“I have him, Liza,” spoke the brother, who walked always with his wide hand at Simon’s elbow and seemed to give him little way. “Here.”
Liza bustled through the crowd and embraced both boys heartily, despite the elder’s embarrassed looks. Simon only looked lost, and while Liza bounded to the father and the elder son stood by the gravedigger’s elbow, I slipped to Simon’s side and whispered in his ear, “I’ve missed you, Master Simon.”
His face filled with the light his eyes lacked. But it drained away as quickly as it had come. He shook his head. “Go now, Pearl, before Liza scolds you for the world to hear.”
“I will, but can’t you come out one day? When your heart is able?”
He dragged at the ground with his heel. “Nehemiah won’t have it. He’s had an earful from the town fathers and wants you not under our roof.”
“Is he your keeper?” I looked for the elder boy, fearful suddenly.
“Yes,” said Simon. “He keeps us well. He’s in more ways father to me than Father.”
“Then I’ll come to the edge of your garden and speak like a sprite in the trees. Your turnips and peppermint need affection.”
“I’ll weed at sunup. My brother will be gone again to Cape Ann. Go now,” he said.
“Farewell then.” I nodded pointlessly toward the grave. “May she rest well with the angels.”
He looked down toward his boots, though not at them, I knew. His silence terrified me. “I can’t help what he says,” Simon whispered. “He says you must go home and stay there. With your fallen mother.”
Before I could understand, I saw Nehemiah turn from the gentleman he had been conferring with. I’d been watching the tall man’s back—his familiar carriage—from the corner of my eye, and when he turned I turned, as if we were dancers separated by space, and I recognized Dr. Devlin. I looked wildly from him to Simon, and my eyes blurred with heat. I ran out of the churchyard and crisscrossed quiet lanes and meadows and marsh until I was sick and stooped with running. I didn’t stop until I dropped to my knees by the bay, and I wondered, sobbing for breath, if I would ever know a life without this sinking.
Most every year at this time there were anxious rumblings around town when great flocks of birds blackened the sky in their passage south. I once overheard a farmer at the inn tell of a roosting site near Virginia to which families came from hundreds of miles away, driving their hogs, to camp and wait. The men met the birds’ deafening arrival armed with poles, guns, and pine-knot torches, with iron pots full of sulfur, while the besieged women plucked and salted. All around, branches sagged and snapped, the farmer said, and none could hear a rifle’s report a yard away nor his own voice whooping, and when they went, the flocks left a snow-white sea inches deep. The pigs had their fill and were fattened, the wolf crept forth and the lynx, the polecat, the possum.
But in Puritan Boston, such plenty was ungodly. It was the devil’s work, all glut and gloat, and worse than suspect. “Where are they going?” I asked Mother as the year’s first stragglers came. She looked up from the crimson thread and her deft fingers embroidering. “I don’t know, Pearl. Some say they bear dark tidings, but I think there is too much evil in the world to be carried on the wings of pigeons.”
I paced the cottage and finally, weary of her concentrated stare that did not include me, slipped outdoors again. I thought the rhythmic pumping of their wings, the rippling wave of noisy birds, was the most comely sight I’d ever seen. The pigeons had a slow grace as a whole that they lost once they settled in fields and on branches, from which boys netted and clubbed them, stuffing them into sacks.
I ran and twirled under their shade into Goodman Baker’s meadow, imagining myself aloft with them until I was too dizzy to stand. Collapsed on the grass, I watched the travelers surge past while the sun broke their ranks as light from Heaven pierces clouds. I mourned their going and wondered a while about Heaven, and would my mother be there to greet me at my turn. If, as the godly wise claimed, this life was but preparation and atonement, my short stay on Earth was doomed enough. Mine would not earn the hottest room in Hell, though Mother’s surely would.
Simon had called her fallen. He had spoken like the others. But he couldn’t, like them, look daggers at me from on high. I shook to think of his face, his empty eyes searching for me, finding nothing, only the dark. Who had schooled him? Nehemiah only? His recently arrived father? Now that they wore the black bands I couldn’t hate them, but it was hard to see these people—who had seemed so promising a diversion—now as any different from the others, like Dame Ashley, who just this morning as I was murmuring the Lord’s Prayer had snapped my back with her hazel switch and said, “Even your temptress mother sits straight, child, and she with every reason to stoop.”
Temptress. The word, like many words, had a certain roundness, a gleam about it. I wagered it was no great task to skirt Heaven, and perhaps Simon would help me do it. If Mother wouldn’t be in the beyond to hold me, there was no point in going there at all.
As promised, he was in the garden at sunrise. Though Mother wondered why I’d mastered my chores so soon, and would I be late for Dame Ashley’s lessons, I’d reassured her, kissed her cool cheek, and proceeded to my post by the beech tree. “I shouldn’t have come!” I called coyly.
He gave a solemn nod over his fist full of weeds.
“I never saw you weeding before. How do you know a carrot from not?” I challenged.
“I feel them. Some I won’t pull, if I’m not sure it’s waste.”
“I shouldn’t have come.” I nestled the toe of my shoe into a curved tree root.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“‘Sorry’ is a fool’s gift.”
“Come here. They’ve all gone for the morning.”
“I won’t,” I sniveled. “I always come to you. Now you must come to my realm.”
“I dare not ask what that realm is, pixie.”
“Come again to the woods.”
“No.”
“Why not?” I challenged. “Because of savages and wolves?”
“And other things.”
“The fiend.”
“He sleeps by day, I expect.”
“I doubt that truly.” I saw in mind a rippling field of new grass, a bird’s nest, and the physician who was by now a constant confusion of bright and dark in my thoughts. Like the dappled forest he attracted me, but for fear of him I had not honored his compact these many days. I couldn’t think what I might barter for his baubles, what “morsels” he might favor, and the longer I delayed the more forbidden his game appeared—and the more inclined I felt to keep my strange encounter with him private, though he’d only requested secrecy in relation to my father. I even kept the doctor from Simon, to whom I now pledged, “I will be your sight.”
“It was different with Liza there.” Simon raised his head, like a bear testing the air. “Still, I wish you would.”
“Then come.” I scaled the lower fence rail, tugging at my dress, and took his hand. He rose slowly, as one in a dream rises, and I led him back to the fence, raising his foot. “Climb through.”
He struggled, gripping my arm. “You don’t believe in throughways?”
“I told you . . . my realm. We have our own outs and ins.”
Once across, Simon resisted, standing still and alert.
“Do you know