The widow's war (24 page)

All was settled. Nathan Clarke would give over life use of house entire; he would remove his brother Silas, he would repair the crane and the window, but he declined to do anything with the furniture, as it didn’t belong to him, it belonged to Eben Freeman. Lyddie had forgotten that. She offered to return the furniture to Freeman, but he declined to take it. He was still of a mind to purchase a house in Satucket, he said, but until he had the house, he had no place to store the furniture. They agreed that Lyddie would keep it, with its free use paying for whatever she might be entitled to charge for storage. Lyddie well knew the more logical arrangement would have been a charge
to
Lyddie
from
Freeman for use of the furniture, but she didn’t argue the point; Freeman seemed in no mood to prolong his dealings with her. They set up the papers and arranged three dates: one when Silas Clarke would exit the premises, one a week later
when Lyddie would enter, one more a week after that when Aunt Goss would join her.

That Freeman continued to mind about Cowett was evident when during one of his rare visits Nathan asked if he’d seen “the Indian’s whore,” and Freeman had stiffened and looked first in Lyddie’s direction before he’d answered that he’d yet to have the pleasure.

Lyddie passed the time at her son’s house regaining more of the strength in her lungs and legs and hands by taking short walks and by squeezing on balls of yarn as she coached Bethiah with her knitting and sewing. The girl seemed low, and her lowness brought Lyddie down with her; if Lyddie took her own heart for the girl’s she would say it was because they were soon to part and Lyddie had no great hope of any visits between the two houses being either encouraged or permitted.

On the eighth of December Silas Clarke moved out of the house and took a room at the tavern. On the fifteenth Lyddie moved in. Jot brought her and her trunk in the wagon, with the cow trailing behind; the cow was Freeman’s final contribution to the negotiation, declaring that as the cow was listed separately from “keep and care” in Edward’s will, it should be treated separately now and return with Lyddie. Clarke had spouted and fumed, but Lyddie suspected he’d agreed in the end because he’d come to doubt Lyddie’s ability to keep herself without it.

Her second day at the house fell on the Sabbath, and Lyddie happened to be spreading Silas Clarke’s fresh-washed linens out to dry on the bushes when the Reverend Dunne came by. He would not come in but stood on her grass, staring pointedly at her washing and demanding her reasons for absenting herself from service.

Lyddie considered several different answers, but each would have
triggered more argument than she had the strength to counter. She decided instead on a simple “With all due respect, Mr. Dunne, ’tis none of your business.”

The next morning Deacon Smalley delivered her notice that she’d been cast out of the church. Lyddie half expected some sort of violence to befall her, or at the very least some tossing and turning and terrible nightmares, but her sleep that night was deep and dreamless.

Lyddie was hobbling from barn and house the next evening when she happened to look down the road and see a small, humped waif coming toward her. Lyddie watched and waited and soon determined that the waif was Aunt Goss, the hump a tow sack she’d tied over her shoulders. She dropped her sheet and hurried down the road.

“Aunt Goss! You were to come next week. Mr. Freeman was to fetch you and bring all your things.”

Aunt Goss dropped the sack in the road. “I’ve come now.” She kept walking.

Lyddie picked up the sack and followed; the old woman was nowhere near as disabled as she’d seemed; Lyddie had some trouble, with her weakened lungs and the heavy sack, to keep pace. They reached the house and Aunt Goss led the way in; she went straight to the one chair Lyddie had set up by the fire, collapsed into it, dropped her chin, and fell asleep.

Aunt Goss slept while Lyddie set up a stew, but when the steam came up in the pot the old woman wakened. She pointed a knobbed finger at it and said, “Mutton?”

Lyddie nodded.

Aunt Goss licked her lips.

Lyddie set them each out a bowl, putting a platter of bread between; she poured two mugs of beer and helped Aunt Goss out of
her chair. She needed a good boost to start, but once she was upright she trimmed herself well and set off for the table on steady feet. Lyddie made one attempt at conversation, inquiring as to anything else that Aunt Goss might need collected from the Hopkins house, but Aunt Goss held up a flat hand, and Lyddie took the hint. No talking while she ate. And she ate every bite. When she’d wiped the last juices from the bowl with the last piece of bread and drained the last of her beer she licked all around her lips and said, “Good.”

