Grace had no way of knowing how her request touched me. When I had left Connecticut, it wasn’t with the ambition of peddling. I had yearned to be a teacher. It seemed to me that most schools went about the work of instruction entirely backward, crushing children’s natural curiosity and deafening them to the wisdom of their own internal voice. I did not have sufficient qualifications to do such work up north, where even distant settlements had their pick of fresh-minted graduates from our many universities and seminaries. So I had come south, thinking that this population might be less nice about such matters. But I’d soon discovered that even here, communities well set enough to have a school wanted credentials, or at least maturity in years, neither of which I could claim, while the poor in the remote places didn’t care to have their children schooled at all.
“Why don’t I do as Annie suggested and ask Mr. Clement? He is a scholar and loves learning; I am sure he will see that this is a good thing for all the children, not just Prudence…”
Grace pulled angrily at an apple bough, stripping the new leaves. “You don’t know him! Perhaps Annie is right, after all; for all your reading you-you…” She did not complete the sentence. Whatever unflattering thing she had been about to say, she evidently thought better of it. But she gave me another of her unnerving stares, this time letting her gaze pass from my head to my toes and back again. Then, as if she’d noted nothing worth looking at, she turned and strode off. I stared at her retreating back, gaping like the loping nimshi my father had so often called me.
As it happened, Mr. Clement himself provided the opening by which I was able to sound him on the matter. He sought me out before the dinner hour, apologizing that he would not be dining down that night on account of a most painful headache.
“In truth, Mr. March, though my son can vex me at times with his mercantile obsessions, I am ill fixed to do without him. I have been forced to spend the better part of this day in the soul-deadening occupation of calculating gristmill accounts. Of what possible consequence is it if Mrs. Carter’s grain weighed in at six bushels or sixty?”
I thought it better to resist the obvious reply: that it was of great consequence to Mrs. Carter. Instead, I asked, rather disingenuously: “Cannot one of your slaves be trained to do such routine factoring?”
Mr. Clement shot me a reproachful glare. “And have him forging papers for every passing runaway?” He rubbed his brow. “Are you not familiar with the history of the Tidewater insurrection, Mr. March? The women and children butchered in their beds? The simple farmers, rewarded for their indulgence to their slaves with a pickax through the skull? That butcher, Turner, was a literate man. You should study that tragedy. I must say that we in these parts have not ceased from doing so, though it is now a decade gone. What great moral reasoning dictates that I should risk having my wife slaughtered in consequence of my slave reading some incendiary tract? Your Yankee pamphleteers have much to answer for. I’ll not have anyone on this place reading those foul, intemperate, slanderous rags!”
I had never heard him raise his voice before. Now he pressed the tips of his fingers to his forehead and winced. “Forgive me for my own intemperance. I am not myself. I did not mean to offend you.” He made a bow then, wished me a pleasant evening, and withdrew. I went to the kitchen, begged a brace of apples, and retired to a lonely supper, accompanied by my own confusion.
By morning, I had made my decision, and so they came that night. Grace waited till she saw my lantern passing across the lawn that divided the house from the manager’s cottage. I had barely splashed some water from the ewer on my face when I heard a scratch on the door. She stood there in the dark, Prudence at her side. The child did not look in the least as if she had just been roused from sleep. She kept shifting her weight from one small foot to the other in a skip of excitement.
“You managed it, then? Annie did not notice you rousing the child?”
Prudence gave a giggle. “Mama snores too loud to notice nothin’!”
“Your mama is up before the birds,” said Grace gently, “making the marse’s cook fires and warming his bathing water. That’s why she falls dead asleep as soon as ever she lays her head down.”
I had trimmed and mended a goose quill and ruled up a sheet of foolscap, so we opened the Webster’s and set to work. She was, as Grace had predicted, an apt pupil. Tell her a thing but one time and it stuck like clay to a boot. I believe she would have worked at the letters all night if I had not stifled a yawn and Grace called a halt to the lesson. Prudence turned to her, with a disappointed, “Oh!”
“We must not impose too much upon Mr. March’s kindness, and you, my little one, need some sleep, after all.”
“You may come again,” I said. “You are a good girl and have done well.” We agreed that if it were possible, and conditions seemed safe, we would meet for an hour every other evening, as long as my stay with the Clements lasted. At the door, Grace turned. She smiled at me, and I realized I had not seen her smile, not fully, since I had arrived there. “Thank you!” she said, and her voice was so warm I wanted to wrap myself up in it, like a quilt.
For the next two weeks, I felt my life more complete than during any period I had known until that time. I had my studies by day, enriching conversation in the evening, and at night, a work that I found uplifting. On the nights they did not come, I stayed up in any case, planning how best to instruct the girl at our next lesson. I looked forward to each part of my day with equal pleasure at first, and then, as Prudence progressed more quickly than I could have imagined, I found that it was the secret schoolroom that most inspired me.
I had grown to like the rich clarets that Mr. Clement poured, but on the evenings of our lessons I held back at dinner so as to better stay alert. One night, Clement noticed my abstinence, and commented upon it; so I laughed and let him pour liberally for the duration of the dinner.
As a result, my judgment was impaired that night, for I let the lesson go longer than usual, and was waxing on some point of no doubt critical pedagogic importance when I noticed that my pupil, for the first time, had dropped off to sleep, her little chin cupped in her hand. I glanced up at Grace, who smiled at the drooping head. “I will carry her,” she whispered, rising.
“Surely she’s too heavy for you…”
“No, no. Not at all. I have grown strong from lifting Mrs. Clement. Oftentimes she is too faint to, well, to ease herself unassisted…”
She glanced away. I felt the heat in my own cheeks, half embarrassment, half anger at the thought of Grace, as refined as any gentlewoman, required to hold the buttocks of demented Mrs. Clement and to clean her stinking chamber pots.
“It’s not right!” I said, forgetting to modulate my voice.
Grace smiled then, not one of the rare, sunshine smiles, but a sad smile of resignation. “If you live with your head in the lion’s mouth, it’s best to stroke it some,” she said.
It was, perhaps, the beauty of her curved lips. Perhaps it was pity, or admiration for her dignity or her patience. Or perhaps just the extra glasses of claret. I stood, reached out a hand, and touched her cheek. And then I kissed her.
I was eighteen and I had never kissed a woman before. The taste of her mouth was like cool spring water. The sweetness of it made me dizzy, and I wondered if I would be able to keep my feet. I felt the softness of her tongue in my mouth for a moment, then she raised her fingers, laid them lightly on my face, and gently pushed me away.
“It’s not wise,” she whispered. “Not for either of us.”
I was overcome with a rush of confused emotion: delight at the sensation of my first kiss, mortification at my lack of restraint, desire to touch her again, to touch her all over, to lose myself in her. Alarm at the potency of my lust. And guilty awarness that I had an obscene power here. That if lust mastered me, this woman would be in no position to gainsay my desire.
“Forgive me!” I said, but my voice came out like a bat squeak, barely audible.