There were many pewter plates, and there was more glassware than I had ever seen in one place. Even the light streaming through the leaden panes of the window casements held a silvery promise because there was more of it. The room where I lived with Mother was ever dark, even on the brightest spring day. Here was little dust to speak of, and no sooty film on everything. And on a shelf were books! Ten or twelve leathery volumes of different thicknesses, some with lettering of lovely engraved gold. One I knew, as the dame teacher used its dreary contents to help those of us who had outgrown the horn, but the others, like the great rug and the shimmer of glass and pewter, seemed to speak in a voice full of secrets.
I did not see his image until I had been staring a long while at the paintings on the wall at the back of the great hall. Even in the gloom I could make out the face closest to the hearth and appreciate its similarity to Simon’s angular mug (though I suspect it was, like the others, a sickly likeness). There was a drawn melancholy about this face, a darkness in the forthright stare that made it both fearful and fascinating to look at. The jaw was even harder than Simon’s, the nose sharper, and I wondered at this family’s greatness that its sons were objects of an artist’s brush. I couldn’t look away. Who had made this painting, and the others in the hall, and why waste them here on the dark rear wall?
Now and then I heard in the room beyond rustling or my mother’s soft voice, the voice reserved for the infirm.
Near the small feather bed in a corner where Simon must have slept so as not to disturb his mother in the room beyond, I found a flock of carved figures, crooked little beings from another world, neither animal nor human nor faery. I nearly made off with the smallest and finest—had it in my itching hand and would have slipped it into my stocking were I not afeared to find my fingers in the stocks. It seemed part dragonfly, part fox, and I wondered was the skewed shape of this and the other carvings because he couldn’t see his handiwork, or did his mind, like mine, leave this world when it could? I put the fox-fly back and touched gently every surface in his house. My two quick hands roved over the pottery and the trenchers he ate his meat and pudding from, the blankets that covered him at night, the hearth by which he warmed himself, even the pallet on which Liza surely slept. But I returned often to glimpse that fine visage on the far back wall of the hall. He had not Simon’s luminous, scarred beauty but the sun-browned strength and sternness of a man; he was older, perhaps sixteen, I guessed, to Simon’s twelve or thirteen years, and he was more sure, with eyes that beheld the world if not his place in it. I thought then that I would have liked to be the artist who painted him, who sat that long in righteous study.
My mother’s voice in the room beyond the stairwell washed over me, coaxing, gentle, punctuated by the occasional startling groan or angry but ineffectual outburst of Mistress Weary of this World. There was nothing like it—pain—to stoke a body’s rage. Some stayed pious and stern till the end, but most didn’t. Many an ill-mannered invalid lashed the well with ugly mutterings. It was a wonder women like my mother endured, but they did, washing and stretching the limbs that seized up in resignation, scraping furry tongues and peeling soiled linen from beneath bodies limp or spotted with sores. As I stood that afternoon, furtively measuring the shape and state of my new friend’s home life—and the face on the wall that would haunt my future as surely as the letter “A” had my past—I felt curiously calm. I hovered at the corner desk, pulling the wooden chair out as quietly as possible to sit like a lady intent on addressing a letter to her beloved lord, and though I dared not search out and soil a sheet of paper, I schemed to leave behind some trace.
Instead of writing, which I did poorly, I skulked round the room and, having little else, laid the prized oriole feather from behind my ear on Simon’s canvas mattress. The little carved sentinels seemed to watch me stooping there.
It was then the door slammed with a great flourish, and I flinched.
“And what hath the cat dragged in?”
Before I could retreat, I found Liza’s hot breath on me and was made to witness the black of her back teeth when she spoke. “I know you. I know all about you. What right have you here?”
I gestured weakly toward the rooms beyond. “My mother is there, ministering to the sick.”
“Your mother might have left her woe at the threshold.”
I felt defiance build in me like March wind, though I tried as best I could to contain it for Mother’s sake. “I’ll go, then.”
“You right will go, child. And don’t let me see you sniffing round Master Simon’s feet anymore. You think yourself a stealthy little mongrel?”
“No.”
“He is a good boy,” she said, her voice falling flat. “Let us keep it that way.” She looked as weary as her whining mistress in the room beyond sounded. But there was a growing delirium in the other woman’s voice that tugged like a cord at Liza’s attention. She shooed me and strode down the narrow hallway holding her skirts, past the stern young eyes of the painting, and her leather soles slapped on the wood. By the time I fled into the light, the lady of the house was shrieking to high Heaven, as if her very soul had been offended. Only my mother could rouse such passions in a body.
• • •
It was a relief to flee into streaky sunlight, but I was restless there and longed to hear the mistress’s voice. Faint though her presence now was, she had borne Simon, and I was grateful to her. But with gratitude forming a sick knot in my stomach, I wished her dead and gone too. I crept along to the rear of the house, crunching old snow. The lady’s own window was sealed fast and draped inside with cloth, but faraway voices came floating through the casements of the window facing out from the adjoining room. Perhaps there was an inner door open between them, for with little effort of concentration I heard Liza’s hoarse instructions, low and impatient. My mother’s voice was strained and haughty. The invalid spoke not at all. Perhaps she had drifted off to sleep. Liza grunted as if under a weight, and I understood that she was struggling to draw the bed linens out from under the sick woman. “You might make yourself useful. I’ve changed that basin already.”
Mother said, “Command me, then. I’ve not come to be idle.”
“No, misspence of time is not your crime, I’m told.”
There was no reply, but more heaving and grunting. I felt provoked on Mother’s behalf. It was usual for perfect strangers to take a knowing, nasal tone in our presence, to own us with their verdicts.
“I see you’ve made yourself at home among our local gossips. And your hands are ever clean?” Mother challenged. Though I could scarce hear her low voice, its familiar edge—normally reserved for me alone—unnerved me. “I’ve not met a servant with clean hands yet.”
“You could eat off my hands,” said Liza. “What part of you hasn’t the devil had his touch to?”
“That may be,” Mother said in a monotonous tone of affliction, and then, hotly, “But I’ve not come here to suffer your abuse. I neither seek nor offer apology. They’ve had their due. I’ve paid my debt with years.”
Liza, like a horse, blew a great blast of air through her nose. “Your debt. In England—here too, for that matter—they might hang you for like offense.”
“They might do me a service.”
“Mind that tongue.” Liza’s lilting voice had snagged on disbelief and something else, pity perhaps; whether it was for Mother or the sick mistress she manhandled I know not. She huffed and murmured, “And you still a young woman. I hope the child won’t take your view. Damp this cloth,” she said. “What sinner won’t thank God for the life she’s given? Wring it, please. We want to cool her, not drown her.”
I