The Witch of Blackbird Pond (10 page)

Suddenly, perhaps because the poetry had opened her heart, Kit raised her eyes and made a discovery. Mercy sat, as usual, slightly in the shadow beside the hearth, her needles moving so automatically that she rarely glanced at her work. Now a brightly glowing bead of resin threw a brief light across her face. Those great listening eyes were fastened on the face of the young man bent over his book, and for one instant Mercy's whole heart was revealed. Mercy was in love with John Holbrook.

Faster than thought the shadows claimed Mercy again. Kit glanced hastily around the circle. No one else had noticed. Judith sat dreaming, a little secret smile on her lips. Rachel nodded drowsily, too tired to keep her mind on the reading. Matthew sat intent, ready to pounce on a hint of heresy.

I must have imagined it, thought Kit, yet her hands were shaking. Mercy and John Holbrook! How right—how incredibly, utterly right—and how impossible!

I wish I had not seen it, she thought in a burst of sadness. Yet she knew she would never forget as long as she lived. The flame that had burned in Mercy's eyes had such purity, such complete selflessness, that everything Kit had ever known seemed dim in its light. What must it be to care for someone like that?

CHAPTER 12

D
AME SCHOOL
ended in mid-August, and a hundred new tasks waited to fill the hours. The onions must be harvested, packed into the rough sacks that Mercy had sewn, and stacked ready to be hauled into Hartford or bartered for goods when a sailing ship came up the river. Early apples waited to be peeled and sliced and dried in the sun for the winter's use. There was cider to be made from the wild pears. The first corn stood high in the meadow, row after endless row, waiting to be plucked. Often Kit and Judith and even Rachel worked side by side with Matthew in the fields until sunset, and there was not a moment to spare. It was hard now to find the time for stolen visits with Prudence and Hannah. Occasionally, by chance. Kit would find herself alone, and rushing through her task at double speed, she would steal down the path to Blackbird Pond, hoping that Prudence too had been able to escape.

One sunny day a whole empty afternoon stretched unexpectedly before her. She had been helping Judith and Rachel to make the winter supply of candles. It was hot sticky work. For two days they had been boiling the small gray bayberries that Kit and Judith had gathered in the fields, and Rachel had skimmed off the thick greenish tallow. It simmered now in the huge iron kettle, beneath which the fire must be kept glowing all through the long hot day. At the opposite end of the kitchen, at a good distance from the heat of the fire, the candle rods hung suspended between chairbacks. Back and forth the three women walked, carrying the candle rods, dipping the dangling wicks into the tallow, hanging them back to cool, and dipping them again, till the wax fattened slowly into the hard slow-burning candles that would fill the house with fragrance all through the coming months.

Finally Rachel wiped the damp gray strands back from her forehead and surveyed the rows of sleek green candles.

"That's plenty for today, more than I counted on. The rods won't be free to use again till tomorrow. I have to look in on Sally Fry's new baby that's ailing, and you girls deserve a rest—you've been working since sunup."

Kit left the work gratefully. She had no intention of resting, however, and presently she was tripping out the door when her aunt called her back.

"Where are you going, Kit?"

Kit looked down, not answering.

Her aunt studied her. "Wait," she said then. She went into the kitchen and came back after a moment with a small package which she held out to Kit shamefacedly.

It was a bit of leftover apple tart. So Aunt Rachel had known all the time! Kit suddenly threw her arms about her aunt.

"Oh, Aunt Rachel—you are so good!"

"I can't help it, Kit," her aunt said worriedly. "I don't approve at all. But I can't bear to think of anyone going hungry when we have such plenty."

This time, as Kir drew near Blackbird Pond, she was startled by the sharp ring of an axe. She had hoped to find Prudence there. Instead, as she came around the corner of the thatched cottage, she discovered Nat Eaton, his wiry tanned body bared to the waist, his axe spouting a fountain of chips as he swung at a rotting log.

"Oh," she exclaimed in confusion, "I didn't know the
Dolphin
was in again."

"She's not. We're becalmed off Rocky Hill and I rowed ahead. Would you have stayed away?"

Kit was in a mood to overlook his mockery. "Barbados molasses and firewood," she commented instead. "I'm beginning to understand how Hannah can shift for herself out here. What a pile of wood, Nat, on a hot day!"

"Come time to use it I'll be bound for Barbados," replied Nat briskly. "Helps keep my hand in."

Hannah peered from the doorway. "More company!" she rejoiced. "Come inside where it's shady. Nat, thee has piled up more wood than an old woman could burn in a year."

