Monstrous Beauty (8 page)

Two hours later he reached the channel entrance to his marsh. He pulled both boats ashore, tucked the young man’s book in his waistband, and carried him over his shoulder, up the bluff, to his cottage.

The fisherman’s wife bathed Ezra in warm water, bandaged his wounds, and put him in dry clothes. With her husband’s help, she settled him in a bed with several blankets and spooned hot tea into his mouth. There Ezra lay in a feverish state for days, before he was strong enough to return to his home.

Chapter 11

T
HE MURDER-SUICIDE
prowled Hester’s mind, teasing her in the quiet moments of the day. It was a history puzzle, and therefore irresistible. It had also likely set the stage for the haunting paranoia at the church, sucking in her own innocent silverfish incident with it. She spent the workweek puzzling over the paltry information Sylvie Atwood had given her whenever she had a private moment in the Howland cottage or garden. She had no doubt that details about the event existed somewhere, hidden, and it was only a matter of figuring out how to uncover them. The Internet had proved useless; this was an obscure piece of local history that had never made it into any sort of larger digital memory. She needed an old-fashioned lead—a single, solid lead.

On Saturday her cottage had emptied and a crowd had gathered outside William Bradford’s house across the lane. It was a hot day, and the bolster under her skirt had soaked up so much sweat it weighed damp and heavy on her hips. With her back to the door, she put her foot on a chair and yanked up her stockings. She heard a low whistle behind her.

“What have we
here
?” a cocky teenage voice said.

A group of boys ducked under the short doorframe into the room. A particularly tall one stared through the open window with his mouth gaping, as if she were an animal in the zoo.

“Good day t’ ye,” Hester said. “I did not see ye at my door, or I should not have carried out such a graceless act. Would one of ye care to rest yourself?” She motioned to the chair near the door.

A boy with a Boston T-shirt who looked to be about her age pushed his way past the others. He pointed in the direction of the bed. “I’d like to rest myself there, with you.” Machine-gun laughter burst from behind him.

She stared at him for a second, just short of a glare, and then she got out the napkins to set the table.

“She’s the only Pilgrim I’ve seen today who looks cute without makeup,” the dope in the window said.

Boston took a couple of steps toward her, “Yeah, how ’bout it, do you have a boyfriend?”

“I regret that I do not comprehend that word, sir.”

“A dude. A steady. Some dick that every hour of the day you just want to f—”

“Ah, I am married, sir,” she interrupted. “And God has blessed us with two children, Desire and little John, who are fetching water at the stream.”

Boston rolled his eyes. “I mean, do you have a boyfriend in real life.”

She was not allowed to address him with her contemporary voice. And she knew that he knew that. “My husband, John, is with the militia down past the redoubt, and returns presently. You’ll know him easily because, unlike yourself, sir, he has an impressive rapier hanging from his waist.” She glanced at his crotch meaningfully, but he was too dense to get the jibe.

The redhead behind him piped up, “Two parents and two kids in a one-room shack? Did you have to sleep in shifts?”

It was an honest question, at last. But it was not a use of the word “shift” that Elizabeth Howland would have understood, and with all those eyes running amok over her breasts and hips and waist, Hester’s patience had dissolved.

“Just so,” she said, mocking him. “Everyone wears a shift as sleeping clothes—men, women, and children. You are no doubt a scholar.”

She put six eggs in a basket. Escape was the surest way to shake Pilgrim baiters.

“Will ye come with me to visit across the lane?” She walked purposefully past them and out the door.

“How now, Governor Bradford,” she called over the heads of the tourists gathered in front of his cottage. “’Tis Elizabeth Howland, come with spare eggs for Alice.” She waved sweetly at Boston and the redhead as the crowd of tourists parted and then closed their ranks behind her.

Bradford was seated at his desk, pontificating about a newspaper—a reproduction that the curators had printed on a Gutenberg-style press using aged cotton paper and authentic ink. The ornate typeset manuscript was always a hit because it looked so real.

“What have you, sir, that causes such a state in your visitors?”

