Belle Cora: A Novel (67 page)

“Yes,” I said.

“But this went on for years. It went on after you had found that your grandfather was alive. He would certainly have paid whatever was needed to free you from this woman. You went away with a gambler and had his child. He did not want to marry you, so he gave you a large sum of money. With his help, you started an establishment of your own, in which you employed other young women. You left the child with Anne.”

“I had lost you. I was without guidance. I was weak.”

“You don’t seem to have been weak. You seem to have been very capable.”

“I meant the weakness to want money. I was confused. I was in a wilderness. You can’t know. You can’t understand. I was lost. I was among other lost people. None of us knew right from wrong.”

“Put aside the question of what was right. If you found that life unpleasant, and had a way to leave it, why didn’t you? If it was money you wanted, you could have gotten more than you had as Harriet Knowles, by hiding your past and marrying.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Don’t you think so, a lovely, well-spoken woman like you?”

“It was too late!” I expostulated, really thinking out loud—understanding it myself for the first time. “The damage was done. I could never go back to being like another girl when I had crossed all the lines they say you can never cross without being destroyed, but I had crossed them, and here I was, alive and strong. And then comes this chance, the world saying: Here is the life we stole from you to see if you would crawl, and look at you, you
did
crawl. Isn’t that funny? Well, here it is back again.” I
stopped for a moment. “Well, in that case, keep it, I thought. I don’t want it anymore, keep it. What, I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life in a parlor, sewing, while my husband goes around town free? Do that now, when I know how these good men live away from their dutiful wives? Restrict my society to the company of these smug, stupid women who would shun me if they knew what I’d done? Why should I, to what purpose, when I’m free, with money of my own, and I’m an aristocrat among my kind, and a newspaper editor does my bidding, and I don’t care that much”—I snapped my fingers—“for anyone’s opinion and could tell anybody to go to hell? And if I did, there would always be the chance that someone like that cross-eyed miner would come along and recognize me from my old life. There had to be a reason, Jeptha. And there could only be one reason. I was ready to do all of that the moment there was the slightest possibility of having you. You see that, don’t you, Jeptha?” I asked, walking to him, reaching my hand out toward his face, but not quite daring to touch him.

He nodded. “Before you said you had given up things to marry me, you were going to say something particular; then you amended it to ‘many things.’ You didn’t mean the chance of marrying wealth. You meant the satisfactions of the life you were living.”

“I suppose I did.” I touched his face.

His head was perfectly immobile on his shoulders, while my fingers stroked his face and felt some bristles the razor had missed an hour ago. Remembering his feeling for my hands, I flattened it against his cheek, and I thought: That was smart. Perhaps, after all, everything was a question of technique, and the right combination of deft moves could save the direst situation. Then he said, as if just reaching the conclusion in his own mind, “Do as you like from now on. I’m finished with you.”

“Oh, Jeptha, please. Show mercy!”

“I’m not better than other men.”

I gripped his coat by the lapels. “You are! You are!”

He pulled my fingers free and writhed out of my grasp, his elbow knocking my jaw so that I bit myself and tasted blood. I clutched him again and collapsed to my knees. “You’re wrong. I’m not better than other men.” His voice did not express his emotions but merely informed
me of them. “I’m not different from other men. I don’t want to be married to a whore. I despise you. You don’t have a shred of decency or morality or honesty. You don’t recognize any law beyond your own desires. You don’t set any value on truth. I don’t want to see your face again or hear your name again. I want to forget I ever knew you.”

I threw my arms around his legs. “Go on and talk that way; hurt me if you want.”

“Get up.”

“Hurt me, you have a right to, I’ve hurt you, but you can’t mean all of it. You can’t. I’m carrying your child.”

He looked down at me. “How do I know you’re carrying a child? Because you’ve told me? That means nothing; your word means nothing. And if it turns out that you are carrying a child, how do I know it’s mine?”

“You know I am and you know it’s yours!”

For a second he seemed to be at a loss. Then he yelled, “How do I know it’s mine?” loud enough for everyone aboard the
Flavius
to hear, as he pulled me to my feet, and across the room, and kicked the door open, and dragged me out onto the deck. “I don’t want you. I don’t want you, and I don’t want your bastard!” he howled, letting go of me. Before I could scurry away, he swooped me up and threw me over his shoulder and walked toward the stern. I remembered him throwing over the books, and I guessed his intention.

“Stop it, Jeptha!” I cried, struggling. It was noon by now. There were other men on the deck, boarders, miners, some amused—a young woman over her husband’s shoulder is comical to certain minds. “Stop him!” I called out. A few floppy-hatted men approached, but they were unsure whether it was right to interfere, or wise: in the San Francisco of those days, quarrels had a habit of becoming deadly affrays, and when not under the influence of spirits, men were cautious.

He lifted me over the rail and threw me clear of the ship. The shock of contact with the chill bay water went unfelt, lost in the shock that he had really done it. I went down a few feet, swam up, and treaded water, tasting salt and beginning to feel the cold. Dress and petticoats ballooned around me. I could swim, as Jeptha knew, and shallow water lay nearby; but the situation was not without danger. There were splashes nearby as
men dived in to fetch me. Two men pulled me to the ladder. One climbed ahead of me, and the other stayed below to catch me if I fell.

