Bitter Eden (43 page)

"Nothing worth anything, I'll guarantee you, Stephen."

"First it was Peter, and now it is Natalie, but you say nothing worth anything. What about Ma, Frank? Will she go too, after she's worth nothing?"

'While we're hurling abuse, little brother, what are you willing to do? You're so damned almighty high and noble, what is it you're willing to take on your back?"

"I've already got Peter and Jamie."

Frank snorted. "Peter!? And a baby. What you've got is a lot of mouth." Frank threw his napkin down in disgust and left the dining room.

Stephen got up and walked out of the house.

Anna looked down at the table. "Maybe you should go after him, Callie."

"Not now. Let me help you clear the table. He'll come back when he's ready."

'Don't judge Frank too harshly. It is I who don't want Natalie here any longer. She never did pay much attention to what I said, but I can do nothing with her now that Mother Berean doesn't help. I am afraid of Natalie in truth, and I think she knows it and takes deliberate advantage."

They cleared the table, and Callie waited up in the parlor long after Anna and Frank had gone to bed.

Stephen paced across the stable yard, his mind a blinding storm of conflicting thoughts and feelings. He was shaking with anger at Frank, and yet the problems that faced him were far too important to allow him to vent that anger by lashing out at his brother. He thought of Peter and the life term he would serve for something his sister had done. And he thought of Natalie and wondered how far back her derangement went. Why hadn't they seen it? Had they all refused to see what was before their eyes, or had it been well-hidden in her strange but enticing personal-

ity. Even if they had seen what was happening to her, what could they have done? There were no medicines to help her. They could have kept her locked in the attic as other families did. They could have committed her to Bedlam and let her be chained to a wall to live like a savage, to become hopelessly insane. What was he to do now? He had no answers, no cures, no solutions that he had not already considered with horror.

His anger grew and with it the pain of what was happening to his family. As he thought of each of them, with his hate and his frustration shouted at the cold, impassive moon, one certainty came to rest equally cold and impassive: He would not let Natalie be put away, or left to Frank's charity. Frank didn't care. Stephen wondered now if Frank had ever cared about anyone other than himself and his good name.

For another hour Stephen fought with himself, seeking a way to take care of Natalie without having to chain his life to hers as he had already to Peter's. The cold certainty that he would not leave her here stirred. He did not feel impassive on the surface; there he boiled, his hatred for Natalie something he could almost touch. There were times he avoided her, thinking that if he were left in the same room with her he'd put his hands around her slender neck and choke from her an admission of guilt. But beyond those hot, seething emotions, far below the surface, Stephen loved her. She lived in torment. He had only to look at her to know. The hell she lived in was a part of his own. She was his sister.

When Stephen walked into the house, he saw the light of Callie's rush lamp and strode defiantly into the parlor. "We're taking Natalie back with us," he said quickly and harshly, his mouth set, his eyes cold.

"I know. It would have been that or never return at all."

"I wont let them lock her up and forget her someplace. Ma could never stand that, not after Peter."

"I understand that, Stephen."

"My mind is made up," Stephen said, ready to argue. Callie sighed and smiled. "You don't mind?"

"Ahh, you silly," she said, smiling and walking into his arms. 'Whatever you decide is always best. That's one thing I know of you, Stephen, and I hope I never forget it. I only worry about Jamie, but that will come right too."

He laughed in relief, hugging her. "Callie, Callie, what would I do without you?"

They walked together to the sofa and sat down next to each other, Callie's hand in Stephen's. He stretched out, resting his head against the sofa back, his mind returning to its tortured thinking. All the old doubts flooded back and new ones were added to them. What was he doing to Callie? It was she who would care for Natalie. It was Callie who would bear the burden of the house and the child and his sister and his brother . . . and him too. He sat up suddenly, ripping his hand away from hers. He buried his face in his hands. "Ohh, my God, I don't know ... I don't know what's right anymore."

