The Endless Forest (70 page)

“Banfield is a village on the Deerfield River. It’s where Nicholas grew up, as far as we can tell.”

“But I thought he came from Boston,” Birdie said.

“So did we. That’s what we’ve got to sort out before Callie goes and jumps to all kinds of conclusions.”

Curiosity closed her eyes. “If you are saying what I think you’re saying, I will see to it that Jemima pays. I swear it.”

“You won’t have to take that on alone,” Birdie’s da said, and he slipped out the door. Birdie watched him disappear into the woods, and then she asked Curiosity the question she couldn’t hold back.

“Does this mean that Nicholas isn’t really Callie’s brother?”

Curiosity took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She said, “Pray the good Lord it don’t.”

They had started another game while Birdie was in the kitchen, and she was glad of the chance to sit down and think for a few minutes. Lily was knitting, glancing up now and then to follow the game, and smiling to herself. She was smiling a lot lately, which made Birdie glad and worried her too. More than once Hannah and Curiosity had stopped talking when she came into the room, and she couldn’t help thinking it had to do with Lily and her baby.

There was something odd going on in the game. She looked more closely and looked again.

“Look,” she said to Lily. “See that bush to the right of the low path? The one that wasn’t there a quarter hour ago?”

Lily raised an eyebrow. “Brother Daniel has been teaching the little people some of his old tricks. And there’s Nicholas walking right into the—”

The bush leaped in that moment, and two strong brown arms reached through the branches to grab Nicholas by the wrist. Nicholas jumped a good foot straight into the air and then fell.

“Henry Savard!” Hannah shouted. “Careful or you’ll put an eye out!”

Henry was trying to rid himself of his cloak of ivy and pine branches, shouting at the top of his lungs all the time.

“I got him! I got Nicholas! Gaoler! Gaoler!”

Lily said, “You have work to do,” and so Birdie went to get her prisoner, who was still laughing so hard he could hardly walk.

She said, “You weren’t scared?”

Nicholas drew a quick breath, tried to answer, and gave up. Finally
settled on the porch, he said, “Henry said he’d sneak up on me and he did.”

“You sound happy about it,” Lily said.

“I like Henry,” Nicholas said.

It was an odd answer, but the right one nonetheless.

“He likes you too. We all like you.”

“Does that mean I can get out of gaol?” Nicholas asked, looking back and forth between them.

“No,” Lily and Birdie said together, and that set all three of them to laughing.

“You are the sunniest, most cheerful boy,” Lily said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you unhappy. We’ll miss you when you go home to Boston.”

Birdie froze, but Nicholas was still smiling. He said, “Oh, look. Martha almost got Jennet.” And: “I’m not going to Boston.”

“You aren’t?” Lily said. She put down her knitting.

“Nope,” said Nicholas.

Birdie heard herself ask the next question. “What about Banfield?”

Lily had a quizzical look on her face, but Birdie kept her attention on Nicholas, who seemed to be thinking about the question.

He said, “I miss the farm sometimes.”

“What is Banfield?” Lily asked, and Nicholas turned to look at her.

“Banfield is where I live,” he said. “And Lorena too. Can I go back to the game now?”

Lily nodded, and he catapulted himself off the porch and raced away.

“What is going on?” Lily asked Birdie.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Da said we should sit tight and he’ll come talk to us soon.”

E
lizabeth had just made the third pot of tea when Nathaniel came back, followed closely by Levi and Lorena.

While she arranged cups and saucers on a tray she listened to the sound of talking. Ethan’s tenor, Nathaniel’s particular rhythms in baritone, Levi’s voice, even lower, as he gave short answers. There was no sound from Callie or Lorena. She realized just then how little she knew Lorena, but the simple truth was that Elizabeth would gladly have foregone the coming discussion.

She scolded herself for being cowardly, and went out with the tea tray.

“No, thank you.” Lorena wanted no tea, nor anything else. She sat straight-backed at the table, her hands in her lap. Beneath the brim of her straw hat it was difficult to make out her expression, but her voice was even. If she was expecting trouble, she was hiding it well. Levi might well have prepared her for what was to come. Seeing them sitting side by side
made Elizabeth realize that they were not strangers to each other, and might be more than mere friends. Under other circumstances she would have been pleased for Levi, but now it seemed only like another complication in an already confusing and even dangerous situation.

Two small coins of deep red sat on Callie’s cheekbones, and in the light of the candles Ethan had just lit, her eyes sparked silver agitation.

Nathaniel said, “Why don’t you sit down, Boots. Folks can help themselves to tea.”

What he was saying to her, she heard it very clearly, was that she was making everyone nervous. She sat.

Callie seemed to be trying to formulate a question, but Lorena spoke up first.

She said, “Levi tells me you want to know about Banfield.”

Callie’s voice cracked. “Is Nicholas my brother?”

Elizabeth’s pulse jumped, but Lorena never blinked. She looked Callie directly in the eye and said, “I don’t know.”

There was a flicker of something, pity or compassion, that touched her expression so briefly Elizabeth wondered if she imagined it.

Callie let out a long sigh. “Martha was right,” she said, dully. “Martha is always right.”

Ethan put a hand on her forearm. “She didn’t say
no
. She said she doesn’t know. It would be a good idea to hear what she does know before we make up our minds about anything.”

Beside Elizabeth Nathaniel was perfectly quiet, but there was a tension in the set of his jaw. He said, “Lorena, it might be a good place to start if you tell us a little about yourself, before you came to work for Jemima.”