She got up, ignored the big southwest room that had held the Clarkes, picked up her sack, carried it into the tiny room off the southeast corner of the keeping room, dropped it on the floor, and looked around. “Needs a night jar.”

Lyddie went to the Clarkes’ room, collected the night jar, and brought it back. The old woman now sat on the bed, fingering the single blanket. “’Tis cold.”

Lyddie fetched the two heavy blankets she’d folded neatly on the Clarkes’ chest. When she returned Aunt Goss had lain down under the one blanket. Lyddie spread the other two on top. The old woman had begun to snore before Lyddie had reached the door.

Freeman arrived a half hour later. The minute Lyddie opened the door and spoke his name the snoring stopped, but Freeman had heard enough of it.

“She’s here, then.”

“Yes.”

“I told Betsey. Next week.”

He went into the little room, and Lyddie listened to him inquire after a sore gum, a kinked hip, an aching elbow, and only after the condition of a good number of other bodily parts had been detailed did he return to the keeping room.

“I’ll take her back in the morning.”

“Please don’t trouble, her or yourself, Mr. Freeman. She’s all right here, now.”

“Very well, then, let me pay you for the month.” He fished four pounds sterling out of his pocket.

Lyddie went to the shelf and took down her pot of coins to give him the difference, but he took the pot from her hand and pushed it back. “Forty-eight pounds a year is a fair price, and I still end up with a savings.”

“Very well, but if you wish to overpay, you must take something for it. Cider?”

He nodded.

Lyddie went to the pantry for the cider, and when she returned he’d pulled two chairs near the fire. They sat.

“Have you filled your beds?” he asked.

“I haven’t. And I’ve no expectation of it.”

“Because you’ve been cast out?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Did they mention—” He couldn’t finish.

“They cited my absence from meeting, and my working on the Sabbath.”

Freeman turned to the fire, picked up the poker, and jabbed at it. As if they’d been talking about it all along he said, “You’ve met this woman he has living there?”

“I have, but briefly. I’m afraid Mr. Cowett and I are not such neighbors as we once were. In time, I hope we might remedy that situation.”

He stared at her. “Widow Berry, you’re a kind of woman I’ve never before met.”

“And you’re a kind of man I’ve never before met.”

He smiled. “I’ve wished many times I’d missed the pleasure of meeting you.”

“Ah. But what’s done is done. We have met. In fact, we know each other quite well, I’d think.”

“I suppose we do. And yet I sit here and wonder this: now that you have your house, are you content in it?”

“Is that a question we ask ourselves? Do we not do what we must?”

“Yes, but whose
must
?”

“I would follow Mr. Otis; I would obey those dictates written on my heart. As long as I hurt no others.”

Freeman occupied himself with the fire in silence for some time. When he looked up he said, “You’ve yet to answer my question.”

“Allow me some time here before you ask it. In the meantime, if you wish, you might answer it yourself. Are you content in your house?”

“At Barnstable, at times, yes. When I’m at a distance, when I’m busy. At my sister’s, I believe I’m miserable most every minute.”

“Then perhaps you’d like to take a room.”

Freeman tossed aside the poker and stood up. “I don’t know how you can make such joke of this.”

As Lyddie had no answer she said nothing, and as Freeman could have nothing to say to nothing, he left.

Except for three seamen off a storm-tossed sloop, directed her way by Jabez Gray, Lyddie received no boarders. The seamen paid down their thirty-five pence for the night’s bed and board, drank up all her cider, and left next day for Marblehead.

Soon after, Lyddie packed a tin of honey cakes and a jug of applesauce and walked down the road to Cowett’s place. The woman urged her in, but there she appeared to exhaust either her social graces or her English; Lyddie stood awkwardly inside the door and described her return to the house and her hope of greater acquaintance with her neighbor; the woman nodded and smiled and shut the door behind Lyddie with what must have been great relief. Lyddie saw nothing of Sam Cowett but a half-mended pair of breeches tossed over a chair by the fire.

But as Lyddie walked home she was almost dropped with a sud
den rush of grief, a grief she had somehow lost amid all the rest of it.

She missed Rebecca. Or perhaps more truthfully, she missed the lost opportunity, all that time living next to the stranger when with very little trouble she might have discovered the neighbor.

