Hour of the Witch(37)

“There is none,” her father said, and Mary glanced awkwardly at her parents and at Abigail and Hannah. They were all looking at Thomas and at each other. It was as if she were invisible.

“Thomas, if thou wishest to speak to me, thou mayest,” she said, standing. “What good it will achieve is beyond my ken, but I will hear thee out.”

“I thank thee,” he said.

“Mary, thou dost not have to see him,” her father said.

“I do,” she told him. “I do.”

“May we speak alone?” Thomas asked, and he sounded shy, as if he were a suitor—more a boy than a man closer to her father’s age than to hers.

“Yes,” she said, and she took her cloak from the peg near the fire. “Let us speak outside,” she told him, and she nodded to her parents, hoping to convey to them that she was fine and this conversation did not trouble her. Then she pulled the front door shut behind her, and so they were alone in a night that would have been wholly dark were it not for the light from the candles and the fire radiating out from the windows.

For a long moment, he just looked at her. She could see his breath, and she smelled the beer he had drunk at supper or afterward at a tavern. But his countenance did not suggest he was drink-drunk. Finally, he spoke: “I miss thee, Mary.”

“That is gratifying,” she said. “But our love is now but apples that fell and were never harvested.”

“I disagree. There is no rot in my heart. The fruit there is still as fresh as when I first cast eyes on thee.”

She held up the back of her left hand, which though healing still sent a message in her mind more powerful than words. Then with her finger she touched the spots on her face where he had hit her in the course of their marriage. “To thee? My face was but a fruit thou couldst bruise.”

    “I sinned, yes,” he admitted, and she detected a trace of sorrow in his eyes. “But no more. I make thee a vow: if thou returnest, I will never again hurt thee. Never.”

“Thou hast made that promise before.”

“But never before had I been given a taste of the bitterness of actually losing thee.”

She wondered what precisely he missed. His access to her body when the spirit so moved him? Her work as a helpmeet and wife? The fact she kept the pillowbeers clean? Yes, he had Catherine, but surely he was having to work harder around the house and with the animals than ever before. He would have to acquire a second servant. Or, perhaps, this was but vanity and shame, and he feared the public ramifications of divorce: the idea of failure. “What dost thou miss the most?”

He looked up at the sky, the stars and the moon hidden tonight behind clouds. “Is this to be an interrogation?”

“I asked but one question.”

“And I have come to thee humbled and chastened. Is that not enough?”

“I do not crave thy praise; once I craved thy love. But thou seemest to believe that to be humbled is sufficient foundation for a marriage.”

“What dost thou want, Mary? I have made thee a vow.”

“What dost thou want, Thomas?” Mary asked in response. “Thou seemest unable to offer me one thing that thou hast missed while I have retreated to my parents.”

“I have not missed thy disobedience.”

“I was an obedient wife.”

“Fine. I miss thine obedience.”

“And that is but sand. Build thy house on rock.”

“Obedience is more than sand. If thou art going to throw scripture at me, don’t heave the words as if thou were…”

“As if I were what? As if I were but a woman with white meat for a brain?”

He folded his arms across his chest and gazed down at his boots. “There are moments when thy mind vexes me. It is not that thou art slow, but rather that thou dost not understand thy need to heel.”

    “My knees exist but to bend?”

“It pained me when I hurt thee. Thou mayest not believe that, but it is true. I know what our Lord God wants from us. I have no desire to cause thee discomfort, but some rebukes will sting more than others. I would rather thou felt pain that will pass in this world than agony that will be ceaseless in the next.”

“I am not sure that either of us can be so presumptuous as to read the mind of God.”

He exhaled loudly and long. Already he was growing frustrated. “That is precisely what I mean.”

“So, my brain is cheese because I think,” she said. “Is that thy logic?”

“Man is an imperfect vessel, Mary. I am but a man.”

“And I am an imperfect woman, and—”

“Yes,” he agreed, cutting her off, “thou art. And when I have disciplined thee, it has always been because I fear for thy soul. I have said it before and I will say it again: I tremble mightily before our Lord, and I am not at all sure that thou sharest my fears.”

Inside she was enraged by his hypocrisy, by the brazenness of either his lying or his monumental self-delusion, but she was able to restrain herself. She had heard from him before this justification for his cruelty. “Perhaps our imperfections together make but mist at best and anger and unhappiness at worst,” she suggested.

“Well, they certainly did not make a child.”

She nodded at the barb. He had spoken reflexively, without thinking. People did not change. “I will see thee at the Town House, Thomas.”