Susannah Morrow (30 page)

“And you…believe this is a sin.”

“What else could it be?” I cried. I pulled back from her, looking at the shadows of her eyes, her hair—wild now, falling over
her shoulders, her bared breasts. ’Twas a mistake to look at her thus—the moments that had just passed filled my head again,
along with a quick, relentless desire that filled me with despair. I could not fight this, not over and over this way. Having
sinned once, I would sin again—now that I knew the feel of her, the taste.

She reached out for me. “I wish it were otherwise too. But I am…drawn to you. Do not mistake me—I did not want to be, and
yet I cannot seem to help it. And I…I have been thinking…Perhaps this is what I came to Salem for. Perhaps ’tis what God wanted
of us all this time.”

I loosed myself from her grip, reaching for my breeches. “I cannot believe that.”

“Because you won’t allow yourself the pleasure,” she accused. “Because you would rather be unhappy—”

“I am not unhappy.”

“Ah, Lucas, look at yourself!” She gestured at me, and I glanced down, watching myself fumble with the fastenings of my breeches.
“Already you lock yourself away from me. What just passed between us…’tis so rare. Have you ever felt anything so powerful
before now? Even with Judith?”

’Twas true, and yet my guilt over that was overwhelming. “Satan has read my heart; ’tis all. He presented me with a temptation
he knew I could not resist.”

“I am but Satan’s minion, then,” she said.

I could not restore my equilibrium. “I don’t know what you are!” I was defeated. “I don’t know what you are.”

She said nothing. I did not move as she eased herself from the keg, and her skirts fell again to cover her. Her bodice was
still unlaced; her breasts still bared, but she let it be. Her gaze lifted to mine. She whispered, “I have not been happy,
either, Lucas. Not for a long time. This seems…’Tis a gift. Would we not be wise to take it?”

I stepped away. Coldly I said, “’Tis a lure set by the Devil to trap us. We cannot mistake it for anything else.”

I turned my back on her and raced up the cellar stairs before she could call out to me.

Happiness…Ah, what was that but the greatest delusion of all?

I
CAME FROM THE CELLAR, HURRYING TO THE BARN AND HARNESS
ing the horse in a fever to be away. It wasn’t until I was nearly a mile from the house before I realized I was trying to
race Saul through the half-frozen mud and icy snow.

’Twas only the thought of Charity that brought any kind of settlement to my soul. ’Twas only the knowledge that I could not
fail her—at least not more than I had already done.

When I finally arrived, breathless and freezing, at Daniel Poole’s house in Salem Town, I was calm enough to speak. Though
when he opened his door and looked at me with concerned eyes, I thought he must see my sin shining like a new-made raiment
upon me. ’Twas all I could do to appear myself. When I told him over dinner of Charity, he said thoughtfully, “I had thought
you seemed troubled, Lucas,” and I was relieved and ashamed that he had not guessed more.

“She is only grieving,” Daniel said to me as he downed a tankard of cider. “To lose a mother…’tis a hard thing, especially
one so good as Judith. Bring Charity to my house. She will heal—Alice and I will make sure of it, and she will be good for
my children. Little Alice has longed for an older sister. Bring her a week from Saturday.”

I agreed with relief. Daniel was a good man, his wife godly. There were no better hands in which to entrust my daughter.

’Twas dark when I arrived home. I put Saul in the barn and rubbed him down, lingering over the task, before I went to the
house. As quickly and quietly as I could, I went into the parlor and closed the door. ’Twas a fire laid there for me.

I stood for a while at the window, until I heard the steps in the hall. Someone was awake; ’twas no doubt who it was. I left
the window and lay upon the bed, staring up at the hanging herbs. I tried to remember Judith, but her face was fading already
in my mind. Seventeen years together, and I was forgetting her so quickly. I rubbed my face with my hands as if the motion
would bring her back, and when it did not, I simply lay there watching the coals of a fire I could not bring myself to tend.

I saw the light shafting through the door as it cracked open, and Susannah followed it. The candle lit her face with a soft
glow, and that reminded me of the way the betty lamp had illuminated her in the cellar. But for the fact that her hair was
pinned up, her bodice neatly laced, we could have been there again.

She closed the door behind her, and then she set the candle on the mantel above the hearth and came to the side of the bed.

“Francis came by,” she said—such a mundane thing, as if ’twere a common occurrence for her to be here, at my bedside, as if
she were my wife, and we were discussing the day’s events. It startled me so, I answered her in kind.

“What did he say?”

“The preachers are coming to the village tomorrow. Parris has agreed to have you both at the meeting.”

“Where?”

“The parsonage.” She hesitated. “There’s other news as well. Annie Putnam is having fits now too. And Elizabeth Hubbard.”

I sat up fully. “Francis told you this?”

“Aye. Whatever this is, ’tis catching…Did you go into town?”

“Aye. Daniel Poole has agreed to have Charity. I’m to take her a week from Saturday.”

We fell into silence.

“I’ll wish you good night,” she said finally, taking the candle, moving to the door. If I said nothing, she would go.

I said, “Come to my bed.”

For a moment, I thought she would refuse, and I was not sure I could bear it if she did. “Is this truly what you want, Lucas?”
she asked.

“Aye,” I said.

She set the candle back on the mantel, where it flickered and smoldered.

“Take off your clothes,” I told her.

She smiled. “Ah, so that’s how you want it,” she said, running her hand over her breasts, sliding it down her bodice.

