“Anna, may I lie in your bed this night?”
I nodded, and we went in, he ducking his head to pass under the low lintel. I started to build up the fire, but he stopped me. “Tonight, I mean to serve you,” he said. He led me to the chair and draped my shawl around my shoulders, tenderly, just as I had so often in the last month tucked a warming blanket around him. He bent to the hearth, and when he had the fire crackling, he knelt before me and eased off my boots and then my hose, laying his long hand gently against the pale flesh of my thigh. “Your feet are cold,” he said, taking both into his broad palms. He fetched the kettle from the hob then and poured warm water into a basin. He washed my feet, kneading the soles with the pressure of his thumbs. At first, I was made all uneasy by this unaccustomed tenderness. My feet are unlovely, hard, and horny from poor boots and much walking. But as he went on, caressing my cracked heels, the knots of tension in me untangled, and I gave myself up to his touch, leaning my head back against the chair and closing my eyes and letting my own hands travel through the strands of his unbound hair. After a long time, his hands stilled. I opened my eyes and met his, gazing at me. He eased me down to him then, so that I sat astride his thighs. He pushed my skirt and placket up and went into me, gentle and slow. I wrapped my legs around him and held his face between my two hands. Our eyes fixed on each others’ eyes, and it seemed that we did not even blink until the warm rush of our pleasure pierced us both.
Afterward, he lifted me back into the chair and would not let me rise to bring food. He fumbled around in my crocks and pieced together a simple plate of cheese and apples, oatcake and ale. We ate it with our hands, off the same board. I think it was the most delicious meal I had ever had. We said little to each other as we watched the fire burn, but the quiet was a companionable one—not the usual empty silence that raked my nerves raw. When we finally climbed up to my bed, we lay for a long time just gazing at each other, our hands laced tightly and our dark hair mingling on the pillow. And sometime in the early hours of the morning I took him again, slowly at first, and then with passion. I threw myself on top of him. He held my wrists and cried out with pleasure. I could feel the straw shifting in my thin pallet and the old floorboards creaking in complaint. When we finally separated, I fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep from which, for once, I did not waken until morning.
The room was sweet with the scent of straw that had tumbled from the burst seams of my pallet. Light spilled through the diamond panes of the casement window and fell onto his long, still body. I propped myself on an elbow and gazed at him, tracing the bright angles on his chest with a fingertip. He awoke then but did not move, only watched me, the crows’ feet around his eyes crinkling with pleasure. As I looked at my hand on his chest, at its ruddied, work-rough skin, I thought of Elinor’s fine, pale fingers and wondered if my coarser flesh was repellent to him.
He reached for my hand then and kissed it. I pulled it back, embarrassed by its condition, and blurted out the thought that filled my mind.
“When you lie with me,” I whispered, “do you think of Elinor? Are you lying with her in your memory?”
“No,” he said. “I have no such memories.”
I thought he spoke thus to be kind to me. “You needn’t say that.”
“I say it only because it is true. I never lay with Elinor.”
I pushed myself up and stared at him. His gray eyes regarded me, inscrutable as pieces of smoky glass. I grasped a corner of the sheet to cover my nakedness. He smiled slightly, reached up and pulled the cloth away again, letting his fingertips brush my bare skin.
I seized his hand and held it still. “How can you say such a thing? You—you were three years married. You loved each other...”
“Yes, I loved Elinor,” he said softly. “And that is why I never lay with her.” He sighed loudly, and the truth of it flew into my mind: in all the time I had spent near them, I had never once seen a touch pass between them.
I dropped his hand and grabbed again for the sheet to cover me. He had barely moved, but lay there upon the pallet still, his body easy as if he spoke only of the most ordinary things. He did not look at me but stared up at low rafters. His tone was patient, the tone one would use to explain something to a child. “Anna, understand: Elinor had greater needs than those of her body. Elinor had a troubled soul. She had need of expiation, and I had to help her. Elinor, as a girl, committed a great sin, of which you could not know—”
“But I do know,” I interrupted. “She told me of it.”