Callie's voice was soft and coolly soothing. Stephen drank it in, letting its sound flow over him. She spoke of so many of his own doubts, but as they came through Callie's pure and trusting view, he began to see them differently. The life he and Callie faced was no easier, but it once more seemed good. As long as she was there, he'd live through anything.

Callie began the packing. She sorted through all of Rosalind's clothes, leaving most of them for Anna to

alter for herself. The petticoats and few practical garments she packed to take with her. Peter's clothes she folded and packed with care. All of them would be taken to Poughkeepsie for that sometime day when he would return.

Stephen received the bank draft from Jack and purchased the passage tickets, and all that was left was the waiting to leave. During that last week, the nights came alive with the sounds of music and revelry as the hop pickers came back to Kent. The campfires glowed against the midnight blue sky and Callie thought of the gypsy woman and wondered if she'd be there in her camp as she had been that night long ago.

The old woman had told her to come back when she returned to England, that she would need her then. But the old gypsy had been too late. What Callie needed now was not to be found in a gypsy camp, or in the deck of tarot cards. She would not go to see the gypsy again, then or ever.

But the sounds of the eerie music and the campfires glowing brought back visions of an old woman staring at her cards as she recited words from the Apocalypse telling of the bitter wormwood that would touch Cal-lie's life.

They set sail for New York on a bright September day. It would still be warm when they returned home. The Hudson valley would be a blaze of autumnal color when they saw it next. Once they had stepped foot on the frigate, Callie's feeling of strength returned to her. They were leaving behind all the bitterness and sorrow she had ever known. With their return home would come hope.

BOOK III

Chapter 31

Moving like an oily stream of filth from the hulks, an irregular line of men, each chained to the man in front of him, was led by guards to a day of hard labor. Some days, as if to taunt them with that which they no longer possessed, the sun shone bright and symbolic of the gift of the earth which God had given so freely to men. Along the roads were the people of London, some going about their business, so inured to misery, the convicts stirring nothing in their hearts, neither pity nor contempt. For others it was a sight to provide some mean entertainment in a life filled with few pleasures.

Peter soon learned the women were the worst of all the roadside taunters. Idle women, who worked by night and drank away their suffering by day, paraded near the lines of chained men, laughing in their hoarse, abused voices. Some had come to see their men, slipping up to the line to thrust a gin bottle into a quickly opened mouth. Others had come to blame them for having been caught at whatever felony or misdemeanor had caused them to end in this rotting

line of humanity. Others pranced and yelled their taunts for the sport of it

For the most part the guards ignored them, wanting no part of the consequences that might come of trying to quell them. There were few men, even of the worst sort, who were bolder or less fearing of attacking an offending guard than these women. Little better than rabid animals, the lowly women who followed the chain gangs had been known to down a full-grown man, strip the clothing from his back along with his flesh when he dared interfere with them.

In the evening when they returned to the hulks, the same scene was repeated; only by nightfall the women were far gone with drink, and feeling meaner. Some of the faces grew familiar to Peter. He looked for them, knowing at what dirty corner or from what mouldering doorway they would appear.

For most of the convicts, the morning and evening circus performed for them by the women was welcome. They were, in truth, their compatriots, and the women's shameful behavior was understood and accepted as a part of the "good" life they had left behind. The convicts were, in the main, small men, most not over five feet four, who had been raised in hunger and squalor. They were men who had breathed the fetid gin-soaked air of the back streets of St. Giles and Clerkenwell and Wapping since they had first drawn breath. They had grown up learning the age-old professions of their forebears, training as pickpockets, footpads, robbers, and thieves. Their women all seemed to have the same names; Doll and Peg and Mag with only an attending adjective to distinguish them from each other. Some were known by Polecat, some by Tantrum, some by Hell. There were Bloody Lizzies and Doll Tantrums, and Hellcat Maggies and Sadie the Goats. These were their women, their lar-

cenous, calloused, and understanding women, who knew what it was to live as they did, and who had the bloody courage to say "Be damnedl" to the guards. They thrust their gin bottles into the guards' faces, lifted their dirty petticoats in obscene defiance, laughed their bawdy laughter, sang their bawdy songs.

