The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  He looked up, then, and lifted his fork and knife.

  Sophia said, “That was a different kind of grace.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Moore,” Samuel said.

  The girls began buzzing to one another as they always did at mealtimes. Caroline caught indecipherable snippets. “Just like that pink thing you had on yesterday.” “The cruelest!” “She could have sniffed it out.”

  “A noble act on Lincoln’s part, marking this day off,” Samuel said to David. “Smaller than his other noble acts, of course.”

  “Yes,” David said, a little flatly. In response to Samuel’s questioning look he added, “Oh, nothing. Today certainly isn’t the day.”

  Samuel laughed. “Now I think you must say it.”

  “Well, Lincoln was a hero, of course. A great man. A tragedy. But the fighting, the actual living through the fighting—there wasn’t much about it that felt noble.” David’s voice came slowly, as if he wished he weren’t speaking at all.

  “But what cause could have been nobler? You fought to free your fellow—”

  David held up a hand. Something Caroline had never thought she’d see, David asking her father to stop talking. “I do know all of that,” David said. “I know all of the reasons.”

  “You should be proud of what you did,” Sophia told him. “I’ve never understood why you won’t talk about it.”

  “Really, the reasons can’t seem unimportant to you, David,” Samuel said.

  “Only they seemed very removed from what we were actually doing. That’s what I love about this, our school.” David gestured around the table, at the oblivious girls. “We have noble reasons, and what we’re doing is noble.”

  “I abhor violence, you know that. But you were helping to end a terrible, a godless tyranny,” Samuel said. David was injuring him with this refusal to take what he wanted to bestow.

  “Yes, I know how terrible enslavement was. I saw it. The fighting was terrible too.”

  “That’s different,” Sophia said.

  “And do you know, that wasn’t even the worst of it,” said David, looking at his plate, speaking softly, though the girls weren’t listening anyway. “The worst was that it was so dull most of the time—these big empty periods of waiting, in the heat or the cold—and there was no distinct margin between the waiting and the fighting. Nothing set off the one as more important than the other. It all happened at the same pace, in the same colors. It made you start to wonder whether everything in the world counted the same after all—whether the value you’d always ascribed to certain things, certain ideas, was an invention. What the purpose was of any of it.”

  “The purpose—” Samuel began.

  “I’m only saying it makes me peaceful, here, being able to stand to look at both the motives and the acts.”

  Horror might have fueled devotion; David might have polished his idea of Caroline’s father with more and more vigor each time he saw a new terror. Samuel’s ideas might have seemed all that could make some things actually matter more than others, the way David had always assumed they would. Coming here, then, and meeting the Hoods, building this school, might have felt like the answer to every question the war had given him.

  Caroline looked at the faces of the girls, who were giving her so many new questions, as they twisted and laughed.

  9.

  PERFORMANCE

  He wrestled mightily with a mad jealousy of her pain—for its exclusion of him he could not bear.

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 212)

  Caroline first read The Darkening Glass when she was sixteen. Her father had never outright forbidden her from doing this, but only because he believed the prohibition went without saying. Miles Pearson had been famous for a decade by then, and dead for a year or two. Dying had not won him Samuel’s forgiveness.

  At that age, Caroline was learning Greek and Hebrew in Samuel’s study, and frequenting Ashwell parlors on the social calls he kept arranging for her, and trying to understand how she was supposed to be one person in those two so different surroundings. One afternoon, she’d been visiting Miss Philomena Cuttman, eighteen years old, daughter of Samuel’s attorney. Philomena patted at the rows of curls that framed her face and talked about her younger sister’s recent engagement. “I’m very happy for them,” she said, fear in her eyes.

  “Yes, how lovely.”

  “I already know the sort of dress I want for the wedding. I want it to be simple, the sort of thing Louisa Blake might have worn. Oh.” Philomena pressed her fingers to her mouth, as if she’d let slip an embarrassing noise.