“Ah, Elizabeth, welcome. I was showing my guests the pamphlet that Isaack de Rasieres sent to the colony as a gift from New Amsterdam these last days. The purpose is to descry the news of the week from France and the Low Countries.” He laughed. “Though after such a long journey ’tis, I find, no longer news that concerns anyone.”

“Good sir, I cannot agree,” Hester countered. “I hear so little word from our old home, I should be enthralled to read even the chronicles of those long dead!”

Suddenly Hester realized how she might research the murders. “Oh!” she blurted, straightening her back.

The local newspaper! Every single back issue of the
Old Colony Memorial
since 1822 was archived at the Plymouth Public Library—Hester had used the records a handful of times for school projects. She was certain that a murder-suicide in such a small town would have been splashed all over the paper for months.

Bradford folded the paper and mused, “How curious that the ink is impressed on both sides of the folio.”

“I beg your leave, sir,” Hester blurted. “I have only just remembered the fire under my pottage. Pray tell Alice that I have called for her.”

Bradford’s mouth hung open as she deposited the basket on the desk in front of him and hurried out the door. If she washed the dishes and swept her cottage before the all clear, she calculated, she could make it to the library an hour before it closed.

Chapter 12

1872

S
YRENKA TOOK
O
LAF’S SHIRT
, trousers, socks, and shoes for herself, carefully washing the blood off the clothes and wringing them nearly dry before she put them on. She rowed Olaf’s boat past midnight, searching for Ezra. Eventually, fearing the arrival of dawn and the earliest fishermen, she pulled in to a remote spot on the shore and staggered across the sand on her new legs, dragging the boat up and past the tide stain.

She wandered for days, hiding off small dirt roads, bewildered by the land beneath her feet, and by insect bites, hunger, cold, and her own unbearable weight. She stole food from open kitchen doors and a blanket from a barn. She ruminated for the first time in her long life over how she might kill herself.

Deep in a pretty wood by a pond she stumbled upon a cedar-shingled cottage, painted forest green and nearly camouflaged by tall pines, whose branches brushed as high as the chimney and left tufts of brown needles bunched in the eaves trough. There she was taken in by two spinster sisters, the Misses Floy, and nursed until she regained her strength. The sisters earned their living selling jams made from beach plums, blueberries, and wild strawberries, by making tea from rosehips, and by keeping sheep in a nearby meadow for milk and wool. Syrenka felt sheltered and safe in the company of only women. They called her Sarah, because Syrenka was not a biblical name. The anonymity suited her.

The older sister, Lydia, asked no questions. It was obvious to her that young Sarah was an immigrant with an abusive husband. Why else would she arrive wearing only his clothes? What other explanation was there for her lack of familiarity with the customs and manners of this country? Lydia imagined, in some detail, that Sarah had been held prisoner in her husband’s locked bedroom, and that she had escaped while he slept.

Every urge in Syrenka’s body told her to seek out Ezra—to see if he had lived or died that night in the bay. But she resisted: she was not ready yet. These women could teach her much. If she gained the skills of a human she might blend in well enough with the townspeople to avoid their prying questions. Time spent now would spare heartache later.

The Misses Floy were delighted when Sarah was well enough to join their daily routines. She was physically strong and exceptionally bright. Listening to them speak, she became fluent in the local dialect, so that there was nothing but her odd paleness and almost imperceptibly oval pupils to set her apart from them. More often than not, when the sisters brought their goods to sell in the town, Sarah stayed behind with domestic chores and the peacefulness of the pond.

It was two months later, when Sarah began to excuse herself from the sisters’ constitutional sunrise swims, that Lydia followed her to her bedroom and heard the retching sound through the door. She waited quietly until Sarah emerged, her face shiny and freshly washed.

“How long have you been ill upon rising in the morning?” Lydia asked gently.

“I am not ill. I will feel well again after I eat.”

“Forgive me, you are correct. It is not an illness to be with child. It is a blessing. It is a miracle.”

