The Taker (12 page)

Maybe I should have spoken to my father earlier, to let him know that his neighborly sacrifice was unnecessary and that in all likelihood Sophia had gone to see a man, a man whose company she should not keep. She could be safe and warm in a room with this man while we tramped through the cold and damp. I pictured Sophia rushing along the trail, stealing away from her unhappy home to Jonathan, tenderhearted and confused, who would undoubtedly take her in. My stomach
twisted at the thought of her tucked in Jonathan’s bed, the thought that she had won and I had lost and that Jonathan was now hers.

Eventually we turned toward the river and walked a ways, following its contours. My father paused at one point, breaking a hole through a thin patch of ice to dip his hand in for a drink. Between sips, he eyed me not without curiosity.

“I don’t know how much longer we will need to search. You can go home now, Lanore. This is no place for a girl. You must be freezing with cold.”

I shook my head. “No, no, Father, I’d like to keep on a while longer …” It would be impossible to wait at home for news. I would go out of my mind or abandon all propriety to race to Jonathan’s house and confront Sophia. I could picture her, smug, triumphant. At that moment, I don’t think I’d hated anyone as much as I hated her.

It was Father who spotted her first. He had been scanning the way ahead while I had kept my eyes trained on the dizzying ground underfoot. He found the frozen body trapped in an eddy formed by a fallen tree, almost hidden in a tangle of reeds and wild vines. She floated prone, caught in a mass of frozen cattails, her delicate body outstretched, the folds of her skirt and her long hair bobbing on the surface of the water. Her cloak sat on the riverbank, neatly folded.

“Look away, girl,” my father said as he tried to turn me by the shoulders. I couldn’t tear my eyes from her.

Father sounded the call while I stared dumbly at her corpse. Other searchers came crashing through the woods, following my father’s voice. Two of the men waded into the frigid water to pull her body from the embrace of the frozen grasses and the thin shelf of ice that had started to claim her. We spread her cape on the ground and laid her body on it, the sodden fabric clinging to her legs and torso. Her skin was blue all over and her eyes, mercifully, were closed.

The men wrapped her in her cloak and took turns holding the edges, using it as a sling to carry Sophia’s body back home, while I walked behind them. My teeth chattered and my father came up to
me to rub my arms in an attempt to warm me, but it did no good, for I shook and shivered from fear, not cold. I held my arms tight to my stomach, afraid I would be ill in front of my father. My presence dampened the discussion among the men and they refrained from speculating as to why Sophia had taken her life. They generally agreed, however, that Pastor Gilbert would not be told about the cape set deliberately aside. He would not know that she had been a suicide.

When my father and I made it home, I ran straight to the fireplace and stood so close that the fire toasted my face, but even that heat could not stop my shaking. “Not so close,” my mother chided as she helped me take off my cloak, afraid no doubt that the cape might catch on a spitting ember. I would have welcomed it. I deserved to burn like a witch for what I’d done.

A few hours later, my mother came up to me, squared her shoulders, and said, “I’m going to the Gilberts’ to help with the preparations for Sophia. I think you should come with me. It’s time you started taking your place among the women in this town and learned some of the duties that will be expected of you.”

By now I had changed into a heavy nightgown, curled by the fire, and had drunk a mug of hot cider with rum. The drink helped to numb me, to tamp down the urge to cry out loud and confess, but I knew that I would come undone if I had to confront Sophia’s body, even in the presence of the other women in town.

I rose up from the floor on an elbow. “I couldn’t … I don’t feel well. Still cold …”

My mother pressed the back of her fingers to my forehead, then my throat. “If anything, I’d say you were burning with fever …” She looked at me cautiously, skeptically, then rose from the floor, tossing her cloak over her shoulders. “All right, this one time, seeing what you went through earlier …” Her words trailed off. She looked me over one more time, in a way I couldn’t quite figure out, and then slipped out the door.