  “It’s all right,” Caroline said, the way she always did when people accidentally mentioned The Darkening Glass or its people in her presence.

  But that day she wondered: Was it? She didn’t know enough about the book to evaluate her own grounds for offense. She’d always understood that The Darkening Glass was a bruise on her father that she must not press, no matter how she wanted to.

  Her father who’d sent her to spend this time in Philomena’s parlor.

  “I’m sorry,” Philomena said. “Will you help me decide on the sash?”

  On Caroline’s way home, she paid a boy she passed on the street to go into the bookshop and buy her a copy of the novel.

  She hadn’t needed long to see that The Darkening Glass was ridiculous. It filled her quiet bedroom with its moaning. Samuel would have hated it even if it had been about another place, other people. She could hear him: Everyone certainly seems to have a great many gusty feelings.

  But of course The Darkening Glass wasn’t about anywhere or anyone else. It was a lurid, smeary picture of something Caroline desperately wanted to see, and when she flipped to each new page, she scoured it for Louisa’s name. Louisa seemed often to give of herself, or cower in fear, or suffer, while being—Caroline learned over and over again—very beautiful. She did not say very much. Hammond, the main character, on the other hand, liked long words. So did Abner, in giving voice to his terrible plans from his dark corners.

  Caroline read the book for longer stretches. She became less careful about choosing her moments. She began to want her father to find out.

  Yet when the evening came that Samuel knocked at her door and entered too fast for her to haul herself up out of the book and hide it, she was filled with visceral horror to be caught with it in her hands.

  “Papa, don’t look,” she blurted out.

  He stopped in the doorway. An issue of The Compass was clutched in one hand; he’d been coming to tell her about something he’d read. That was why he hadn’t waited after knocking—he’d been too eager to share it with her. Meanwhile she’d shut herself away in secrecy to do a thing she knew would hurt him as much as anything she could think of.

  “Where possible in life, we should avoid practices that cannot bear the eyes of others.” His voice broke.

  “I don’t like it.” Her eyes stung. “I only wanted to see.”

  He nodded. “You wanted to see.”

  Then he left, closing the door behind him so softly it made no sound she could hear.

  * * *

  *

  At Trilling Heart, fall was now turning to winter. The leaves had gone. The air thinned; the remaining grass dried to straw. Silent too on Caroline’s walks, where before there had been buzzing and chirping. So many small deaths.

  The woods drew her. She might understand something about that night with the girls and the branding if she could return to the precise place where it had happened, if she could find the stick with its burned end, and then—she wasn’t sure. Hold it? Break it? Throw it as far as she could, bury it, convince a tree to take it back onto itself? It didn’t matter; she couldn’t find it. Each day she was certain that she was just there, that she recognized the shape of a copse or the bend of a trunk, but the next day she was just as sure about
a different place. Each time she scuffed up leaves, searching—burrowing through the dry top layer to the wet beneath, and then to the depth where leaf began to turn to dirt and fleshy white earthworms writhed frantically for new cover. With the leaves mostly fallen, the woods were becoming a place of exposure, and while she walked she sometimes saw a red trilling heart cutting across the sky. The birds seemed quieter in the cold. She could not understand why they hadn’t left. It had already snowed. Their continued presence, as if following some rhythm more powerful than seasons, unsettled her.

  Caroline had often felt a desperation arrive with the fall—worse this year than usual, with the promise of more time in rooms with David and Sophia, but not new. Winter had sealed Birch Hill’s ruin. Not the first winter but the second. The group had survived the first on momentum and food they’d brought with them from their previous lives, and when it warmed again, their planting went promisingly enough—what doesn’t seem promising in spring? But that second fall, the little grove of birches after which they’d named the settlement caught a mysterious rotting blight and fell, and set the tone for what followed. The harvest faltered. The animals sickened. None of those men was a farmer, really, and they didn’t know what to do with so physical a disaster.

