Belle Cora: A Novel (21 page)

My aunt said that she did not know what to do about Lewis. She had never in her life heard of a case of a boy trying to murder his aunt—not in the sinful families that worked on the Lord’s Day, not among the heathen Indians—and we mustn’t speak of it. People would point to Lewis as a man and say that when he was a boy he had tried to kill his aunt with a poker. What on earth was she going to do with him? He was so small and skinny, she said, that she feared to punish him as he deserved.

She said all this out loud, to impress upon him the gravity of his crime, but her confusion was genuine. She decreed, foolishly, that he would go to bed without supper every night for a week. After three days she gave in, because he wasn’t eating his dinner.

We were eating downstairs, and he was in the loft, where he spent suppertime. My aunt said, “Belle, come with me,” and gave me a plate burdened with bits of salt pork, red beans, stony biscuits, and a spoon. Lewis was crouching by our trunk, guiltily hiding his marbles, which he was on his honor not to play with while he was being punished. “Sit, Lewis,” she said, and he sat on his bed, and she handed him the plate, which he held indifferently. “Lewis, I want you to eat. You have to eat. If people don’t eat they die.” She sat on a stool facing him, looking down and up, looking at me and at him, her hands gripping and turning and squeezing each other.

“I wasn’t trying to kill you,” he said, just wanting to set the record straight.

“Let’s say you weren’t. But something very bad could have happened. And it was a shock to me that you would raise a weapon against your aunt, who is only trying to do what your poor mother would want me to do. That was very wrong. Can you see that?”

The mention of his mother had its effect. “Yes,” he said, suddenly on the verge of tears. Seizing the opportunity with better instinct than was usual with her, she reached out, and he let her enfold him in her angular embrace. “That’s better, that’s better,” she said, stroking his hair and looking alternately at him and at me. “We’ll make a new beginning, each one of us. We’ll each be good according to our different duties. Now, I’ve been praying on this matter of your books, Arabella, and I’ve talked
it over with Elihu. We’ve decided to give you five dollars out of what we got from the sale of them. You may have this much, but not the whole amount, because we all have to help each other. We all have to make a contribution. Do you think that is fair, Arabella?”

“Yes, Aunt Agatha,” I said, still hating her, but she was obviously relieved. She had a great innocent faith in contracts. You said a thing, under duress or not, and she considered the matter settled, and if you went back on it later, she was appalled.

Reader, do you feel sorry for her?
I
do. She wanted us all to be as happy as we could be, given that there is no real happiness this side of heaven (and her primary task, more crucial than the hard work that occupied her every waking hour, was to get us all into heaven). She did not understand exactly why it was proving difficult to be a mother to me, but she knew she had to take some of the blame. She knew she had a bad temper. It may even be that she knew, without quite admitting it to herself, that greed had helped to convince her that I was better off without Buffon’s
Natural History
and the novels of Scott and Marryat. But if she regretted that decision, she did not see that it was possible for a grown-up to acknowledge fault in a dispute with a child.

That’s how I see it today. At the time, I only knew that we were struggling and that any friendly gesture she made was a thrilling sign of weakness in my enemy.

XIV

I READ WHAT WAS LEFT OF MY LIBRARY
. I read the Bible from Genesis to Kings. I read
Exemplary Letters for Sundry Occasions
, which, watered by my imagination like some highly concentrated soup stock, proved as heady a form of romantic literature for me as Captain Maryatt had once been for poor Frank. I would have copied out the letters if paper had been less dear. Instead, I memorized them, imagining as I did it the
guests I invited to the banquet, the invitations I accepted, and the unsuitable ones which I graciously declined; the suitors to whose respectful approaches I was not averse, the clergyman I thanked for his kind words after my husband’s death. How enviable were the lives of the fine ladies who wrote such letters! They did not boil the wash or disembowel hogs. They sat at a writing desk. They slipped off their white gloves; soft white hands trimmed the pen, dipped it, lifted it. “As I lift my pen …”

Following models in the book (“To Family Members Far Distant”), I wrote my first letters to Robert and Edward, and to Mrs. Fitch, and to my grandparents.

I wrote similar letters to Robert, Edward, and Mrs. Fitch. I finished them while we were all together around the fire. My aunt, as I had expected, asked if she might know their contents. I read them aloud, and was rewarded with general expressions of approval at the letters’ maturity and accuracy. Agnes and my aunt asked to read them over for themselves. I agreed. They made suggestions. Agnes hoped that I would not take it amiss, for she knew I was excessively sensitive to criticism, if she noted that I had misspelled several words—“abolition” should be “abalishin,” “syrup” should be “sirrup,” “garden” should be “gardin,” etc.—and I should throw in some more commas for good measure, as well-bred people did. My aunt examined the letter and agreed that my spelling needed work. I thanked them both for catching these errors. My aunt said that it would be better not to worry my grandparents by telling them that Lewis wasn’t eating as well as he should; we were all doing our best to encourage him to eat more; there was nothing Grandpa and Grandma could do; so perhaps I should rewrite all the letters without that in them, if I didn’t mind. I said of course I didn’t mind.

And indeed I did not, for they were all dummies and feints, these letters. The letter I actually wrote to my grandfather survives, and here it is, word for word.

Reading it over, I want to improve the letter as if the nine-year-old child who wrote it still existed and still had the power of choice. Apart from wanting to remove the silly echoes of
Exemplary Letters
, I want to tell my young self that it would be better not to give every possible argument; that weak arguments discredit strong ones by casting doubt on the writer’s judgment. And that, when begging for help, it is better not at the same time to preen, showing off your recent ladylike accomplishments, making it seem as if you do not need help.

As soon as the weather allowed trips into town, I brought the letters
to the store, where Colonel Ashton weighed them and charged me for them under my aunt’s eye. Since there was no coach to Livy, they would be carried in a mailbag to the larger village of Patavium by whoever happened to be going there next, in a day or two days or a week.

Sitting by the fireside with my enemies, sewing, spinning, or hugging my skinny brother in our straw bed after saying aloud for public consumption my lying prayers, I pictured my letter being read in Bond Street. When two weeks had passed—my estimate of the time it would take the letter to reach its destination—I decided that I was free to think of my grandfather or one of his employees traveling toward us by steamboat, stagecoach, and canal packet, advancing implacably on this farm like Caesar on Gaul, come to demand the surrender of the two captives. A four-in-hand hurries in, the driver snapping the whip; customers at the general store rush to the porch; gossip spreads through the miserable town; the simple people are amazed—All this for two children! Who
are
these children?—and they realize then and forever how trivial their own lives are.

At the end of April, my uncle came back from a trip to town and handed a letter that had come and been addressed to me—it was from my grandfather. I took it up to the loft and read it in a shaft of light from the window.