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The widow set the pouch down. She said, “You’re with child.”

Alice said nothing.

“How far gone are you?”

Alice stayed silent.

“Speak up, girl! Who’s got this child on you?”

It began in enough anger, but halfway through something went wrong with it; it didn’t hold its fury all the way through the second sentence. Alice lifted her eyes to the widow and saw her do a thing Alice had never seen her do before; she glanced away from Alice. As if
she
were ashamed. As if
she
were somehow to blame. Alice didn’t understand it, and then she did. Why, the widow had even said it!
I should like to think that you wouldn’t further abuse a young girl…
She wasn’t ashamed over Alice, she was ashamed over Freeman, the man she had taken under her roof and so allowed to abuse Alice.

Alice imagined a faint breeze of hope entering through that tiniest of cracks. Perhaps it didn’t matter what had actually happened in the barn, perhaps it only mattered what the widow chose to believe had happened. She had appeared in the door just as Freeman had swung Alice against the wall; for all she could know it was Freeman who had undone her bodice and his breeches. Alice tried to concentrate, to think through the rest of it. If the widow were of a mind to blame Freeman, would she consider Alice as now in even greater need of her protection? Was it possible she would leap to Alice’s defense as she’d done on the deck of the ship? Was it possible she might choose to keep Alice under her roof and throw Freeman out the door? After all, how much did she need his money now that the cloth was selling at Sears’s store?

The widow cut through Alice’s swirling thoughts. “Speak up!” she snapped. “I asked you who’s put you in this way?”

Through the open window Alice could hear the sounds of a horse’s hoofs scuffling in the dirt. Apparently the walk to the water hadn’t cooled him, and Freeman had decided to ride off somewhere. Alice let her eyes float toward the window, and it was enough. The widow came at the bed, grabbed Alice’s wrist, and pulled her to her feet.

“Understand me, Alice. You’ll answer me in God’s own truth, right now, this minute, or you’ll go out of this house this minute. You put this child on Mr. Freeman?”

Alice nodded.

“And how long…Well, I might figure how long.”

The widow dropped Alice’s wrist, walked with purpose to the stairs, and down.

Alice hurried to the window. Freeman was still in the yard, tightening the girth on his saddle, when the widow appeared. He didn’t straighten.

“So you have no further words for me on this matter?” the widow said.

“Judging by the words that have flown thus far, I’d say fewer were required, not more.”

“Even on the subject of the child Alice credits you?”

Freeman laughed.

Alice heard the laugh, returned to the bed, and lay down on it. She needed nothing more to know the sound of a plot failed. No man could laugh so in anything but the purest innocence, and as Alice knew it, so the widow must know it. All was ended there.

Yet the conversation continued below. Alice leaped up and returned to the window. Freeman had at last straightened to his full height, and stood staring at the widow. “My God, you mean this!”

“As I’ve just been told it, yes, yes, I do.”

“Well, if that’s what she’s told you, she needs a lesson in the animal sciences.” Freeman turned back to the horse, and then pivoted again. “Good God, was that the little wretch’s scheme? To tempt me into rashness and lay some ill-gotten child at my door?”

Alice returned to the bed, rolled on her side, and hugged the bolster to her. Foolish, foolish girl! To have tried such a thing on such a man! And worse, oh, so greatly worse, to have confessed her condition to the widow! If she’d but kept to her deception she’d have stayed safe there for many months more. Now she would either be sent away as sinner or, if she admitted to Verley’s abuse of her, carted away to face Verley in a courtroom somewhere. If Alice knew one thing about herself it was that she couldn’t physically enter any room that held Verley in it. So, she would be sent away. She had admitted to the child, and there was no turning back from it now.

A pair of boots crossed the floor below and hit the stairs, not lightly. Alice leaped up as Freeman swung himself around the stair rail into the room, with the widow behind; he stopped short a good distance from Alice. She saw his face and realized she had never until that moment seen anything like anger in it.

“What in all the—” He stopped. His chest and shoulders rose once, and fell. He began over, in another kind of tone, but still not his. “The widow informs me you’re in the way to having a child. She informs me further—” He stopped again, and Alice understood his difficulty. He couldn’t believe, he wouldn’t believe, that such trust as he’d come to put in her could have been repaid with such treachery. Alice made herself look at him, made herself take his anger as her punishment, and was amazed to see that his disbelief in what she’d done lingered yet. Oh, how hard he would try to believe her something other than the thing she was! How hard he would try to turn back, as Alice would turn back, to before her claim against him! But if Alice had her choice she would turn back further yet, to before her claim of a child at all. Oh, if only she could go back there!