  Before the second spring everyone else had fled to reassembled lives or new ones: two solicitors to reopen their old businesses, Dr. Hawkins to resume his practice in Boston, a newspaperman to start a new paper out west, and Miles Pearson, unbeknownst to them, to write The Darkening Glass. The three Hoods, left behind, went back to hiring out their farming and buying what they needed instead of trying to make and grow it all. Samuel went back to writing about his ideas instead of trying to live them. And then one September day Anna died of a fit, and there were two.

  Caroline wondered how the Birch Hill failure had looked to the women as it was happening. It hadn’t been their dream, probably. One or two had been professional writers and thinkers, but most had only been married to them. It seemed to her that they might have seen the coming end more clearly, and sooner, than their men had seen it. Had they talked, as they patched and plugged and repaired, about how they’d come to be tending this dying vision? How early had they known it was beyond their ministrations? Anna, how early had she known?

  Returning to her room after failing again to find the stick, Caroline passed Eliza in the upstairs hall. “I’ve noticed your eye is improving,” she told the girl.

  Eliza stopped and put a hand to the wall as if she required its support. “Somewhat, yes.”

  Afternoon light streamed through the windows on this side of the house, and Caroline could see that spot perfectly well, shrunk to a pinprick now. From inside, its slow dissolving might have looked to Eliza like the burning off of a red fog. “More than somewhat, from appearances.”

  “I suppose. I’ve been a little afraid to believe it.”

  “I think it’s especially important to believe in good developments and cling to them. Those kinds of slow daily miracles—like healing, like spring—you know.”

  “It’s almost winter now,” Eliza said.

  “I’m doing you the credit of imagining you might still remember springtime.”

  Eliza tilted her head, and the light caught that pinprick of red, small as it was. “You sounded very like your father just then. You often do.”

  The words made Caroline’s tongue lie heavy in her mouth—though any of the boys who’d tromped to the Hoods’ door through the years to pay homage would have given, for that compliment, an eye, a toe, a finger.

  Eliza knew her effect. Caroline could tell she knew.

  “I’m nearly done with the reading for tomorrow,” Eliza said. They’d finished Midsummer and begun Romeo and Juliet; Caroline hoped to show the girls the resonances between the two. “Romeo is absurd.”

  “Well, he’s very young.”

  “He makes that very obvious,” Eliza said.

  As it turned out, all the girls relished mocking Romeo. They read aloud his overelaborate faux despair over Rosalind gleefully, their arms clapped to their foreheads. Juliet, on the other hand, they loved. “She’s too good for him,” Felicity pronounced.

  Eliza was as perceptive as ever in their discussions, if sometimes quieter and preoccupied seeming. Caroline called on her frequently but avoided giving her certain roles in their acting. Needing no extra wit or new adoration from the others, she couldn’t be Juliet. And never Romeo, with his dramatics and his celebration of pain. Not Mercutio, irresistible and doomed. Not even the Prince, who called all action to a halt when he chose.

  She would have liked for Eliza just to sit and watch every day, but the others would have noticed. So Caroline made her various servingmen, or sometimes Lady Capulet or Benvolio.

  * * *

  *

  Samuel wrote a letter to the parents suggesting the girls might remain at Trilling Heart for the Christmas holiday. He managed to imply that there would be something important and transformative about the experience.

  “Why do you want to keep them?” Caroline asked him.

  “I was hoping to avoid the interruption. So much lost time!”

  She suspected he also hoped to prevent word of the Eliza-related dramatics he refused to acknowledge from reaching the parents. Tabitha’s, Livia’s, and Rebecca’s sent for them anyway, but all the other girls stayed.

  There had been a bit of snow cover since early December, but Christmas Eve day was warm enough to melt it. By Christmas morning the ground was wet, brown, and bereft looking, like something hatched too early from its egg. The scene in the sitting room was cheerful as a picture book, though, with a fire pleasantly popping and hissing, and a garland of pine boughs on the mantel giving off its fresh, spicy smell, and bright stockings hung below. The Hoods’ life had grown so many new feet.

