Our Own Country: A Novel (The Midwife Series) (32 page)

44

I CUDDLED WITH MY BABE, AND FED
him, and he finally fell asleep for the night at around ten, followed soon thereafter by Lizzie. Their quiet breaths were consolingly regular. But I remained awake. The air was hot and close; the room was utterly black—I could not tell whether my eyes were open or no, and in my nervous state I thought I could hear animals scratching in the walls. I must have dozed off, for I was awakened by a soft knock.

“Who’s there?” I whispered. I thought of Langdon’s words but dared not hope.

Silence. I got up and approached the door. Perhaps it was a messenger. I opened the door slightly and looked through the crack.

There stood Watkins. His fair, clear eyes took me in for a long moment. Then they moved beyond me, to Lizzie and the sleeping babe.

“A moment,” I whispered. I went to wake poor Lizzie. She roused herself quickly, smiled blearily, and asked, “Who is it?”

“As you see,” I whispered.

Lizzie looked toward the door and said, “Oh!” She turned to me and opened her eyes wide, as if to say that I had not exaggerated, that he was, indeed, the handsomest man on earth. She then rose, curtsied without meeting Watkins’s eyes, and moved past him into the hallway.

“Where go you?”

“Just here in the hall. I shall keep watch.”

“I remain not long,” Watkins said to us both. “The colonel waits for me below.”

Oh, God! The sound of his voice made me dizzy.

Watkins’s right arm was hidden in a linen sling. With his left hand, and very slowly, he took my hand in his. He looked a little older, perhaps, but here was the same animated face; here, the strong, sinewy body I once had known so intimately. His curly hair, which I had caressed I knew not how many times, was now pomaded and tied in a ribbon. One brown-blond lock had escaped and tumbled upon his shoulder. But his eyes were different. In them, I thought I saw a kind of resignation I had not seen there before, not even on the pier after the
Ranger
’s departure. I could think of but one remedy: I moved to the bed and lifted Johnny gently. He remained asleep, on his back in my arms.

“Your son,” I said, holding Johnny out to him. “Isn’t he amazing? He called me Mama today.”

Watkins gazed down at his child. Gently, he cradled Johnny’s head in his good hand.

“Amazing, yes. But don’t wake him just yet.” He glanced lovingly at me.

“No.” I placed Johnny back on the bed. John approached me slowly, as if I might flee, his eyes never leaving me. We embraced, saying nothing, and for the longest time we just stood like that in the small chamber in Stavers’s tavern.

John left in the dead of night, Lizzie having stood guard in the hallway the entire time. When it was time for him to leave, she knocked gently. But she did not wake us, for we had not slept. John said he hoped to see me once more before we returned to Braintree.

At breakfast, Lizzie and I sat in one of the tavern’s small public rooms, where we were served coffee and a fine plate of ham and eggs. After ten minutes of silence, however, she began to giggle. The harder she tried to squelch the urge, the worse it became.

“Oh, Eliza,” she blurted at last, “I must have at least some details. Do give me a morsel and put me out of my misery. For it’s certain I’m to be an old maid and must live vicariously.”

“You are depraved,” I scolded. I gave her no details, though I did say, “Oh, you should have seen him with Johnny. You should have seen his tenderness.” She stopped laughing, and her eyes grew tearful at the thought of Watkins holding his son for the first, and possibly the last, time.

Just as we were finishing our breakfast, a messenger approached us with a letter for Lizzie. As she perused it, she stood up from her chair.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s from Colonel Quincy. My brother, Harry, is alive—and in Braintree. Eliza, we must leave at once.” Indeed, she looked as if she would leave that very moment, whether I followed or no.

We traveled till near midnight, when we reached the inn at Newburyport and stopped to catch a few hours’ sleep. We continued down the coast early the next morning and arrived in Braintree late the following day. I would have relished the opportunity to write Colonel Langdon before I left, but there simply was no time—Lizzie would not rest until sh
e’d
seen her brother with her own eyes.

I bore my suffering stoically, as Abigail did. But at least I now knew that Watkins still loved me, and that our bonds had not been irrevocably broken.

As we entered our lane off the coast road, we espied a tan young man walking down the dunes from the Quincys’. He looked hale and hearty, and his golden hair shone in the declining sun.

Lizzie cried, already rising from her seat, “Stop! Stop the carriage!”

At the sound of her voice, the young man turned. “Lizzie?”

“Harry? It
is
you!” She nearly tumbled out of the carriage and ran flying into the young man’s muscular brown arms. He spun her around and laughed.

“You are changed,” he remarked, holding her at arm’s length.

“Am I very ugly?”

“Not exactly.” He took another step back, the better to scrutinize her. “You’re tan.”