Within a month Lyddie had put up her winter stores, dipped two hundred candles, boiled up a vat of soap, and purchased five barrels of wool from Winslow’s farm in preparation for the winter’s spinning. She got Aunt Goss to keep awake till dinner by giving her the task of sorting the fleece, picking out any pitch or matted bits, which Lyddie then greased and returned to Aunt Goss to card into fine straight bundles, which Lyddie then combed into rolls. By the first week in January the walking wheel was in place a safe distance from the fire. Lyddie tried out her hands and found them slow and awkward at feeding the wool; Aunt Goss watched, sucking her gums together, but remaining silent.

Lyddie worked at the wheel a short two hours the first day; the second day her hands cramped up after an hour; the third day she decided to give them a rest.

A light tap on the door the morning of the fourth day brought both women eagerly around; they’d had no visitors since Freeman’s the previous month. Lyddie opened the door and found Mehitable on the stoop; her surprise was so great she stepped backward, which made Mehitable do likewise. Lyddie had to take three steps ahead to catch Mehitable’s hand and attempt to pull her into the house, but Mehitable hung back. “I mustn’t. He returns at any minute and will inquire on my absence. I only wished to give you this.”

She thrust a clenched hand at Lyddie; Lyddie reached out, and a leather pouch with a white bead dropped into her palm, soft and
heavy. Lyddie opened it and spilled out its contents: seven shillings sixpence. She looked up at her daughter. “Come into the house.”

“I cannot.”

“Then tell me how you fare.”

“I fare well.” She looked down at Lyddie’s fingers, which were struggling to pick up the coins and return them to the purse. “And yourself, Mother? Are you able to manage your house?”

“All but my wheel. In time, I hope to get the better of it. The children are well?”

“The babe has cough.” Mehitable paused. “I see you do not ask after my husband.”

“With what I hold in my hand, can you be surprised?”

“I found your purse while you were still with us and couldn’t think what to do. I didn’t know what to think. At last I concluded you must have the money back, no matter the consequence to me. But I further concluded my husband meant you no harm. He wished only to persuade you of what was best for you to do. He was wrong to take what belonged to you, but now you have it back. Can you not forgive him as I have done?”

Lyddie stood silent. It seemed a short time, two seconds or perhaps three as Lyddie measured out each coin in grief and toil and apprehension. Mehitable burst out weeping and stumbled down the stoop. Lyddie wished to call her back, but beyond her daughter’s name she had no other words to offer.

Eben Freeman dismounted in front of the barn and walked his horse inside, tying him a safe distance from the cow; he’d experienced firsthand the cow’s tendency to raise a hoof whenever she sensed something solid behind her. He removed the saddle, grabbed a rough sack, and rubbed the horse down; he’d no intention of staying long, but they’d just come through heavy snow, and a wet horse steaming in a cold barn always led to trouble. Freeman fought the wind for the barn door and finally bolted it behind him, pushing through the drifts that had blown up between barn and house; when he reached the house door he lifted his knuckles, hesitated, then dropped them against the wood with some violence. While he waited he looked up at the sky; pewter gray and not through with them yet, but bad weather at Candlemas meant winter’s back was broken, or so the old women said.

The door opened. Freeman carried a picture of her in his mind wherever he went, and yet every time he saw her she looked nothing like it. Harder, he thought. More determined. He would soften her where he could. And he wouldn’t.

“Mr. Freeman,” she said and held the door wide, looking pleased enough to see him, but nothing beyond it. Which, he reminded himself, was how he’d wanted it. He might ask himself why he came through a storm to see such a look, but he might ask himself many things, some time when he had the stomach for it.

He stepped into the welcoming heat and looked around with approval. He couldn’t say what in the house had changed, but she’d reclaimed it, despite Aunt Goss carding wool by the fire, despite the girl Bethiah at the spinning wheel, her feet moving awkwardly forward and back. He’d heard from Betsey that Mehitable had sent the girl to her grandmother to learn spinning; he’d been glad of it and not glad. Another pair of eyes and ears. Not that he had anything so private to say. But the Widow Berry was glad to have the girl there, that much was apparent; she hurried over to set the tangled feet right by providing a demonstration, and the pretty dance brought Aunt Goss to attention. It brought Freeman to attention. Very well, then, he could live with it.

