The widow's war (21 page)

“Married or unmarried, you would not trust to my judgment. You showed it to be so when you refused to sign that paper.”

“Can you not understand my reluctance? Can you not think of it as your Mr. Otis would think of it? To have that one small certainty in my life, to know that I, too, will be as secure in my house as any prince in his castle—”

“You would have been so secured with me. You know this. You must know it.”

“I do. I do. But—”

“Then why fuss so over it?”

“Then why balk so at it?”

“Even Mercy Warren acknowledges that in every household, for the sake of order, there must be one master.”

“I give you master. Can you not give me my one small corner?”

“Do you not see? I would give you more than a small corner, I would give you all, as and when you need it.”

“As you would have me need it.”

He stared at her. “So you offer nothing and you accept nothing. And you would call that marriage.”

Lyddie thought. “I accept this. Today you open your mind and heart in an effort to understand my own, however imperfectly you
succeed at it, and that I can and do accept and, indeed, even cherish. I’ve had few such people in my acquaintance.” Lyddie leaned forward. “And I offer this. You now see me as I am and you see I’m not the wife for you, but can we not at least part again in friendship?”

Freeman’s features worked. He walked away to the door, returned to the table, and sat down. “Friend. And lawyer, if you wish it. After all, I’ve had the papers ready some time now.”

Lyddie considered and could find no reason against it. She got up, found her bag, and unwrapped the silver frame, and brought it over to him. “I heard talk at my son’s of a fee for a will at two pounds fifteen shillings. I’ve little idea what you might charge for such a case as mine, but you might get four pounds silver from this frame. If you would take it to begin—”

“I will not. Not that or any other thing. There’s my condition. And if you truly think me friend, you will accept it.”

Lyddie set down the frame.

“Besides, if it goes to court the charge will be set off to Clarke; he’ll lose the case and he knows it. But I don’t think it will go to court. Once the papers are served I think you’ll find your son ready to comply with the will’s strictures. The trick will be to keep him in compliance, but I have an idea if he knows I’m in the shadows, with court waiting…” Freeman’s eyes grew dreamy. “I will say to you, Widow Berry, I should enjoy having Clarke before the bench. And I’ll tell you another who would enjoy it: our friend Otis. He’d take your case and sue for life use of house entire, with keep at two hundred pounds of beef—”

“And he’d lose.”

Freeman smiled. “And he’d lose. But, by God, he’d enjoy the experiment. And I should enjoy it. But we can’t afford any such ride. We won’t persuade Clarke to give way with any such madness, and winter comes on. It must be as I said before: he sees the papers and settles.”

“And what of the tenant?” Lyddie explained some, but not all, of the difficulty with Silas Clarke.

“You know already what must be done. You said it yourself, to his brother Nathan. If he makes threat against his family or against you, or steals or does damage to any property, you must fetch the constable to arrest him.”

Lyddie nodded. She extended a hand across the table, and after a minute Freeman took it and gripped it.

Sometime in the night the wind picked up even more speed and the rain came down on the roof like hammers. Lyddie believed she heard every moan and tap and woke thinking they would not sail; but by the time she joined the men at breakfast the wind had veered off to the south and the rain had tempered to a drizzle; Shubael’s face was all smiles and happy chatter, Freeman’s a paste of shadows and deep, dark crevices.

Freeman disappeared as soon as Mrs. Crocker took away the plates. Shubael set off to the dock to check on the boat. Lyddie went to her room and packed her bag, then waited for the sound of the chaise outside the door before she exited. Shubael handed her in and climbed in after her; Freeman drove them to the dock, and they reversed the process. As Shubael strode toward the ship Lyddie hung back a second to say, “Good-bye, Mr. Freeman,” to which he man
aged to say, in a high, tight voice nothing like his own, “Good-bye, Widow Berry.”

At first it appeared that Shubael’s luck had turned: the sun came out, a fresh breeze filled mainsail and jib and shot them away from the wharf and out of the harbor, but soon after he rounded the mouth the boat shuddered under Lyddie’s feet, heeled over, and stopped, hard aground.

Shubael barked his orders, but the crew were already at the stays; the sails came down and the ship leveled slightly. The tide was on the ebb, another hour yet to low; that meant one hour out and one back and then, what? Another hour again before they’d float? Shubael wanted to take Lyddie into shore in the longboat, but Lyddie refused. She didn’t believe she had the stuff for another encounter with a still-fragile Freeman. In the end the crew took the longboat, and Shubael and Lyddie stayed on board. Shubael went below to work on his accounts, but Lyddie fetched her basket with her knitting and stayed above. The wind was brisk, but the sun warm, and it danced across the water, disguising both its shallows and its depths.

Lyddie had already turned the heel on her stocking before Shubael reappeared and gazed out to sea with his glass. Lyddie opened her basket and offered him an apple. He joined her, and they braced their backs against the now severely canted larboard rail.

