Hour of the Witch(11)
* * *
She did visit her father before going home, just in case. She doubted that anyone of consequence had seen her stroll here, but there was no reason to take chances with the gossips.
The storehouse was more crowded than usual because a ship’s hull had just been emptied into it, and it was a potpourri of exotic scents: seasonings, of course, but also the smell of the massive bolts of calico, the books (musty from the voyage), and the rugs that had started to mildew at sea.
The building wasn’t as tall as her grandfather’s hay barn had been back in England—nothing here was, not yet, not even the brand-new Town House with its court and offices for the magistrates—but it was almost as wide and perhaps half as long. There were casement windows fifteen feet up the east and west walls, but her father also kept the southern doors open during the day, and a corridor of sunlight streamed inside, illuminating the massive containers of guns and glass, and all manner of tools made of iron: handsaws and hinges, wedges and padlocks, drawing knives, gimlets, gouges, hammers, andirons, fire shovels, pint pots, scythe blades, chisels…
It was amazing to her the service that her father—and men like her father, because he wasn’t the only saint who had the resources to buy and sell goods at this magnitude—provided the colony. In the room, in the containers and casks and barrels stacked to the height of two men (the blocks of a giant child, she thought) were the skillets and spiders and kettles that would stock the newcomers’ kitchens (and always, always there were new people coming) and the tools on which the farmers would depend. The chains. The plow blades. The spades. The axes that the men, tirelessly and aggressively, would swing to fell the forests, work that was endless because the woods stretched on…forever.
And there were bedsteads. There were chairs more ornate than could be manufactured by the woodworkers in Massachusetts. There were pistols with ivory handles and pistols with brass trim around the flashpans, and there were muskets and buttons and swords.
She saw her father in conversation with a group of businessmen. One of them was probably the ship’s captain. When her father saw her standing in a swath of sunlight, he left them and came to her. She knew he wouldn’t want her to hear the conversation, more because of the sailors’ inability to restrain their language than because he thought her too demure to hear his business negotiations.
“Ah, little dove,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting thee.”
“I didn’t know I was coming when I left home. I had errands, and—”
“And thou were enticed by the treasures thou heard had arrived.”
She knew he wasn’t serious, at least not completely. His smile was so broad and mischievous that it made his beard—a small triangle on his chin—seem less severe. He was wearing cuffs that matched his collar today, a particularly sumptuous and detailed set that she suspected he had chosen to impress these men.
“No,” she answered, returning his grin. “It takes more than a little calico or tiffany to tempt me.”
“I’ll be just a few more minutes,” he said. “Canst thou wait?”
“I can.”
“Good. There are new bodices and wings that girls thine age are wearing back in London. I also have two trunks of books.”
She nodded and went to stand in the doorway, where she faced the warm sun with her eyes shut and smiled. Books. On occasion, Thomas had suggested that she read too much and from tomes that were inappropriate. Oh, but books had always been one of her pleasures. She thought herself most fortunate that moment, but then two questions caused her to pause: First, what did it mean that, on the one hand, Thomas often berated her for being dim and slow, but on the other could chastise her for reading? Second—and this was an enigma of far more consequence—what did it say about her soul that a few bits of fashionable silk or cotton cloth and some interesting books could make her content?
* * *
Before leaving, she placed a petticoat, a bodice, and two books—Michael Wigglesworth’s new poem inspired by Revelation and a collection of the psalms deemed most helpful in diverting the Devil—into her basket, and thanked her father once again.
She considered how she never went to see her husband like this, but reassured herself that it wasn’t a likely thing for her to do because she usually saw him at dinner and because there were considerably fewer surprises to be found in her husband’s world of grains and powders than in her father’s ever-changing empire of goods. Besides, it was a longer walk to the North End. The harbor? It was closer. It was just the right distance if one wanted to stretch one’s legs.
But then a realization came to her, triggered in part by the way Thomas had no curiosity in any book but the Bible and the Psalter (and she doubted he actually had much interest even in them), and though she could push the idea from her mind, it lodged there like a stump too wide and strong to be evicted: she wanted to see as little of the man as she could. It wasn’t that he hit her or, recently, had thrown her into the hearth. It was deeper. She really didn’t like Thomas Deerfield. She didn’t like anything about him. Some days, in fact, she loathed him.
* * *
The city was crowded as she walked home with her basket of gifts from her father, and when she stepped around a dead bird she was nearly flattened by a pair of oxen pulling a cart along High Street. She jumped aside and the driver, a godless-looking man whom she instantly imagined quailing in some shadowy hovel on the Sabbath, yelled that she needed to be awake more and continued on his way. She had slop from the street now on her waistcoat and skirt, and knew either she would have to clean them before making supper or give them to Catherine to blot. Supper would be delayed if she didn’t hurry, and it had been too nice a day to risk fouling Thomas’s mood by failing to have his food waiting for him when he returned from the mill.