If only she could go back there. Alice looked again at Freeman, at the widow. Why, what if she could go back there? Wasn’t there a chance of it, right here? Freeman wished so much not to believe. He could be persuaded, Alice was sure he could be persuaded. But could the widow be persuaded to go along? And what if she didn’t? What risk did Alice take that could be any greater than the risk she faced now? If she left things as they lay she was already gone from the widow’s home. Why not try to go back?

Alice’s heart began to pulse until her flesh grew damp. She wiped her lip, her forehead. She said, “Child, sir?”

“Child, child,” the widow interrupted. “The one you claim Mr. Freeman’s got on you.”

“I’ve got no child in me, sir. Madam.”

Freeman whipped around to face the widow. “Did you not just accuse me—?”

“I accuse! ’Twas she accused. What game is this you’re playing, girl?”

“I made no such claim against Mr. Freeman, madam. Mr. Freeman may have had certain wishes—”

“The devil I did! I go to the barn to see to my horse as any man might expect to do in peace—”

“Did I not ask you,” the widow cut in again, “in the clearest possible terms, if you were with child? And did you not answer me—”

“I didn’t answer you, madam. I couldn’t understand how you could ask such a question, and so I made no answer.”

The widow stared at her. “Perhaps you didn’t answer my question, but neither did you deny. And at a moment further on, when I said to you, ‘Do you put this child to Mr. Freeman,’ you said—”

“I said nothing, madam. I didn’t understand your first question, nor your second, except as you might think, after seeing him a short time before—”

“You nodded your assent! As clearly as you shake your head now! What’s the matter with you, girl, do you think me a fool?”

“Here, now.” Freeman took a step forward, positioning himself more evenly between them. “Let’s collect ourselves. Let’s attempt to proceed in a rational manner. What matters now isn’t what was purported or believed purported at some point heretofore, what matters now is the state of affairs at present. Answer me, Alice, with the fear of God’s wrath in your heart, are you or are you not with child?”

With the fear of God’s wrath. And what was God’s wrath? A vague, unknown, distant thing, no matter how desperately described by the reverend, as compared to the other choices laid before her. “I am not, sir.”

The three of them stood in silence for the space of time it took Freeman to expel a breath, the widow to take one in, and Alice to hold one.

“All right, then,” Freeman said. “As we have no child, we can therefore have no false accusation. We can have nothing, in fact, but some false assumptions. And let me say to you right now, Alice, whatever you might have fancied as my intention toward your person, that too was falsely assumed. Now I suggest we put this behind us and return to whatever business we’d been engaged in before this unpleasantness began.”

He strode to the stairs. The widow peered a second longer at Alice before following him down. Alice sat down hard on the bed, as suddenly weak as if someone had punctured her lungs, but she hadn’t sat for a five count before she realized she couldn’t afford such luxury. She must know what they said of her yet. She pulled herself up and went to her spot on the stairs.

The widow had wasted no time in laying out her case again.

“I said to her flat out, ‘You put this child on Mr. Freeman?’ and she gave me a clear nod. Further again, when I entered her chamber I found a pouch that had at one time held pennyroyal—pennyroyal, which you well know will destroy a conception. And look how she’s filled out—”

“Widow Berry, you lay too much on a nod. She admitted to a state of confusion over your question; she might have been nodding at anything under the sun in response to it. As to the pennyroyal, it has its other uses, has it not? As to her filling out, no doubt she eats better here than she has in her entire lifetime. Besides, what might she gain by denying a condition, which if true, will certainly show itself down the road?”

Time, Alice answered him silently. She gained time. And she counted as gain every hour she remained safe in the widow’s home. Besides, who knew what might happen down Freeman’s road?

A
s hard as Freeman tried to turn them back to the time before the “unpleasantness,” it couldn’t be done; he lasted only the remainder of that day and night and left the next morning for Barnstable. Alice waited in dread for the widow to confront her about the child, but she did not; after two days Alice began to hope that Freeman had indeed convinced her she’d mistaken Alice entirely. There remained the scene in the barn, but of that too the widow said nothing. In fact, she said little at all. She spoke when she had to in thin, taut sentences, and except for the hum of the wheel and the thump of the loom the house fell into silence, the walls shrinking in around them like a chestnut burr around a pair of blighted seeds.

So they went on, Alice spinning, the widow weaving, Alice making trips to Sears’s store with their cloth and listening to the talk of politics that filled the air, even from the women now. They tossed about the men’s words as well as the men ever had—non-importation, tyranny, taxes. Alice even overheard Mrs. Cobb quoting the widow’s own words, adding in her own embellishment: they might pickle her and ship her to the West Indian Islands in a herring barrel before she’d pay a king’s ransom for a bit of cambric.