“Did she so?” he said. He turned to look at me now, his brows creasing and the gray eyes darkening. “It seems there was much between the two of you—much that I was unaware of. More, I should say perhaps, than was fitting.”
I thought, fleetingly, that he, lying naked upon my bed, was barely in a position to comment on the fitness of my friendship with his wife. But my mind was too much troubled to linger there.
“Elinor told me of her sin. But she repented. Surely—”
“Anna. There is a great difference between repentance and atonement.” He sat up at last, his back against the rough wood wall. We faced each other now upon the pallet. I had drawn my legs up under me and pulled the sheet all round my body. I was trembling.
He raised his large hands and held them open before him, like the dishes of a scale. “Elinor’s lust caused the loss of the life of her unborn child. How do you atone for a life? An eye for an eye, the Bible says. But what, in such a case as this? What could she give in atonement for the life that, because of her actions, never could be lived? Because lust caused the sin, I deemed that she should atone by living some part of her life with her lusts unrequited. The more I could make her love me, the more her penance might weigh in the balance to equal her sin.”
“But,” I stammered, “but I heard you, at the deathbed of Jakob Merrill, consoling that man—telling him that as God made us lustful, so he understands and forgives ... And when you caught Albion Samweys lying with Jane Martin, you chided yourself for your harsh words to that girl—”
“Anna,” he interrupted, and his voice was flinty now. He spoke to me as if his patience waned, as if the child he instructed did not properly attend to what was being said. “When I spoke thus to Jakob Merrill, it was in the sure knowledge that he would be dead by twilight. So what good to speak of atonement? What atonement could his ravaged body make? As for Jane Martin, had I cared for her as I cared for my Elinor, I never would have relented, but punished her, punished her, body and mind, until her soul was cleansed. Do you not see? My Elinor, I had to be assured was cleansed, or else risk the loss of her for eternity.”
“And you?” I said in a small, strangled voice.
“Me?” He laughed. “For myself, I took a page from the Papists. Do you not know that women are the dregs of the Devil’s dunghill? Do you know how the Papists teach their celibates to master their desire? When they want a woman, they school themselves to turn their thoughts to all the vile emissions of her body. I did not allow myself to look at Elinor and see her fair face or to breathe the fresh scent of her. No! I looked at that lovely creature and made myself think of her bile and her pus. I dwelt on the sticky wax deep in her ears and the green slime in her nose and the reek of the stuff in her nightjar ...”
“Enough!” I cried, covering my ears. I felt ill.
His body is strong, but I fear that the strength of his will far exceeds it. It can drive him to do what any normal man cannot do, for better and for worse. Believe me, I have seen this. Elinor had said this to me, many months ago. Now I knew what had been in her mind.
He was kneeling now upon the bed, the light limning his body. His voice had gained the ringing timbre of the pulpit. “Know you not that I, the husband, am the image of God in the kingdom of the home? Was it not I who drove the whore from Eden? I turned my lust into holy fire! I burned with passion for God!”
And then he laughed, a mirthless laugh, and fell back upon the pallet. He closed his eyes and a spasm wrac
ked his face, as if he suddenly felt a great pain. His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “And now it seems that there is no God, and I was wrong. In what I asked of Elinor. In what I asked of myself. For of course I did love her and desired her, no matter how hard I turned the press down upon my own feelings. Wrong in doing that, and wrong, most shockingly wrong, in what I asked of this village. Because of me, many are dead who might have saved themselves. Who was I to lead them to their doom? I thought I spoke for God. Fool. My whole life, all I have done, all I have said, all I have felt, has been based upon a lie. Untrue in everything. So now,” he said, “I have learned at last to do as I please!”
He reached for me then, but I was quicker. I slid away from under his hand and rolled off the pallet. Blindly, I grabbed what I could of my scattered garments and fled the room, shrugging my smock over my head as I stumbled down the stairs. My only thought was to get away.
