The widow's war (23 page)

Lyddie moved through the days in the steady motion of preparation for winter, making butter, pressing and boiling apples for cider and sauce, preserving currants and plums, storing pumpkins and turnips in the cellar. She worked and waited for the peace to descend, for some sense of victory or vindication, now that she had won her right to her third of the house, but nothing happened. Every other night she was wakened by Silas Clarke, either outside shouting and weeping or inside, snoring and farting, and when she rose one morning and nearly stepped in a slick of vomit she understood that her sense of victory would not come because she’d won nothing. This shabby, bruised house was no more her house now than it had been the week before the agreement; it would never be her house as long as Nathan Clarke controlled its upkeep, controlled who lived there. It would be all delay and neglect with him; Freeman had warned her of it long
ago, and now she saw it all ahead, saw it as one long, uneven struggle. And Lyddie was tired. Her legs felt heavy when she pulled them out of the bed; her head ached behind the eyes most of the day; she developed a kink in her hip; she began to lie in bed past dawn most mornings and tumble back in as soon as she’d finished eating supper at night.

But on the first day of November the temperature plummeted as if someone had read it the calendar, and it spurred Lyddie to action. She set out for the sedge ground to pick bayberries to melt down for the winter’s candles; by two o’clock she’d harvested six pails and returned to the house to set up the kettle.

Silas Clarke appeared to have given up on the tannery and lay in his room, sleeping. Lyddie fed the fire, and when she’d got a hearty blaze she made her trips to the well, each one pulling at her limbs as if she’d been stretched on a rack. She set her kettle, filled it with water, and as soon as it began to boil she poured the berries across the top, skimming off the wax as fast as it melted, all the while feeding the flames.

A sleep-shout from Silas Clarke startled her; she whirled around, spilling a skimmer full of wax down her skirt; she snatched up her skirt to contain the wax, but she was too close to the fire; the wax dripped into the fire and the fire flamed; a hungry tongue leaped up the wax to the skirt, gobbling wax and cloth. Lyddie beat at the skirt with the skimmer, a foolish thing to do, as the wax remaining in the skimmer just fed the flame and her sleeve caught, too. She grabbed the bucket, but not an ounce of water remained. A thick, black smoke now fumed around Lyddie and she couldn’t see; she beat at the seared places and shouted for Silas Clarke; she ran to the peg, caught up her cloak and beat herself with it; the smoke billowed thicker and blacker and she began to choke. She thought: I’m tired. I’m so very tired.

And dropped into nothing.

“The right leg’s got the worst of it. And the arms. I’ve picked away most all the cloth. I can’t answer for the lungs. She breathes yet; that’s the main thing. She must be kept breathing. Apply this salve morning and night, each time you change the bandages. And give her this tincture in warm wine every third hour.”

Lyddie opened her eyes and saw Dr. Fessey peering down at her.

“Ah! Here she comes now. Well, now, Widow Berry, what have you been up to?”

Lyddie looked around. She was back in her old room at Nathan Clarke’s; her trunk sat again in the same corner; Mehitable stood just behind Dr. Fessey, Bethiah behind Mehitable and Jane by the door.

“Candles,” she said and coughed.

“Candles, she says. Well, and did you have to light them all? Now, then, are you in any pain?”

“Throat. Sore.”

“You see? That’s the smoke. She says nothing of the burned limbs because the nerves have been deadened.” He patted Lyddie on the chest and took himself off, the others following.

Lyddie closed her eyes and listened to the low voices in the other room. At length one spoke closer by.

“Grandmama?”

Lyddie opened her eyes. Bethiah.

“Are you great hurt?”

“No.” Saying the one word made her cough, and the coughing made her throat hurt. But after she was through coughing she asked, “Who brought me here?”

“Uncle Silas. He’s got cough, too; they’re giving him a tonic.”

“Is—” Lyddie felt another cough coming on and stopped. It wasn’t worth the trouble. Nothing was worth the trouble. She was tired. She closed her eyes.

The next voice she heard was Mehitable’s. “Mother?”

Lyddie opened her eyes. Mehitable stood over the bed with a bowl, a spoon, and a napkin.

“I must lift you a very little.” She eased Lyddie higher on the bolster, sat on the edge of the bed, and began to spoon a salty, rich broth into her. It felt like fire going down. Lyddie reached up to stop the spoon and saw the clumsy bandage. She lifted the other hand. The same.

“Daughter—”

“Don’t worry, Mother. With the proper care, with the proper rest, the wounds will heal. The doctor said so. Are you finished? Very well, perhaps you’d better rest now.”

Lyddie closed her eyes.

Rest now.

Lyddie slept. It seemed to her she slept through night and day, but she couldn’t have done, because she could recount each visitor in her chamber: Mehitable with more broth and warm wine and salve and clean bandages, and Bethiah with more questions, and Dr. Fessey with scissors to cut away the dead flaps of skin and percuss her lungs and announce her good and bad signs to those waiting in the next room. Silas Clarke came, and received her thanks; Cousin Betsey came and chattered at her until she fell asleep; Eben Freeman came and asked how she fared and left almost before she answered. He came again and said something about the house, about tending to the house, but Lyddie was tired; she closed her eyes, and when she opened them he’d gone.

