. The same words Louisa Blake says to Hammond on the day they first meet in The Darkening Glass. “This is a place of marvels.” Who was Eliza, to quote them here?

  Pearson’s daughter, and Caroline had invited her in.

  * * *

  *

  Mrs. Sanders served a passable meat pie for dinner, but Caroline would be teaching straight after and found she couldn’t swallow any. David, beside her at one end of the long table, wolfed his. “Thank God for all those afternoons I spent out of doors, bored senseless, as a boy,” he said.

  “I thought you were never worried about how it was going,” said Caroline.

  “You didn’t think that,” David said, “for a second.”

  She’d been planning to ask what he made of Eliza and her feather, but she saw he was too full now of his triumph, of the pride with which Samuel had clapped him on the shoulder when his lesson was done.

  Their warm, sated bellies made the girls sluggish, and back in the barn they slumped a little in their seats. From the teacher’s desk, Caroline surveyed them. Why did they look so young? At fourteen, fifteen, she’d felt as complete as she did now. The lines of their faces were still cloudy with changing. All but Eliza’s, which was clear enough.

  “I’m your third instructor, Miss Hood,” she told them, “and I’ll be directing your study of English literature.” She handed around the books while her father and David regarded her from the back wall.

  “Miss? Will we read any Miles Pearson?” said Felicity, stealing a glance at Eliza.

  “I loved The Darkening Glass,” Livia chirped.

  Eliza watched Caroline. Was that a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth?

  Caroline took a breath. “I’m afraid we won’t have time to read contemporary novels here.”

  “He isn’t really contemporary, is he? He’s dead,” Livia said. Then she flushed—she had skin that mottled—and told Eliza, “Sorry.”

  “I was aware,” Eliza said.

  It seemed to Caroline that this was not a place to linger. “We’ll be beginning much further in the past. Most of you will have read some Shakespeare, I believe,” Caroline said.

  Nods around the circle.

  “Whatever play you studied, you likely found it at least somewhat difficult.” Fewer nods. “Shakespeare is wonderfully rich but also wonderfully demanding, for everyone. Soon we’ll be studying A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but today we’ll read some of the sonnets, with the aim of arming ourselves for those difficulties, on a larger scale, by beginning to settle into the rhythms and patterns of Shakespearean language. You may open your books to Sonnet 65, please. Would anyone like to read it for us?”

  Sunny-faced Abigail Smith raised her hand. She read smoothly, though with the loaded pauses at the ends of the lines that Caroline had forgotten from her previous schoolroom:

  Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,

  But sad mortality o’ersways their power,

  How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,

  Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

  O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out

  Against the wrackful siege of battering days,

  When rocks impregnable are not so stout,

  Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

  O fearful meditation! where, alack!

  Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?

  Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?

  Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

  O, none, unless this miracle have might,

  That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

  Abigail’s cheeks were red with risk.

  “Thank you,” Caroline said. “Let’s begin by discussing the structure of the poem. You might already be familiar with sonnet form. Like all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, this one has three quatrains and a couplet. Each of the quatrains, in this case, elaborates upon the same basic problem, to which the couplet then offers a solution. Let’s see if we might determine what that problem is. There’s a struggle set up here, a war between two opposing forces, which the speaker fears are unequal—what are they? Can anyone tell?”

  “Time,” Eliza said, “and beauty.”

  “Exactly right.”

  Julia Altman raised her hand and intoned, “Beauty is fleeting. True grace belongs only to the soul.”

  Caroline hoped never to spend much time with Julia’s mother. “Yes, thank you, Miss Altman. Now, everyone, look at the poem again—what clues does the imagery give us about the strength of the two forces in question? What are the images associated with time, or with the things time manages to destroy?”

  The girls gave them to her: “brass,” “stone,” “earth,” “boundless sea,” “wrackful siege,” “battering days,” “rocks impregnable,” “gates of steel,” “swift foot.” Then they produced the images associated with the lover’s beauty: “a flower,” “summer’s honey breath,” “best jewel.” “Note how vastly stronger time is made to appear,” Caroline told them. “It isn’t until the end of the poem that we arrive at the only possible solution to the problem of beauty’s inevitable decay. Which is what?”

  “Well, his writing?” Livia said. “Anyone who reads the poem will know how beautiful she was.”

  “Yes! This grants a sort of immortality.” Caroline felt so eloquent suddenly, as if she might have explained anything to anyone. “A perpetuation of the spirit, the immortal thing we all do have.”

  “It’s a comfort, to think there might be ways of compensating for loss,” Eliza said. “That’s what I’ve found, anyway, in my own life.”

  “What do you mean?” Meg asked.

  Livia elbowed her. “Her father, obviously.”

  “Oh, both my parents.”

  Caroline said, “Your mother is living.” It was startled out of her.

  “Her life doesn’t include me, though, really, and so in many ways we’re lost to each other, I think.”