I reeled blindly toward the churchyard. I wanted Elinor. I wanted to hold her and caress her and tell her that I was sorry he had used her so. My beautiful friend, full of affection, made for love. In lying with him, I had sought to bring her closer to me. I had tried to become her, in every way that I could. Instead, in taking my pleasure from his body, I had stolen from her—stolen what should have been hers, her wedding night. I went to her tombstone and lay down upon it. When my fingers found the place where the unpracticed graver had botched her inscription, that tiny indignity undammed my grief, and the sobs wracked my body until the stone was slick with tears.
I was lying there, prone on her gravestone, when I heard him calling me. I did not want to see him. The face that had moved me so, the body I had desired—suddenly his whole person was repulsive to me. I slid down off the stone and into a crouch, then edged on all fours to the giant cross, whose looming bulk might hide me. I leaned against it, as I had been wont to do. But the carvings no longer felt alive under my hands. I no longer thought that its maker had anything to say to me. I could hear the crunch of boots on the churchyard pathway. I ran across the lumpy grass toward the church doorway. I had not been inside since the Sunday in March when the rector had closed it to all of us. I stepped up onto the stoop, letting my hand rest on the door. The wood felt warm after the chill of the stone. I pushed, and it opened. I slipped inside, easing it gently closed behind me. A flurry of wings declared that doves had taken up residence in the belfry. And why not? No one tolled the bells anymore; nothing would disturb their roosting.
The air inside seemed stale. On the brass candlesticks near the altar, green blooms flowered. As the birds cooed and settled, the silence seeped back. I slid forward, muffling my footfalls out of the habit of reverence so long ingrained in me. I ran my hands around the old stone font, remembering the two joyful mornings when I brought the babies to have their heads wet here. Sam, scrubbed to an unaccustomed shine, had beamed so that it seemed his face might split.
Simple Sam. Sometimes I had been ashamed of the plain feelings written on his face—the uncouth laughter at childish joys, the animal way he would fumble at my body and grunt his pleasure in our bed. How I had envied Elinor! The delicacy of her husband’s manner, the subtlety of his mind. How could I have understood so little? And yet how could anyone understand such things: that delicacy masked a most unnatural coldness; that subtle thought had twisted itself into perversion.
Wax scents, damp stone, empty pews. I pictured the faces that had filled each one. We had sat here and listened to him, and believed in him, just as Elinor had done. Trusted him to tell us what was right and good to do. Now two-thirds of those faces were gone—buried in the ground outside or scattered in the shallow pits of our extremity. I stood there, willing a prayer to form for them. But nothing came. I tried the old, rote words on my tongue. They rang much more loudly than I’d intended, meaningless as the tumble of pebbles falling down a well. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth ...” My echo whispered and died amidst the dry scratching of scurrying mice.
“Do you, Anna? Do you still believe in God?”
The voice came from the Bradford pew. Elizabeth Bradford rose from where she had been kneeling, hidden from my sight by the high oaken backrest. “My mother does. She believes in the God of wrath and vengeance, who broke the pride of Pharoah and laid waste to Sodom and rained down torment upon Job. It is on her request that I am come here, although I doubt it will do her much good. She has been in labor since late yesterday, a full month before her time, and the surgeon gives her up; he says a woman of her age flirts with death by getting with child, and that death will surely find her this day, as she absolutely cannot be delivered. And as soon as he had pronounced himself of this grim prognostic, he mounted his horse for home.”
She sank down then into the pew and her voice turned to a childlike whisper. “The blood, Anna. Never have I seen so much blood.” She buried her face in her hands for a long moment, then I saw her back straighten. “Well,” she said, gathering herself as I had seen her do the day before in the rectory kitchen, “I have done as she begged me and said her prayers for her in this so-holy, so-sacred church, sanctified by all of you, the brave beloved of God. And now I must return and listen again to her screaming.”
“I will come with you,” I said. I had seen so much death that I would try to save a life if I could. “I have had some small experience attending at childbirths; perhaps I can help her.”