“It won’t be long, now, Cousin,” Shubael said. “The tide’s now turned; another hour and a half and we’ll be clear. I must say, this shoal’s filled in since my last run out here. Did Edward ever tell you of the time we ran aground outside New—” He broke off and turned away from her.

Lyddie rested a hand on Shubael’s knee. “’Tis one thing to lose Edward to the sea. ’Tis another to lose him because his cousin can’t speak his name to me.”

Shubael tossed his core overboard; it plunked like hail into the water. He rounded on Lyddie.

“I’ve long wished to say his name to you, Cousin, long wished to tell you a thing that will ease me, but not you. I can’t keep it to me any longer. I cost you your husband.”

Lyddie blinked.

“I was driving a small group of whales into the shore. I heard Sam shout my name and I ignored him. I thought, Hang it, I don’t care what he has, I’ve got these fine, fat fish of my own on the run and I’m going to see they hit ground. I didn’t even turn. When I did I saw Sam going like the devil for the overturned boat, but I was closer before, and if I’d turned when he’d called I’d have reached them in good time. When I finally got there Sam had Edward by the belt and he was alive, I could tell because he reached up and grabbed hold of Sam’s coat sleeve, but I came shooting in too close and a wave caught me broadside and I ran right into Sam’s boat. Sam lost his balance and his hold, but I thought for a minute it was okay, see? ’Cause Edward still hung on to Sam’s sleeve, and then the sleeve tore right out of the coat—”

“No. Edward’s coat was never torn.”

“’Twas Sam’s coat that tore, Cousin. He’d already rent the sleeve, which I suppose is what gave Edward his hold, but then it ripped through, and that was it. Edward was gone. But Sam wouldn’t quit. ’Twas all I could do to keep my boat from falling off, going with all hands at the oars, and here’s Sam fishing around in the water with one of his, looking for Edward and taking it broadside, until finally Jabez yells to him they’re shipping water, they’d have to quit, but it was Sam got there first and gave up last where it should have been me both times. Sam.”

Shubael stopped and gulped in air, looking at Lyddie like a hungry dog.

Lyddie got up and half walked, half crawled over the pitched deck to the companionway. She went below and lay down on the leeside bunk. The boat was still locked hard in the mud; she knew this to be true because of the angle and because of the occasional dull nudge of the waves, but it seemed to pitch and rock in time with her staccato breathing. The crisp air funneling through the hatch hit her cheek like a cold wave; she closed her eyes and saw Sam Cowett’s drenched, torn coat in place of Edward’s whole one, saw a patchwork of words and accounts unravel into a series of incohesive parts. Once Lyddie saw the parts she saw they would not serve to cover her naked, lonely flesh at all. She lay there bare and raw, feeling the boat slowly righting itself, and once she felt herself in balance she got up and went to find Shubael.

He sat on a barrel not far from where she’d left him.

“Cousin,” she said. “Do you believe that God rules all?”

He nodded.

“Then ’tis God sent you shoreward instead of seaward after my husband. ’Tis God brought your boat into Mr. Cowett’s and tore his coat and left Edward to drown. When we next talk of Edward, let it be Edward live, not Edward dead.”

Shubael’s wind-scoured face twisted, forcing his tears to zigzag down his cheeks. Lyddie reached up and wiped them away with her sleeve. Shubael caught up her hand and pressed it to his chest. “You were his greatest blessing, Cousin. He once told me so. He said he’d never seen the bottom of your courage and that he took half of his from you. So I teased him. I said, ‘She’d need courage, taking up with the like of you,’ but he didn’t come along with the joke. I don’t even think he heard it. He went off on a line of his own. ‘’Tis the hardest part of life,’ he said, ‘to be half of something and yet remain whole.’ I didn’t know the first thing of what he meant and I told him so—I told him he was turning into last winter’s squash, but he said
his wife knew what he meant and that was all that needed to. Ah, and now I’ve made you cry, too.”

The crew returned, and when the sails were raised they filled with a fine southwest breeze. Lyddie stood on deck facing down the wind and spray, trying to sort through everything Shubael had said but could not get beyond the last thing, could not hear Shubael’s words for Edward’s. The half. The whole. His voice seemed so clear to her that for a minute she thought he was there beside her on the deck of the ship, but then she realized she was just remembering another time on another deck at Long Wharf in Boston, Edward having just left the ship to do his dealings with the oil merchants, Lyddie preparing to leave to secure them a room. Edward had called back to her from the dock with some instruction, not too near the wharf, or near the wharf, Lyddie couldn’t tell. She’d called after him, “What?”

But Edward had turned back and smiled and shouted to her, “Never mind! I leave the whole to you!”