Sarah’s eyes opened wide. “With ch—?” She clamped her hand over her mouth. “No! Please. It can’t be. It’s rather the newness of this place. I’m still growing accustomed to the food and to the air—that is, the
fresh air
—which are so different from…”

“From where, my dear? Perhaps this is a sign from God that it is time to write to your husband and see if your differences can be worked out.” She smiled and looked pointedly in the direction of Sarah’s belly. “For the sake of the child.”

Sarah conceded to herself with growing revulsion that there was a sensation of fullness low in her abdomen that she had ignored. Her breasts were tender. She fatigued easily of late.

So it was done, through violence rather than love: she was mortal.

Her mouth became a tight line. She stood up straight and put her shoulders back. “He is dead.”

“Who…?”

“The child’s father is dead.”

Lydia’s mouth opened. “I’m so sorry.”

“I am not.”

Lydia was silent, with her mouth still open. Sarah sensed that more was needed. A sign of compassion, or hope; a lie.

“He was … from a wealthy family. His mother has longed for a grandchild. It will be beloved and cared for.” She clasped Lydia’s wrinkled hands. “Please, I could not bear to live with her now while she grieves for him; may I stay here until my confinement? I beg you.”

“But this woman should know…”

“I’ll send word. I shall write a letter today. She’ll take comfort in knowing I am safe in your hands.”

Lydia smiled. “You may stay until the baby is born. We will help you with the delivery and recovery, and take you to your mother-in-law when you and the baby are strong.”

“You are all kindness,” Sarah said. “It was fortun— It was a blessing that you found me.”

Lydia took her to the secretary in the front hall and gave her a sheet of paper, an envelope, a wax seal, and pen and ink.

“I have no postage, but I will make a trip into town later today and take your letter with me.”

Sarah said, “I should like to come with you, if it is not an inconvenience.”

Sarah prepared the envelope as if it contained a letter. In town, she excused herself on the pretext of mailing it, threw the blank letter in a dustbin outside of a pub, and went inside. It was early in the day, so only a few drunkards lingered there. She inquired of them about a man named Ezra Doyle.

Mr. Doyle? Yes, he was alive, although he’d had a nasty brush with drowning down the coast and had been melancholic ever since. No, he had not married. How could he form an attachment? He spent all his days at the bay, brooding on the rocky outcropping or rowing his boat aimlessly offshore.

Sarah had scarcely allowed herself to hope that he was alive, let alone that he was still searching for her. She was unable to speak. A sober man might have seen that her lower lip trembled.

“And whom might we say is the ravishing lady who inquired after him?” the bar owner called across the counter, his eyebrows raised and his mouth half smiling.

She pinned him with her eyes and found her voice again. “An old friend. A very old friend. My name is Sarah.”

She knew that her paleness would distinguish her in their memories. Eventually they would tell Ezra of her visit, and perhaps he might guess it was her, in human form. If he still wanted her, he might not give up his search. He might sustain his hope for the seven months it would take her to be free.

A part of her—the part that had learned compassion from him and from Lydia—was grieved to deceive him by hiding her pregnancy. But she could not stop herself from wanting him, and she could not bear to let him see her carry another man’s child. If he still loved her seven months from now, she would find him. If he would have her, she would devote herself to him for the remainder of her mortal days.

Chapter 13

H
ESTER CHANGED
into her street clothes and hurried to Nancy’s car. The public library was just a five-minute drive from work.

As architecture went, the library looked like a high school in the suburbs: it was a large contemporary building with red brick walls and a domed skylight above an open staircase to the second and third floors. She was disappointed to discover that the strategy of looking up the murders in the
Old Colony Memorial
newspaper was fruitless. The archives were stored on microform—an antiquated set of film reels that were not indexed. She should have remembered this from her school assignments: the only way to look anything up on microform, other than educated guessing or browsing, was to know the exact date of the event you were searching for. She tried reading headlines starting from 1892, the date of the church fire, and working backward in time, but quickly gave up. There were too many films, the librarian had to retrieve each one for her, and the reader was a finicky machine, making winding and unwinding the film a slow process.