Her fingers were long and graceful as she fumbled with her laces—they had been knotted back together, I noticed, and remembered
how I had broken them in the cellar. I reached for my knife—I had not undressed; it was still belted at my hip. I slid it
from its sheath. It glinted in the candlelight, and Susannah went still. Her gaze slid to mine as I moved to sit on the edge
of the bed.

“Come,” I said, and she stepped between my knees and raised her arms to allow me access. I slid the knife between the laces,
slicing them easily, and then I sheathed the knife again and spread my hands beneath the lax camlet. I heard her breath, the
little catch as I palmed her.

“I want you against my skin,” she murmured, pulling away, stepping back. She no longer lingered; she slipped off the bodice
and her skirts until she stood naked before me, her pale skin glowing in the near darkness.

She stepped over to me, again between my knees, and her scent came to me so strongly it rocked me back. I touched her knees,
urged them apart, put my hands on her hips and made her straddle me. ’Twas like my dream, and yet not like it—she was there,
and the scarlet bed rug glowed around us, coloring the half light. But this time, I was the one clothed, and she as naked
as she’d been born.

She pulled at my shirt, her palms were warm on my chest, and then I was falling back on the bed, and her with me. The urge
to take her, to possess her, was as strong as it had ever been. As I shed my clothes in a frenzy and pulled her down again
to straddle me, I wondered if ’twould ever be different than this, or if we were destined, she and I, to need each other so
fiercely each time, to never pause, as if every meeting were the last, as if we might lose each other in the moments after.

Her skin was not perfect after all. Her shoulders were speckled with freckles; she wore dark moles as beauty marks—one inside
her elbow, one just above her navel—a tiny fleshy one at the curve of her neck and another just below her breast. There was
a single scar on her back, a whip mark cut deep.

“He did not whip me so much,” she told me as we lay, still coupled, in the cocoon made by green bed curtains. I had put the
candle in the sconce above the headboard, and now it sputtered, ready to go out. “He preferred to use his hands. I think…He
told me once that he did not want to mar the only thing he had of value. He planned for me to make a good marriage—to guarantee
his future.”

“But you ran away with the yeoman’s son,” I said.

“Aye. Though I did not run away with him, not exactly. ’Twas more as if I followed him.” She shifted, twisting onto her back
without untangling her legs from mine. “He had meant for me to come. He had asked me to, but I think…I think he was surprised
when I showed up in London. He did not know what to do with me.”

I traced her breast. I could not stop touching her. “What then?”

“I stayed with him a little while. Not long. A month…less than that. When he asked me to marry him, I left.”

“Why?”

She gave me a bemused look. “How can you care about this, Lucas?”

“Because I am ridden by the desire to know you,” I admitted. “Because you are in my head every moment, and I cannot understand
why.”

“And you think to learn the reason by knowing my history.”

“No. Because…” I sighed, then closed my eyes, trying to think of the words. “Because when I am making a spinning wheel, I
can tell by the fit of the wood in my hand what part it will be. People have never been that way for me. I am…mystified…by
them. ’Tis not what I want now. Not for you. Not for…”
Us.
I could not say the word. I could not think of a future beyond this moment. I pulled her to me. “Tell me, why did you not
marry your yeoman?”

“Because I did not love him. Because I ran away with him to punish my father. Because I was a girl from Lancashire and London
is…London was…like no place I’d ever seen. I wanted to know every inch of it. To marry him would have been to fall into a
trap. I was not ready for it.”

“You were not ready when it came to Geoffrey, either? Or Robert?”

She smiled. “Will you list them all for me?”

I didn’t smile back. “I cannot name them all.”

“Oh, Lucas.” She kissed my cheek. “You have already done so.”

I looked up at the herbs hanging like shadowed nests in the corners. “You must know this,” I said carefully. “When it comes
to that trap you speak of, I—”

She finished my thoughts softly. “You cannot marry me. I have not asked it. I will not. I do not need marriage.”

“The law is clear. You are my wife’s sister. ’Tis the law—”

“I understand well enough. I am no fool, Lucas.” Her hand came up to rest against my face. “It doesn’t matter. I am glad to
be here. I was…happy to leave London.”

“Why was that?” I asked quietly, half afraid of the answer, of Susannah’s revelations, which made me as uncomfortable as her
secrets.

“Robert was dead,” she said matter-of-factly. “His son did not want me there.”

“London is a big city.”

“Aye.” She sighed. “But it seems I’ve the heart of a country lass. I could not get Lancashire out of my bones. And so I left,
to find it elsewhere.”

I laughed. “To find it here.”

She smiled back at me. “I was not certain, when I left London, that I would stay here. I did not think beyond the next tide.”

“And now?”

“And now…I will stay until you wish me gone.”

“Just now, I cannot imagine that.”

Her fingers trailed lingeringly through the hair on my chest, a light tease, though her expression went thoughtful. “Perhaps
you do not know yourself as well as you think,” she said. Then, as if to ease her words, she leaned down to kiss me. She whispered
against my mouth, “Again, Lucas.”

I put my arms around her and rolled her onto her back and obliged her, but even as I lost myself in the sensation of her body,
I felt a soft doubt that fed the guilt I could not quite appease, a quiet fear.

I
WOKE TO A POUNDING ON THE DOOR
. T
HE ROOM WAS HEAVY STILL
with night. I pulled my nightshirt over my head and stumbled groggily through the cold room, wrenching open the parlor door
to see Susannah coming down the stairs. She glanced at me in question, and I shook my head and went to the door while she
stood back, wrapping a shawl about her.