Lorena raised a brow and glanced at Levi, who closed his eyes and inclined his head. That gesture said more about their relationship than any verbal declaration.

Levi cleared his throat. “I want to say something first. Whatever Lorena got to say is new to me too. I ain’t asked her about her past. Not because I don’t want to know, but because I didn’t want to have to keep anything from Callie.”

He was looking at Callie as if he expected her to ask questions, but she only acknowledged him with a short bob of her head.

Lorena said, “I was born and raised up in Boston. My father was a
preacher. At sixteen I went into service as a maid. I married at twenty-five.”

These facts she laid out in a line on the table, one by one, with no inflection. As if she were reciting verses from a primer.

Ethan interrupted her gently. “Just tell the story your own way. Tell it to Levi, if that helps you gather your thoughts.”

“I am breaking every rule Mrs. Focht laid down,” she said. “Excuse me if I hesitate.”

Then she turned to Levi, and concentrated on his face alone.

Lorena keeps house for her husband of one year, takes in sewing and mending so they can put a little aside, and waits for the birth of her first child. It is a simple life. They are both satisfied with their lot and each other
.

On the day she loses everything, Lorena feels the first birth pangs early in the morning. She keeps this to herself. First babies are slow in coming, and there will be time enough for Jonah to worry when he comes home from work. She is thinking about what he will say to find the midwife with her when she hears the sound of something very large crashing to the ground
.

She finds Jonah sprawled in front of the door, a hand clutched to his chest as if to grab hold of his heart and make it behave. That night she gives birth to a daughter who breathes fitfully for a quarter hour, and then stops
.

The little bit of money they have put aside goes to the coffin maker and the grave digger. Then she walks home to find a note from Mr. George pinned to her door. Now that Jonah is gone, he needs the little house for another worker, a man with a wife and children. He can give her two more days. He is not a cruel man, Lorena knows this. She also knows that he will do nothing to help her
.

She has no place to go. A hard birth has left her too weak to take on work in a scullery or washhouse; her clothes are so worn that she can’t present herself as a house servant. Her people are in Philadelphia. She has exactly enough coin in her pocket to buy a simple meal
.

Lorena dreams of the baby. Her breasts ache, and there is a hole inside her that seems to grow by the hour
.

A woman who turns her away when she asks for work takes the time to give her advice. The almshouse is the place for your kind, she says. Except of course they don’t take colored
.

On her first day without a roof. Lorena finds a copy of the
Boston Advertiser
on a bench in the park. At the very bottom of the last column on the last page she reads an advertisement:

It takes her more than an hour to walk there. A house in a neighborhood of fine houses, the kind of place where successful businessmen raise their families with the help of nurses and cooks and maids-of-all-work. There will be meat on the table every night, fresh wheaten rolls for breakfast, ponies and pianoforte lessons for the girls, and when they are old enough, the sons will become members of the clubs their father favors
.

The servant who answers the kitchen door is a true African, her English so turned around that Lorena has to ask more than once if she has found the right house
.

The servant leaves her there with nothing more to do than study her surroundings. The kitchen is tidy and well scrubbed. On a long table are the makings of a cake: sacks of flour and sugar, a clutch of brown speckled eggs, a lump of butter. On a piece of paper are small hills of ground spices: nutmeg and cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. Lorena commands her belly to be quiet before someone comes into the kitchen
.

Another servant who might have been a sister to the first takes Lorena through to the parlor where she will be interviewed by the lady of the house
.

The parlor drapes are pulled so that the sun won’t fade the expensive fabrics. With one part of her mind Lorena takes note of the figurines on the mantelpiece, the thick carpet underfoot, the fragile teapot on a tray inlaid with ivory. With the foremost part of her mind, the part that understands what is at stake, she calculates what this woman—Mrs. Wilde, she names herself—needs to hear that will convince her to hire Lorena
.

Mrs. Wilde wears a gown the color of muddy water, with jewels at her throat and in her ears and on her fingers. A plain woman, who puts Lorena in mind of the old-time Puritans, those who made it their business never to smile. There is no sign of a cradle, or of a husband. She wonders whose child needs suckling, if it could be Mrs. Wilde’s. There is nothing about her bearing that marks her for a mother
.

She says, “Where were you born, Lorena?”

By rights she should be addressed as Mrs. Webb, but this white woman, like most of her kind, won’t be bothered with last names for blacks
.

The questions come rapid-fire. Lorena names her place of birth, her parents, their occupations; yes, her father taught her to read, she owns a Bible, and she writes a clear hand. Mrs. Wilde reels off a list of numbers and Lorena adds them together in her head. Divides them by three, multiplies by eleven. She tells the story of how she met Jonah and how he died. Yes, she has her marriage lines
.

“Tell me about your child.”

“A girl,” Lorena said, her voice catching. “Died almost right away. Just three days ago.”

“Ill-formed?”

Lorena shakes her head because she doesn’t trust her voice
.

The questions turn to her health. Has she had smallpox, measles, whooping cough, lung fever? Is she clean in mind and spirit and deed?

She says it like that, though Lorena would not have taken offense at a more direct question. She has never prostituted herself. The only man she has known was her husband
.

“I suppose you sound white because your father was a minister,” says Mrs. Wilde
.

Lorena drops her gaze because there is nothing to say to this that won’t shore up the world of wrong ideas Mrs. Wilde has built for herself
.

“Well, I was hoping for a white woman but every one of them who answered that advertisement had gin on the breath. You don’t take strong drink?”

“I never have.”

“Tobacco? Laudanum?”