Alis (21 page)

He sat down again upon the bench and stared at her disbelievingly. She said gently, “He will not force me. He has given me his word.”

Luke took a deep breath and let it out again. The hardness was gone from his face. Hesitantly he said, “You do not share a bed?”

She smiled. “I have my own chamber.”

Luke shook his head wonderingly. “He must be a strange man. But Alis, suppose he changes his mind. What will you do?”

“He will not change his mind.”

“You cannot be sure.”

“I am sure.”

His expression was mulish. “All the same, what would you do?” “Oh, Luke! I don’t know. I wouldn’t let him touch me, you may be sure of that.” She remembered her first sight of the marriage bed, and the nausea rose in her throat as it had done that day. “I think I would kill him. I know how to use a knife, I suppose.”

He looked at her, appalled, and she hastened to reassure him. “But truly, there is no danger of it. He has no desire for me. And though he says the marriage is the Maker’s will, in truth I am not sure he believes it.”

For a long time they sat without speaking. The sun left the garden and a little wind got up. She took him indoors and prepared food for him, assuring him that Galin would not be home for hours, for he said he could not endure to sit at table with the man who was her husband. While he ate, she asked for the news from Two Rivers. Luke looked gloomy.

“There is little good to tell except that you are no longer spoken of as starting the fire. They have blamed the mute woman who Samuel lived with before he was whipped and driven out. But Thomas is more powerful than ever. He and Robert have their way in everything. Sarah is with child again. My grandmother is unchanged, only grieved for my grandfather who is full of sorrow, and sick, too. They have made him so: he could not bear to see the people suffer, and yet he would not leave them until he was forced to. And the Elders are extending their power, buying up farmland closer to where we are living. We may yet be driven right away.”

She sat opposite him at the table as he talked, reluctant to take her eyes from him for an instant, wishing that the meal might never end. But at length he said, “I must go. I do not like to leave my grandparents any longer than need be. Tell your . . . tell Minister Galin my grandmother bid me say to him that Freeborne is not far from Two Rivers and you should not think yourselves safe from the contagion of reform.”

They went to the door and stood there. It was too cruel that they must part. They could not say, this time, that they would—
must
—meet again. She was married. She put her arms around his neck as she had done once before.

“Oh, Alis.” His voice trembled.

She thought she would weep. “Don’t say anything, Luke. It is hard enough to bear.”

For a moment they clung to each other, then she was watching his tall figure stride away into the June dusk and biting her lip to hold back the tears.

Galin returned weary and vexed, and she had to hide her feelings. The farmer he had been to visit was tormented by ideas of sin since his widowed mother-in-law had come to live with them.

“I would that we could send her away again,” Galin said, sitting down to the food she put before him. “The reformers rule where she has come from, and I would not have her spread their poison here. I suppose they have tightened their hold on Two Rivers also. What did the young man have to say?”

She told him the news and gave him Luke’s message from Mistress Elizabeth. He looked gloomy. “These are ill tidings. I hope we shall not take the infection.” He looked at her, and then went on a little hesitantly, “You are recovered from what ailed you earlier, it seems. There is color in your cheeks. You need young company. I hope you will see much of Elzbet, now that you have begun. You and she were inseparable once.”

“Galin.” She was looking at him intently, a plan forming in her head. “Why might not Luke’s grandparents”—she would not say

Luke—“come here to Freeborne if they are driven even farther from Two Rivers?”

His face was somber. “They might, but it is usual for such moves to be agreed between the Elders of both communities, and I daresay those of Two Rivers will declare Minister Jacob and his wife vexatious. Then we would have to ask permission of the Great Council for them to settle here. And I do not think it would be granted. I have heard that Master Robert has friends on the Council.”

She felt cold suddenly. “Will it be the same everywhere?”

He nodded. “Among the Communities, yes. There would be no place for them.”

“Could we not take them despite the Great Council?”

