“I know not,” Mother said as I begged to be told what had made the lady shout. “Death throes. She is far gone.”
“Did you kiss her hand? Did you damp her brow?”
“Yes, yes. I always do.”
“Did the house servant come screeching?”
“Yes,” Mother sighed, “like a harpy. But she helped me ease the good woman to her afternoon’s rest.”
“But why—”
“I know not, Pearl. Now go.” She rubbed her temples and slipped into our cottage. “Let me rest.” Mother closed the door lightly. I kicked it.
I kicked the door again and again, feeling wrath shoot through me. When she did not reopen the door, I pitched sticks and broken shells from the garden rim at the walls. Still she did not return to me. She wouldn’t, I knew. She would only when others were about and to placate me was to protect us both. Otherwise she let me rail. Often she threatened after these episodes to place me in service with a stern and godly family—the custom for older girls—but I think she knew not whom to ask. Though she and her infamous “A” were no longer so reviled, she would sooner do a favor than ask one.
I felt foolish in my violence and huffed and stomped down to the water beyond our cottage. I knelt on the ground and scowled at the rushes and clumps of scrubby trees that did little to conceal our humble cottage—though we were far enough from the nearest homestead not to want concealing—and rubbed cool sand on the tender flesh above my wrist until a red slash appeared. Then I fell into a heap on the little beach, curled like a restless infant to watch a distant sloop chase the sliver of pale moon. The sun was low behind the forest-covered hills of the mainland across the basin. The water shimmered. I shivered and sucked my sandy middle and forefingers and watched that boat, as if it carried my life and might soon crash against the rocks. Then I turned away from the tedious sea and surveyed the clearing beyond.
I may have sensed him before I saw him, but my eye soon fixed on a man stooped in a meadow west of our inlet. He had been collecting new herbs and now brought himself tall, regarding me. The basket swung at his elbow as he strode near with alarming purpose. The wind-blown grass made his lower half appear fogged, as if he did not walk so much as float forward.
As one forced by standing to loathe most everyone I knew, I was more than usually enamored of strangers, not cowed as one my age and size ought to have been. In fact, the striding figure was none other than Dr. Devlin.
The learned physician had come too late to ease Mistress Weary’s struggle, but Simon often parroted his older brother’s sentiment that Devlin was a thoroughly modern man of science. The community would do well to value him above the barber-surgeons, as he might effect a cure with his store of herbs and the treatments stored in the pages in his mind . . . before he bled you silly. Just now he looked quite mad, and the closer he came lurching, the madder he looked. His skin was sun-brown against the blackest hair I’d ever seen, blacker even than Simon’s, but just as unkempt and far too long for Puritan Boston. Surely some worthy would hunt him down with scissor and razor. The doctor had deep squint lines around the eyes that would have given him a perpetually merry look had the eyes themselves—strange hazel flecked with gold—not been so violently sad. These mournful eyes were older than he by far and seemed, at close range, awed at the mere sight of me. I frowned and pushed blown hair behind my ears. Like a bear lumbering stay back don’t step more or I’ll scream murder.
His pace did not change, though I brushed the sand from my skirts and rose, haughty before the ocean. The water now seemed distant and drowsy in the late light, calmly sparkling, but it was the one calm thing in this windy world, and I was poised and ready don’t come closer.
“There,” he barked cheerfully. “That will be our line.” He pointed with his staff to a half-visible nest in the tangle of last year’s shore grasses. “I won’t cross it if you in turn won’t scamper off like a rabbit.”
“Well, sir,” I braved with raised brow, “rabbits do not scamper. I believe they bound or spring.”
He sucked in gaunt cheeks, set down basket and staff, and settled hands behind his back. I trusted this humble posture not at all. “I see words matter to you, Pearl. I confess this pleases me.”
I did not ask why it should. Grown people were forever saying such things, and were like to mean almost nothing they said. “Goodman Baker would not wish to see you collecting his weeds,” I scolded. There were few on this earth I had license to scold, few who would not peer down at me with a rage of flared nostrils or produce a hazel switch, and I expect I recognized and loved those few instantly. “He does not like me on his beach or in his meadows. He spits his juice on my Sabbath shoes and calls me idle. He does not like even old Belle, the Prices’ mule, to tread over his lines—”
“Nor the birds to sing, I wager. But you are a famously idle girl, aren’t you, Pearl.” It wasn’t a question. It was his second challenge. He wanted a question from me, and I would not grant it how do you know my name how do you know me pearl pearl it is my name. Elders often knew things, took things I had not offered. His familiarity was of no concern to me. His uncanny stare and restless gait, though, were. He did not cross the bird’s-nest marker but seemed to hover at its border as a horse will before moving water. “Do you wonder what I want, Pearl?”
“Do you wish me to?”
He laughed through his nose. “You’re a clever child, but do you know that many fine feelings will desert you if you’re ruled by cleverness?” He took one step, not over but onto the line, where the nest should be. I backed away, imagining the eggs smashed and working up a fury for it when he squinted through the fingers of one hand raised against the glare. The lines radiating from his eyes bunched together and darkened like storm clouds, and his formerly playful voice now better matched the expression in those eyes—high-sorrowful and cloying. I can’t say the change suited me.
“Is that your mother’s cottage there, round the bay? Why does she live no more in her father’s big house in town, Spring Street I think it was? I’ve been gone some years, Pearl. I’ve only lately returned to these lands.”
“Spring Street?” The words were bland in my mouth. “No, she doesn’t live here or there. I have no mother.”
He smiled and looked bemused. “You must have a father, then?”
“Not in this world.”
What a hearty laugh, his. I did covet that laugh—the eyes were truly merry then—and it made me forgive him the despair that had come straying, stamping over our discourse as his heel had doubtless trodden the bird’s nest.
“Can you keep a secret, Pearl?”
“Not very well,” I said, “but I’ll rally for love of one.”
He dropped to one knee near his edge of our invisible line. “I know him—your father.”
My narrowed eyes cupped the sun and watered. I did not, would not, gnaw on my lower lip as blind Simon claimed of late to know I was doing whenever Liza happened near and frayed my nerves. How he knew, I can’t say.
“He sent me to you,” the doctor persisted.
Don’t invoke him. “You crushed them,” I cried, and my hand, eager for diversion, shot out toward the nest hidden in the grass.
He stood and plucked something from behind his ear, where nothing had been before. It was a single splendid oriole’s feather. He held it aloft on his palm.
“Are you a sorcerer?” I demanded, thrilled to my core, for it looked to be the very feather I had left behind