Never Call It Love (44 page)

She
broke off, and then added, "Go to him. You are doing neither yourself nor
the child any good, pacing up and down like that, and you are upsetting me.
Now, go. Go on!"

Dully
obedient, Elizabeth took down her shawl, flung it around her shoulders, and
stepped out into the cool spring dark. There was no moon, but starlight shone
on the leafless trees walling in the south side of the clearing. Except for a
lamp's glow showing through one of Colin's deerskin-covered windows, every
house was dark.

She
started toward Colin's house and then stopped, arrested by a sound, harsh and
painful, off among the trees to her left. With an odd, lurching sensation
within her breast, she recognized it. It was one of the most terrible of all
sounds, that of a strong man weeping.

Footsteps
noiseless over the ground, she moved to the wood's edge. A few yards ahead, a
patch of lingering snow glimmered. Beyond it, back turned to her, wide
shoulders heaving, Patrick knelt on the damp ground. His sobs seemed wrenched
from him, like something torn out by the roots.

She
heard a whimpering sound, like an echo of his pain, and knew after a moment
that it came from her own throat. She took a step forward. Then she halted,
because he had begun to speak.

"Let
the child live," he said. "I don't ask it for myself. How could I?
You know what I have always been. But if You really exist, let our little girl
live. I'm not even asking it mainly for the child's sake, God. I'm asking it
for Elizabeth, my Elizabeth. Yes, I know I have ho right to call her
mine..."

His
voice broke. For a moment there was no sound except those raw, tortured sobs.
Then words again poured Out of him. "And I know I have no right to feel
this love for her, or expect her to feel anything but hatred for me. What sort
of treatment has she known at my hands? At best, I've been blindly selfish, as
when I scoffed at her fears and left her alone here. And at worst, such as the
night when I broke into her bedroom in that house north of London.... Oh, God!
If I could only roll back the years, and meet her for the first time, and woo
her gently, lovingly. But I cannot. All I can do is to plead with You to spare
her this suffering now. Please, please let the child live." Again his
words gave way to hoarse sobbing.

Standing
at the wood's edge, Elizabeth felt the ache of tears in her throat. Tenderness
for him seemed to swell her heart, so that it was hard to breathe. Afraid that
in another moment he would become aware of her presence, she turned and moved
back across the starlit clearing to her house. She mounted the front steps and
stood there weeping quietly, forehead leaning on the arms she had crossed
against one side of the door frame.

After
a while she wiped her face with one corner of her shawl and went into the
house. Mrs. Thompson rose from beside the crib. "I was about to go to the
door to look for you. I think she has passed the crisis."

Elizabeth
crossed the room swiftly, and half afraid to believe the evidence of her eyes,
looked down at Caroline. The child's face was less flushed now, and her
breaths, more normally spaced, had lost some of that terrible rasp. Relief
washed over Elizabeth, relief so profound that it left her faint. She gripped
the crib's rail to keep from falling.

Mrs.
Thompson said,
"m
sit up with her. You'd best go to bed, just as soon as you have told your
husband. Or shall I tell him? Where is he? At his brother's?"

No
one must disturb Patrick, not when he might still be
talking to that
God he did not believe in. "Yes, he is with Colin. But you needn't call
him. He will be here soon."

Relief
and fatigue and joy combined to make her feel half-drunk. She moved to the bed,
sat down, and took off her shoes. "I won't undress." She stretched
out on the bed. "I will just wait here until Patrick comes in," she
said—and knew nothing more until morning light and the sound of Mrs. Thompson's
quiet movements awoke her.

Swiftly
Elizabeth sat up. "Is Caroline...?"

Mrs.
Thompson, bending before the fireplace, turned to Elizabeth with a smile.
"She's much better. I fed her broth about an hour ago. Now I'm heating
water for tea."

Elizabeth
swung out of bed and crossed to the crib. With a flood of thanksgiving she saw
that the child's breathing seemed almost normal. True, the sleeping face, in
its frame of matted curls, looked shockingly bony and white, and yet it seemed
to Elizabeth that a shadow—an almost visible one that had lain over her little
girl's face for a week—was gone now.

Patrick!
She must tell Patrick! "Did my husband come back here last night?"

"No,
he did not." If Mrs. Thompson felt curiosity about Patrick's failure to
return, she was careful to keep it out of her voice. "He must have stayed
with his brother."

Swiftly
Elizabeth moved back to the bed, sat down, and slipped on her shoes. Then
remorseful realization struck
her. "You shouldn't have let me sleep! Why, you've
been here all night."

"I
slept. I pulled my chair up to the table and rested my head on my arms and
slept real well. Now, go make yourself pretty for your husband."

Elizabeth
hurried through the door into the pump house, where on one rough wall a small
mirror hung above a shelf holding a white china basin, a matching pitcher, and
comb and brush. A few minutes later she crossed through early-morning sunlight
to Colin's little house. Smoke rose from its chimney. He must be preparing
breakfast. She wondered if Patrick sat at the rough table. Or was he still
asleep? He had looked so tired the night before, so thin and sunken-eyed.

She
knocked. Almost immediately she heard limping footsteps. When Colin opened the
door, she looked eagerly past him. No one sitting at the table or lying on the
built-in bed against the far wall. She asked, "Where's Patrick?"
Fleetingly, in one part of her mind not wholly taken up with her husband, she
realized that Colin no longer leaned upon a cane.

He
said, frowning, "Patrick! What do you mean?"

"Didn't
he sleep in your house last night?"

"You
mean he was here?"

"Of
course he was here!" she cried. "I talked to him."

After
a long moment he said, "Then he must have gone away afterward, because I
did not see him at all."

She
stood rigid. Last night she had told him that he had killed his own child. She
had hurled her hatred at him. And so, after he had made that tormented prayer,
he had simply walked away into the night.