She wanted him to say it was so—she was afraid for them—but he shook his head. “If we defy the Council, Freeborne would cease to be one of the Communities of the Book. I do not think our people would vote for that.”

In her mind, she saw the three of them: Minister Jacob leaning on his stick, Mistress Elizabeth wincing at the stiffness in her shoulders, and Luke staring ahead. They had their backs to her and the empty road stretched away before them. There was a tremor in her voice. “Where would they go? How would they live?”

The oil lamp was beginning to smoke a little. Galin said, “As to where they would go—who knows? There are farms and villages outside the Communities, and forest settlements. The city, too. But”—seeing her distress, he sought to sound a more cheerful note—“perhaps it will not come to that. And they have their grandson. He will take care of them, surely.”

He was trimming the wick of the lamp as he spoke, and the light burned clear and steady again. She was comforted. They were not without help. And as for herself? Luke had come, and he had gone once more, but he was not dead. They would meet again: she knew it.

A
lis stared up at Galin in horror. “Thomas? Here in Freeborne?” She was trying to clear the ground at the end of the garden where the brambles snaked over the other weeds and flourished their thorns in what had once been the vegetable patch. Lacking the appropriate tools but unwilling to venture out to borrow from anyone, Alis hacked away with a rather blunt old kitchen knife and made slow progress. Nevertheless there was already a considerable pile of barbed strands, some several feet long, when her husband came out to give her the news.

“He arrived yesterday, it seems, with his wife who has miscarried a child. They are with her sister Leah and he asks permission to remain.”

Alis was crouching down to cut off a thick stem of bramble. As she stood up, it caught at her sleeve and it was only with difficulty that she detached it, scratching herself in the process.

“He will make trouble,” she said, brushing earth and leaves from her skirt. “He is cruel and dangerous. When I was . . .”

She stopped. She had told Galin little of what had occurred during her year away from Freeborne and he had refrained from questioning her. She had gone from Thomas’s house in Two Rivers to stay with the Minister’s wife, and from there had disappeared on the night of the fire: this he knew but nothing more. Now he waited. She went on.

“When I was there, he dealt harshly with his wife, blaming her because their babies did not live. I think perhaps he beat her, though I did not see it. But whether he did or not, she was terrified of him. I should have become so, too, I think, if I had remained with them. Why has he come to Freeborne? It cannot be for his wife’s sake. He hates her.”

Galin nodded uneasily. “I have heard much about Master Thomas, and there is what the Minister’s grandson said to you, also. The man likes power, and he has power in his own community. Why does he leave it for one where he will be a mere guest, unless he sees some gain for himself?”

“Can we not refuse his request?” Alis wanted to know.

Galin shook his head.

“His wife is sick after miscarrying a child and wishes to visit her sister. He is concerned for her in her melancholy condition and would attend upon her. What could be more natural or more praiseworthy? How could we refuse?”

Alis felt her temper rise. It did so often these days. “So Mistress Elizabeth may not come here, though she is all goodness, but if Master Thomas wishes to bring trouble among us, he must be permitted to do so. It is a topsy-turvy world, is it not? And if I ask you why, you will say the Great Council rules thus and therefore it is the will of the Maker.”

Angrily she turned her back on her husband and heard him retreat toward the house. Seizing a long strand of bramble, she began to saw at it with her knife. Her first wild joy at Luke’s reappearance had given way to bouts of misery and rage. She need not have come back to marry Galin after all. It was Lilith’s fault, and her mother’s, and Galin’s—his above all. It was his failure to marry that had brought the Bookseers to Freeborne. And she would never forgive her mother, who should have defied them for her daughter’s sake. All her bitterness toward the two of them had returned.

Over and over in her mind she replayed her encounter with Lilith. Why had she not realized? They had cheated her, the three of them: she hated them all. And now, as if things were not bad enough, Thomas had come to Freeborne!

The knife blade snapped off suddenly, and the bramble she had been trying to cut sprang up and scratched her face. Furiously, she flung the useless knife handle across the garden and stormed into the house. Where was Galin? It was all his fault. She would tell him so, let him do what he would. She was not afraid of him anymore.