For a second, something flickered in her face, an instant of hopefulness. But then she recalled who I was, and who she was, and the face set again into its prideful sneer. She gave a snort and smiled superciliously. “So the housemaid knows more than the London surgeon? I think not. But come if you like. She will die in any case. And it may gratify you to bring word to Mompellion of how thoroughly God has fulfilled his prophecies regarding my family.”
I followed behind Elizabeth Bradford, trying to tamp down the anger rising within me. At the church door I paused, looking around for the rector. There was no sign of him, so I followed Miss Bradford to where her mare was tethered and clambered up behind her. We rode up the hill to the Hall in silence.
The building was a desolate sight. Towering thistles had pushed through the stones of the driveway. The carefully clipped topiaries that lined the drive had reverted to scraggly bushes, and weeds had claimed all the formal flower beds. Miss Bradford dismounted and handed me the reins, tacitly assuming that I would stable the mare for her. Without a word, I handed them back to her and turned toward the front door of the Hall. She made a sound that was half hiss, half sigh, and walked the mare toward the stables. Even from outside the vast door, I could hear the screams within the Hall. When Miss Bradford returned, we entered, passing by the hulking shapes of the shrouded furniture and mounting the stairs to her mother’s chamber.
She had not exaggerated about the blood. The very floor was slick with it, and wads of linen and napkins, muck-wet, lay all about. The girl who tended Mrs. Bradford was a stranger to me. Her eyes were wide as chargers as she groped for a fresh towel to stanch the unabated flood. Quickly, I barked out a list of my needs. “Bring me whatever you have of broth or jellies, a little good wine, and some warm toast to sop in it, for she is in dire need of strengthening, if she is to survive the loss of so much blood. Bring me also a kettle of boiling water and a basin and whatever you can find for grease.” The girl rushed from the room as if she could not quit it fast enough.
Mrs. Bradford did not make any protest as I approached her; perhaps because she was by now too weak to waste the effort, or perhaps because she welcomed any faint hope of help in her extremity. She had stopped her screaming as soon as we had entered, and I think that she had cried out not so much of the pain as of the fear of lying so long in her own gore. She reached out weakly for her daughter, and Elizabeth ran to her and kissed her tenderly. Whatever low opinion she had of my skills, she obviously wanted to calm her mother’s terrors, for she spoke in a soothing voice of how she had heard high praise of my midwifery and how all wou
ld now be well. I looked at her across the body of her mother and gave a slight shake of my head, for I did not want to mislead anyone about how desperately the matter stood. Elizabeth held my eye and nodded, implying that she knew my meaning very well.
Once I had the scalding water, I washed my hands and drew away the saturated towel between Mrs. Bradford’s legs. I did not need the butter the maid had fetched, for her passage was slippery enough with the fluids flooding from her. Despite her age, her flesh had a healthy soundness, and her body seemed well set for childbirth, for though her figure was slender, the bones of her hips were amply spaced. As soon as my hands were well inside, I could feel that the door of the womb stood fully open, and I easily introduced my fingers within. The bag of waters was not yet broken, and so I tore at it with my fingernails. Mrs. Bradford gave a weak cry at this and sank back in a near faint. I worked quickly then, not wanting to lose her before I saved the child. I let my hands search out the baby’s lie and found it a simple breach. Why, I wondered, had the surgeon abandoned this case as hopeless? Had he persevered here he could easily have done what I was about to attempt. It came to me then that he must have arrived here under instruction to be negligent.
The baby, being before its time, was small, and I was able to turn it with very little difficulty. I urged Elizabeth Bradford to try to revive her mother so that she might push. The woman was too weak to do much, and for a while I feared we would fail because of it. But somehow, from some deep place, she summoned up just that small bit of strength we needed, and a perfect,, precious little girl eased out, alive, into my hands.
I bent my head and breathed the fresh new scent of her. I looked into her deep blue eyes and saw reflected there the dawn of my own new life. This little girl seemed to me, at that moment, answer enough to all my questions. To have saved this small, singular one—this alone seemed reason enough that I lived. I knew then that this was how I was meant to go on: away from death and toward life, from birth to birth, from seed to blossom, living my life amongst wonders.