The widow and Alice took the necessary time away from their textile work to pick and preserve watermelons, cherries, and currants. Nate came often to inquire if Freeman had returned, or so he said; sometimes he waited in the yard or near it to see if Alice would come out on some kind of errand. Alice knew this because she could look out the window and see him lurking. Sometimes, when Alice didn’t appear, he would make a slow stroll in the direction of the landing and come back again; if someone passed him in view of the widow’s house he waylaid him with conversation, darting his eye at the house as he talked. Most of the men thus accosted seemed willing enough to talk to the boy; once he stopped an Indian girl, and she seemed willing enough too, until the Indian Sam Cowett came out and beckoned to her to get along.

Alice watched Nate and wondered things, the old things, but some new things too. Strange things. What if she went out just now to collect a tow sack from the barn? What would Nate do? Would he follow her into the barn? Would he try to touch her? If he didn’t try to touch her would they stay in the barn and talk of Freeman, or Otis, or the widow, or Nate’s father, as they’d done before? Or would he ask about Alice’s life now? If he did, what would she say?

As it happened one day she did step outside to pick a handful of parsley for a sauce just as Nate came walking back up the landing road, and he saw her and walked slowly over the grass, as if afraid she’d duck back inside if he came too fast at her, as if she were a deer. But as she watched him come into the dooryard she thought he was like a deer too, slender but sure-footed, graceful, strong. He came up to her and reached out a hand, not to touch her but to take the parsley, to hold the parsley. He grinned.

Alice said, “What amuses you so?”

“I’m not amused, I’m glad.”

“What are you glad of?”

“Of everything. Of parsley.” He lifted it to his nose, sniffed it, bit off a stem.

Alice reached out. “Give it to me. I must go in.”

He handed her the greens without argument. He said, “Am I still not to touch you?”

“You’re never to touch me.” She turned away and moved toward the house.

He said, “Alice!” so violently from behind her that she started.

She said, “What? What is it?”

“Nothing. I just want you to know that you may touch me whenever you like.”

Alice ducked inside, her face in flame.

That night she lay awake thinking of Nate, how young and silly he was with all his talk of gladness and parsley and touching him. But after a time of lying awake Alice began to think something else about Nate. She had told him she did not want him to touch her and he hadn’t. Alice began to think too that she didn’t know a great deal about this subject of touching. She had Verley, who had touched her when she hadn’t wanted it, and she had Freeman, whom she had touched when he hadn’t wanted it, neither example giving her the least idea how the thing might work when the parties were together on the subject. Nate had said she might touch him, which took care of his part of it, but what of Alice? Why should she want to lay a hand on him? She knew well enough what would happen the minute she tried it. His hands on her. Not like a Verley, perhaps, at least not to start, but it would be just the same at the end, or close enough to it. She might wonder what that soft, pink cheek would feel like against her palm, and whether it had come into its whiskers yet; she might wonder whether a hand slipped under his shirt would discover a smooth, slender back, as it looked, or a collection of lean muscles and sinews, of the kind required to send wood chips flying wildly. She might wonder, yes, but wondering did not cause pain. Wondering did not cause bastards.

When Alice slept, which wasn’t until she’d kicked the sheet loose of the bed tick, she dreamed of Nate, and Freeman, and Verley, all mixed in together, and of herself, running away from them down a long, narrow, stinking street that she didn’t recognize in the dream, but on waking she knew it to be her old street in London. As the street came out of the grayness so did the little house, and her mother and father lying on their bed in the corner of the kitchen, their limbs all tangled up in each other, her father’s hand gripping her mother’s buttock as he slept, her mother’s hand curled around her father’s cheek. The buttock would have been smooth, the cheek rough as bark, until her father got up and scraped at it with the razor. Alice remembered this too: her mother touching her father’s cheek in the morning after he’d worked it over and saying, “Better.”

FREEMAN STAYED AWAY
until September, when his uncle died, as they said, from drinking cold water, and he was forced to return to see his affairs to a close. His arrival brought the men to the widow’s house as usual, where a few hasty condolences were voiced over the uncle, but soon enough they returned to battering away at the same old subjects. Trade. Taxes. Non-importation. From the discussion Alice learned that Boston held strong on the agreement, with Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania following behind. At the end of the meeting they again toasted their king, but it seemed to Alice that Freeman did so with something akin to hurt feelings.

In the few moments Alice had spent in Freeman’s company since his return he had barely spoken to her or looked at her, and if he said more than two words to the widow, Alice didn’t hear them. Alice imagined that although Freeman’s singular laugh had cleared him of the charge of actually penetrating Alice’s flesh, an acceptable accounting of the events in the barn must still be wanting. Freeman stayed only the single night and rode off again, this time to Boston.

THE VILLAGE NOW
smelled of an odd mix of fresh-cut hay and fetid oil as the whalers returned from the north with their holds full of blubber and began to boil it down. Neither the sickly sweet smell of the hay or the cloying smell of the oil disturbed Alice’s stomach, and again she hoped it meant that the pennyroyal had belatedly taken hold, but even as she hoped, she knew it to be less hope, more dream. Yet the face in the mirror regained its color; with the cooler weather Alice was able to add a light shawl to her dress to conceal her fullness; the deception held.