During the first days aboard the hulks, Peter had been horrified by these women and their men, and more than a little afraid of their raw, unfettered vi-ciousness. He had never seen people like this, not so many and not so close at hand. He had heard of them. He knew, as all gentlemen knew, that the streets of London were not safe because of people like these; but now, living among them, seeing them both in prison and clustered in groups along the way to the stone barges, it was different. He thought, rather bewildered, of the people in Kent he had tried to help. Were they like these people? Had he been among them, spoken to them of justice, freedom, hope, and not known their true nature? No, he knew the Kent workers had not been as were these Londoners. They had not, for all their poverty, been crowded like so many dead herrings into tenements not suited to hold half their number. They had not been raised in the atmosphere and the expectancy of crime that these men and women had been. Poverty and injustice and hate had fallen unexpectedly on the rich Kent countryside, the fault of innumerable unforeseen events. These city people had had violence and cruelty bred into their bones. It was like a permanent barrier they no longer had the stature to see over or beyond.

With some admiration Peter thought of Ian Dawson, who had had the fortitude and the audacity to challenge the morass of poverty that afflicted these people. It was almost incomprehensible to Peter that a

man would dare to try to undo what centuries had done. Yet Ian had. Callie had told him often of her father and the kind of man he was. Peter wished he had known Ian, for he had possessed a strength that Peter knew he didn't possess. It was a strength that Peter couldn't even understand, and he staggered beneath the weight of his need for it. He was afraid, and faced a lightless future with a trembling soul and a heart that knew hope only by the scrap of colored cloth a young girl had given him.

Peter was held on the convict hulks for twenty-one days. Most of the time he stayed with the prisoners who were more like himself, men of some education, men able to talk of principles and philosophies. But the talk of such things served only to emphasize the callous injustice of the convicts' treatment. And while he said nothing aloud, inside of Peter welled up the cry, "I don't belong here! I'm innocentl I did nothing!" making him feel reckless and hopeless and driven. Then Peter would listen to the other convicts, hearing their constant chatter, allowing their chronicles of age-old injustice to become a part of the bitterness he felt.

After twenty-one days aboard the Justitia Peter came to look upon the men who guarded him as a different breed, separate from him, his enemy. It seemed ridiculous and humiliating to him that he had once been naive enough to believe the guards and officers would accept him, even like him for who he was. He had been a friendly man, a man willing to work, and if he hadn't willingly resigned himself to the necessity of serving a term for a crime he hadn't committed, he was at least resigned to the fact that he couldn't change it.

He had quickly learned that none of this made the slightest impression on the guards. Innocence or guilt

meant nothing to them. The quality of one prisoner or another meant even less. They had a mass of resentful humanity to control, and control it they did. With few exceptions the soldiers and guards detailed to the hulks were as miserable and of as beggarly a disposition as were the convicts. Most of them were men unfit for finer duty, sentenced much as the convicts were to a wretched life, blighted by the pestilence of hopelessness and frustration. Their pride and sense of accomplishment came not from their position, but from the degree of difference they could create between their wretched lot and the far greater misery they inflicted on the prisoners. They were men only because the humans they guarded were reduced to depraved beasts.

From the beginning the credo of degradation was forced on Peter by the guards and the soldiers and the people in the streets. He was a convict and convicts were to be despised. Mentally he chafed at this. He thought about it and dredged up all the history he knew, thought of Plato and Aristotle and Socrates and knew that the bitter, godless hate that was thrust on him was wrong.

But reason has no voice to penetrate the deaf ear of despair. From the outset, had he but seen it, Peter had had to choose to live in the solitary isolation of his own memory, or join with the other prisoners as enemies of society. He joined with the others, hesitantly at first, then with greater relish as they made life more difficult for the guards, stealing biscuits, rations, handkerchiefs, taking gin from the women, any smal] infraction possible. Playing the clown, falling and holding up a chain gang, often worked well to annoy, providing the warder wasn't one too free with the use of his whip or stick.