  The girls squealed as they went to collect their stockings. Eliza too. This morning she seemed just like the others, all of them sitting together on the sofas and opening their bundles with the excitement of younger children. Their treasures accumulated in sweet troves in their laps. The girls had given one another new ribbons and peppermints and butterscotches. Caroline had given each of them a scrap of fabric, out of which something small but pretty might be made: green paisley for Meg, madder stripes for Felicity, purple flowers for Eliza, chintz on white for Abigail, gray jacquard for Julia. Samuel gave them all lexicons. David gave them unusual, lovely bits of rock he’d collected from the fields in warmer days, and these they pocketed like secrets. Sophia gave them each three new colored pencils.

  They’d also all contributed, even the girls, to the Society for Poor Relief in Ashwell, and Samuel reminded them of this now. “Because of you this day is warmer for someone than it might have been.”

  The teachers had agreed ahead of time not to give one another presents, but this agreement did not extend to presents between fathers and daughters or husbands and wives. As always, Caroline had given Samuel a book he’d said he wanted: a new translation of a French essayist he liked. And as always, Samuel had given Caroline a book she wanted but hadn’t known she wanted ahead of time: Goethe’s Egmont.

  David gave Sophia some fine new drawing paper. She stroked the surface of a sheet. Sophia gave David a magnifying glass with a pewter rim. “For your rambles,” she said.

  He laughed and lifted her and spun her around once before setting her down on her feet again. Caroline acknowledged to herself that they looked like an illustration of love. The girls giggled. Meg, who seemed a little easier and gentler in Livia’s absence, clapped.

  Four days later, Tabitha, Rebecca, and Livia returned, right on schedule. They went into exaggerated raptures about their Christmases at home, trying to make the others jealous and heal their own jealousies over what they’d missed. Nothing much was said about their parents, what they had or hadn’t told them about life at school. Lessons resumed.


  On a gray, cold day in January, Caroline cast Eliza as Tybalt. They were reading act 3, scene 1, so it was the last chance for anyone to be Tybalt, or Mercutio, about to doom all the others with their deaths.

  Samuel, David, and Sophia sat at the back wall. “An audience!” Rebecca said, as the girls wrapped themselves in sheets—why sheets were any better than dresses to attire Verona’s gentlemen, Caroline didn’t know, but the girls had protested against their retirement after Midsummer—and picked up the branches they’d gathered outside months ago to be their swords. Leaves, now turned brown, still clung to a few.

  “You’ll be kind to us, won’t you, Mrs. Moore?” Meg called.

  “Mr. Moore is never kind,” Livia said.

  “I am,” David said.

  “You always have a lot of criticism.” Livia shook the hem of her sheet into place.

  “Kindly meant, Miss Bunting.”

  They adjusted themselves, tucking at their hair, smiling.

  Caroline clapped, and they assumed their places. Benvolio and Mercutio bantered, then Tybalt arrived, then Romeo; the fight began. From the beginning, the girls had taken to swordplay. Today they set their jaws and violently swished their branches, playful and also serious as death. The aging leaves wafted a mossy smell, detached, floated to the floor.

  Eliza jabbed at Livia, who threw up her hands and toppled.

  But then Eliza also fell, though it was too early in the scene for her scripted wounding, though Julia, as Romeo, hadn’t yet come anywhere near her.

  She’d tripped, Caroline thought. Then her body began to jerk. Her back arched, relaxed, arched again. Her hands batted.

  Her open eyes moved from face to face to face.

  “What’s happening?” she screamed.

  Caroline crouched beside her. Samuel came forward and collapsed to his knees. “Miss Bell!” he shouted, his voice loud and strong. “Miss Bell, stop!”

  “Can’t! I can’t!” Her movements garbled the words.