The cloth went faster off Sears’s shelves, and on Alice’s trips to and fro she noticed the talk among the women turned to what each had done to support the non-importation plan. To save the sheep for wool, they wouldn’t eat lamb; they used beet sugar or honey or maple syrup to sweeten their bread or pudding; they traded recipes for tea made from goldenrod and blackberry leaves or made a kind of coffee out of rye and chestnuts.

Alice saw Nate now and then, sometimes at a distance as he attacked his father’s hay with a scythe, sometimes near to, if he happened to come along as she was leaving the store or stepping out into her dooryard. He kept his hands to himself, but at the same time he seemed to grow easier in her presence, as if assuming that Alice liked him near. Alice couldn’t think what she might have said to cause the change in him; she continued to act toward him as she always had; if she dreamed confusing dreams of him he couldn’t have known.

At the end of the month Nate came to say good-bye as he prepared to leave for Harvard College; the news saddened his grandmother and surprised Alice—she’d lost count of the days. He began by reporting to them that the Sugar Act had taken effect, displaying the same hurt surprise over this news that Alice had seen not long ago in Freeman. The widow received the news in solemn silence, but as Nate made to leave the widow said, “’Tis a time that needs men well versed in the law. Attend to your work and make me proud of you,” a little speech that surprised Alice, as from the widow’s previous talk she’d not understood her to have any great love for lawyers. Nate left but not without making a great show of rolling his eyes from Alice to the door; he would have her go out after him.

Alice didn’t want to go anywhere after Nate. She didn’t trust the new ease in him. She stayed at her wheel until it became time to collect the cow from the meadow, well ahead of sundown, it was true, but only because the wolves had made such noise of late. She stepped into the dooryard, and there was Nate, coming out of the wood much as he’d done the day he’d helped her pick up the cloth. He fell in alongside her as she walked but said nothing, more like the old days of the hot face and stopped tongue.

After a time Alice said, “Your father will be angered that you’ve kept away so long.”

Nate shrugged. “’Tisn’t so long. ’Tisn’t so long as I’ll be gone from here.”

“You’re unhappy to be going to the college?”

“I’m unhappy about a number of things. I wished to see Mr. Freeman before I left. I wished to go to another frolick with you. I wished—” He broke off.

They walked onto the meadow, the sun just low enough to blind them; Alice couldn’t at first spot the cow and thought it must have chewed its tether and wandered off.

“There,” said Nate, pointing at the scrub along the edge of the meadow, and Alice set off after it, slowly at first, but liking the swish of the grass against her skirt, liking the path of the sun on the grass, liking the crisp breeze that peaked the waves in the distance, she started to run. She heard Nate behind her, beside her; she put on a burst and pulled ahead; he caught her up and pulled ahead, then ran backward until he tripped and went down, spread-eagled in the grass. He leaped up and began to hop around, clutching his ankle; Alice came up in all concern, but once she got close she saw he was clowning, wagging his elbows like a chicken again, just as he’d done at meeting. Alice began to laugh. Such a silly thing, to run like children, to hop around like a chicken! Nate saw the success of his clowning and joined in with the laughing, making Alice laugh the more, until she hiccupped, until the tears ran. She bent low to untether the cow, hiding her face; she set off the other way across the meadow, the tears on their own plan now. Nate pulled up alongside, peered at her, and stayed silent.

At the barn he pulled open the door for her, bent down, and peered at her again. He said, “Why do you cry, Alice?”

Alice didn’t know. She didn’t in the least know.

Nate said, “I should like to think it’s because I’m to leave soon and you won’t see me for ages and ages, but I think it more like a bee sting, or some dirt in your eye. Or perhaps you wish to kiss me good-bye but don’t quite know how to enter upon the subject.”

Alice couldn’t help it. She started to laugh again. Oh, he was so silly! So young! She said, “’Tis nothing but my eyes mistaking happy tears for real ones. Thank you for finding the cow. Good-bye. May you do well at the college.” She tugged at the cow, but Nate held on to the tether.

“Will you miss me, Alice?”

Yes, she thought, surprised; yes, she would miss him, but she said nothing.

He said, “I shall miss you too, Alice.”

They stood with the cow between. What
would
it be like to touch him? What harm, now that he was going off? She leaned over and laid her palm against his cheek; she felt the remnants of morning whiskers, but soft ones. Nate put his hand over hers and slid her fingers onto his lips. How soft his mouth was! She pulled her hand away. “Good-bye,” she said. “Good-bye and good luck to you.”

She yanked the cow into the barn and pulled the door closed.