She told me later what had happened at the pastor’s house, how the women prepared Sophia’s body for burial. First, they set it by the
fire to thaw, then they rinsed the river silt from her mouth and nose and gently combed out her hair. My mother described how white her skin had become from the time in the river, and how she’d been scraped with thin, red scratches after the current had dragged her corpse over submerged rocks. They dressed her in her finest dress, a yellow so pale as to be almost ivory, embellished with embroidery by her own needle and tailored to her slender frame with pin tucks. No mention was made of Sophia’s body, no abnormality, no remark of the faintest swell to the dead woman’s abdomen. If anyone noticed anything, it would be attributed to bloat, no doubt, water the poor girl had ingested as she drowned. And then a linen shroud was tucked into a plain panel coffin. A couple of men who had waited while the women completed their work loaded the coffin into a wagon and escorted it to Jeremiah’s house, where it would lie in wait for the funeral.

As my mother calmly described the state of Sophia’s body, I felt as though nails were being driven into me, exhorting me to confess my wickedness. But I held on to my wits, if barely, and cried as my mother spoke, my hand shielding my eyes. My mother rubbed my back as though I were a child again. “Whatever is it, Lanore dear? Why are you so upset for Sophia? It is a terrible thing and she was our neighbor, yes, but I didn’t think you even knew her very well …” She sent me up to the loft with a goatskin filled with warm water and went to chide my father for taking me with him into the woods. I lay with the goatskin pressed against my stomach though it brought me no comfort. I lay awake, listening to all the sounds of the night—the wind, the shaking trees, the dying embers—whisper Sophia’s name.

As had been the case at her wedding, Sophia Jacobs’s funeral was a mean affair, attended by her husband, her mother, and a few of her siblings, and not many others. The day was cold and overcast, snowfall promising to drift down from the sky as it had every day since Sophia had killed herself.

We stood and watched from a hilltop overlooking the cemetery, Jonathan and I. We watched the mourners press around the dark, hollow plot. Somehow they had managed to excavate a grave site though the ground was beginning to freeze, and I could not help but wonder if it had been her father, Tobey, who had dug the grave. The mourners, specks of black against a white field far in the distance, shifted to and fro restlessly, as Pastor Gilbert pronounced words over the deceased. My face was tight, swollen from days of crying, but now, in Jonathan’s presence, no tears came. It felt surreal to be spying on Sophia’s funeral—I, who should be down there on my knees, begging Jeremiah for forgiveness, for I was responsible for his wife’s death as surely as if I’d pushed her into the river myself.

Next to me, Jonathan stood silently. Snow began to fall at last, like the release of a long-pent-up tension, tiny flakes swirling on the cold air before landing on the dark wool of Jonathan’s greatcoat and in his hair.

“I cannot believe she is gone,” he said, for the twentieth time that morning. “I can’t believe she took her life.”

I choked on my words. Anything I could say would be too weak, too palliative and altogether untrue.

“It is my fault,” he croaked, raising a hand to his face.

“You mustn’t blame yourself for this.” I rushed to comfort him with the words I had said to myself over and over the past few days, as I’d hidden in feverish guilt in bed. “You knew her life was miserable, from when she was a child. Who knows what unhappy thoughts she carried with her, and for how long? She finally acted on them. It’s hardly your fault.”

He took two steps forward, as though longing to be down in the graveyard. “I can’t believe she had been carrying thoughts of self-injury, Lanny. She had been happy—with me. It seems inconceivable that the Sophia I knew was fighting the desire to kill herself.”

“One never knows. Maybe she had an argument with Jeremiah … perhaps after the last time you saw her …”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “If she was troubled by anything, it was my reaction when she told me of the baby. That is why I blame myself, Lanny, for my thoughtless reaction to her news. You said”—Jonathan lifted his head, suddenly, looking in my direction—“that you might think of a way to dissuade her from keeping the baby. I pray, Lanny, that you didn’t approach Sophia with any such plan—”

Startled, I jerked back. I’d thought these past few days about telling him everything, as I’d struggled with my guilt. I had to tell some-one—it was not the kind of secret a body can keep without doing irreparable harm to the soul—and if anyone would understand, it would be Jonathan. I’d done it for him, after all. He’d come to me for help and I had done what was required. Now I needed to be absolved for what I had done; he owed me that absolution, didn’t he?