Dr. Fessey came and announced that her legs were healing well, but her lungs were inflamed and the skin on her hands was healing
too tight; she needed to breathe deep, drink more wine, use her hands; Mehitable suggested she get up and walk about, but Lyddie was too tired. She needed to rest. Hadn’t Dr. Fessey said so?

Freeman came again, and she heard him talking to Clarke in the outer room.

“How does she fare?”

“The burns heal, the throat heals, but she’s got the lung fever. If she lives, I don’t believe she’ll leave here. Best to sell the house now.”

“Will she agree?”

“I’d say she will. She’s not asked once about it, or her stores, or even the bloody cow or chickens.”

“She’s made no mention to me, either. Can she use her hands?”

“The doctor says she might eventually, if she worked them. ’Tis an effort.”

“Effort! When has effort ever stopped her?”

Now, Lyddie thought. She had no need of effort here. She would sign the paper agreeing to the sale and stay here with her daughter. Mehitable had proved she would take better care of Lyddie than Lyddie would take of herself, and Lyddie would lie and watch the babe grow and prosper…

The men had moved on to talk of Silas, flush with pride at his heroic rescue, back at the tannery and, for the moment, sober. Lyddie closed her eyes and slept some more.

When she woke, Freeman was standing in the door, staring down at her as if she were some foreign species of bird blown in on a storm.

“Good morning,” she said.

“If you raised your head you might see by your dark window that it’s morning no longer.” The words carried more bite than the information required and it puzzled Lyddie until she remembered about Sam Cowett. He was still angry about Sam Cowett. In an effort to smooth him she raised her head to the window, but it set her coughing. She lay back down, exhausted.

Freeman approached the bed. He pulled the blanket down to her waist, exposing her untied shift, but it didn’t slow him. He gripped her arms high inside the armpits and pulled her forward over her knees. He began to clap her hard on the back. Lyddie began to cough again. He pushed her farther forward, and she spewed big green gobs into a handkerchief, which appeared under her chin at the key moment.

Freeman stopped thumping and laid her back against the bolster. “My wife had lung fever,” he said.

“It’s taken many in the village.”

“It didn’t take my wife, and it won’t take you, not if you keep spewing.” He shoved the soiled handkerchief back in his pocket and left her.

The next time the cough struck, more out of curiosity than anything, Lyddie leaned forward over her napkin and let it shake her. Sure enough, more green gobs came out. They came out green for three more days and then they turned yellow, and Lyddie discovered she breathed easier.

The next morning Bethiah came to see her with her workbox. “Mama says you know the herringbone.”

Well, good Lord, of course she knew the herringbone, but she could never work a needle, and Mehitable should know that. But there the girl sat, opening her workbox and taking out a rough piece of tow, threading a needle with scarlet thread. Lyddie lifted her right hand; it had contracted like a claw; she stretched the fingers and felt as if she were breaking them one by one. She reached for the needle and dropped it.

“Another day, child.”

The legs were one thing, but the hands were another. The skin stretched shiny and tight across Lyddie’s shins, and when she got out
of bed to walk to the window it caught her feet up flat so that she hobbled like a duck, but that could be managed. It was the hands that worried her. The skin had healed, not in shiny smooth patches but in hard ridges, and the hands had lain curled inside their bandages so long that the tendons had pulled up tight as well. Lyddie tried to straighten one hand with the other, but the one wouldn’t work enough to help the other. She hobbled out of bed and tried flattening them against the wall. That worked better.

After a week she knew she couldn’t manage any pretty stitch, but she felt sure she could guide Bethiah’s needle. She called the girl into her room and told her about making roofs, one next the other, with a small cross at the top where one might plant the chimney, and two small crosses at the bottom for the eaves. Bethiah held the needle and Lyddie directed, and a wobbly row of red roofs sprung up across the cloth.

The next day Lyddie dressed herself alone and joined the family in the keeping room for breakfast.

The one downside to Lyddie’s recovery was her daughter Mehitable. While she’d been charged with nursing her mother the old resentment seemed to have taken a distant seat to a new tenderness; once the nursing ended she retreated to her original edginess, and lately she seemed to actively avoid Lyddie. One morning Lyddie asked Mehitable if she was distressed over something, and Mehitable answered, “Why do you ask that now?”

“Because you’re not as you seemed before.”

“No one is as they seemed before,” and to Lyddie’s great surprise Mehitable burst into tears and ran from the room.

Lyddie tried once more to talk to her daughter but got only more stiffness from her.

She ran short of wind after four crossings of the room. She dropped as many knitting pins as she dropped stitches. Once she stumbled and fell as she tried to leave her chair in too great a hurry, and she went to bed each night more exhausted than she’d ever been in her life. But when Nathan Clarke called her into his study and she found Eben Freeman waiting with him, an old quickness shot through her system.

Eben Freeman sat quiet, watching her. Nathan Clarke began by complimenting her on her recent progress and then outlining, in detail, her many remaining limitations. “In view of the current state of affairs,” he concluded, “we thought it likely you might wish to reconsider our agreement. We thought it likely you might wish to permit the sale that we’d planned originally, and stay here where you’re safest.”

