Never Call It Love (40 page)

Trotting
briskly now, the horses drew the wagon down the rutted road and into the
clearing. A half-dozen young children broke off a game of tag to stare solemnly
at the newcomers for a few seconds, and then, with excited shouts, race toward
the houses to tell the grown-ups. Sunset light lay over everything, the
hard-packed earth, the house fronts of unpeeled pine logs, and the faces of the
men and women who came out to surround the wagon.

Colin
got down, and then Patrick. He turned to help Elizabeth from the high seat.
Already the settlers, faces beaming a welcome, were introducing themselves.
Tired after the long day in the creaking wagon, Elizabeth absorbed only one of
the names, Thompson. A middle-aged couple, the Thompsons appeared to be the
eldest in the tiny community. The husband, a gaunt, craggy-faced man, told
Colin and Patrick that their horses could be stabled in his shed. Mrs.
Thompson, plump and motherly-looking, with gray-streaked brown hair, kissed
Elizabeth.

"It's
so good to have new neighbors. You see, Joe and I were the first to come here,
more than six years ago. We
named the place after Canterbury, because we were both
born there."

Elizabeth
had guessed that. Their voices still held the accents of southeastern England.

Smiling,
Mrs. Thompson glanced down Elizabeth's figure. "You'll be glad to know
that I'm a midwife. I delivered all but the three oldest of that lot over
there." She nodded toward the group of children, who stood silent now,
drinking in every word. "And five months ago I delivered Sally Jessup's
baby here."

Again
she nodded, this time toward a blond girl of about nineteen who held a fat
infant on her hip. Sally smiled shyly and ducked her head.

The
children looked in robust health. So did Sally Jessup's baby. Elizabeth felt
relief. So there would be no need for her to go back to Philadelphia for her
lying-in. All the way here over the rough road, she had dreaded the return
journey.

Mrs.
Thompson put her arm around Elizabeth. "Come, dearie. You'll stay with us
until your own place is built."

That
night the entire settlement gathered at the Thompson's for a feast of welcome.
Men carried an extra table, roughly constructed of pine, into the big room
that, together with a lean-to and a sleeping loft, comprised the entire house.
Soon both tables were laden, not only with the Thompsons' roast venison but
also with contributions from the other households. Warm cornmeal bread from
young Sally Jessup and her almost equally shy young husband, John. Snap beans
and creamed onions from the Wentworths, a couple in their mid-thirties who,
like the Jessups, were native-born Americans from Providence, Rhode Island.
Elizabeth learned that the four youngest of the children, gathered in a noisy
group at one end of the joined-together tables, belonged to the Wentworths. The
remaining couple, who had contributed two apple pies to the feast, were named
MacPherson. About the Wentworths'
age, they were both from Scotland, and
both red-haired. So were their eleven-year-old twin sons, the eldest and
noisiest of the group of children.

As
she sat on the women's side of the table, Elizabeth was aware of the roughness
of her surroundings. The stone fireplace with its hooks to hold pots suspended
over the coals. The built-in double bed on one side of the fireplace, and Mrs.
Thompson's homemade loom on the other side. The wooden ladder leading up to the
loft's trapdoor.

Every
now and then she looked across at Patrick and Colin, seated on either side of
red-haired Duncan MacPherson. Sir Patrick Stanford, fourth baronet. But no one
here knew he was that. He and Colin and Elizabeth had agreed that in the raw
frontier toward which they were heading, any mention of former tides would
handicap them. To the women, he, like Colin, was plain Mr. Stanford. To their
middle-aged host, Joe Thompson, he was already Patrick.

Colin
slept that night in the loft. Elizabeth and Patrick occupied the homemade bed in
the lean-to. ("It used to be our son's bed," Mrs. Thompson said
sadly. "But last summer he married a girl in a settlement twenty miles to
the north, and went there to live.") As they lay there in the darkness,
Patrick said, "We can't start work on the house tomorrow."

"I
should think not. After that long journey, you and Colin must be very tired
indeed."