Oh, the things he could and couldn’t live with!

Freeman went to Aunt Goss and kissed her on the cheek; she lifted her head and looked up at him with more alertness than he’d seen in her at his sister’s. He wondered what these women talked about, alone with each other night after night.

The widow left the girl and came to Freeman’s side. He handed her the four pounds sterling, Aunt Goss’s board for the month, and she pocketed it. He could have paid the year in one, he could have paid via his brother Shubael, but instead he put himself through this monthly visit.

What he could and couldn’t live with.

“Stay to tea?” Lyddie asked.

He nodded.

She knew by now that tea for him meant cider. She went to the jug and poured his tankard before she set up the kettle for herself and the others. While he waited, Freeman watched the girl twist the wool between her fingers and walk the wheel, backward first, then forward, lose the rhythm and stop and start, stop and start. She’d walk five miles before she’d fill the spool, he wagered.

Once the tea had steeped, the widow set Freeman’s tankard and her cup together at the table, putting a fair distance between them and the aunt and the girl, and Freeman wondered if she’d set them apart on purpose. Could it be she had something private to say to him? He doubted it. And as he had but one thing of interest to say to her, he hated to exhaust it too early.

A grubby-looking journal sat open beside Freeman on the table, and he’d have given a good deal to be able to read just one of its pages, but the widow reached over and flipped it closed before he’d caught more than the date and the usual notation on the weather. All right then, best to drink his cider, say what he had to say, and get home to his sister’s; she wouldn’t be pleased if she had to set out two suppers.

“Do you happen to recall a conversation over a year ago where I mentioned a case before the court in which Mr. Otis attacked the legality of the Writs of Assistance?”

“I do, and vividly.”

“Then you might be interested to learn that the verdict has come in. Mr. Otis has lost his case.”

She gazed at him with the unfocused eyes of a person in deep thought and then nodded. “This comes as no great surprise to you,” she said.

“It surprises no one, least of all Mr. Otis. But although the Writs are declared legal, there seems little interest in their enforcement.”

“So. ’Tis the end of it.”

“’Tis the end of nothing.”

She studied him again, nodded again. “I would hope—” She left it there.

Very well, Freeman thought. He might not know what she wrote in her journal or talked of with Aunt Goss, but he thought he knew what she hoped of.

And without planning it, barely even thinking it, he fished in his pocket and brought out an assortment of coins. “How much for a bed?” he asked.

She looked straight at him and never faltered. “Without board?”

“With.”

“Up under the eaves, with such company as might wash in, or full room below?”

“Full room below.”

“Below room with meals, three shillings.”

“And what for a fortnight?”

Again, not a flinch. “Two pounds.”

“Well, then, at a savings of two shillings, best make it the fortnight.”

He flipped his hand upside down, spreading the coins over the table. He pulled out two pounds sterling and pushed them at her.

“Thank you,” she said.

He nodded, and they fell into their usual silence, like two birds after dark.

“Would you like to see your accommodation now?” she asked at length.

He nodded. She stood up, and he followed the gently swishing skirt into the northwest chamber. The minute he stepped into it he thought of that other room in the opposite corner, and that night in Barnstable, when he’d walked the floor in his own room while she’d lain in the one opposite. He wouldn’t sleep a minute in this house, he
was certain of it, but what did it matter? He’d not slept a great many minutes down the road, either.

She pointed out each piece of furniture as if he had no eyes, as if in fact he didn’t own them. She talked about linens and breakfast and dinner and supper; when she ran out of things to list she gave a little shrug and a smile and led him back to the keeping room fire. She reached for a fresh log, but Freeman got there first and dropped it onto the hot cinders. The flames shot up and turned her face bright gold, erasing the lines, making her appear the very opposite of himself, all rest and contentment. But was she? She barely limped now, the hands were marred but functional, her flesh had filled out some, but more than one of the old shadows still danced across her face as the flames withered.

“Will you answer my question now, Widow Berry?” he asked. “Are you content in your house?”

She had that way of looking off in thought as if she’d just been carried bodily out of the room. He’d been trying to decide if she’d been carried off to sea or only down the road when her eyes came back and fixed on him.

“I intend to be, Mr. Freeman.”