I stood on the deck in my dripping clothes, shivering, looking around me. “Where is he? Where is he?”

“Over there. There, that way,” said Mrs. Austin, pointing over the side, and I saw Jeptha on the wharf, getting out of one of the
Flavius
rowboats.

“Jeptha!” I screamed. He didn’t turn. I was shivering so violently I could not speak.

“You’d better get out of those clothes,” said Mrs. Austin.

It was at this point that I became aware of an urgent cramping in my womb, a sensation until then lost in my emotions and the shock of my immersion into the bay. “Oh no,” I said. “Oh no.”

Later, after I had lost the baby, Mrs. Austin brought me clean sheets, took away the old ones, and came back with some broth in a cup. Standing over me, she said, “A Baptist minister—if that don’t beat all. Well, he’s baptized you, all right. You know what? I’ll bet, if you had gotten him to some other city, you could have gone on fooling him for a good ten years. But here everything goes fast. Now, you can stay overnight, while you recover, but I want you out by tomorrow afternoon. I draw the line at whores.”

XLVII

I SAT IN THE BED WITH MY HANDS FOLDED
across my lap, thinking at first mostly of the bloody mess, my child somewhere in it, that I had glimpsed for a moment before Mrs. Austin wrapped up the gory sheet that had received the contents of my womb. I felt as if I had been struck all over, equally. Though my thoughts were disordered, I understood that this was the good part. When rational thought came, it would bring suffering of an as yet incalculable size. After what could have been a minute or an hour, Mrs. Austin re-entered the cabin with a bucket, a scrub brush,
and some rags. Without giving me so much as a glance, she got on her knees—that good woman, that good, stupid, honest Christian woman—and, with her fat bottom a little higher than her head most of the time, she scoured a place on the floor where a puddle of my blood had left a residue. When she was done and had left, the spot was noticeably cleaner and lighter than the surrounding wood; and when feeling came back to me, it came back first through that tawny light patch, which delivered a stab of grief whenever I looked at it. Gradually, it became a symbol of everything I wished not to think about: of the unborn child and all it would never be; of its absent father, who had spurned us both; of the future that had been proved a silly daydream, the impossible things I had wished for with my poisoned heart’s last ounce of innocence.

It was afternoon, probably, not late. The walls of the cabin were thin, and the schooner was small. Often I heard footsteps, clanking, grunts, and muffled conversations; once, I thought I heard the name “Harriet Knowles,” and a burst of laughter. In time, my eyelids became heavy and I thought that I might sleep. If someone had told me I would never wake again, I would have hoped it was true. I wished I were made of sand and a wind could blow me away. I had as lively a distaste for Arabella Godwin as any of my breast-beating Puritan forebears ever cultivated for themselves. Creation groaned with the burden of me; the earth was an unwilling stage for my wickedness. These facts had been established by an expert in morality whom I had long ago denominated the expert on me. I had told myself that if he knew the truth he would love me still; but I had known all along that he would not. Who was I, really? I was a whore. Anyone who knew my history would agree. He had agreed, because it was true. I was a whore, whatever I did. If I should devote the rest of my life to charitable work in a home for crippled orphan children, I would still be a whore: not only was I a whore as a matter of personal history, I was a whore in my character, in my instinct to deceive and manipulate, in my readiness to turn anything to use, to be dishonored in ways good women would die rather than permit. I was also a murderess, but that was of less account to me, as it is to mankind generally. Though the punishment for murder is very severe, the world holds murderers in far less contempt than whores.

I woke in the middle of the night, and lay burning like a wound for
hours. I slept again. When my eyes opened next, there was a crack of daylight through the door, which shook repeatedly, and a sound of loud knocking. I wanted it to be Jeptha. It could all be made right again, we would mourn together and forgive each other. I pulled the sheet up to my shoulders. “Come in.”

The door swung open, and a sudden brightness hurt my eyes. I could see from her silhouette that it was Mrs. Austin, but I could not make out her expression. She half closed the door, and after a moment she said, “You can stay if you get back to work right away.”

I blinked. “Why?”

“Do you want to or not?”

I thought a little longer, and her patience while I did so was instructive. “Have the men been asking for me?” She didn’t answer. I supposed this meant that they had been. “I’m not well,” I told her finally. “I need more time.”

In an unconvincing tone of authority, she said that I could not take up space here without working. I repeated that I needed time to recover.

I spent the rest of the day in the cabin, sleeping when I could and mourning when I was awake. A little after nightfall, it occurred to me that I should eat. I went out to the galley to get a piece of corn bread, but when I had it in my hand I wasn’t hungry. I went back to my bed.

The next day was the same. In the evening, there was a knock, and upon lighting the lamp and opening the door, I saw Jeptha, with Herbert Owen behind him. I guessed from his grim expression that he had just heard of my miscarriage, but all he said was “I came for my trunk.”

I watched in the quaking lamplight, which shook our tall shadows, while he dragged it from under the bed and to the door. He stood still for a moment. “She told you?” I asked. He nodded. I rose from my bed slowly and stood before him for a second. I tried to slap him across the face. He caught my hand. “I hope you never have another,” I said.

“Just as well,” he said, and released my hand. Herbert Owen, who looked very sorry for both of us, helped him drag the trunk down the deck and into a rowboat.