"It
is not that. Tomorrow is Sunday. Joe Thompson told me that even though there is
no church here yet, New Canterbury observes the Sabbath strictly. The men stay
home from the fields, and in the evening everyone goes to the Wentworths' for
some kind of meeting."

"They
call it a Bible-reading. Sally Jessup mentioned it, I remember now. And,
Patrick! No matter how you feel about religion, I think we also had best go to
the Wentworths'. Our
neighbors are far too few for us to antagonize any of them."

"Don't
you think I realize that? I'll sit there and listen to whatever sort of
mumbo-jumbo they fancy. But on Monday," he said, his voice quickening,
"we'll start building our house. It will be like this one, only a shelter
until our land is cleared and making money. But someday we will have a fine
house on our own acres."

"With
twin staircases?"

Instantly
she regretted her words. She did not want to remind him of his lost property in
Ireland. She wanted even less to remind him of the cause that had ended in
disaster and that, she feared, still often occupied his thoughts.

But
when he spoke, his voice was calm enough. "Why not twin staircases? I hear
that many houses in this country are almost as fine as any in Ireland or
England. Why shouldn't ours be?"

With
Patrick and Colin working from dawn to dusk, and the other men helping after
they returned from their fields, the Stanford house took shape with what seemed
to Elizabeth unbelievable rapidity. Within a week the well had been sunk, the
cellar dug, the floor beams laid. Within a month there it stood, a log house
almost a duplicate of the others in the clearing, with a lean-to shed housing
the well pump, and a lean-to stable for the horses and wagon.

Colin
did not move into the house with them. Instead, he chose to stay with the
Thompsons, waiting until the fall to build a small shelter for himself. Often
Elizabeth found herself wondering about her brother-in-law. Was he lonely,
living as a boarder beneath another man's roof? It was impossible for her to
tell. He seemed much the same quiet, hardworking, practical-minded man that he
had appeared to be on the island of St.-Denis. But, just as she had on that
tropical island, Elizabeth felt that there was an abiding sadness in him that
he allowed no one to see.

With
the house completed, Patrick and Colin started clearing their lands, the
northern boundary of which lay less than a mile from the settlement. Working
twelve and sometimes fourteen hours during the long summer days, they felled
pines and oaks and maples and beeches, and used the horses to pull the stumps
from the rich dark earth. It was too late in the season now to plant anything
except field corn to serve as fodder for the horses. But next year, Patrick
said confidently, they would be able to grow enough food for their own needs.
And within a few years their land would include many acres of pasturage upon
which to graze cattle. Surely the fast-growing settlements between New
Canterbury and Philadelphia would provide a ready market for milk cows and beef
cattle.

While
Patrick worked on the land, the women of the tiny community taught Elizabeth
the skills of a frontier housewife. She learned to weave on the heavy loom that
Patrick, aided by Joe Thompson, had built for her. Using molds lent to her by
Mrs. MacPherson and Mrs. Wentworth, she learned how to make tallow candles.
Gathering with the other women at the Thompsons' house, she helped salt down partridges
and wild turkey and venison the men had shot, and trout and bass they had taken
from the river. In return for her labor, she received a barrel of salted fish
and a haunch of venison to store in her own cellar.

Late
in October, work on Colin's house began. Situated on the opposite side of the
clearing near the young Jessups', it was to be a small house, little more than
a hut—a house suitable for a man who did not intend to marry. With the deerskin
flap unhooked from the window on this mild afternoon, Elizabeth watched Patrick
and his brother stake out an area not more than twenty feet square. To her,
aware of the new life within her swollen body, it seemed sad that Colin
apparently intended to live out his days as a bachelor. True, there were no unmarried
young women in this little settlement, but that situation could change as new
families arrived. And there were marriageable girls only a few days' journey
away, in the second of the settlements where they had stopped on their way to
New Canterbury. But in all these weeks, Colin had made no move to return there.

On
a gray afternoon in early December, her daughter was born, after a brief and
far from difficult labor. She awoke two hours later to candlelight. Mrs.
Thompson sat beside the fireplace, stirring stewed chicken in a pot that hung
over the coals. Near the bed, Patrick was looking down into the cradle he
himself had built. Elizabeth must have made some sound, because his dark face
turned toward her. Then he came and stood beside the bed.