“We work in the fields, like slaves.” Then she turned to me to see whether her words had given offense. I smiled at her and shrugged. Words did not offend me, where the heart was loving.

“Well, I come bearing gifts that may relieve your labors—at least, for a short while.”

“Gifts?”

Harry laughed gaily. “I must return to the Quincys’ to thank them and get my things.” And off he loped, back up the hill through the dunes. Martha had stepped out to greet us holding a kitchen cloth; she followed Harry with her eyes.

“Oh, Martha,” said Lizzie, embracing her. “Eliza has so much news to tell. But first—have you met my brother?”

“Of course. He’s been here these past three days—at the Quincys’, I mean. I didn’t think it meet that he stop here—”

“No,” Lizzie agreed.

“He’s begun to help about the farm. He says it’s in a woefully feminine state.”

“Feminine state?” Lizzie smirked. “We’ll see how well he fares with all our feminine work!” I had only gotten a glimpse of Harry, but it was enough to know that Harry was a very fine specimen of a man. Five years at sea had hardened his muscles, turned him brown, and bleached his light-brown hair blond. Yet he seemed a mere boy in spirit, lighthearted and ready to laugh.

I handed Johnny down to Lizzie and then descended the carriage, my limbs having grown stiff. The colonel’s coachman brought our belongings into the cottage. It was a sweltering day, and as we had traveled since before dawn, we were quite exhausted. Johnny, wh
o’d
been asleep on my lap, woke and cried inconsolably.

Harry returned with his sacks just then—what a horrid impression the child must have made! Even I wished to cover my ears. Martha and I set about bathing and changing Johnny. We fed him a bit of mashed pea and potato. After he had bathed and eaten, he finally settled and was soon crawling toward Harry’s burlap sacks.

“Hey, there, fella!” Harry exclaimed. He bent down on one knee, and Johnny sat up to listen to whatever Harry might have to say. “Why, aren’t you a handsome little man!” Harry turned to his sister, “Dusky, though, what?” Lizzie did not reply, but merely shot him a peremptory glance. It occurred to me, however, that, having traveled from port to port—West Indies, East Indies, even Africa—Harry must have seen a myriad of humanity’s variations. Johnny crawled off to the kitchen, where we heard him banging happily on a pot.

“A cozy house, indeed,” said Harry to his sister.

“Small, you mean?” She had made us all some tea and brought it into the parlor.

“Nay, cozy. Truly.”

As there was but one chair, Harry sat himself on the floor, cross-legged. “Never mind about a chair. The floor is not heaving to and fro—that’s already an improvement.” Not to be outdone, we ladies sat ourselves upon the floor as well, giggling as we adjusted our petticoats. We no longer wore our stays about the house, so sitting in this manner was not the miserable ordeal it might once have been. Harry sipped his tea and frowned.

“Ugh. Sister, what
is
this? Tastes like horse dung.”

“Harry!” Lizzie scolded. “You drink our finest and most patriotic blackberry tea. We’ve had no real tea since ’75.”

Martha corrected her: “Recall you not the tea Abigail shared with us in ’76?”

“Abigail Adams, you mean? John Adams’s wife?” asked Harry, all astonishment.

“Harry,” Lizzie said with some exasperation, “I see you’re as ignorant as a newborn babe. Of course. This is
Braintree
. Abigail lives not two miles down the road. Colonel Quincy is her uncle. Our Eliza is related to them.”

“Oh, goodness me,” he said, affecting ignorance. “That would be the lady I met yesterday, with whom I conversed for well over an hour.”

“You met Mrs. Adams?” Lizzie cried.

Harry nodded. “And I do believe—I say this with no false modesty—she had a very great pleasure in meeting me.”

“Oh!” She hit him upon his head, at which assault he cried out and attempted to shield himself.

Harry then shifted his attention to the sacks. “Go ahead and open your gifts, Lizzie.”

“Should I?” she turned to me inquiringly.

“Oh, yes, let’s,” I said with some enthusiasm. I would not ruin this moment with my own misery, not for all the tea in China!

We set our dishes of tea aside and Harry opened the mouth of one of the sacks. Soon we were exclaiming and crying with joy: Oranges! Flour! Real wheat flour, too!

“Oh, I shall make an orange cake and invite the Quincys,” was Lizzie’s first comment. Then came Bohea tea—several boxes of it.

“You can feed your blackberry horse dung to the pigs,” Harry said to his sister as he handed the boxes to her.

“We have no pigs.”

“To the chickens, then—though I doubt whether even they shall eat it.”

There was more. Rum, ham, beans, coffee, dried fish. What bounty! Martha’s eyes moved silently from Harry to his provisions and back to Harry again, as if she couldn’t decide which to devour first.

“What think you, Martha? Is not my brother a most wonderful pirate?”

“It would seem so,” she said dryly.

