She was not there for her own disownment, but she has a copy of the declaration; she keeps it with her wedding lines.
“Because he wanted to draw?” Curiosity can’t quite understand. Maddie doubts that anyone but another Friend could.
“He could not live his life according to the principles,” she says. “And so he left.”
“And his family won’t own him.”
“No!” Maddie’s tone is too sharp, and so she takes a deep breath and attempts to explain.
“A Quaker who cannot or will not live by the principles is warned and prayed over and given every chance, and when it is clear that he has no intention of changing his ways, he is disowned by the meeting. It only means that the meeting no longer owns him. He might still attend if he likes. He is welcome everywhere in the hope that he will find the light again and return to the Quaker way of life.”
“But his family put him out,” Curiosity says. “Because he has a gift for drawing.”
“Not exactly,” Maddie says. “People are sometimes disowned by the meeting but rarely by their families. In his case, his father would not allow him back into the house unless he gave up his worldly ways.”
“Like your mama did to you,” Curiosity says. Her tone is not unkind; she is a sensible person and not given to displays of emotion.
“Yes,” Maddie says. “That is true. Though thou has seen, my father still is concerned with my well-being. He sent ye to us here, and I am thankful for thy help and company every day.”
“He don’t want you to be lonely,” Curiosity says.
To that Maddie has nothing to say; she is overwhelmed, as she often is these days, by the depths of her loss. How much she gave up, for something that never existed.
He comes again when she is working in the garden, and his hair is damp and she thinks he must have gone swimming in the lake. He has an exuberance of hair, thick and healthy and anything but plain. Her own curly mass she keeps tightly braided and hidden away under a white linen cap. She is no longer a Friend, but some habits she cannot leave behind.
“Let me help thee,” he says and without waiting for her answer he takes up the spade and starts turning the earth with sure, quick movements.
For a long while they work in silence. Without asking he takes the bushel of seed potatoes and begins to plant them, his fingers moving in the earth. Maddie realizes that she is staring and she goes back to her carrot bed. She has many questions, none of which she can think of a way to ask.
He says, “Tell me about thy husband. How ye met, and why ye married.”
From anyone else this question would be too rude to answer, but he is a Friend, someone from home. He is asking for her testimony, in this oddest of ways and settings. Maddie finds, to her own surprise, that she doesn’t mind. In fact, she feels some relief that he has asked so directly.
“Alfred came to see my father on business,” she tells Gabriel. “And my mother invited him to table. He told us stories of his travels. He is English, you understand. He came to the colonies when he was just five-and-twenty and decided to stay.”
He works on as if he doesn’t hear her, but she knows that he does.
“It was very exciting,” Maddie says. Her trowel makes sharp punching sounds as she digs. “Such tales as he told. He spoke of the Russian winter, and the villages ruled by robber barons. He told of Paris and Barcelona and the African coast. He spoke of Sweden and the Lowlands. He traveled through the mountains in Switzerland and Austria on his way to Italy. Oh, how he talked about Rome and Florence. He is a good storyteller, and he made it so real, I could smell the very air. And he had plans to travel farther. He wanted to go to China, and start a business importing silk.”
What she doesn’t say, not yet, not now, is simpler: Most of what Alfred told was no more than fantasy. He is a story teller first and foremost; he does not credit any difference between truth and imagination. Something she realized far too late, after she had married him and left her family for this wilderness.
The simple truth is, he has no more been to Russia than she has. All his plans and grand schemes will never be more than that, ideas that never come to life. If not for Galileo and Dan’l Bonner, who bring meat and fish for the table, they might well have starved in the past winter. She and Curiosity spend every spare minute spinning and weaving to trade cloth for things they cannot afford to buy and Galileo can’t make.
It has been three months since she had a sheet of paper, anything at all that she might write on. Her father will wonder, and worry. That is the hardest thing, not having her father’s ear, even in this disjointed fashion.