Nat set down his axe. "Today is strictly business," he announced. "The next job is some new thatch for that roof. Some spots there's not enough to make a decent mouse's nest."

"Can I help?" Kit was astonished to hear her own voice.

Nat's eyebrow lifted. His quizzical blue eyes dwelt on her brown arms so deliberately that she closed her fists to hide the calluses on her palms.

"Maybe you could at that," he replied, with an air of bestowing a great favor. "You can gather up the grass while I cut."

Kit followed him into the swamp and stooped to gather great armfuls of the long grasses that fell behind his scythe. The strong sweet smell of it tickled her nostrils. When he propped two logs against the cottage wall to make a crude ladder, she amused him by climbing nimbly up after him. Together they spread the bunches of thatch, and Kit held them flat in place while he fastened them with stout vines, his brown fingers moving with the strength and sureness of long years in the rigging. When the last tuft was in place they sat on the fragrant springy cushion and rested, looking out over the sunny meadow toward the gleaming band of the river. For a long time neither of them spoke. Nat sat munching on a straw. Kit leaned her bare elbows back on the prickly thatch. The sun pressed against her with an almost tangible weight. All about them was a lazy humming of bees, broken by the sharp clatter of a locust. The queer rasping call of the blackbird rose from the grass, and now and then they caught the flash of scarlet on the glossy black wings.

This is the way I used to feel in Barbados, Kit thought with surprise. Light as air somehow. Here I've been working like a slave, much harder than I've ever worked in the onion fields, but I feel as though nothing mattered except just to be alive right at this moment.

"The river is so blue today," she said sleepily. "It could almost be the water in Carlisle Bay."

"Homesick?" asked Nat casually, his eyes on the blue strip of water.

"Not here," she answered. "Not when I'm in the meadow, or with Hannah."

He turned to look at her. "How has it been, Kit?" he asked seriously. "I mean really. Are you sorry you came?"

She hesitated. "Sometimes I am. They've been good to me, but it's very different here. I don't seem to fit in, Nat."

"You know," he said, looking carefully away at the river, "once when I was a kid we went ashore at Jamaica, and in the marketplace there was a man with some birds for sale. They were sort of yellow-green with bright scarlet patches. I was bent on taking one home to my grandmother in Saybrook. But father explained it wasn't meant to live up here, that the birds here would scold and peck at it. Funny thing, that morning when we left you here in Wethersfield—all the way back to the ship all I could think of was that bird."

Kit stared at him. That cocky young seaman, striding back through the woods without even a proper goodbye, thinking about a bird! Now, having spoken too seriously, he turned back her solemn regard with a laugh.

"Who would guess," he teased, "that I'd ever see you perched on a rooftop with straw in your hair?"

Kit giggled. "Are you saying I've turned into a crow?"

"Not exactly." His eyes were intensely blue with merriment. "I can still see the green feathers if I look hard enough. But they've done their best to make you into a sparrow, haven't they?"

"It's these Puritans," Kit sighed. "I'll never understand them. Why do they want life to be so solemn? I believe they actually enjoy it more that way."

Nat stretched flat on his back on the thatch. "If you ask me, it's all that schooling. It takes the fun out of life, being cooped up like that day after day. And the Latin they cram down your throat! Do you realize, Kit, there are twenty-five different kinds of nouns alone in the
Accidence?
I couldn't stomach it."

"Mind you," he went on, "it's not that I don't favor an education. A boy has to learn his numbers, but the only proper use for them is to find your latitude with a cross-staff. Books, now, that's different. There's nothing like a book to keep you company on a long voyage."

"What sort of books?" Kit asked in some surprise.

"Oh, most any sort. We pick them up in odd places. I like the old logbooks best, and accounts of voyages, but once a man left us some plays from England that were good reading. There was one about a shipwreck on an island in the Indies."

Kit bounced up off the grass in excitement. "You mean
The Tempest?
"

"I can't remember. Have you read that one?"

"It was our favorite!" Kit hugged her knees in delight. "Grandfather was sure Shakespeare must have visited Barbados. I suspect he liked to think of himself as Prospero."

"And you were the daughter I suppose? What was her name?"

"Miranda. But I wasn't much like her."

Nat laughed. "That Shakespeare should have gone on with the story. He didn't tell what happened when that young prince took her back with him to England. I bet she gave the ladies plenty to talk about."

"It wasn't England. It was Naples. And that's another thing, Nat," she remembered. "All this talk against England and the King. I don't understand it."

