“Pearl is wayward,” said the minister, and that seemed to end the impasse, for the two men nodded as if in agreement. The distance between them diminished, and soon the physician had caught the pastor in a hearty embrace and they tolled with false laughter like rival schoolfellows. “Pearl!” called the minister. “Come here and meet my old friend, a sometimes wise physician.”
“I have had his acquaintance,” I called, dropping to a defensive crouch on the ground.
“Here, young lady. Right your posture. Come hither.”
I went and felt again the doctor’s winking gaze upon me. “Pearl,” he said simply, almost tenderly, nodding as if he knew me well. “I have had the pleasure of her acquaintance, Arthur, to be sure.”
There followed an interminable pause. “Yes,” I told the silence. I looked from one mute man to the other. “Why do you stare at me like cattle? What do you wish of me? A dance, perhaps?” I curtsied as low as I could and then stood again, waltzing a slow turn. “Mayhap a song?” I seized on my favorite verse of a tune Liza had taught me, “The Clarke of Bodnam,” and loosed my voice in a wailing frenzy:
Yet though my sins like scarlet show,
Their whiteness may exceed the snow,
If thou thy mercy do extend,
That I my sinful life may mend,
Which mercy, thy blest word doth say,
At any time obtain I may.
While the physician smiled, strange eyes twinkling, and clapped his hands, the minister looked appalled, and this left me pleased and frustrated. “Too idle for your tastes? Perhaps a fit, then? Will a fit amuse you?” I began shaking my head and hands and let my tongue loll. People sometimes traveled miles to watch a woman at her fits.
The minister began to look vexed, though Dr. Devlin held his gaze on me. “That will do,” the doctor said, as if we’d planned this eccentric outburst together. Clasping one narrow black shoulder, he steered the minister toward the graves. “Go along now,” he called over a shoulder, “lest you rouse the dead. I’ll expect you at dusk, at the line. Yes?” He winked at me, and I drank in sweet complicity like a tonic. Such unaccountable tolerance (I was used to being scorned, even stoned, for my thespian efforts) brought a rash of heat to my ears, but Dr. Devlin’s wink satisfied me in a way that nothing outside the forest had or could. Like Simon’s favor, it seemed a miracle.
I might have lost interest then, my heart grown fat on the physician’s sport, if not for the sneaking suspicion that they had—caught in their own drama—already forgotten me. My curiosity could scarce endure such a slight, and I slipped into the woods, creeping to the edge nearest them to kneel in shadow where the lady slippers bloomed. I listened with the babble of the distant stream at my back as they strolled, the doctor asking from time to time, without resolve, after the minister’s health and welfare. Was he warm today? Had the pain returned to his chest? Were the visions still troubling him? Had the herbs eased his stomach at all? What was it that weighed so heavily on his mind? He was aware, no doubt, that the rigors of charity, of forgiveness, would exhaust even a stout spirit. And having opened his heart to many a penitent, having borne the weight of countless sorrows, how can the responsible man rest while wickedness prevails, while the very heat of Hell seems to bubble up through his floorboards at night? “What will you tell the sinner, sir? Turn back? And what if such path is closed to him? Damnation is a pity, but there are more pitiful things. You sense the truth in my words, don’t you? It pains like a rotten tooth, Arthur. Extract it from me.”
“It’s difficult to know what is true,” the minister cut in sternly. “It is a difficult truth—though silence leaves a bitter taste in my mouth—that God alone can craft right judgment.”
“Would that He exists, then.”
The minister seemed to stoop under these words and brought shaking fingers to his temples. “Why do you toy with those whose trust you have savaged? Were you not my friend once? Daniel? Were you not her friend?”
The doctor soothed his charge with sentiments too soft for me to hear and held the other’s shoulder as if to steady him. “Death is friendship’s fond reward,” he called at length to the rocks and trees, to the pigeons and me, and sent one hand sweeping through the cemetery air. “And love’s. For sinner and saint alike, Arthur. But now,” he prescribed, steering the minister tenderly back toward the churchyard gate, “you must return to your rest.”
“What do you want here?” droned my pastor. “What would you have from us?”
“I would have you instruct me,” said the other firmly. “I crave spiritual guidance, which it is your civic duty to provide, is it not? As mine is to provide healing herbs and poultices.”
“Then make a public statement, Daniel,” he urged, anger flashing in his eyes. “Confess your crime. I have so counseled you—”
“But what do I gain by doing so without her consent, against her will? Shall I rob her more? Would you?”
“Would I?” The minister’s vehemence frightened me.
“No,” the doctor acquiesced. “Of course you wouldn’t.”
I knelt on a stick as they passed, and it snapped. The sound cut the air. The minister didn’t turn back, but the doctor did. He walked to the edge of the clearing, cast his searching gaze into the dark where I crouched as one in prayer, and bade me in little more than a whisper go home where I belonged, before he saw fit to tan my hide.
Later, in the garden, I told Mother of my strange encounter with the minister and his boarder, the new physician in town.
I had been weeding absently, watching plants sway in the garden Mother kept for physic, listening without care to the uproar of crows across the basin and imagining, with a sly and dreamy smile, that Simon was listening too.
No sooner were the words out of my mouth than Mother rose and rushed to me as to one in harm’s way. Clutching my shoulders, she fairly roared, “What are you, child, that torments me so?”
This bewildered me, and I must have flinched, for her face softened, and her grip relaxed. “I have heard as much—that he is returned to Boston—though our good minister would not have me know. As if our paths could fail to cross.”
“He?”
“The doctor you speak of, Pearl, is no friend of ours. He is a devil.”
Delighted, I tried to conjure his face and could not. “But the Miltons say—” I tried to twist away, but she held my shoulders fast and swiveled me round again. I knew better than to meet her eye, knew well how ferocious her resolve could be.
“Had I known that he stood in that good family’s house before me, I should never have crossed the Milton threshold.” Mother let go, exhaling hard, and walked away from me. “As for the minister, Pearl, has he not suffered enough for his sympathies? Why persist in going where you are not wanted?”
I knew enough not to pout but rubbed my shoulder for effect. “If I did not go there, Mother, I would go nowhere at all.”
She ignored my wit. “I’ll remind you. We have no use for doctors or surgeons. We have Goody Black, the midwife, for our ailments.” Mother settled on her knees with a hard sigh, staring past me at the sea. “Obey me in this.”
Her distraction humbled me more than admonishment could. In a feeble effort to recall her, I walked round and knelt before her. I reached out for the stark red “A” on her dress, which frayed artifact was, even in my earliest memories, like a ripe plum to my eye. Without a word, I placed my pale hand upon it, flat against her heart.
ONE SOUL THAT KNOWS YOU
I