Rachel and Leah (Women of Genesis) (43 page)

“You can’t give Bilhah to anybody. She’s a free woman.”

“Right, yes, technically I
hired
her. But she didn’t make a fuss about it. Where else would she go? Besides, she’s so sure that Rachel has been badly treated—as if Rachel didn’t
start
the whole mess—anyway, Bilhah is full of compassion for her poor, injured mistress. She would have insisted on staying with her even if I had forbidden it.”

“I’m glad Rachel will have a friend.”

“And so will you.”

Leah laughed at that. “Zilpah? I suppose she’s a friend. But you won’t find her fighting for me the way Bilhah’s standing up for poor Rachel.”

“Won’t I?” said Father. “You should have seen how she went straight to the worst gossips in camp—and you can be sure Zilpah knows who they
all
are—and laid down the law about what will and won’t be said about you in this camp. I’ve never seen her so … fiery.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,” said Father. “Whether you
feel
you do or not, you
have
a loyal friend.”

“Well, that’s something, I guess,” said Leah.

“It’s not everything, but yes, it’s
something
. And a husband is something.”

Leah hugged him tighter. “And a father who loves me, that’s everything.”

“No,” said Father. “That’s just ‘something,’ too. A whole bunch of somethings, that’s what everything is.”

His words were so absurd that Leah couldn’t help laughing, and this time with real mirth.

“I never thought I’d hear that sound again,” said Father. “Leah, laughing as if she were really enjoying herself.”

T
here was another wedding in the camp at Padan-aram, only a week after the first. This time the husband placed the veil over the bride’s face himself. There was no doubt about whom he was marrying.

This time the bride did not tremble. She stood boldly to drink from the cup and to say the words she had to say, and when she walked around her husband, she did it, not three times, but seven.

At the feast, Jacob brought his new bride out for the company to cheer her, and they did it heartily. A few attempts at ribald humor were made, but her brother Choraz made it clear that there would be no more of that, and so there wasn’t.

That night, Jacob fetched Rachel from her father’s tent himself, and when they came inside his own tent, he kept a lamp burning. “I know you’re shy,” he said. “But I have to see you.”

“I was afraid before,” Rachel answered. “But then I learned that there was something I feared worse than marrying you.”

“What was that?”

“Not marrying you,” said Rachel.

By morning she had learned what a liar Hassaweh was.

* * *

That night her sister Leah slept very little. But it was not from jealousy. She would never begrudge Rachel the love of Jacob—it was Rachel’s from the moment of that first kiss at the well, and Leah had never aspired to supplant her sister.

No, Leah was awake because she spent the night in prayer. For that morning she had awoken feeling nauseated, and hadn’t been able to keep any food down until early afternoon.

She knew that it might be nothing more than the turbulence of her feelings about her husband’s wedding that day—certainly the gossips of the camp would be speculating that Leah had induced the vomiting as an excuse to stay away from Rachel’s wedding. Let them talk. Leah knew better.

She prayed for her nausea to mean what she wanted so desperately for it to mean. Let it be a boychild in her womb that made her feel like this—for she knew some women were sick right from the time when their husband’s seed first took root inside the womb.

“O Lord,” she prayed, “look upon my affliction. Let me bear him a son. Then my husband will love me.”

I
never intended the story of Rachel and Leah to be broken up among multiple volumes. It happened against my will. I had no problem with keeping
Sarah
and
Rebekah
to one book each. But unlike either of those books, the story of Rachel and Leah has four very strong female characters who needed separate development. I had to create a network of attitudes and experiences for each of the six pairings. That takes time—measured both in book pages and writing time.

About halfway through writing this novel, I realized that there was no way to carry the story through to the logical ending place: Rachel’s death after the birth of Benjamin. For a while I tried to bring it to an end at the point where Bilhah and Zilpah are given to Jacob as concubines, but that will now be one of the major events in the next book in the Women of Genesis series,
The Wives of Israel
. What finally worked for this book was to close the story when all the anticipation of the
marriage is brought to its messy and painful fruition on Leah’s wedding night.

Because this book ended up being one of the most difficult writing projects of my career, it didn’t fit into my writing schedule as I had planned. Instead of writing it in the summer of 2003, the bulk of it became a project for the winter of 2004—precisely at the time when I began teaching two writing courses at Southern Virginia University. SVU is located three hours by car from my home in Greensboro. I had planned to commute with the company of books on tape, but I simply couldn’t afford to take that much time away from writing.

Instead, our resident webwright, Scott Allen (you can see his work on my websites,
www.hatrack.com
,
www.nauvoo.com
,
www.ornery.org
,
www.strongverse.com
, and
www.taleswapper.com
)
, put his laptop in the trunk of my Crown Vic and drove me up highway 220 and I-81 twice a week. While I taught three hours of classes, he hooked into the SVU computer system in the office of my coteacher, Robert Stoddard, and worked on our websites.

For some inexplicable reason, it turned out that throughout the semester, I was only able to really concentrate and solve the writing problems of this novel while I was working on my laptop in the car during those drives. So about three-fourths of this novel was written within arm’s reach of Scott Allen. I have
never
written a book with somebody else in the room until now. I’m just glad he’s even more of an introvert than I am—he was perfectly content to drive in silence for hours on end.

Meanwhile, we got to know every McDonald’s and Subway between Greensboro and Buena Vista. Thanks, Scott,
for service above and beyond the call of your official job description—loose as that already was!