He spoke kindly. Indeed, through the past weeks he’d treated her with respect and generosity, as had her daughter. If she’d felt any discord at all, it had been between the couple themselves, and for a moment she wondered if they had disagreed over this very offer to return her to the household. But Lyddie knew she could stay where she was in comfort and safety, perhaps as happily as she would stay in her own home with Silas Clarke. Lyddie had learned what a house was and wasn’t. But what was she? What might she become if she stayed here? A thing that sat in the corner knitting unwanted stockings, trying to contain her tongue against her son-in-law, and even her own daughter?

“Mother? Come now. You’re a woman of good sense. Think of the practicals in the matter. You’ve great physical limitations; you’ll not hire yourself out now to cook and clean; I daresay you’d be hard-pressed to keep your own house in order.”

“I would keep my own house in order if there were not your brother in it.”

“Hah! You’ve come to another reason to keep here. So, what say you? We put the house for sale, you live here with every comfort, and you’ll have a nice little pot to spend on all your pins and ribbons.”

Pins and ribbons.
The word shot her backward, to the first time Nathan had thrown them at her during his first attempt to sell Edward’s house. If he’d used another set of words, something that didn’t immediately cast her back to the place she’d begun, what might she have answered? She would never know. Her words came out the way they had been sown. “I cannot agree to any sale, Nathan.”

Nathan threw his hands over his head. “All right, Freeman, you talk to her. I’ve wasted enough breath on it.”

Lyddie looked at Freeman. His mouth had lifted at one corner. “I believe the widow has made her wishes clear. We now return to our original agreement.”

Freeman’s voice, steady and rich and deep, gave Lyddie courage. She thought of James Otis standing before the chief justice in the town house last winter and her brain seemed to open fully for the first time in weeks. Months. Since Edward. An idea, a bold idea, a fresh breeze of an idea, began to stir among the long-stagnant branches of her mind. She turned to Freeman. He had said
we
and
our,
but she would not presume on it. “We had at one time discussed the necessity of my acquiring another lawyer. I wonder, does your presence here—”

“I am here and at your service as long as you desire me, Widow Berry.”

Lyddie turned to Nathan. “You intend to keep your brother in your two-thirds the house?”

“You may damned well count on it, Mother. And if you don’t happen to care for it—”

Lyddie faced Freeman again. “Mr. Freeman, have you resolved the matter of Aunt Goss?”

He blinked at her in surprise. “I have not.”

“And would you, in principle, have any great objection to my keeping her instead of your sister doing so?”

“I…Well, no, I would not.”

“Then I would direct you to make my son another offer. He gives me life use of house entire—”

Freeman’s eyes flickered briefly and then burned steadily, but Clarke cut her off with a great shout. “Freeman, I suggest you take your
client,
if you would so call her, educate her as to the law, and come back when you’ve brought her sensible.”

“I’m sensible now, Nathan. If you would hear me—”

“If it begins house entire—”

“It does, but it also ends there. No keep and care. You have such objection to this inconvenience and expense, I should think you’d be delighted to get shed of it. If you give me life use of house entire I’ll
have the means to make my way; I’d take Aunt Goss as boarder at a rate of, say, forty pounds per year, add another long-term boarder in the remaining downstairs chamber or perhaps a few transients up under the eaves, and support us all quite neatly. If nothing else over this past year, I’ve learned economy.”

If nothing else, thought Lyddie, she’d at least stuck Nathan silent. Even Freeman opened his mouth and wordlessly closed it.

“What say you, Nathan?” Lyddie asked. “Would you think it fair exchange? Life use of house entire and you may keep your wood and rye and beef forever? You must remove your brother, of course—”

“And suffer the loss of my own rent.”

“I should like to know what you’ve actually managed to collect in rent from that quarter,” Freeman interjected. “As he’s at the tavern more than he’s at the tannery, I should think it will figure at no great loss. As for my part, I’ll send Aunt Goss to the widow at the rate quoted and save twelve pounds a year in the bargain.”

“I’d have to consult Doane,” Clarke said, but Lyddie thought she could detect a spark of interest in his eye.

Freeman must have seen it, too. He stood. “Consult Esquire Doane at your leisure. When you’ve made your decision, you may reach me at my brother’s house. Good morning.” He turned for the door without further look or word for Lyddie.

“I make one further condition,” Lyddie said.

Freeman halted as if he’d been shot in the back, and Lyddie felt a moment’s pity for him. He turned slowly.

“I would require that the house be returned to the state it was in before the arrival of Mr. Clarke. You’ll find a window in need of repair, and a fireplace crane, and several chairs—”

“God in heaven!” Clarke shouted. “Leave off, now! I’ll not talk to you longer! When I’ve made my decision I’ll be talking to your lawyer!”

Her lawyer left, and Lyddie followed as soon as she felt sure he’d
had time to clear the outer door. She returned to her room and lay down on the bed, her lungs aching, her heart racing, but her brain still working. Nathan Clarke would agree; she was sure he would agree; she held the most valuable bargaining chip of all: he could get shed of her forever.