Peter Loon (20 page)

The quilt was spread over the grass before the birches, and the basket laid beside it. Peter stood awkwardly at the edge of the quilt, while the women sat and kneeled and James clambered down the bank. Nora had followed her guests' lead, but could not recline so carelessly, nor look so natural, nor drape her limbs so gracefully. Emily actually reached out and, with a quick motion, tugged the hem of Nora's skirts over her ankles.

“Oh!” cried Martha. “Everything is so sweet after it rains!” and she took such a breath that her whole form seemed filled with it. Peter watched, fascinated, as she drew this luxurious breath, and every line and curve of her seemed to pulse with a feminine energy that made his ears turn red; and yet it was wholly innocent and without motive. Sussanah was less unfettered in her joy of the day, but Emily sprawled like a cat on the quilt so that even Nora smiled softly.

Peter went to the edge of the knoll to look out over the river and James's activity among the rocks of the shore, and all the feminine eyes were upon him. He was a tall, straight young man, made lean and muscular by the life in which he was raised, and the uncultivated figure in the refined attire made a contrast that pleased his observers.

The chatter died some, while the wind moved in the trees and the sound of the water reached them on the knoll. James shouted something they couldn't understand; exclaiming over some discovery. Peter was conscious of the sudden quiet and began to feel more unwieldy, standing there with his back to the others. When Sussanah spoke, the anxiousness in her voice made her sound almost like Nora.

“Have you been to Newcastle before, Mr. Loon?” she asked.

Peter was not used to being addressed so formally and he had to wade through this before he could consider his answer. “No, I haven't,” he said, after some toil.

“Oh.”

In all his life, he had never been so far from his birthplace, and he was attempting to conjure a way of saying this without sounding exceedingly cloddish, when he said instead, “Have you been very far from here yourself?”

“Father took us to Boston, when we were young,” said Sussanah.

“
I
don't remember,” said Emily, as if that were more to the point of his question.

This small exchange served as an excuse to look at the young women, but this in turn made further conversation more necessary still. He'd heard of Boston from the old sailor who lived, now, in Sheepscott Great Pond, but nothing the man had told him seemed proper to convey to such refined people.

“Is it very different where you live?” asked Martha. She watched him with such a soft expression, and her features were so mild, that his heart went out to her in an entirely unexpected manner. He thought again of his sisters, and in such a tender light that he wished he'd been alone for a time to ponder this sudden emotion. He had the vision of his sisters toiling in a manner these young women would probably never know or understand, and he was touched by an unaccustomed sadness. It seemed strange that he must come to this place, so foreign to the circumstances of his own life, before some verity regarding his own people came home to him. “Yes,” he said, in the midst of this confusion.

The young Clayden women were beginning to think their conversational efforts were unsuccessful when Emily said, “How did you meet Mr. Leach?”

“I was looking for my uncle,” he said, and began to tell them of his father's death and his mother's peculiarities and how he had been sent to find a man whose existence he had never suspected, and whose present circumstances were unknown to him. He told of his walk through the forests at night and his experience in the midst of the deer herd; then he explained how he had made a bed of leaves at the foot of an oak and how the woodsmen Manasseh Cutts and Crispin Moss had mistaken him for some singular manifestation of a felled deer.

The tale sounded poor and hardscrabble to Peter as he told it, and he considered his own roughened hands, as if they were emblems to prove it; but the story was myth and legend to the young women, Nora included, and when James clambered back up the bank with an eagle feather in hand and news of his venture along the shore, he was shushed to silence, and soon he too was enthralled by Peter's account.

By the time he was done, and they had extracted (by question and comment) all they could from the tale, they had all but forgotten the purpose of their outing and gazed down at the quilt with dreamlike gazes. Emily was the first to rouse herself and consider practical matters; with sudden resolve, she delved into the basket that Mrs. Magnamous had packed for them, laying plates and jars out on the quilt. Martha and Sussanah asked Peter who his uncle was and they speculated, with James's assistance, about the man–somewhat fancifully, as can be supposed. Peter was amazed at their notions, at the wealth and attainments they conjured for the unknown uncle; Nora did not appear to be as charmed by the story, or by its implications, as if she were uncertain what it meant that Peter had such a task to accomplish. She had said almost nothing since speaking to Peter in the Claydens' kitchen.

