“Do you always favor a question with a question? I confess you bring me. She does. And the night air—and this scaffold. I’ve been studying the nail heads in the wood, Pearl. Know you that once, when herbs and bloodletting failed a patient of mine, one dear to me, I found my head empty of all wisdom imbibed at the Royal College.” His words came racing now, and I could scarce keep up with them. “An old method for curing ague says to situate yourself at a crossroads at midnight, and that is precisely where I found myself. Turn three times—so the wisdom goes—whilst driving a fair-sized nail into the ground up to the head. Then walk backward from it before the clock completes the twelfth stroke, and voila, the fever is expelled, moving instead to whosoever next steps on the nail. And what of the hapless soul who earns the ague, you ask?” He caught his breath in a sigh. “What can it matter but that somebody does? All bindings are commodities, Pearl. All life is barter. This sturdy scaffold: you have stood upon it—you know it? Or rather, your mother has—with you in tow.”
“For three long hours,” I put in, perhaps too willingly. “Her arms quaked holding me. The governor and his men frowned down on us from the meeting-house gallery.”
“Now, that’s the sort of morsel I crave, Pearl, as I patiently haunt my side of the line. We had a bargain, after all, but you’ve not returned to honor it. Have you another morsel for me? I would know you, Pearl. I would watch your mother walk these muddy roadways year after vanished year. How has she suffered? Where might she pause at market? Who will ease her day’s burden with a smile?”
“Spit on her hem, more like,” I murmured, cross that his talk had turned from me to my parent, who had, in my opinion, earned no such trifle.
He settled on a creaking step of the scaffold to urge me on, oblivious. “I hear, for instance, that you own the prettiest dresses in Boston. And that your mother flits to the dying like a moth to flame.”
“She tends the sick.”
He nodded agreeably. “She has a healer’s hands, but without hope to guide them.”
“Tonight she watches at the governor’s bedside. She’ll help the servants and have his measure for a robe.”
He looked up. “And how are you here by yourself? You should go at once before you’re missed.”
“You haven’t paid me yet.”
He surveyed me dully.
“All life is barter,” I reminded him.
The doctor felt in his pockets, sighing as he searched, and his bottle made a soft thunk in the grass. Because he came up empty-handed time and again, and because it seemed to pain him, I saw fit to give him more chatter. I told in a soft voice of my mother’s watch at the governor’s deathbed, of how tonight I’d crept up the stairs (but once) and heard her speaking to the doomed worthy almost as she spoke to me, in a mother’s voice. (Had the presence of Death made him a puling baby, then?) I told of my unfinished sampler and her matchless embroidery (she would not make pretty that savage emblem at her breast, though I begged her to decorate it and spite them all), of Eden and the coiled serpent, of brushing Mother’s long hair in the coppery twilight. I told of her lilting voice and the ever-fresh supply of impromptu lullabies that came like salmon from the rivers, slippery gifts from another world. I withheld her early effort to drown and be quit of me (this lives like a sore under my tongue, and I never air it), but I did describe her sporadic witless days and nights. I told how her strength seeped away and her neck seemed broken and how, at such times, I had to rouse and dress her, though her glazed eyes were Hell’s windows. I told of things lately on my mind, mine alone, of Simon and his princely brother, of stones hailing as I outran the resident holy pygmies, of the lure of the forest.
At last, slowly, he drew his pockets out and left them hanging linty for me. He pressed three warm fingertips to my runaway mouth and bade me stop, for he swore his heart was breaking, and it vexed him. “I have only a bitter, small specimen, Pearl, but you will have it in pieces. Let me repay you now, and we’ll resume our game in a more fitting time and place.” He paused to consider. “I have neither feather nor coin to offer, but you’ve heard of the great city of London?”
I nodded. Of course I had. What mooncalf hadn’t?
“You know it’s a vast stage, then, with all and sundry calling ‘Show!’ night and day, even under the offended nose of Cromwell. This you may know, but have your deprived ears heard of Bartholomew’s Fair at Smithfield?”
I sank to the night-moist grass in a willing heap, parked elbows on my knees, and gazed up at him. He paced the scaffold as if it were a wooden balcony from which a painted sign emblazoned with the words “Show! Show! Show!” hung. “A fair, sir? I have heard of them. We have none in Boston, though Election Day is nearly—”
“Of course you don’t, which is why I propose this as your due. Imagine a full fortnight of puppet-plays and hobbyhorses. Can you do that, Pearl?”
I nodded eagerly. He leaned close and I smelled the bottle on him, a heavy sweetness.
“As you step upon the grounds, you hear first the criers: ‘What do you lack?’ and ‘What is it you buy?’ And it unfurls at you like a great banner of brilliant color and sound and motion: wooden stalls adorned with gingerbread and mousetraps, theatrical booths and toy shops, pantomime operas and masquerading beggars, street performers, human freaks—”
“Freaks, sir?”
“Such as the girl of sixteen years, born in Cheshire, no more than eighteen inches high though she can whistle like a seven-foot sailor. Or the Giant Man, or the man with one head and two bodies, or the Little Faery Woman. Or, best of all, the man who can put any bone or vertebrae in his body out of joint and back again. And the animals, Pearl! As freaks go, witness the famed Horse and no Horse, whose tail stands where his head should do. Find puppies and ponies and whistling birds for sale, and join the swarming children who scour the ground for apple cores to feed the bears. For these bears dance, Pearl. What’s more there are performing dogs, peep shows, acrobats, dwarves, conjurers, and waxworks. There are pickpockets to spare, and mountebanks hawking rare and curious potions. There are canvas tents to dance and drink in, eating houses where you’ll find the most succulent roast pork imaginable. There is a symphony of ballad cries, drums, rattles, and bagpipes, and not least a rope walker who dares the journey with a duck on his head and a wheelbarrow before him containing two droop-eyed children and an Irish wolfhound. In short, there is spectacle, Pearl, living and breathing—and apprentice, lord, and milkmaid enjoy it together. Now,” he said wearily, for his bottle was drained, and with the dream of the fair receding he seemed as bereft as I knew I would be when he sent me away, which he promptly did, “go back where your mother set you down. Or rather,” he added abruptly, “first—come up here a moment.”
I stood my ground.
“You’ve been before,” he explained solemnly, “you and your mother both, but your father was not with you. Come, and I will stand on his behalf, and we will step forth in spirit, all three together.”
Daniel Devlin staggered up the scaffold steps. I felt, in the face of his evident lunacy, a throbbing in my chest and ears, and at length I understood that it was not lunacy but some bitter truth that plagued him. His face seemed distorted, and his eyes shone as he backtracked, fumbling for my free hand.
A voice that came from me but seemed not mine whispered, “Sir?”
He looked straight through me, and I shuddered. “Come, Pearl. I have tarried long with ghosts. Take my hand.”
“Will you bring him? Will he stand with Mother and me tomorrow noontide?” I was riveted by the sight of a shadowy figure across the way that for a moment I mistook for the very fiend whose name was bandied about Boston like hayseed (he must be out here somewhere, my father), come to witness our vigil. But it was only the minister, out from the parsonage in his nightshirt, as pale and wasted in appearance