The Taker (4 page)

When the service ended, my father, Kieran, took my hand and led
me down the stairs to join our neighbors on the common green. This was the reward for sitting through the service: the opportunity to talk to your neighbors, to have some relief after six days of hard, tedious work. For some, it was the only contact they’d had outside their family in a week, the only chance to hear the latest news and any bits of gossip. I stood behind my father as he spoke to a couple of our neighbors, peeking from behind him to find Jonathan, hoping he would not be with Tenebraes. He was standing behind his parents, alone, staring stonily into the backs of their heads. He clearly wished to leave, but he might as well have wished for snow in July: socializing after services typically lasted for at least an hour, more if the weather was as pleasant as it was that day, and the stalwarts would practically have to be carried away. His father was doubly encumbered because there were plenty of men in town who saw Sundays as an opportunity to speak to the man who was their landlord or in a position to improve their fortune in some way. Poor Charles St. Andrew; I didn’t realize till many years later the burden he had to endure.

Where did I find the courage to do what I did next? Maybe it was desperation and the determination not to lose Jonathan to Tenebraes that compelled me to slip away from my father. Once I was sure he hadn’t noticed my absence, I made haste across the lawn, toward Jonathan, weaving between the knots of adults talking. I was a tiny thing at that age, easily hidden from my father’s view by the voluminous skirts of the ladies, until I went up to Jonathan.

“Jonathan. Jonathan St. Andrew,” I said but my voice came out as a squeak.

Those beautiful dark eyes looked on me and me alone for the first time and my heart did a little flip. “Yes? What do you want?”

What did I want? Now that I had his attention, I had no idea what to say.

“You’re one of the McIlvraes, aren’t you?” Jonathan said, suspiciously. “Nevin is your brother.”

My cheeks colored as I remembered the incident. Why hadn’t I
thought of the incident before I came over? Last spring, Nevin had ambushed Jonathan outside the provisioner’s store and bloodied his nose before adults pulled them apart. Nevin had an abiding hatred of Jonathan, for reasons unknown to all but Nevin. My father apologized to Charles St. Andrew for what was seen as nothing more than the sort of skirmish boys get into routinely, nothing sinister attached to it. What neither father knew was that Nevin would undoubtedly kill Jonathan if he ever saw the chance.

“What do you want? Is this one of Nevin’s tricks?”

I blinked at him. “I—I have something I wish to ask you.” But I couldn’t speak in the presence of all these adults. It was only a matter of time before Jonathan’s parents realized there was a girl in their midst, and they would wonder what the devil Kieran McIlvrae’s oldest daughter was doing, if indeed the McIlvrae children harbored some strange intent toward their son.

I took his hand in both of mine. “Come with me.” I led him through the crowd, back into the empty vestibule of the church, and, for reasons I will never know, he obeyed me. Strangely, no one noticed our exit, no one cried out to stop us from going off together by ourselves. No one broke away to chaperone us. It was as though fate conspired, too, for Jonathan and I to have our first moment together.

We went into the cloakroom with its cool slate floor and darkened recess. The sound of voices seemed a long way off, only murmurs and snippets of talk drifting in from the common. Jonathan fidgeted, confused.

“So—what is it you wish to tell me?” he asked, an edge of impatience in his tone.

I had intended to ask him about Tenebraes. I wanted to ask him about all the girls in the village and which ones he cared for and if he had been promised to one of them. But I couldn’t; these questions choked in my throat and brought me to the edge of tears.

And so in desperation I leaned forward and pressed my lips against his. I could tell he was surprised by the way he drew back, slightly,
before regaining his wits. And then he did something unexpected: he returned the kiss. He leaned into me, groping for my lips with his mouth, feeding his breath into me. It was a forceful kiss, hungry and clumsy and so much more than I knew to expect. Before I had the chance to be frightened, he backed me against the wall, his mouth still over mine, and pressed into me until I bumped against the spot hidden beneath the front of his breeches and below the folds of his jacket. A moan escaped him, the first time I heard a moan of pleasure come from another person. Without a word, he took my hand and brought it to the front of his breeches and I felt a shudder run through him as he uttered another moan.

I drew my hand back. It tingled. I could still feel his hardness in my palm.

He was panting, trying to get himself under control, confused that I’d pulled away from him. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” he asked, studying my face, more than a little worried. “You did kiss me.”

“I did …” Words tumbled out of me. “I meant to ask … Tene-braes …”

“Tenebraes?” He stood back, smoothing the front of his waistcoat. “What of Tenebraes? What difference—” He trailed off, perhaps realizing he had been watched in church. He shook his head as though brushing aside the very notion of Tenebraes Poirier. “And what is your name? Which McIlvrae sister are you?”

I couldn’t blame him for being uncertain: there were three of us. “Lanore,” I answered.

“Not a very pretty name, is it?” he said, not realizing that every little word can bruise a young girl’s heart. “I will call you Lanny, if you don’t mind. Now, Lanny, you know you are a very wicked girl.” There was a playfulness in his voice to let me know he wasn’t seriously angry with me. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you should not tease a boy so, especially boys you do not know?”

“But I know you. Everyone knows you,” I said, somewhat alarmed that he would think me frivolous. He was the eldest son of the wealthiest
man in town, the owner of the logging business around which the entire settlement revolved—of course everyone knew who he was. “And—and I believe that I love you. I mean to be your wife one day.”

Jonathan lifted a cynical eyebrow. “To know my name is one thing, but how can you possibly know you love me? How can you set your heart on me? You don’t know me at all, Lanny, and yet you’ve declared yourself mine.” He smoothed his jacket one more time. “We should go back outside before someone comes looking for us. It would be best if we were not seen together, don’t you agree? You should go first.”