She doesn’t say any of these things, but it seems that he may be reading them from her face. It would be a gift to have another Friend—a former Friend—to talk to about these things, but maybe it would not be wise.
“It is a quiet life here,” she says finally. “And a good one.”
“So I see.” And then: “But not the life thee expected.”
“I am young,” Maddie tells him. Too young, her mother had said, but that thought she puts aside. If she thinks of her mother she will weep.
“I am young,” she says again. “There are many years to travel.”
To that he says nothing at all, and she knows now that he is wise where she cannot be.
It is the next day or the day after when he asks her. He says, “What wilt thou do if he doesn’t return?”
That question that beats like a drum in her head. Alfred has been gone almost three months, the longest time he has been away without any word at all. He may be dead, or he may sit in a gaol somewhere, or maybe he has just lost track of time, wandering as he loves to do. As Maddie had once thought she would do with him.
“Go home,” she says. “I will go home to my family.”
“Thou might do that anyway, if this life does not suit.”
“I was married before God,” she said. “I made a promise.”
“And so did he, but is he here to keep it?”
There is something still in his expression, something watchful. As if this is an assignment he sets her, this question.
“I thank thee for thy concern,” she says. “But I will wait for my husband a while longer.”
“Then may God send thee children to brighten thy days,” says Gabriel Oak, and when she looks up in surprise she sees that he knows more than she could ever say.
“Ma,” said Lily. “This is not talk for Birdie to hear.”
Her mother’s gaze was distant. She came back to this room, this day, with reluctance, blinking like a child roused from a nap.
“Ma,” said Lily.
Birdie scowled at her sister. “Curiosity wanted me here and Ma wanted me here and you can’t send me away. Can she, Ma?”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “We won’t send you away. I think Curiosity is almost done with her story. Is that not so?”
“Almost,” Curiosity agreed.
“I want to hear the rest of it,” said Birdie, still glaring at her sister.
“So do we all,” said Curiosity.
—
It is clear that Galileo and Curiosity are concerned. Curiosity says, “You watch yourself, Maddie. You watch out for yourself.”
Another time Maddie hears them talking in the garden.
“First time I seen her smile like she mean it,” Galileo was saying.
“Headed for heartbreak,” answers his wife.
When Sixth month passes into Seventh and the visitors have not yet moved on, Martha Todd and Mary Witherspoon come to pay a call. Mrs. Todd’s firstborn, a sturdy little boy with hair the color of ripe corn, runs ahead of her and jumps into Maddie’s lap where she sits in the shade of a birch tree, mending a shirt.
Mrs. Todd is heavy with child, her belly so extended that it almost comes to a point, like the prow of a great ship. Her face is red with the sun and perspiration runs off her brow like rain.
Maddie offers them water, and they accept with thanks. When Mrs. Todd puts th
e jug down her gaze fixes on Maddie, and her mouth presses itself into a line.
“Mrs. Middleton. Caroline. We are here,” she says in her clipped Boston way, “to tell you that your immortal soul is in danger. Send the man away.”
She has been expecting this for some time, and she is ready. “Friend Gabriel comes and goes as he pleases,” she says. “He is not mine to command.”
Mrs. Witherspoon’s thin mouth curves downward, but she leaves the talking to her friend.
“Is he not?” Mrs. Todd’s tone is flat. “Well then, suit yourself. What will you tell your husband when he comes home?”
“I am sure you will tell him whatever needs to be told,” Maddie says. “Which is nothing at all.”
When they are at the door Mrs. Witherspoon speaks for the first time.
“Whose shirt is that you’re mending, Mrs. Middleton?”
When Maddie doesn’t look up and keeps her silence, her neighbors go out into the heat of summer.
Gabriel says, “Come away with me.”
Maddie thinks of the cabin, of the garden and the ripening corn, of Curiosity and Galileo. She thinks of Cora, who has been so kind, and the other friends she has here. Anneliese Metzler, who is often ill and needs help. Axel, who makes her smile with his tall tales.