He
said, holding her upstretched hand in both of his, "How are you,
Elizabeth?"

"A
little tired." She hesitated. "Are you disappointed?" It was a
question she hated to ask, because she knew it would conjure up for him, as it
did for her, that bitter day at Stanford Hall when she had lost their son.

He
said frankly, "When I first heard the child was a girl I was not certain
as to how I felt." He had spent the hours of waiting at the MacPhersons'.
"But now that I have seen her, I wouldn't want her to be anyone
else."

Elizabeth
felt relief, and a happiness so deep she could not express it. And so she said,
"What hair she has is
yellow. But her eyes are a deep brown, like yours.
Did you notice?"

"I
did."

"What
shall we name her?"

"I
have been thinking about that. Unless your heart is set upon some other name, I
would like her to be called Caroline, after my mother."

She
said the name over to herself. Caroline Stanford. "I like that. She will
be Caroline."

Winter
was mild that year, so mild that the men of the settlement often were able to
fish from the riverbank, rather than, as in seasons past, through holes carved
in the ice. With no heavy snow to impede them, Patrick and Colin continued to
clear land. And like the other men, they took advantage of the mild weather to
hunt, so that they could supplement with fresh meat the provisions salted down
months earlier.

Busy
with household tasks, and with caring for an infant daughter who seemed to grow
rosier and more enchanting almost by the hour, Elizabeth did not mind the short
winter days. To conserve firewood, she and Patrick went to bed soon after
supper each night. Sometimes, tired out, they fell asleep almost immediately.
Other times, while the banked fire still sent a faint glow over the big room,
they made love. One night, as she looked up through half-lidded eyes and saw
the brooding look that desire always brought to his face, she suddenly
remembered
words from the marriage service. "With my body I thee worship."

Was
it only with his body, and only at times like this, that he could be said to
love her? Right at this moment, were his feelings any different from those he
used to experience when he held Moira Ashley in his arms? Perhaps actually that
beautiful and high-spirited Irishwoman had aroused more protectiveness and
tenderness in him than she herself did. Elizabeth had a painful memory of a
candlelit room in that Dublin inn, and Moira saying, with the complacent laugh
of a truly cherished woman, that Patrick would scold her for not following his
financial advice....

Elizabeth
felt Patrick's lips warm on her mouth, and his hand cupping her breast,
arousing the first tremors of desire deep within her. Soon all thought of Moira
Ashley was swept from her mind.

***

An
early spring brought a quickened tempo to the whole community. On the first
warm day in March, a big iron caldron was set over a fire in the center of the
clearing, and Elizabeth and the other women took turns stirring the bubbling
mixture of tallow and lye that eventually would solidify into soap. When the
ground grew sufficiently soft, Patrick used the hand plow he had brought from
Philadelphia to prepare ground behind the house for a kitchen garden. Using
seeds they had bought in Philadelphia, as well as ones donated by their
neighbors, she planted peas and spinach and green onions. Several times during
the late spring and early summer, leaving Caroline with Mrs. Thompson, she took
the trail through the woods to where Patrick and Colin planted potatoes, sweet
corn, and squash, and, on newly cleared ground beyond, timothy and red clover,
which perhaps next year would provide pasturage for cattle.

No
new settlers arrived. But the long summer days did
bring visitors,
families on their way to take up land farther west, and French trappers, some
bound for Philadelphia, others for the rivers and dense forests of Ohio and
beyond. The ones traveling toward the Ohio and Mississippi rivers carried
money, with which they bought corn-meal and dried meat to sell in the little
French settlements along the river route to New Orleans. Late in August,
Patrick hauled up from the cellar most of the venison and dried fish stored
there and sold it to two black-bearded
voyageurs.
When Elizabeth
protested that they themselves might need that food, he said confidently,
"We won't. As soon as the harvest is in, Colin and I will hunt, just as we
did last fall and winter. What we do need is money, if we're to start buying
cattle next spring."