  Caroline watched the girls mull this over in the light that spilled through the barn’s new window—watched them begin to wonder if it might be true of their own mothers too. What did it mean that Eliza had aired such a private thing so quickly? Only that she was seeking attention, perhaps. Or that she hoped if she met Trilling Heart with her entire self in her hands, it would give her its entire self in return.

  That she wanted, wanted, wanted.

  “What about you, Miss Hood?” Eliza said. “Does this poem comfort you too?”

  The question was like a specimen pin fastening Caroline to her desk. Louisa Blake, they were thinking, the ones who knew. Soon they all would. Her mother was lost Louisa Blake.

  Comfort? No. She’d never found a record of grief that she recognized. These words did what all beautiful words had always done, more and more the longer the years she spent with them: they inflamed her. They promised and promised, and yet here she still was.

  She glanced at the back of the room. David looked stricken. Her father was getting ready to open his mouth and try to save her. Eliza leaned in, and Caroline knew better than to let her draw breath.

  “Let’s return to the poem, Miss Bell,” Caroline said. �
��It’s more interesting than I am.” A fruitless wriggle on the pin.

  5.

  COUCHED

  Deep, transformative, is a spiritual satisfaction!

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 93)

  Those first weeks, teaching exhausted Caroline. After the long quiet of her previous life, all the words she spoke in front of the girls sapped her, and her throat felt always raw from use. By evening, if she tried to sit and read, her eyes drifted closed. There was satisfaction in this tiredness. She liked using herself up.

  They’d started A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Caroline had the girls act frequently, entering and exiting the patch of cleared floor in the center of the desks’ circle, reading their parts. Felicity was a nimble reader, Eliza delivered lines almost musically, but the real revelation was Livia. The drama of her voice and expressions, overdone for her own life, bore up beautifully under the play’s weight. “ ‘How happy some o’er other some can be!’ ” she read, accusing them all.

  “Extraordinary,” said Samuel, during one of their teachers’ meetings. “It raises the question of what roles she’s playing at other times.”

  In these meetings none of them seemed to know what to say about Eliza. On every one of her days at Trilling Heart so far, Eliza had remade herself. She appeared one morning with her dark hair upswept and tightly coiled, the next with it pinned loose and low. A plain dress that on Tuesday hung modestly was transformed on Friday, by a purple sash and draped lace, into a frothy swirl.

  “Such variety!” Caroline said to her.

  Eliza smiled, and beneath the smile was that craving for—what? “I’m looking for the right way to be, here,” she said.

  “The right way to be is of course to be yourself.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  That same Friday, three sashes appeared on other girls. Felicity and Meg both came down to breakfast with their hair high on their heads the day after Eliza had; finding that Eliza’s hair had changed, Meg re-pinned hers lower by dinnertime, though Felicity’s stayed tentatively in place, small wisps escaping to cling to her thin, fragile-looking neck.

  The girls seemed drawn together as easily as iron filings. They walked, sat, and ate only in groups. Patterns became clear. Livia and Meg were a set, always talking loudly and always in the same way, with Livia offering some new salaciousness and Meg answering with her noisy toneless laugh. Abigail, Felicity, and Rebecca made their own group, quieter and more deliberate, often echoing the quips and styles of Livia and Meg an hour or a day later. Tabitha and Julia were left a pairing by default, like two spinster aunts seated next to each other at supper. Eliza attached where she wanted. She was most often with Livia and Meg, and rarely with Tabitha and Julia, and never, ever alone.

  One day in their third week, Caroline went into Eliza’s empty room to deliver a thin letter from Mrs. Bell. Putting the envelope on the girl’s pillow, she saw the trilling heart feather from the first day of lessons tacked to the headboard, as if part of some blood ritual.

  She ran her fingers over it. So crisp one way—smooth enough to feel almost wet on her fingertips—but the other way, a jaggedness. Those red tines stiff and sharp enough to bury themselves in her skin. What could Eliza want with it? Posted there where she might look up and see it first thing each morning, a promise of what the day ahead would bring. Who would want such a bloodred promise? Caroline smoothed the ruffled edges down before she left, erasing her intrusion.

  She hated to bother her father with formless fears when his project seemed in most ways to be succeeding so marvelously. The girls had adapted quickly to their new right to speak, think, question—as if all of it had been ready inside them and waiting only for someone to ask to hear. As Samuel taught, Caroline had the feeling that she was witnessing the creation of one of those great Renaissance paintings of crowds, a monumental sweep in which each face is individual and sharp. He brought the girls, so gently, to see themselves in the mirror of the text and to decide what they might want to change in that reflection: Julia her prizing of rules; Meg her swayability; Felicity her ambition.

  Though Eliza did sometimes hoist a piece of the past out of its grave, into the middle of the classroom floor, where it sent up its pervasive odor. “My mother said my father always loved the House of the Interpreter episode. Did you know that, sir?”

  “No, Miss Bell, I can’t remember that our favorite passages of Pilgrim’s Progress ever came up.”

