The Language of Paradise: A Novel (47 page)

“I suppose it’s your mother’s money that has kept us all these months?” she says. “I hope she would have approved of our glasshouse. Was her fortune very vast?”

Leander continues to gaze at her for a few seconds, as if she hadn’t spoken. Then, putting his weight on the arms of the rocker, he hoists his long body out of the low seat. “She liked a garden, my mother did. Gardens reminded her of the country house she grew up in.” His tone is thoughtful, without a trace of mockery. “Her fortune was comfortable, not vast. I’ve drawn on my portion when I needed to and put some back along the way. But our little household has drained me dry. I tell you frankly, I’m almost at the end of my resources. I don’t know what we will do when the cold comes.”

As he passes her on the way to the door, his eyes rest briefly on the blanket and twine. He glances once again at the impromptu exhibit against the wall. “Perhaps we’ll chain you to your easel, Sophia. These might be worth something.”

CHAPTER 38

____

LEAVING

T
HERE IS A MOON. THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A MOON, BUT ITS
appearance on this night is a courtesy, if not a grace. It could have been shrouded in clouds. It could have been a sliver, with limited candlepower. That it is three-quarters full and shedding light on Sophy as she makes her way up the road with Aleph in her arms must surely be due to special intercession. Mama must be arranging the celestial calendar, Papa has possibly won an argument with God.

She and Micah contrived the plan, but the first part has fallen to her alone. It is too risky for him to bring the horse and wagon near the house; the clatter would be heard half a mile away. All you have to do is leave, Micah told her: slip out with Aleph while the others are asleep and walk straight till the road forks. If you’re frightened, think of me waiting for you.

A simple stroll, he made it seem. These past few weeks she has been calculating each step, rehearsing every obstacle in advance. Gideon’s long hours of watchfulness could work in her favor; voices and visions might poison his dreams, but lately he sleeps like the dead. If she could extricate herself from the house without waking him, she would have a chance. Should the worst happen, she could contrive some excuse—assuming he gave her time, given the state of his nerves and the nearness of the gun. Her mind averted from this extremity. She meant what she said, he is not a man for killing. Still, he had hinted at the consequences of betrayal. Told her she was expendable.

Leander sleeps in a small room off the kitchen, near the rear entrance—if he sleeps at all. Sophy took him at his word when he claimed to keep one eye trained on the ceiling. He is well situated to monitor their comings and goings. His magic might be mundane, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew what she would do before she knew it herself. Aleph was the other question. He might wake crying when she lifted him, or snuggle against her and go on sleeping. Her best hope was that he’d disturbed their rest before. Gideon and Leander were both accustomed to her nocturnal pacing as she soothed the baby.

Then there were the doors, fastened with primitive latches since the trouble started; Leander secured them each night before retiring. And the weather, which, halfway through September, had shaken off summer without stepping firmly into fall. If the cold blew in, if the clouds were thick, if it rained, how would she keep the baby warm and quiet, how would she see a foot ahead of her? The passage from her bed to the bend in the road where Micah was to meet them seemed as fraught with peril as Odysseus’s journey across the sea, and as endless.

THE DAY BEGAN
in ordinary fashion, as momentous days often do. Up at dawn to attend to Aleph and settle him back in his crib for another hour; he’d need the rest, poor mite. Gideon was snoring gently; he had rolled over when she left the bed, his vigilance relaxed as morning approached.

Sophy had one errand to accomplish, and she wanted to do it before breakfast. With Micah’s help, she had wrapped and tied her paintings as planned, with some vague idea of preserving her claim to them. But where to hide them in a house as open and bare as this one? She had poked around the wasteland of sawdust-strewn rooms upstairs and crept down in defeat. She had wedged the bulky package into the back of her shallow wardrobe, but her few dresses provided little cover, and the doors kept swinging open. In the end she settled for an obvious solution. Hidden, not quite in plain sight.

The parlor was a grand space designed for formal gatherings, now more a crossroads than a room. Though each of them passed through numerous times a day, there was no reason to linger; its one piece of furniture, the settee, had been moved to the dining room. Leander, who was forever rhapsodizing about Spain, called the sun-splashed expanse their inner courtyard: “A lemon tree, a stone bench, and we could be in
Sevilla
!” Against a wall, where lovers might have communed on the bench, was the trunk Mama had packed for them, empty now except for the remnants of their move. A cumbersome thing with curling paper lining, it had been ignored for so long that no one talked any more of hauling it upstairs. Sophy put the paintings inside, along with the cloth bag she had filled for the journey, and covered them as best she could. She had not dared to check on them since.

This morning the lid creaked when she raised it—a modest complaint, but, to her strained senses, loud enough to open Leander’s other eye. The package was awkward to lift from the depths of the trunk, heavier than she remembered, and her hands shook so that she almost dropped it. With the paintings clutched to her bosom and the bag over her arm, she struggled, first to unlatch the front door, then to push it open. Rarely used, it seemed to have absorbed the inhabitants’ perpetual distrust of outsiders.

There was a rhododendron bush by the pillared porch, a wild, overgrown shrub that had yet to produce a flower. Sophy set the package behind it, flat against the house under the shelter of the portico roof. She concealed the traveling bag in the bed of earth and leaves around the roots, as near to the stairs as she dared; a hundred times she’d imagined bending to retrieve it in the dark while carrying the baby.

The paintings would have to wait for Micah to pick up on another day. Better to leave them outside, they’d decided: the weather was less a risk than the door shut in his face. Sophy knew she might not see them again. Leander could discover the package and turn its contents to profit, a view of Eden for a bag of flour; Gideon could destroy them in a rage. So be it. One day, if life permitted, she would make others. But, whatever their fate, she was purely glad that these trifling works of her hand had been liberated. It was as though they were harbingers, making their way into the world before her.

