Captivity by Deborah Noyes

Author:Deborah Noyes [Noyes, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Published: 2010-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

Will returns the next day, and Mary equips them with a picnic basket. All morning they scour the shore, weighting pockets with shells and jagged little spines and sea glass, holding their faces to the sun and wind.

“Pratt, what do you make of Will’s pet idea that we’re all prisoners but carry around little worlds inside that make us free?”

“You’re a philosopher, then,” commands Pratt, who will have precision of thought or none at all. “Define ‘prisoner.’”

“Well, the pious claim we’re prisoners in our very bodies,” he ventures, his voice low in the sea wind. “And that death frees us.”

“Yes, but what do you claim?” Pratt prods. “I hardly deem you unduly pious. Do you presume to call yourself a captive on this earth?” She eyes him sternly, tenderly. “How justify such claim to an African in chains or a woman wed to a brute buffoon for the sake of her day’s bread? I trust you’ve known poverty, as I have, but you are a young man of sound mind and body in a privileged nation.”

He laughs. It isn’t a hearty laugh, Clara thinks. Pratt doesn’t intimidate Will as she does some people—in fact, Clara was surprised and envious to learn that he’d called on her several times since the eland dinner, hoping to win her support. Pratt put him through his paces, and he pleased her enough to be invited back and back again. But favored or not, her challenge seems to trouble him.

“We won’t speak of degrees, then. Above and beyond what an unjust world will impose, every person’s a slave to choice. We make them, and they make or unmake us in turn.” He sets down the basket in the sand, pushes up his sleeves, and turns away from them, toward the waves, adding, “But the world we imagine lives on inside us.”

“Like a cancer,” Pratt concedes, “but you seem to think little of free will.”

He turns back with a grave smile. “I think of little else.” He looks at Clara, who can’t bear to look back. “Or did.”

After they walk a long, not uncomfortable while in silence, Will sets down the basket again and begins gathering scraps of sea wood. Hurling the gray remains of battered ships into the waves with slow grace—and with Bartleby pouncing after like a right wolf—he recounts his childhood and pirates on the Isle of Wight. Clara recalls the smuggler’s coin she found in the sand the day before, which rests now in a little dish with her rings and trinkets at the cottage; she must remember to return it to him if his soul depends on it.

In time, they retreat to the dunes for tea, settling out of the wind in a crater of grasses. After eating her fill and flattening her petticoats to lay stout legs before her on the tablecloth, after considering the clouds and waxing about transcendentalists and petrified toads, after slyly assessing her companions’ feigned disinterest in her or his own or the other’s sun-warmed body, Pratt begins to fidget and lament.

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