  “What other books did he love, do you know? I’ve just always wondered.”

  “Of course you have,” Samuel said. “But it was so long ago. I’m sorry.”

  Eliza nodded. “Did you talk often, I wonder?”

  “Certainly.”

  Eliza nodded again. If you say so, that nod said.

  Also: I am doing what you like, for now, but I am not yours.

  * * *

  *

  Apart from one another, David was the girls’ main audience. He was the only object for all the feelings they’d brought with them. They laughed and shrieked louder than usual during David’s lessons, and their voices were higher. After the lessons were over they argued about whom he had looked at the longest.

  “You’ve certainly made an impression,” Caroline told him, at the end of his lesson on cloud formation. The girls had just disappeared through the door, Livia calling, “Farewell, Mr. Moore!”

  “Though never on you, despite all my best efforts,” he said, smiling, with just a quick glance at her, as if wary of looking too long, as if the sight of her cost him somehow.

  Her heart, her heart, surely he could hear it.

  “You don’t impress easily. Your approval would be a particular triumph,” he said.

  “You know you have that,” she told him. It had a less playful sound than she’d intended.

  He stepped toward her, close and then closer, and then reached past for a book left lying on the desk to her side. When he straightened again he looked at her with surprise, because there was a feel in the space that separated them now of a thread being drawn tight.

  “Caroline,” he said, and put his hand on her upper arm. Her skin beneath her sleeve greeted that weight joyously, and he met her eyes, and his were wide, and his fingers tightened as if to pin that joy between them, at this meeting point of their bodies.

  Did he drop his hand first? Did she move her arm first? Impossible, after, for her to know. She reached for her books and took her time stacking them, watching only her own hands, not letting herself look at him again. When she was finished she left.

  David’s lessons moved into the biology of plants. The girls preened before him as he bounced around the room: to the blackboard to draw the details of a leaf’s architecture, to Julia’s desk to point out an omission in the labeling of her diagram, to the center of the circle to explain the role of sunlight, rocking a little from heel to toe to heel again. “It’s a trade, light for fuel,” he said.

  Here he caught Caroline staring at him and looked away.

  He came to find her that night in the sitting room, where she was sewing an old sheet into a robe for Oberon to wear in the morning. “I saw Miss Ridell leaving,” he said. “Is she all right?”

  Felicity had come to talk to Caroline about a barbed letter her sister, a year younger, had sent her. That and she’d lost one of her favorite earrings, and no one else would look very hard for it, and the day had become a tragedy. She’d cried a little.

  “Only hurt feelings,” Caroline said.

  The girls often brought their problems to her. Mostly they didn’t want help, only to learn they could withstand the speaking of these problems out loud. Caroline was good at giving them this feeling, just as she was good—not great, not her father, but good—at helping them see the meaning of words on a page.

  She’d found herself beginning to have a curious feeling, previo
usly unknown to her, of fitting.

  “Oh, good,” David said. He cleared his throat. “Caroline, might I speak with you?”

  She noticed he had his fists balled in his pockets. “You look like you’re coming to confess something.” She laughed, but he didn’t, so she stopped.

  He sat in the chair opposite. “There’s something I should say, something I probably should have said long ago.”

  How would it unfold, Caroline wondered, if it did? Would he touch her hands, her face, carefully at first? Or a seizing, her lips to his, the salt-bread-and-heat smell of his throat, the feel of her face caught in his hands? These were scenes she had never played. She neatened the sheet in her lap: creasing and creasing again.

  Gesturing to the sheet, David said, “But you’re busy.”

  “Caroline!” Samuel called from the hall. He appeared in the doorway. “Mrs. Sanders is wondering about new bed linens. I find I have no distinct opinion.”

  David smiled at Caroline. “Another time.”

  She returned his smile. Say the rest, she willed him, as she stood; Stop me, as he let her father lead her down the hall.

  When she lay down that night beneath her quilts (the nights were growing cold already), she tried letting the rest of the scene play out.

  I didn’t know such a feeling could exist, he would tell her.

  And she would say, Nor I.

  Nor I.

  I.

  I.

  Hands on her face. Hands on her neck, her breasts, her waist, her hips.

  I.

  I.

  Hands on her central pulse, all the warmth gathered there. Hands. His, hers. Here they were. What words had ever given her hands before?

  * * *

  *

  In the back garden, planning her lessons a few days later—sitting in the grass, one palm flat to the swell of the ground, like a hip’s curve—Caroline saw a group of trilling hearts fly by. One seemed to have a bundle of something in its beak. Another thieving of some part of their woods or their meadow. Except—was that a circlet of hair? Brown and long and fine, too fine to be grass. At the sight, a queasiness washed over her, a recoiling like what she felt on occasionally discovering the viscera of small animals strewn in their fields, dark and bloody near the hollowed-out skins. She stood for a better look, but the bird was already out of sight, carrying whatever it was to wherever it was going.