By the time Robbin’s hill came into sight the sun had gone and Lyddie was frozen through, but some of those jagged half-edges appeared to have scoured themselves smooth.

She and Shubael made their good-byes and Ned Crowe rowed her ashore. The walk through the dusk as far as Cowett’s house seemed long; the walk from there to hers seemed longer. She’d been unsurprised by the lack of smoke from Cowett’s chimney, but quite surprised by the lack of it from her own. She pushed open the door and
saw first the dirty pot on the cold hearth, then the broken crock on the table. She sniffed. Sour milk. Old sweat. Brandy.

Lyddie worked up the fire, listening for sounds of Clarke children, hearing nothing. Once she had a solid blaze she approached the door to Clarke’s chamber and peered around its edge. The bed was unmade and the sour-milk-old-sweat odor was strongest in its near vicinity, but the room sat empty. Lyddie backed away and ran up the stairs. The children’s beds had been pushed under the eaves, the room cleared of their few belongings. Lyddie went downstairs, and outside, where she found a distended, protesting cow and a handful of fussing chickens, one with an odd, listing hop, but no Clarkes.

Lyddie tied up the cow, got her stool and pail, and set to the milking. She took an angry hoof in the ankle and a shitty tail in the face, but at length she got the udders emptied and her pail filled. She next removed her stocking, captured the hobbling chicken, drew the stocking over its head, and examined its leg. It had dislocated from its socket. She wrung its neck, removed and replaced her stocking, and hung the chicken in the barn. She carried her pail of milk to the pantry, filled her milk pans, jugged the rest and carried it to the cellar, then collected her kitchen knife and a lantern and returned to the barn, where she plucked and gutted the chicken and returned it to its hook until she was ready to roast it. At last she could go inside and change her salt-crusted, milk-and-blood-spattered clothes.

As Lyddie opened the door to her chamber she looked down and saw a twice-folded paper on the floor. She picked it up, and a pound note in the old inflated paper tenor fluttered from it. She caught the note and unfolded the paper:

      Dear Widow Berry,

We’ve gone to live with my brother in Connecticut. I thank you again and again for your many kindnesses and
am most heartily sorry for what trouble we’ve caused. May God have mercy on your soul.

   I am your most humble servant, Patience Clarke

Lyddie changed her dress and returned to the keeping room to address the fire. Some tea inside and a good blaze outside finally chased away the numbness, but under it Lyddie found none of the contentment she’d been expecting if she ever discovered herself back in sole possession of her home. The fact that Nathan Clarke would be unlikely to leave her in peace was part of her difficulty, but not the biggest part. The main thing that set hard on her mind was that dead chimney down the road.

Lyddie had had so little time to think over everything she’d been told by Freeman and Cousin Shubael about Sam Cowett that it came crowding in on her in a disordered jumble, but one thing leaped out of the mess: she wouldn’t attempt to deny Sam Cowett’s intemperate nature, but she would deny him any crimes against herself or her husband.

Lyddie’s fatigue and the comfort of her own bed put her into a deep sleep, so deep she had some trouble coming out of her dream. In it a tall, faceless man, neither black nor white, young nor old, broad nor lean, stood on the far side of the Robbin’s landing channel, calling her across, and although she knew he wanted her, he kept calling her by another name. When she opened her eyes she saw the dim shape of the man at the foot of the bed and heard the voice and the name, but still thought it was the dream.

“Come on, Patience. You get back where you belong or you’ll see daylight before dawn.” And he picked up the foot of the bed and slammed it into the wall.

The jolt catapulted Lyddie into full consciousness. Silas Clarke, drunk, not in Connecticut, but here? But of course he was not in Connecticut. Patience Clarke had done what she’d done before and fled him, this time to her own brother instead of his, and Lyddie might have known if she’d registered what she’d seen: the children’s room packed up and tidied, Silas Clarke’s used and filthy. If Silas had gone with them, Patience Clarke would certainly have put that other room to rights, too. The question now was, did Silas Clarke know where Patience had gone? Or that she was gone? But Lyddie had learned something about the futility of attempting to communicate with intoxicated persons; she wanted only to get him out of her room.

“I’m not your wife, Mr. Clarke,” she said. “I’m the Widow Berry. Now please leave me to my sleep. We’ll speak in the morning.”

The form at the foot of the bed swayed. “Widow Berry.”

“Good night, Mr. Clarke.”

“Widow Berry. Did you get your cow?”

“I did, thank you. Good night, now.”

“Wife’s gone to Connecticut. Found a note when I got home.”

“Yes. We’ll talk tomorrow. Good night.”

He sat down on the floor and began to weep, a ratcheting, coughing, strangling sound.

Lyddie slid out of bed and half pulled, half pushed him to his feet. He smelled of sweat and piss and grease and liquor. She walked him to his room, dropped him onto his foul bed, and shut the door. She returned to her room and jammed the latch down.