But the house was empty. She stood in the kitchen, panting with fury. It was unbearable: she must do something or she would go mad. On the table was one of the red platters from which they always ate. She seized it, raised it high above her head, and hurled it down. With an immense crash it exploded against the flagstones, sending pieces sliding across the floor in all directions.

In the ringing silence she stared at what she had done. Fragments of red earthenware littered the kitchen. There were even some on the stove. The thought of having to clean it up appalled her. Impulsively she went toward the door, shards crunching under her feet. She must get away.

Tormented by the thought that she might still have been free, she walked until she was weary, finding herself at last at Boundary Farm, where her husband had been called away the day Luke had come. She was tired and hungry. With a little tremor of fear, she realized that her husband might by now have returned to the house and found the scene of destruction she had left in the kitchen. What would he think? Would he guess that it was an act of temper and not an accident? She did not fear punishment—that was not his way—but he could be very cutting when he was angry, withering her with icy words to which she had no answer. She shrank from that.

When she arrived back, he was eating cold pie and bread, sitting at the table in the main room. She paused in the doorway and he looked up, his face expressionless. Quietly he said, “You must be hungry. Come and eat.”

He had laid a place for her.

“The kitchen, I ought to . . .”

He smiled a little at that. “I have done it. Come and eat.”

After all her rage, she was touched. If only she were not married to him, she might like him very well.

When they had eaten and the table was clear, she said awkwardly, “I am sorry about the platter.”

He raised his eyebrows in that way that he did, and his mouth twitched humorously. “I am glad I was gone from the house or perhaps Freeborne would need a new Minister now.”

She laughed, a little startled. He was jesting, of course, and he could not know what she had said to Luke. All the same . . .

 

 

It was an unusually hot summer. The old people kept within or sat on their doorsteps, fanning themselves with their hands. The more easygoing mothers brought their little ones down to paddle in what was left of the stream. Shrieking and laughing, the children splashed each other. Elzbet and Alis walked slowly in the shade of the trees close to the water; Elzbet was near her time now and the heat troubled her.

They had been speaking of Thomas. He had created no such stir as Alis had feared but conducted himself courteously enough as a guest in the Community, though not concealing the strictness of his views. Some of the unmarried girls would have made eyes at him had they dared, Elzbet reported. He was a good-looking man, and his sternness excited them.

They seated themselves on the bank, watching Leah’s children, Peter and Rachel, who were playing at the edge of the stream. Peter was already soaked. Little Rachel, more mindful of her clothes, was keeping well back on the bank. Her brother was capering for her amusement, pretending to extract fish from his pockets, shaking his head like a dog so that the drops sprayed everywhere. Rachel laughed and clapped her hands crying, “More! More! Do it
again
, Peter.”

The boy broke off a long stem of willow and began flicking the surface of the water with it so that Rachel was showered in droplets, much to her delight.

Suddenly Thomas appeared from among the trees, looking stiff and hot in his dark clothes. “Come, Rachel, and you too, Peter. Your mother wants you home. The meal is nearly prepared.”

Rachel came forward obediently, but the boy, who had crouched down at the water’s edge to examine something in the mud, looked up briefly and went back to his play. Alis held her breath as Thomas stiffened, wondering whether she could intervene. Before she had time to speak, however, Thomas was beside the child. He grasped Peter roughly and hauled him to his feet. The boy let out a yell of protest and began to struggle. Thomas’s face convulsed with rage. In an instant he had seized the willow rod that Peter was still holding and began to beat him furiously with it, gripping him by the arm. At once Alis was on her feet calling loudly, “Stop, Master Thomas! Stop this instant! Leave the child be! You have no right.”

Thomas’s head jerked up in surprise and taking advantage of the diversion, Peter wrenched himself free and ran to Alis, flinging his arms about her waist and sobbing with his face in her apron.