This book is dedicated to Robert and D’Ann Stoddard. It’s a wonderful thing when a dear friend from bachelor days marries a woman that becomes as good a friend as he is. Over the past decades, Kristine and I have come to think of Robert and D’Ann as some of the dearest friends in our lives. But until the fall of 2003, we only got to see them when we went to Los Angeles—or, occasionally, when Robert’s job at UCLA took him to Washington DC on a lobbying expedition. Now he teaches at the new LDS-oriented Southern Virginia University (which took over the name and campus of what used to be a women’s college, which had long occupied a onetime resort in the Shenandoah Valley), so we get to see Robert and D’Ann far more often than before—to our delight.

For those who don’t know, Robert was my collaborator on many theatrical projects when we were both in college. Steeped in musical comedy, Robert arrived at BYU in 1969 armed with extraordinary talent as a composer, writer, and performer—and almost as much ambition as I had. Once we started working together, we both produced some of the best work in our theatrical writing careers, though Robert never really needed
me
—he does brilliant work on his own.

Robert’s ties with my career, as well as my life, are many. For instance, my book
Folk of the Fringe
began as a project to write a post-apocalyptic musical drama with Robert. We have some of the songs written, and all we’re waiting for is my script for
Pageant Wagon
.

The very book you’re holding is owed to a collaboration from our college days. I wrote the play
Stone Tables
, about Moses and Aaron, while I was a missionary in Brazil, and sent
it off to Charles W. Whitman, my favorite professor and good friend in the BYU theatre department. Dr. Whitman (sorry, I can never call him by any other name; it would be like giving the Pope a nickname) immediately put it on the mainstage production schedule for the winter of 1973, and wrote back to tell me that Robert Stoddard—with whom I had already collaborated on several projects before my mission—was writing the music for the songs.

Songs? What songs?

I had written the play in verse—still my preferred form. (Yes, that’s right. I also wrote a long set of poetic essays in heroic couplets. I may never recover from my one-sided love affairs with William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. “One-sided” because, as far as I know, neither one of them has ever bothered to read anything of mine.) Seeing the words so nicely lined up in rows, Dr. Whitman made the connection I hadn’t made. It was Robert’s music—edgy, dramatic, powerful—that elevated the production to real event status at BYU that winter. It was so successful they held it over for a couple of weeks, and were still turning people away from packed houses at the end. I missed all of that, being a missionary in Brazil—they don’t let you go home just because you have a big opening night. But I’ve heard recordings and I knew all of the actors anyway, either before or after my mission.

Years later, determined to get Robert’s brilliant music before the public, I made a deal with Deseret Book (the parent company of Shadow Mountain, which published this volume in hardcover) to record and publish a CD of Robert’s and my music from
Stone Tables
, to be marketed along with a novelization of the play, which I would write.

That book marked my return to writing adaptations of
scriptural stories. That’s what half my playwriting in college consisted of, but in those days I knew I was writing for a Mormon audience. Now, with
Stone Tables
, I deliberately opened the book to any reader who cared about the story of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or unbeliever. I don’t require the reader to believe—or disbelieve—that God is speaking to these characters. What matters is that
they
believe it, and act accordingly.

Stone Tables
as a novel worked—to my satisfaction, anyway—and so it was only natural to look for a chance to do it again. That’s when I contacted Deseret Book’s then-competitor in the LDS publishing market, Bookcraft, where publisher Cory Maxwell made a deal with me over the phone for six books, the three “Women of Genesis” (
Sarah, Rebekah
, and
Rachel and Leah
) and three others about women in the Book of Mormon. Whereupon Bookcraft promptly sold itself to Deseret Book and these books became Shadow Mountain novels. (Later, TOR, my science fiction publisher, acquired the rights to at least the first two books in the series in mass market paperback.)

Fortunately, Cory Maxwell was acquired right along with Bookcraft, and he is still my publisher for this series of scripture-based novels. Kristine and I consider him, along with his boss, the inestimable and delightful Sheri Dew, to be friends as well as collaborators in the publishing biz.

In fact, just to take this full circle, Sheri Dew, the chief of the creative end of Deseret Book (i.e., she’s in charge of everything that directly affects me except signing the checks), has theatrical roots—and back in college days, she was part of a USO tour of Alaskan military bases where the pianist was
none other than … Robert Stoddard. There are twelve million Mormons, but apparently we all still know each other.

Anyway, this network of connections between Robert Stoddard and this book made it obvious to me that this book should be dedicated to him and D’Ann, who know more than a little bit about how two strangers can create a marriage that is more than the sum of its parts. In a book like this, which is about marriage, I couldn’t think of anyone more appropriate to receive the dedication. However, I can assure you that Robert never married any of D’Ann’s sisters.

There are several others who contributed to this novel, besides those already mentioned. My wife, Kristine, read every chapter as soon as I managed to squeeze it out of my head, and made many good suggestions and corrections. I also showed the chapters to Erin Absher and, between her cruises, Kathryn H. Kidd, who were both very helpful, even though they were reading chapters sometimes weeks apart. It’s a good thing they both had Genesis
chapter 29
to help them keep continuity.

Parts of the book were also written in the home of my cousin Mark and his wife Margaret, whose generosity seems to know no boundaries—and believe me, I’ve tested them strenuously.

Besides Sheri and Cory, we’ve had other good friends at Deseret Book who’ve been of great help in creating this series. Richard Peterson is the editor who makes sure that errors in this series are rare—though I remain responsible for any that survive. On previous books we’ve taken great pleasure in working with Emily Watts and Kathie Terry, who have both moved on to other work while this book was still aborning. We’ll miss working with them.

And thanks to Tom Doherty, my publisher at TOR and still the best friend a writer’s career could ever have, for picking up these out–of-genre books and keeping them alive in mass-market paperback editions.