“We’ll go to Russia,” he says, laughing down at her. This is a joke now, one they tell each other quite often.
“Russia in the winter?”
He is so close, the smell of him rubbed into her skin so that she is loath to bathe.
“And in the spring. And summer. And fall. Maddie, come away with me.”
High summer, in the cool of the woods.
“Wilt thou think about it?”
She says, “I do little else.”
“Tomorrow,” she tells him on a day when rain has driven them indoors. “Tomorrow is the anniversary of my marriage.”
“What marriage?” Gabriel says. “I see thee alone here on the very edge of the frontier.”
“Tomorrow,” Maddie says. “Tomorrow Alfred will be gone for six months. If he does not come tomorrow, I will go with thee.”
The day comes and goes. Thunderheads build in the west and then descend to pelt the small settlement on the lake with fistfuls of hail. The wind tears down the fence and the corn within the fence and the twining morning glories from the fence. When the lightning finishes they go out, Maddie and Gabriel, Curiosity and Galileo, to save what they can. They are soaked to the skin within seconds.
Curiosity and Galileo go off to their small cabin and Maddie stands across from Gabriel, dripping onto her scrubbed plank floor. The first time she saw this room there was only the beaten earth. But she wanted a floor, and Alfred saw to it she got one. The men who did the work have still not been paid.
The sun has come out, only to set. Gabriel stands in the open doorway watching the last of the sunlight reflected in every water drop. A cave of wonders, jewel-bright.
Maddie says, “Come now. Come, it is time.”
Later they talk of where they will go. Or Gabriel talks and Maddie listens, stopping him now and then to ask a question. Tomorrow, she thinks, she will remember little of this, but no matter. He will tell her these things again. As often as she asks, he will tell her because he will be right there, beside her. His body, the long bones of him, the muscles that flex and tighten under her palms. His mouth. His lovely mouth.
She sleeps, one hand cupped over her own belly. Over the child she has conceived with this man who is not her husband.
And the next day her husband comes home.
Elizabeth was pale, her gaze fixed on her folded hands. “Tell the rest of it,” she said without looking up.
“I think you know,” Curiosity said. “But I got to tell it anyhow. Gabriel Oak asked her to go away but she couldn’t, not with her husband come home. So he left without her. Said he’d be back in the spring to ask her again, and every year after that until she said yes. In November Alfred was gone again, off to Montreal for one thing or another. Man could not sit still. Neither of her men could.”
“But why did she go to England?” Birdie asked. “Why didn’t she go home to her ma and da?”
“I expect she didn’t want to lie to them,” Elizabeth said. “And she wanted to be far enough away that her husband couldn’t come after her easily.”
“She did write to her family,” Curiosity said. “Borrowed paper from Cora to write a letter and borrowed money to send it. And waited until an answer came back. A draft on a bank in Manhattan and a note from her daddy, saying her ma wouldn’t have her back but she should write for money when she needed it. And that same day there was a letter from England, from her good-sister, your aunt Merriweather, Elizabeth. Saying she wished Alfred and his wife would come home to England. She worried about him with all the Indian trouble.”
“But what about Gabriel Oak?” Birdie asked and her voice had a tremble to it. “How could he not come back?”
Curiosity was looking at Lily. “You know, Lily, don’t you? You guessed it.”
Lily looked from Curiosity to her mother and back again. “Yes, I suppose I did. I told Simon a long time ago that Gabriel Oak was most likely my real grandfather.”
For a moment Elizabeth thought Lily would want to tell them how she had come to such a conclusion, as Elizabeth herself had in that last summer Gabriel Oak spent in Paradise. Like Lily, Elizabeth had talked to Nathaniel about it, but otherwise kept the idea—one that had grown from suspicion to a certainty over the years—to herself. But then it seemed Lily was as impatient as Elizabeth was to hear the rest of what Curiosity had to say. To confess.