"No, I suppose you couldn't, not being brought up here."

"Why are they so disloyal to King James?"

"There are two sides to loyalty, Kit," said Nat, looking suddenly almost as serious as John Holbrook or William. "If the King respects our rights and keeps his word to us, then he will retain our loyalty. But if he revokes the laws he has made and tacks and comes about till the ship is on her beam ends, then finally we will be forced to cut the hawser."

"But that is treason!"

"What is treason, Kit? A man is loyal to the place he loves. For me, the
Dolphin
there is my country. My father would give his life for the right to sail her when and where he pleases, and so would I. Anyway, 'twould do little good with a gale blowing to wait for orders from His Majesty in England. I suppose it's like that for these people in Wethersfield. How can a king on a throne in England know what is best for them? A man's first loyalty is to the soil he stands on."

That would please Uncle Matthew anyway, Kit thought, bewildered and a little dismayed to glimpse under Nat's nonchalant surface a flash of the same passion that made life in the Wood household so uncomfortable. Nat was a New Englander, too, had she forgotten? She was almost relieved to hear Hannah's voice at the foot of the ladder.

"Has thee finished the thatching yet? 'Tis high time thee had a bite of supper."

"Supper?" Kit had not even noticed the slanting sun. "Is it as late as that?"

Nat's hand on her wrist detained her as she scrambled toward the ladder. "You will come often to see her, won't you?" he reminded her.

"Of course." Kit hesitated. "I worry about her, sometimes," she whispered. "She seems so smart and spry, and then, the next moment, she seems to forget—she talks as though her husband were still alive."

"Oh, that!" Nat dismissed her fears with a single word. "Hannah's in good trim right enough, but her mind wanders now and then. Don't let it bother you. I have an idea Hannah is a lot older than we think, and she's lived through a lot. She and her husband starved in jail for months in Massachusetts. Finally they were branded and tied to a cart's tail and flogged across the boundary. From what I hear, Thomas Tupper was a sort of hero. If he still seems close enough to Hannah so she can talk to him after all these years, you wouldn't take that away from her, would you?"

As usual, Hannah did not urge her to stay. "My company always has to hurry off," she chuckled. "Nat always is in a hurry, and thee, and now Prudence."

"Who is Prudence?" Pulling on his blue cotton shirt, Nat fell into step beside her along the path to the South Meadow.

"You remember the little girl with the doll?" Hurrying along the path, Kit told him about the reading lessons. She expected that when they reached South Road Nat would turn back, but to her consternation he strode along beside her, and even when she hesitated at Broad Street he did not take the hint. The happy mood of the afternoon was rapidly dissolving in apprehension. Why on earth had Nat persisted in coming, too? There would be enough explanations without a strange seaman to account for. But Nat easily matched her nervous pace with his swinging stride, apparently quite unaware of her desire to be rid of him.

There they all were, sitting outside near the doorstep. Then supper must be over. As they drew near, William rose heavily to his feet and stood waiting.

"Kit, where in the world have you been?" Judith spoke up. "William has been waiting for ever so long."

Kit looked from one to the other, from her aunt's barely restrained tears to her uncle's waiting judgment. There is nothing I can possibly tell them, she thought, except the truth.

"I've been helping to thatch Hannah Tupper's roof," she said. "I'm sorry that I didn't realize how late it was. Aunt Rachel, this is Nathaniel Eaton, Captain Eaton's son, from the
Dolphin.
He was mending Hannah's roof, and I helped him."

The family allowed Nat scanty nods of acknowledgment, but William did not alter a muscle of his tight-clenched jaw. The two young men measured each other for a long moment.

Nat turned to Matthew Wood. "I was at fault, sir," he said, with a dignity Kit would never have given him credit for. "I shouldn't have accepted her help, but 'tis a tricky job, and when she came along I was greatly obliged to her. I trust that none of you have been inconvenienced." He looked back at William, one eyebrow tilted at the old familiar angle. Kit stood helpless as he took his leave and strode lightly away. He had done his best, but the reckoning was still to come.

"Why should you take it upon yourself to mend a roof for the Quaker woman?" demanded her uncle.

"She lives all alone—" began Kit.

"She is a heretic, and she refuses to attend Meeting. She has no claim on your charity."

"But someone ought to help her, Uncle Matthew."

"If she wants help, let her repent her sin. You are never to go to that place again, Katherine. I forbid it."

Morosely Kit followed the family into the house.

"Don't mind too much, Kit," Mercy whispered. "Hannah will be all right if she has that seaman to help her. I liked his looks."