The
ground seemed to tilt beneath her feet.

Swiftly
Colin was beside her, his arm around her waist. "Elizabeth! Are you all
right?" When she did not answer, he said, "I had best get you back to
your house."

Faint
and nauseated, she allowed him to draw her
across the clearing. As they neared the
door, he said, "You lie down. I will go the the other houses to see if
Patrick is there."

She
nodded an agreement. But she knew he would not find his brother at any of the
other houses. Patrick had gone, whether back toward Philadelphia, or westward
toward Ohio, or along one of the trapper trails that led north and south, she
had no way of knowing. All she could hope for was that somehow he would learn
that their child still lived, and come back to her.

***

The
days lengthened. Amid the rapidly disappearing patches of snow in the woods,
blue-flowered hepatica appeared, followed by Dutchman's breeches, with rows of
pink blossoms, shaped like miniature pantaloons, hanging from their stalks. The
first returning swallows, blue-backed and tawny-breasted, soared and dived
through the air above the clearing, and finally selected the leaves of the
Jessups' lean-to as a nesting site. After supper, adults sat before their
houses in what remained of the twilight and watched the older children play
run-sheep-run.

To
Elizabeth the beauty of that spring was like a knife to the heart. So,
sometimes, was the sight of Caroline, fully restored to health now, toddling
after the older children. Patrick should be there to see his daughter, sturdy
legs pumping, golden hair bright, as she ran across the clearing. And Patrick
should be there with
her.
It was torment to lie alone in the warm spring
dark, aching to be held in his arms.

Four
evenings after Patrick's disappearance, Colin had urged her to leave New
Canterbury. As she sat on the front step after supper, door open behind her so
that she could hear the slightest whimper from Caroline's crib, Colin limped
across the clearing. He looked down at her through the fading light. "Do
you have any plans, Elizabeth?"

She
felt bewilderment "What sort of plan would I have, except to wait until
Patrick comes home?"

The
light was too faint for her to see his face clearly. Thus she sensed, rather
than saw, the angry scorn in his dark eyes. "How can you be sure he'll
come back? After all, a man who deserts his wife, deserts his child, even
though he knows she may be dying—"

"You
don't understand! I said terrible things to him! He must have felt that... that
the best thing he could do for me was to go away."

"And
leave you without money, without a husband to protect you and provide for you?
Elizabeth, this is no place for you now. Let me take you and Caroline to
Philadelphia."

She
shook her head. "No, Colin. I want to be here when Patrick comes back. And
he will come back."

"Very
well," he said finally. Then, after a long moment: "I'll start spring
planting by the end of the week."

Several
more times as the spring advanced, as the graceful catbirds and flame-bright
tanagers arrived, and swamp marigolds in the woods gave way to blue flags,
Colin urged that she and Caroline retreat to the safety and comfort of
Philadelphia. Did she want to risk another such winter for the child and
herself in this frontier settlement?

Each
time, Elizabeth thrust his arguments aside. She knew that any day now, any
hour, she might look out and see Patrick's tall, lean figure moving toward the
house.

But
days stretched into weeks, and still she was alone. And then, one late May
night as she sat on the front step in the gathering dark after supper, achingly
aware of the beauty of dogwood blossoms like falling snow among the pines at
the clearing's edge, she heard Colin lead the horses into the lean-to stable.
Strange that he was coming back from the fields so late. The other men had
returned almost an hour before.

A
few minutes later, he walked around the corner of the house. Even before he
spoke, something in his manner caused her nerves to tighten. He said, "I
think we had better go into the house."

Too
frightened now even to speak, she got up and moved ahead of him into the dark
room. When her fumbling fingers found the box of flints on the fireplace
mantel, he took it from her. A moment later, lamplight filled the room.

She
said, from a dry throat, "What is it?"

His
gaze went from her face to the crib in which her sleeping daughter lay, and
then back to her face. He said, in a voice that sounded heavy with reluctance,
"A French trapper came through the fields today. He said he had a message
for a Mrs. Stanford. When I told him I was your brother-in-law, he gave it to
me. I guess he was glad not to have to..."

Abruptly
he broke off. She managed to move her lips. "What message?"

He
reached into the pocket of his gray homespun shirt and held out a folded piece
of paper. Like the note Patrick had sent her the previous fall, it was soiled
and worn-looking, as if it had passed through many hands. But when her cold
fingers unfolded it, she did not see Patrick's bold handwriting, but the
labored, semiliterate script of someone who had signed himself "Wm.
Carney."

The
note was dated Hagerstown, Maryland, May 2, 1783. The first sentence told her
that William Carney was "sorry" to tell her that her husband, Patrick
Stanford, had drowned with two other men in Chesapeake Bay.

There
were more words, something about a small boat overturning in a wind squall, something
about none of the bodies being recovered. But by then a mist was closing in
around her, blurring the written lines. She felt Colin's hands grasping her
shoulders. Then, for an interval, she knew nothing.

Someone
was chafing her hands. Lifting weighted eyelids, she found that she was lying
on the bed, and that Mrs. Thompson sat on a chair beside her. Colin stood at
the woman's elbow, anxiety in his dark eyes.

Mrs.
Thompson said, "That's better." She turned to Colin. "I have
some blackberry brandy at my house. Please ask my husband to give it to
you."

Elizabeth's
dull gaze followed him as he limped across the room. She would let him take her
and Caroline to Philadelphia now. As soon as possible, she wanted to be away
from this house, where she had once known happiness as clear and sparkling as
spring water, away from this bed, where she had known the ecstasy of love.
Because the man who had brought her that happiness, who had awakened her to
love and physical joy, had been dead for weeks now, his fine long body buried
by fathoms of water.