“You won't be sick after a while,” stated James categorically, when it was decided that Peter would need to sail somewhere foreign and strange to find his uncle. “Momma said she hardly feels ill at all, anymore, when she sails with Poppa.”

Peter was amazed again by the abundance laid out before them, and also by the affable manner in which it was shared. The Claydens laughed and referenced private jests among themselves and praised the day and asked him more questions. Emily thought to draw Nora into the eddy of conversation, but this proved a difficult undertaking, for Nora grew quieter still when she was questioned or spoken to.

The day was rare, as only the fall can offer, and Peter began to understand the young Claydens' responses to it, though it continued to open a melancholy sort of hole within him. The Claydens prompted a game they called “I Spy” while they ate, and Sussanah at one point, fell to tickling her brother as a forfeit for his having failed an impossible challenge–“I spy the corner of my eye.”

Even Nora feasted–though she only watched and listened to the game–and she did seem to grow less troubled, if not absolutely glad of her circumstances; it was difficult not to be pulled along by laughter and good feeling. There were meats and a peach pie and apples and cranberries and cider, and they made good on the most of what was pulled from the basket till they must fall asleep or work off their meal. James called out for a game and Martha declared hide-and-seek. Peter continued to be astonished, for his companions were more like children than ever and they leaped up with shouts and laughter.

Someone would hide and everyone else would look for them, each joining the missing person in his hiding place when they found him. There were certainly places to conceal oneself, for the immediate countryside was dotted with hills and gullies, and the shore was rife with pocks and tree shaded inlets. The boundaries of the sport were laid out and James declared that he would be the first to hide. Everyone else must bury their faces and count to one hundred together. Peter felt silly, but complied with the rules and when the count was done, he looked up, his sight dazzled pale by the brilliant sunlight.

Emily and Sussanah and Martha sprang to their feet and scattered in separate directions, leaving Peter and Nora standing by the quilt looking bewildered.

“I've played this, a long time ago,” he said, as much to himself as to the young woman.

“I am with you,” Nora said to him.

Peter felt a mounting frustration with her, as if she were simple and had only a small measure of thoughts at her command. Already, when he looked about them, Emily and Martha had disappeared. Only Sussanah lingered in sight, and then Emily's figure rose up from beneath the next knoll to the west and pulled her sister along. Soon they were both gone and Peter and Nora were alone in the landscape.

“We should search for him, I guess,” said Peter simply.

Nora had an odd look about her. She glanced around for signs of their companions, then stepped past Peter, catching his hand as she went. He was surprised, and not displeased with her touch, and he allowed himself to be jerked into movement and led along the shoreline. The young woman appeared to be looking for something below them, tugging him along in a walking, cautious hurry. Peter was reminded of their meeting on the shore of Great Bay.

She was trembling, the vibration translating to Peter's arm like the wing-beat of a small bird. Her breathing was short and shallow, perhaps frightened by her own purpose. Her red-brown hair fell untidily beneath her bonnet, as if disarrayed by emotion alone, and her slight figure proved uncommonly strong and compelling as she pulled him with her.

They came to a broad pine overlooking the water, where nature had hollowed a place between the roots and a separate sort of nature had feathered the hollow with grass and fern. She made a sound, as if she had discovered what she knew would be there. She tugged at his arm and pulled him to the other side of the tree. He could read nothing in her expression, and even less in her words than before when she said again, “Parson Leach went away.”

“Yes,” said Peter, fascinated by the sight of her shaking before him.

