The Witch of Blackbird Pond (7 page)

CHAPTER 9

"
Good children must,
Fear God all day,
Parents obey,
No false thing say,
By no sin stray
"

S
IX VOICES
chanted the words in unison. Two small heads bent earnestly over each of the three dog-eared primers which were all the dame school could boast.

"That's fine," praised Kit. "Now go on."

"
Love Christ alway,
In secret pray,
Mind little play,
Make no delay,
In doing good.
"

At the opposite end of the kitchen Mercy, having generously alloted to Kit the primer readers, was laboring with the beginners. They sat hunched on the bench, each holding in hand a hornbook, a small stout-handled wooden slab on which was fastened a tiny sheet of paper, protected by a thin strip of transparent horn held in place by a narrow leather strip and tiny brass nails. At the top of the single page was printed the alphabet, and at the bottom the Lord's Prayer. The children wore their horns strung on cords around their necks. Now they squinted at the blurred letters and painfully repeated out loud:

"A, f, af
f, a, fa
a, l, al
1, a, la."

What patience Mercy had! If only patience were contagious like mumps. Kit sighed and turned back to the primer. Of all the dreary montonous sermons! Grandfather would never have allowed her to learn from such a book. She wished she could remember how her grandfather had taught her the syllables and words. She suspected that he had made up his own lessons, and now, as her small pupils spelled out the gloomy text, she could not resist following his example. She seized a quill pen and printed two lines on a scrap of the curly birch bark which the children collected to use in place of costly paper. She passed the little scroll to young Timothy Cook.

"
Timothy Cook
Jumped over the brook
,"

he read with astonishment.

The other children giggled. "Write one about me," begged a dark-eyed little girl. Kit thought a moment and then printed out:

"
Charity Hughes
Has new red shoes
"

The six children followed every motion of her quill with breathless eagerness. Kit had no idea that her methods were novel and surprising. She only knew that the past ten days since the dame school had begun had been the pleasantest she had known in Connecticut. She and the children had taken to each other at first sight. Kit felt at ease with them as she had never managed to do with their elders. The children admired her pretty clothes, they brought her strawberries and daisies, they argued over who would sit next to her, and every day they waited with delighted expectation to see what she would do and say next.

There were eleven of them in all, eight small boys and three girls, ranging from four to seven years in age. Sober little adults they had appeared on that first day, dressed in fashions much like their parents'. One of them, to Kit's amusement, had given his name as Jonathan Ashby, a serious, stocky small edition of his brother William. But as their shyness wore off, so did their solemnness. They sat crowded together on the two long benches that Matthew had provided by the simple method of laying planks on rough wooden crosspieces. There was a daily scrambling for favored positions on the bench. If two or three of the heavier boys could band together at one end, they could make precarious sitting for the unlucky female at the other end. Altogether, it took alertness and patience to keep those restless little bodies still for four long hours at a stretch. While Kit resorted to ingenious tricks, Mercy possessed the patience. Kit marveled at the ease and gentleness with which Mercy controlled her charges, her warm sweet voice never raised, her lovely composure never ruffled. Now, as the chanting syllables came to an end, Mercy met Kit's eyes across the room and smiled.

"You have all done very well this morning," she said. "Now we will repeat the first part of the Catechism, and then Mistress Tyler will tell you a story."

Mercy worried about this indulgence, which had begun by accident on the second day, and proved such a success that she had weakly allowed it to continue. Was it right, she questioned Kit, to bribe children into good behavior by these stories? That was not the way the schoolmaster enforced discipline. But Kit could see nothing wrong in a reward at the end of the day's work. Truth to tell, she looked forward to the story as eagerly as the children. If only she had more to read to them! Last week she had told them the story of
Pilgrim's Progress,
drawing on every detail she could remember. What would she have given for that much-loved volume that had lain on Grandfather's table! But in a week's time she had stretched her memory to the utmost, and Pilgrim had traveled all the way from the Slough of Despond to the Celestial City. Now she had only the Bible to read to them, but there was far more between those black covers than the verses Uncle Matthew favored. Kit chose the stories she herself enjoyed most, and her reading had a zest and liveliness that enthralled the children. Even Mercy was surprised, and frequently a little disturbed at the drama that Kit seemed to discover in these long-familiar narratives.

Today she chose the parable of the Good Samaritan. "Now a certain man," she began, "went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves—" Suddenly she had an inspiration. Years ago, her grandfather had taken her to see a masque in Bridgetown, in which a troupe of players from England had acted out the ancient Christmas story.

"I have an idea!" she cried, laying down the Book. Eleven small faces turned toward her eagerly. It had not taken them long to discover that Kit's ideas usually meant something new and exciting.

"You all know this story, don't you?" The heads nodded earnestly. "Then, instead of my reading it to you, let's pretend that it is happening, right now, to us. Let's pretend that this room is the road to Jericho. One of you—you, Peter—will be the certain man traveling along the road. You can walk down between these benches, like this. And three of you can be the robbers, that set on him and strip him of his raiment and wound him. Martha and Eliza, you can be the priest and the Levite, who pass by on the other side and just look at him and turn up your noses. And Jonathan can be the Good Samaritan who finds him and binds up his wounds. Charity, you can be the innkeeper, over here by the fireplace, and the Samaritan will bring the traveler to you to take care of."

"Kit—" broke in Mercy anxiously. "I never heard of anything like that before. Are you sure—?"

