Angel and Apostle by Deborah Noyes

Author:Deborah Noyes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Published: 2005-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

YOUR HUMBLE SERVANT

How far was London? Countless muddy miles away, it seemed, and Mother so silent as the wagon bounced. Even our forays at strange inns, the smoky swirl of faces, the thought of standing at long last outside Simon’s dark window, could not distract me from her silences.

Caleb Milton would sail from London this summer or sooner, to Boston on the way to Virginia—Nehemiah too, perhaps—and Mother would again be his passenger. She would go home to her cursed scaffold, and I would remain.

I imagined her rattling the rust from the keyhole of our old cottage, the cold iron key in her palm, the open door and bleed of sunlight on the dirt floor. I heard the sea and smelled the marsh. Above all, I saw the dappled mouth of the pine and beech wood and felt the velvet dark beckon. It would be nearly autumn when she arrived, and I imagined the stain of berries on my fingers, lichen and cool stone, the sag of grapes and, in the meadows, the bobbing husks of milkweed; these I gathered as a child for their down—from which, when I didn’t send the faery tufts flying on the wind, we wove candle wicks. I heard the complaint of chipmunks as I entered again the remote clearing where once I’d found a deer’s antler on a bed of moss. I prowled in mind the churchyard that now housed the minister’s bones, the plateau overlooking the ocean where my father had addressed me in a meadow.

New Forest had not been without like pleasures. I mourned as we went from it to yet another unknown, though Nehemiah assured me the property was mine to return to. But there was no eclipsing that other world, a child’s world, in my heart. And it was sharp memories of that place, as the horse clopped along and Mother and Nehemiah talked of the Marietta and storms, of how best we might correspond between shores, that brought Simon back to me. Because I realized, as we stopped by yet another tavern on the way to London, that I had forgotten what he looked like. Unlike Nehemiah, who was flesh to me, it was Simon’s essence I’d clung to all these years, not more. His face now swam into view as a drowned face bobs to the underside of ice, and I shuddered at this, my latest betrayal. As we climbed down from the wagon, I went straight to the inn’s outhouse and sat in the spidery dark to cry for the boy Simon who was no more.

A short while later I found my husband in the stable, where in the closed dusk he would not see my eyes. I stood quiet as a dormouse and watched his strong arm brush the mare. He hummed to her and seemed in a trance of sorts, recalling the remote and self-possessed boy I had known long ago. When I spoke his name, he started.

“Mother has gone in alone?”

“It’s a godly crowd here,” he assured me.

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