I stood there for a second, shocked. I was confused, still possessed of phantom traces of his desire, his kiss and the memory of his hardness in my hand. In any case, he’d misunderstood me: I hadn’t given myself to him. I had declared that he was mine. “All right,” I said, and the disappointment must have been evident in my voice because Jonathan gave me his handsomest smile.

“Don’t worry, Lanny. There is next Sunday—we will see each other after service, I promise. Perhaps I can persuade you to give me another kiss.”

Shall I tell you about Jonathan, my Jonathan, and then you will understand how I could be so sure of my devotion? He was the firstborn of Charles and Ruth St. Andrew and they were so thrilled to have a son that they named him on the spot, had him christened within the month, recklessly exulting in him in an age when most parents would not even name a child until it had lived for some time and proved it had a chance of survival. His father threw a great party while Ruth was still recuperating in her bed; had everyone from the town come in for rum punch and sugared tea, plum cake and molasses cookies; hired an Acadian fiddler, had laughter and music so close after the boy’s birth, it seemed the father was daring the devil—just try to come and take my boy! Just try and see what you will get!

It was apparent, from the earliest days, that Jonathan was uncommon: he was exceptionally clever, exceptionally strong, exceptionally
healthy, and above all, exceptionally beautiful. Women would sit rapt beside the cradle, beg for turns to hold him and pretend that the well-formed bundle of flesh and swirling tendrils of black gossamer was their own. Even men, down to the hardiest axman working for St. Andrew in the logging operation, would get uncharacteristically misty when brought in proximity to the babe.

By the time Jonathan reached his twelfth birthday, there was no denying that there was something preternatural about him, and it seemed just as obvious to attribute this to his beauty. He was a wonder. He was perfection. That could not be said of many at the time; it was an age in which people were disfigured by any number of causes—smallpox or accident, burned at the hearth, spindly from malnutrition, toothless by thirty, lumpy from a broken bone set improperly, scarified, palsied, scabbed from lack of hygiene, and, in our stretch of the woods, missing parts from frostbite. But there wasn’t a disfiguring mark on Jonathan. He’d grown tall, straight, and broad shouldered, as majestic as the trees on his property. His skin was as flawless as poured cream. He had straight black hair as glossy as a raven’s wing and his eyes were dark and bottomless, like the deepest recess of the Allagash. He was simply beautiful to look upon.

Is it a blessing or a curse to have a boy like Jonathan living in your midst? Pity us girls, I say; consider the effect a boy like Jonathan can have on the girls in a small village, in a town so limited there are few other distractions and it is impossible to avoid all contact with him. He was a constant, inescapable temptation. There was always the chance you might see him, coming out of the provisioner’s shop or as he rode across a field seemingly on some errand but really sent by the devil to weaken our reserve. He didn’t even have to be present to dominate our thoughts: as you sat with your sisters or friends to take up needlework, one of them would whisper about a recent glimpse of Jonathan, and then, he would be all we could talk about. Perhaps we had a part in our own bedevilment, for the girls could not stop obsessing about him, whether on the occasion of a casual meeting (did he
speak to you, the girls would want to know; what did he say?), or a mere sighting in town, when even a detail as trifling as the color of his waistcoat was discussed. But what we were really thinking, all of us, was: how he could look you over with an impertinent eye or the way the very corner of his mouth turned up in speculation, and how any of us would die to be in his arms, just once. And it was not just the young girls who felt this way about him; especially as he reached his teenage years, fifteen, sixteen, he already made the other men in the village seem spent, coarse, overfed, or scrawny, and the good wives started to consider Jonathan differently. You could tell by the way they’d stare at him, their feverish looks, flushed cheeks, bitten lips, and the eternal hope in a quick drawing in of breath.

There was the aspect about him of slight danger, too, of wanting to touch him the way a mad voice in your head tells you to touch a hot iron. You know you cannot help but be hurt, but you cannot resist. You must just experience it for yourself. You ignore what you know will come next, the unbearable pain of seared flesh, the sharp bite of the burn all over again every time the wound is touched. The scar you will carry for the rest of your life. The scar that will mark your heart. Inured to love, you will never be quite so foolish in the same way again.

In that respect, I was envied and ridiculed at the same time: envied for all the time I spent in Jonathan’s presence, ridiculed because I had made it plain that there was no romance of any sort between us. This only confirmed in the eyes of the other girls that I lacked the necessary feminine wiles to pique a man’s interest. But I was no different from them. I knew Jonathan had the ability to burn me up with the brilliance of his attention, like a flame to paper. A girl could be destroyed in an instant of divine love. The question was, was it worth it?

You might ask if I loved Jonathan for his beauty, and I would answer: that is a pointless question, for his great, uncommon beauty was an irreducible part of the whole. It gave him his quiet confidence—which some might have called aloof arrogance—and his easy, disarming way with the fairer sex. And if his beauty drew my eye from the
first, I’ll not apologize for it, nor will I apologize for my desire to claim Jonathan for my own. To behold such beauty is to wish to possess it; it’s desire that drives every collector. And I was hardly alone. Nearly every person who came to know Jonathan tried to possess him. This was his curse, and the curse of every person who loved him. But it was like being in love with the sun: brilliant and intoxicating to be near, but impossible to keep to oneself. It was hopeless to love him and yet it was hopeless not to.

And so I was afflicted by Jonathan’s curse, caught up in his terrible attraction, and both of us were doomed to suffer for it.

THREE