As for Simon, Liza was his only comfort. She was kind to him, he said, if brisk and impatient, and though he occasionally had to listen in the night, he hinted, when she took a furtive lover to her bed, Liza was a voice to follow and a relatively cheerful one at that. She was noisy at her work and let him be idle just often enough without forgetting that he could complete most any task if someone brought it to him or him to it.
I stroked the cold stone and sang a little parting song to Mistress Weary of this World, who had borne me a friend. Though the public festivities surrounding her funeral might be deemed colorful enough—with rum and cakes and trinkets for all—hers seemed to me a lonely end. Thinking thus in the damp churchyard made me long for my own mother’s arms and know, for an instant, the worth of that embrace, though her mind often wandered from me.
I didn’t go to her, of course, because I am as lazy as a cat and knew Mother was stooped over her needle and thread or churning butter, and that I would purchase her affections only with an hour’s work or more. Instead, I walked along the edge of the quiet churchyard hitting pebbles with a stick. I crept through the tall grass that swayed by the dappled tree line, a tiger in darkest India. I scrambled up a pine as far as I could go before the middle limbs, or lack thereof, blocked my ascent. I tugged at and arranged my dress and sat on a sturdy branch, legs swinging, high above the dead. I heard cows lowing on the distant Commons, a dog barking, wagon wheels grating the earth to the rhythm of horses’ hooves. I heard also the laughter of children, a sound that at one time would have haunted me. I felt the sap on my palms and—hoping, for Mother’s sake, that it was not on the skirt of my dress—listened to the taunts and playful shrieks grow distant. I felt not rage or melancholy, as I might have before, but a detached calm. Someone in this churchyard, and in this world, belonged to me now. I sat still and smiling above the dead.
I was not long in the tree when I heard a squelch of boots in the damp leaves and the light swish of vestments.
“Pearl,” said a voice I knew well from Sunday meeting, “come down from there.”
“No.”
“You mustn’t give the magistrates added cause to doubt your mother’s fitness. You don’t want them calling her teachings into question again, do you?”
“What teachings are those?”
“Exactly,” the minister said with a light laugh. “Come down, and walk a while.”
I studied his thinning hair, his pale, trembling hands. One of them found its way, as always, to his breast, as if he had run a vast distance. He was as thin as a sapling, but his voice at least was strong.
I pouted and crossed my arms, resolutely silent.
He strolled a moment among the graves, hands now clasped tight behind his back. This gave him an appearance of calm forbearance, but I knew better. I knew from years of observing him at the pulpit that those fingers, that palm, were itching to rest over his heart, which organ was, rumor had it, frail and faulty. I wished I could be one of the squirrels that sailed from branch to branch, tree to tree. I would escape into the woods without his pity.
“Why do you hide among the dead, Pearl?” His voice, for a moment, rang with hopeless wrath. “What draws you here? Do you wait hoping I’ll come out, as I did today, and speak to you? Do I seem a haven to you? I would wish it—and yet I wish you away, too, like any bright light that shines on failure.”
There was no denying that because he was a man, and kind, he brought me a degree of comfort. I’d even on occasion imagined him as my father—tried him on as it were, as I would a friend’s or cousin’s dress had I friend or cousin to speak of—but like the other townsmen I auditioned in mind, he fit ill. He would tie my morning bonnet with pale, fumbling fingers, I suspected, and because I made him nervous, I would feel forever nervous in kind. “I come to be among the dead, minister.” It was wicked, I know; mayhap I was a prophet unawares and teased him to ward off terror. “Are you dead?”
“Not quite yet, but in any case, you are alive. Haven’t you a friend to sport with?” His jaw clenched. “Chores to do? Life is hard for your mother, as you know. You might be a helpmate to her.”
“I am her helpmate,” I murmured, only half believing it. “And I do have a friend to sport with.”
“Then go to her. Don’t lurk here among the graves. It pains me to think of it.”
“I’ve come from him, just this morning, and I said the catechism with Dame Ashley after, and so my soul is safe for today.”
He looked up, alarm in his eyes. “It’s a finer knowledge than you imagine. Don’t discredit it, Pearl, nor let your mother’s damaged nature defeat you. You have a life and light of your own. Be true to it.” The minister shook his head distractedly and walked away from the tree in which I sat. His vestments made an angry swirl round him as he walked, hands clasped tight behind his back. “You are a lamb, Pearl, a lost lamb, and I have failed you and your good parent from the beginning.”
“Your sermons serve my soul well,” I said weakly, looking round for something or someone to draw my attention from his stern brow and twitching mouth. His pacing made me understand, for a moment, how hard my restless nature must have been on my mother.
“How,” he asked mysteriously, “have I kept his bitter secret thus long, only to find it lodged under my very roof?”
Even as he spoke, nodding with a kind of grim exuberance, I heard again the sound of boots squelching in the leaves. Both the minister and I looked to it and found a disheveled Dr. Devlin, hands behind his back, leaning over the fresh grave of Mistress Weary of this World. “A strange little bird,” he mused, peering up at me through his sad squint, “has lighted in our churchyard, minister.”
The good man appeared far more startled by this address than I was, and that was a puzzle. I had been given to understand—had overheard on my spying rounds—that the physician was an old friend of the minister’s, now boarding at the parsonage. Were their relations always so strained? Now the man of God hovered below my branch with bullish posture, and I saw from my vantage point the rosy bald spot on his crown perspiring. He thrust out his cleft chin, a pudgy infant’s chin in a man’s face, and I felt the stirrings of mirth at the unspoken bristling below me.
But then the doctor looked up and at me with those perilous gold-specked eyes, and called in a voice humorless as the night, “He might be a bloodless shadow, Pearl, for all the use he’s been. What other flock has suffered so dull a love?”
My body began to hum with the feeling it sometimes had in the woods, when an unseen presence unnerved me and bade me run. I was not afraid exactly, but there were things that came there, I knew, that could seize or overwhelm or slice me, the swipe of a panther’s paw or the current in the air before a storm, or a harpy from my own musings. It was a danger that for me, as for the doe or grouse, manifested itself in physical terms. I needed to run but had first to climb down.
The two men had drifted some distance apart, and perhaps in another time, had they been other men, they would have treated me to a duel. Instead they smoldered. I shimmied down the tree in rapt confusion, feeling my wool stocking tear underneath my dress. I could not remember such urgency, even as a young child in the presence of the governor when Mother, delivering to his grand house a pair of embroidered gloves, the most beautiful I’ve ever seen—guarding, I fancied, a lavish spell in their stitches—begged to keep custody of me. It was the minister, finally, who had convinced him. I looked at him now, so small and stung without