Lily said, “He did come back, didn’t he. He came back and you told him she was gone. Did he give you a letter?”
“Yes, he did,” Curiosity said. “He come back here at Christmastime, couldn’t wait any longer is what he say to me. We sat at the table and I told him not the way it was, but the way I wanted it to be. And then I watched him write a letter for Maddie. He gave that letter to me to make sure she got it, and he went off and didn’t come back for a long time, some twenty years.”
“Did you have a letter for him?” Elizabeth asked. “Did she give you a letter for him when she left for England?”
Curiosity closed her eyes briefly and then nodded. “I didn’t give that over neither. If I had done what they ask me to do, most likely she would have come back. It was me kept them apart, may God forgive me my pride. And you know why I did that? Lily?”
“Because you thought you knew better,” Lily said. There were tears on her cheeks now. “You thought you knew what was right, and you were so sure you made that decision for her.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Curiosity said. “In my pride and vanity I thought I knew better than your grandmama. I tole myself that Gabriel Oak couldn’t be trusted to take care of her and a child too. Him with that itch to always be off moving. I was bitter about her going off, though I didn’t see that right then. And so I tampered where I had no business, no matter how much I loved Maddie. I had no business. I have prayed every day that the Good Lord might take mercy on me for my wickedness. When the letter come from England saying you was safely come into this world, Elizabeth, there was a note for me too.”
She reached into her apron pocket and brought it out. A single piece of paper, yellow with age. Elizabeth took it when Curiosity held it out to her, and after a moment she opened it. She read aloud:
If thou shouldst ever see Gabriel again, please tell him that I bear him no ill will. He gave me a beautiful daughter and I am content.
“Right then I knew what a terrible thing I had done. I had to tell Maddie, but I kept putting it off. I thought if I could find Gabriel first and confess to him, he’d go to England and claim Maddie and his child. I wrote to him, I did. Whenever I could get together enough money I sent off another letter, to all the places he talked about. Wrote on it, for Friend Gabriel Oak, Artist Originally of Baltimore, Should He Pass Through. I did that right until the j
udge went off to England hisself to bring Maddie home. Then I waited all those months until he came back, every day telling myself that when she was back, when I could look her in the eye, I would confess it all.
“But she didn’t come back and I never had word from Gabriel either, not until he come through Paradise some twenty years later, when Maddie was long in her grave, may the Good Lord rest her soul.
“I can see the question you afraid to ask on your face, Elizabeth. So let me just finish this sorry story and say yes, I did tell him then. I tolt him what I had done and I tolt him he had a daughter, born and raised in England in the belief that the judge was her daddy.
“I tole him all that and he just sat quiet, the way he had. Thoughtful. I wished he would shout at me but no, he just sat and thought for a long while. And then he ask, real calm, what was it did I want from him? As if he owed me something. As if I thought I deserved his forgiveness. I was going to say that, but then something else come into my mind. Something I could ask for, not for me, but for you, Elizabeth. I ask him for a picture of his own face, a portrait. So that I could send it to you one day and say, this is your daddy. Your mama loved him very much.
“And he say, yes, he would see to it that you got to see his likeness one day.”
“Oh,” Lily said. Tears trailed over her face but she made no attempt to wipe them away. “That day he asked me to draw him. You were there, Curiosity.”
“Yes, I was. I held him to that promise.”
Birdie sat up straight. “Is that the picture hanging in your room, Ma? Of the man with the—” she used her hands to describe the broad-rimmed hat Gabriel Oak had worn.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Lily gave me that drawing as a gift. I look at it every day.”
“That’s the story I been holding back all these years. I expect I’ll have to tell it again when I stand before God, and I won’t have no excuses because it was wrong, what I did. I will tell him what I’m telling you now, Elizabeth. I am heartily sorry.”
“I can see that,” Elizabeth said. “I can see that you are. But Curiosity, the penance you have inflicted on yourself has been too extreme. All these years of self-recrimination and guilt—”