But as he searched me with those dark, willful eyes, I realized I could not tell him. Not now, not while he was raw with grief and capable of being carried away by emotion. He would not understand. “What? No, I came up with no plan. Why would I approach Sophia on my own, anyway?” I lied. I hadn’t intended to lie to Jonathan, but he surprised me, his guess like an arrow shot with uncanny precision. I would tell him one day, I resolved.

Jonathan turned his three-cornered hat in his hands. “Do you suppose I should tell Jeremiah the truth?”

I rushed up to Jonathan and shook him by the shoulders. “That would be a terrible thing to do, for yourself as well as poor Sophia. What good would it do to tell Jeremiah now, except to appease your conscience? All you would accomplish would be to ruin Jeremiah’s illusion of her. Let him bury Sophia thinking her a good wife who honored him.”

He looked at my small hands clasping his shoulders—it was unusual for us to touch each other now that we were no longer children—and then looked into my eyes with such sorrow that I couldn’t help myself. I collapsed against his chest and pulled him toward me, thinking only that he needed comfort from a woman at
that moment, even if it wasn’t Sophia. I will not lie and say I didn’t find the feeling of his strong, warm body against mine comforting, too, though I had no right to comfort. I nearly wept with happiness at the touch of him. Holding his body against mine, I could pretend that he had forgiven me for my terrible sin against Sophia, although, of course, he knew nothing of it.

I’d kept my cheek against his chest, listening to his heart beat beneath layers of wool and linen and breathing in his scent. I didn’t want to release my hold of Jonathan, but I sensed he was looking down at me, and so I looked up at him, too, ready for him to tell me again of his love for Sophia. And if he did, if he said her name, I resolved, I would tell him what I had done. But he didn’t; instead, his mouth hovered over mine for an instant before he kissed me.

The moment for which I’d waited went by in a blur. We slipped into the protection of the woods, steps away. I remember the wonderful heat of his mouth on mine, its hunger and forcefulness. I remember his hands pulling on the ribbon that closed my blouse over my breasts. He pressed my back against a tree and bit into my neck as he fumbled with the fall of his breeches. I lifted my skirts so he could claim me, his hands on my hips. I regret that I didn’t have even a glimpse of his manhood for all the clothing between us, coats and cloaks, skirts and petticoats. But I felt him in me, suddenly, a great firm hotness pushed up inside me, and him bucking against me, grinding me into the bark of the tree. And at the end, his groan in my ear sent a shiver through me, for it meant he had found pleasure with me, and I had never been so happy and feared I would never be so again.

We rode together on his horse through the woods with me holding tight around his waist, as we had as children. We took the least-traveled trails lest we be seen together without a chaperone. We didn’t exchange a word and I kept my hot face buried in his coat, still trying to come to grips with what we’d done. I knew of plenty of other girls in town who had given themselves over to a man before marriage—with Jonathan often the recipient—and had looked down on them.
Now I was one of them. A part of me felt that I had disgraced myself. But another part of me believed I’d had no choice: it might have been my only chance to capture Jonathan’s heart and prove that we were meant to be together. I couldn’t let it pass.

I slipped from the back of his horse and, after a squeeze of his hand, hiked the short distance to my family’s cabin. As I walked, however, doubts began to set in as to what our tryst had meant to him. He swived girls with no thought to any consequences: why did I imagine he would attach consequences this time? And what of his feelings for Sophia—or my obligation, for that matter, to the woman I had driven to take her own life? I had as good as murdered her and here I was fornicating with her lover. Surely a more wicked soul did not exist.

I took a few minutes before proceeding to my home, to compose myself with deep breaths of cold air. I couldn’t go to pieces in front of my family. I had no one with whom I could talk this over. I would have to keep this secret hidden inside until I was calm enough to think on it rationally. I pushed it down, all of it, the guilt, the shame, the self-hatred. And yet, at the same time, I was filled with tremulous excitement, for though I didn’t deserve as much, I’d gotten what I’d wanted. I exhaled, dusted the fresh snow from the front of my cloak, squared my shoulders, and trudged the rest of the way to my family’s cottage.

TEN