“Oh, but where shall we put him?” Rising from the floor in spirited fashion, Lizzie set her hands on her hips and looked about her. Johnny and I slept in the parlor, and Martha and she were in separate chambers upstairs, as they preferred to be during the hot summer months.

“I suppose we could give him your room, Martha.”

“No, indeed,” Martha replied. “I want no man so close to us. Let us put him in the dairy, with the cheese.”

“Am I ripe, then, Miss Miller?” he roguishly cocked his head at her.

“Rather,” she agreed, twitching her nose.

“You could use a bath,” admitted Lizzie.

Harry rose up to his full height—near six feet. “Very well, then, ladies. Draw me a bath, since I have no wish to offend.” And with these words he began to unbutton his trousers. We all rose at once and ran shrieking from the room. Harry just laughed and laughed.

45

THE FOLLOWING EVENING, THE QUINCYS CAME TO
dine, and we feasted on everything good, such fare as we had not tasted in years. The evening was so merry. Lizzie beamed with joy and pride. Harry regaled us all with tales of mysterious islands and primitive peoples. At one point, Johnny woke and would not resettle. Ann Quincy, at her queenly best, said, “Bring that child here at once.” After we set him upon her lap, she carried on with our lively conversation, cuddling him while he played with her pendant and snuggling his soft, curly head upon her breast. Then Colonel Quincy motioned to his wife to hand over the babe, and was duly granted it.

The next morning, Harry set about mending a fence whose broken slats allowed all the local cows to wander in and help themselves to our vegetables. Martha watched him, and we watched her do so—Lizzie, Abigail, and I—from the edge of the kitchen garden. Abigail had returned early that morning to fetch a pan sh
e’d
left the night before.

Martha took Harry refreshment, and when he announced his intention of clearing away the brambles in the next field, she disappeared into the house to see if perhaps Jeb had owned a pair of leather gloves. He had, and Martha returned with them to offer Harry. The sight of those gloves pained me; I could make out the creases in the leather where his finger joints had molded it.

“Thank you, Martha,” Harry said.

“It’s nothing. Those brambles can prick.”

“I’m most obliged. Indeed, these shall make the work far easier.”

Martha seemed pleased that she could be of service to him. She walked back toward the house with a satisfied smirk.

“But do you think he cares at all for her?” Abigail whispered once Martha had gone inside.

“There’s no indication that he even notices her existence,” I said plainly. “Not in
that
way,” I replied.

“No,” Lizzie agreed. “I wonder if I should have a word with him,” she said.

“Nay,” Abigail replied. “She is proud. That would mortify her.”

“Abigail’s right, Lizzie,” I concurred. “Either he shall fancy her or he shall not, and our urging him to do so won’t change things.”

“Yes, but it will break her heart if he does not return her affections,” said Abigail. So involved were we in our conjectures that we had not noticed Martha creep up on us from behind.

“Of what do you speak, harpies?” she asked, handing each of us a glass of cool cider.

“Oh—nothing,” we all said in unison and then blushed. Originality is hard to come by in a pinch.

Harry, we were convinced, saw us all as his sisters. But then, one hot day, as we sat in the kitchen garden having a dish of tea, we saw something that made us revise our opinion. Harry was once again by the fence along the eastern side of our property, closest to the Quincy property. Martha handed him a cool mug of cider, as she always did. This time, however, as she turned back to the house, he reached for her hand and held it a moment, unwilling to let it go. Martha blushed and pulled away, to return to her work.

“Did you see that?” Abigail whispered to Lizzie.

“Of course.”

“What means it?” I asked.

They both turned to me with hands on their hips. “You of all people should know, Eliza.”

They began to laugh. I chased them into the fields, threatening to pour my tea on their heads.

For several weeks after this, Martha and Harry teased each other much as children who secretly like each other do: with insults and gibes. When Harry returned to the cottage in the afternoon, Martha would make a face and say, “Ugh! A pig has wandered in from the road!” When Harry caught a scent of dinner cooking, he would remark, “Oh, no. I hope Martha isn’t cooking today—I’ve run out of Glauber’s salt.”

“Oh, shut up,” sh
e’d
reply to him.

The banter didn’t fool us one bit. We knew they were falling in love, though the lovers continued to fool themselves for several more weeks.

And what of Lizzie? By all appearances, she had renounced Thomas Miller. She did not speak of him, and when Martha made mention of him—his whereabouts, or the fact of his having dined with so and so—she affected indifference.

I knew otherwise, however, for I had known what it was to pine in secret for someone others believed wholly unsuitable. I often came upon Lizzie pacing her chamber anxiously, or sitting by the window with tears in her eyes. When I asked her what was wrong she would always laugh and dismiss it with a wave of her hand and a glib word.