The weather was promising: sunny and brisk, the breeze strong enough to send leaves flying. Already the rich mulch of fall was in the air, summer’s parched leavings turning to gold. Sophy wondered idly why the first hints of decay were so stirring to the senses, why the heart quickened in full knowledge that the long winter lay ahead. It struck her suddenly that almost a year had passed since they moved into the house. The rain came back to her, and Mama weeping at the farmhouse door. The ride in the rocking chair, hugging her belly to protect the baby as the wagon jounced on the wet road. Crying herself to sleep in her strange room. Wandering into the glasshouse at first light and being dazzled by a world ablaze. And now, at the start of another autumn, Mama was gone and Aleph was nine months in the world and she was moving again.

Leander hailed her from the road, a sack over his shoulder. So fixed was her image of him listening in his room that Sophy was at first disoriented, as if he’d conjured a
doppelganger
to confuse her.

“The mistress at her front door! I was feeling a little winded, but the sight of you spurred me on.” Panting, he dropped the bulging sack at her feet. “I woke this morning with apple pie on the brain. Walked all the way to Haskell’s place without a bite of breakfast and raised the old man from his bed. My zeal got the better of me—I picked too many and forgot I had to carry them.” He loosened the strings of the sack and the apples rolled and settled, a few tumbling to the ground. “I don’t suppose you’d deliver some of these beauties to their just reward?”

“I’ll make a pie,” she said, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

“No more, no less, dear lady. One day, you know, we’ll have an orchard of our own.” He lifted his face to the sun and breathed deep. “Do you love this season as much as I do?”

“It’s my favorite, I think—though why rot should be so appealing is a mystery.”

Leander shrugged. “Most men believe life begins in spring. For me, the sap always rises in autumn. A chilly morning, a whiff of woodsmoke, and I get the most powerful urge to move on. Year after year it shook me loose and drove me here and there, as if I had no more substance than one of these brittle leaves. I’d be drifting still, if I didn’t keep it down by force. Perhaps you feel the same?” Squinting, he gazed at the house, dwelling briefly on the bush. “Next spring it will flower,” he said. “I hear the little one crying. Shall we use the visitor’s entrance?”

He followed her up the stairs, and held the door open as she went inside.

PIE IS A GREAT HARMONIZER
: the rolling-out of dough, the slicing and sugaring, the crimping of the crown. In need of an extra measure of calm, Sophy made two. The aroma of baking lured the men to the kitchen. Leander declared that the fragrance was a meal in itself; he wouldn’t sully such perfection by reducing it to the gross processes of mastication and digestion. “More for the rest of us then,” Gideon said. They ate the first pie warm and bubbling at noon. The silence was for once contented, the men cutting slice after slice and eating slivers off their knives like peasants. Sophy mashed a bit of apple with her spoon and put it on her finger for Aleph to suck. Gideon looked her full in the face and smiled for the first time in weeks. It was an effort for her to smile back. Did he think that a moment of sweetness could heal the rift between them?

On another night, after an afternoon as tranquil as this one, she might have slept. Instead, she lay folded in Gideon’s arms for what seemed like hours, her muscles tense and her brain as jumpy as a cat’s. He was holding her spoon fashion, as he used to—a token, perhaps, of the softening of his feelings—but it was all she could do to bear the weight of his arm over her, his breath stirring her hair. Around midnight, she’d told Micah, though there was no way to tell the hour; the tick of the pocket watch would have alerted him, and how would she read the numerals? The darkness thickened by degrees, the muted hum of night noise overspread the house. Twice she was poised to move when she thought she heard a floorboard creaking, the weight of a step. At last, unable to bear it any longer, she began to shift her body toward the edge of the bed. Gideon tightened his hold, grunting. When she slipped free of his arm, he shuddered, his eyes fluttering open. “The baby,” she whispered. He seemed to try to rouse himself, but sank back into sleep as she tucked the covers around him, her warmth still in them, her touch tender.

The dark gleam of the rifle drew her eye. The old soldier is sleeping at his post, it came to her. He’ll be shot in the morning.

The refrain beat in her head with a nursery lilt.
Shot in the morning
as she dropped her dress over her shift, put on her shoes and shawl.
Shot in the morning
as she gathered up the baby, nested his bedclothes around him, stood still for a pulsing moment until he settled against her.
Shot in the morning
as she looked one last time at Gideon, threw him a kiss, closed the bedroom door behind her. Sleep smoothed out the marks of his overtaxed mind, restored his pure beauty. In spite of all, it was a wrench to abandon him.

The house was still. A ghostly phosphorescence hung in the parlor windows and spread its pale light over the inner courtyard, an illumination that could only come from stars. No candlelight seeped from under Leander’s door. She stole down the front hall—a disembodied feeling, as if the flesh-and-blood Sophy were dreaming the scene in her bed—grateful for the solidity of Aleph in her arms. At the door, her hand met a smooth surface. It took her a moment to realize that the latch was still undone. Leander, who diligently checked all the doors each night, had somehow overlooked the one they’d passed through that morning. A twist of the knob, and Sophy walked out through the front entrance like a guest.

NIGHT SPREADING AROUND HER
, impenetrable after the mottled dark of the house. The sheer infinity of space turns her to stone ; if it weren’t for the baby, she would rush back inside. Gradually, her eyes begin to discern shapes. The darker mass of the bush, where, after some groping, her fingers close on Mama’s sturdy homespun: a miracle, it seems, a relic of a lost world. The wall, slumping to scattered piles of rock, and a wheelbarrow filled with more rocks, abandoned by the Quinns. The narrow, rutted road that will lead her away. Over all, spilling its merciful silver, the moon.