She shouldered herself out of the coat she had been given and laid it in the hollow beneath the tree as carefully as Emily had laid the quilt. “I am with you,” she said, when she confronted him again with that plain expression. The breeze blew a lock of hair over her eyes and she brushed it aside.

Peter's heart pounded with blind anticipation, and he thought it would burst from his chest when she leaned forward and kissed him. At first the mark of affection grazed his cheek, but then it pressed his own lips and lingered.

Nora pulled away then and considered the effect of this, her small features sweet and ethereal. She took handfuls of his coat and drew him toward her and kissed him again with an urgency that even Peter's inexperience could consider odd. He gasped a little when she pulled away this time. She seemed as real and as potent as anything in his entire life, and her small hands and her narrow shoulders, the serious set of her mouth, were like the essence of something he had not recognized before that moment. His entire surroundings fell into the emotions she had provoked in him–the air rushing in the trees, the call of a river bird, and the sound of the river itself, the sun on his back.

When she leaned forward a third time, he was prepared and he thought he might draw her inside of him, his heart felt so ready to be filled. His hands went up to the back of her neck and touched her hair, then swept down to hold her shoulders to him. Her knees buckled–not with weakness, but with design–and he was suddenly kneeling beside her. She continued to shake and as a result of some sympathetic energy, a cleaving together of motive and response, he found himself shaking as well. All the while, she never lost touch of him, and pulled him down atop of herself. She kissed him fervently, insinuating her hands beneath his coat, and twisting beneath him so that one knee rose up alongside his thigh.

There was a scent to her skin and her hair, and a mysterious softness to her hard, gaunt body. Peter felt he must touch everything about her and press her entirely to him and calm her trembling with his closeness.

Then her trembling became something else, and a strange sound rose in her throat, like a muted expression of fear. Her shivering increased beneath him, and his first instinct was to press her closer, to speak in a low hush, but she only shivered more violently. Another, strangled sound rose out of Nora, and her shaking might have seemed like an attempt to throw him off if, at that moment, she had appeared at all capable of motive.

Frightened, Peter pushed himself away from her, and kneeling at her side he watched with helpless horror till her quaking was like a fit he had once seen taken by a rum-soaked neighbor. Her arms and legs twitched horribly. Her eyes creased shut. She let out another low cry or two, then rolled on to her side and fell into a paroxysm of grief. Her hands gripped at the roots of the broad pine and her legs convulsed, kicking without purpose at dirt and stones.

Peter looked up the bank, suddenly aware of where he was and what the scene might seem to someone stumbling upon them. He felt guilt and fear, and then an extraordinary, tender sort of sympathy that all but overwhelmed his ability to move or speak. His eyes were filled with tears and his throat raw with emotion. His initial fear of being found in such straits was pushed aside by the belief that Nora was in a terrible danger which had nothing to do with her physical being, and that she needed immediate care that he was incompetent to offer.

Nora's sobs altered into something more human and answerable; she covered her mouth with one hand to quiet herself and curled her legs close to her body. Peter approached her carefully, but when he kneeled beside her and she showed no extra-violent reaction, he dared to prop her up and drape her coat over her shoulders. Then he took her into his arms, with one hand beneath her knees and the other behind her back, and stood with her. He had never been so conscious of the stark angularity of her body, not three minutes before when he was pressing her close to him, nor the day before when she appeared along the shore of the lake, drenched in her insufficient clothes.

She actually clung to him and put her face against his shoulder. She was quivering still, but it was as a secondary reaction to what had occurred between them and not the initial tremor of fear and grief, and he had the impression that this time his physical presence had soaked up her distress rather than increased it.

“I must get you back,” he said, wondering if he could safely carry her up the steep bank.

“Please, don't let them see me!” she said in a hoarse whisper.

“No,” he said, then, “But. . .” She was trembling less and he could imagine that whatever had happened had not stricken her in a permanent way. He thought he heard voices from over the bank and he let her down onto her own feet. She shivered slightly now, but as if from a chill and she pulled the borrowed coat around her shoulders.