"Oh, Mercy! It's from the Bible! Now, each of you, try to imagine just how you'd feel if you really were those people. Just make believe this isn't a room at all—it's a hot dusty road, and Peter, you are getting very tired from walking so far."

The children were entranced. A game of pretending in school! They took their places, jabbering with excitement. Charity picked up the broom by the hearth and began to sweep. "An innkeeper is busy all the time," she said importantly. Jonathan Ashby stood stolidly beside Mercy, waiting for his chance to be the rescuer. Peter began his long journey between the benches.

But Kit had made one mistake. She had picked her characters too hastily. By chance she had chosen the three most obstreperous pupils in the school to be her thieves and robbers. And the hapless boy who represented the traveler was the priggish little scholar they most cordially disliked.

The unsuspecting traveler fell into his part as conscientiously as he read his primer. He walked primly between the benches from Jerusalem to Jericho. Out from behind the settle popped the robbers, and set upon him with a vengeance.

"Wait a minute!" warned Kit. "Tom—Stephen—we're only pretending!" But her warning was lost in the uproar. Such an opportunity, sanctioned by authority, had never been known before. Peter's raiment actually was in danger. His shrieks were genuine. Jonathan, forgetting his role entirely, rushed in with both fists flying. The innkeeper hurried to the wayfarer's defense with her broom. Both Kit and Mercy moved quickly, but not quickly enough.

From the corner of her eye Kit glimpsed the two tall figures in the kitchen doorway. Then, before she could reach the tussling children, a cane swung from nowhere and landed on an unwary back. A smart crackle of blows, a few agonized howls, and silence and order descended suddenly on the room. Across the subdued children's heads Kit and Mercy faced their two visitors, Mr. Eleazer Kimberley, the schoolmaster, and the Reverend John Woodbridge.

"What is the meaning of this disturbance?" demanded Mr. Kimberley. "We come to inspect your school, Mistress Wood, and we find bedlam."

Mercy opened her mouth to explain, but Kit broke in first. "It is all my fault, sir. I was just trying out a new idea."

"What sort of idea?"

"Well, sir, I was reading a story out loud to them from the Bible, and I thought instead it might be—more instructive maybe—to sort of—well, to act it out, and—"

"To
act it!
"

"Like a play, you know," Kit floundered, confused by the increasing horror on both their faces. Mr. Kimberley seemed to be strangling.

"
Play-acting!
And with the
Bible!
"

Reverend Woodbridge stared incredulously at Mercy. "What could you have been thinking of, Mercy, to allow such a thing?"

Mercy clasped her hands tight together. "I—I didn't realize what we were doing, sir," she faltered. "I never thought that it was play-acting."

"I am shocked and disappointed," he said sternly. "I had heard such excellent reports of your school."

Mr. Kimberley flourished his cane at the silent children. "Go directly home, boys and girls. The school is dismissed. Do not come back tomorrow. We will send word if the school will continue."

"Oh, please, Mr. Kimberley," begged Kit, as the children, one by one, slipped through the door and escaped. "You can't not continue the school because of what I did. It wasn't Mercy's idea at all. Dismiss me, if you like."

Mr. Kimberley fastened upon her the look that was well known in his classroom. "Most assuredly you are dismissed, young lady," he said coldly. "We will have to consider seriously whether or not Mercy is responsible enough to continue such a position."

When the men had gone neither girl spoke a word. Mercy pulled herself about the room, righting an overturned chair, straightening out the scuffed primers. Two great tears ran slowly down her cheeks.

The sight of Mercy's tears was more than Kit could endure. If she looked at them for another instant she would fly into a thousand pieces. In a panic she fled, out the door and down the roadway, running, blind to reason or decorum, past the Meeting House, past the loiterers near the town pump, past the houses where her pupils lived. She scarcely knew where her feet were taking her, but something deep within her had chosen a destination. She did not stop until she reached the Great Meadow. There, without thinking, she left the pathway, plunged into a field, and fell face down in the grass, her whole body wrenched with sobs. The tall grass rustled over her head and hid her from sight, and the Meadows closed silently around her and took her in.

When Kit had sobbed herself out, she lay for a long time too exhausted to move or to think. Perhaps she slept a little, but presently she opened her eyes and became aware of the smell of the warm earth and the rough grass against her face. She rolled over and stretched, blinking up at the blue sky. The tips of the long grasses swished gently in the breeze. The hot sun pressed down on her so that her body felt light and empty. Slowly, the meadow began to fulfill its promise.

All at once, with an instinctive quickening of her senses, Kit knew that she was not alone, that someone was very close. She started up. Only a few feet away a woman was sitting watching her, a very old woman with short-cropped white hair and faded, almost colorless eyes set deep in an incredibly wrinkled face. As Kit stared at her she spoke in a rusty murmuring voice.

"Thee did well, child, to come to the Meadow. There is always a cure here when the heart is troubled."

For a moment Kit was too dumbfounded to move.

"I know," the murmuring voice went on. "Many's the time I've found it here myself. That is why I live here."

Kit stiffened with a cold prickle against her spine. Those thin stooped shoulders, that tattered gray shawl—this was the queer woman from Blackbird Pond—Hannah Tupper, the witch! The girl stared, horror-struck, at the odd-shaped scar on the woman's fore head. Was it the devil's mark?

"Folks wonder why I want to live here so close to the swamp," the soft husky voice continued. "But I think thee knows why. I could see it in thy face a moment back. The Meadow has spoken to thee, too, hasn't it?"

The cold feeling began to pass away. In some unexplainable way this strange little creature seemed to belong here, so much a part of this quiet lonely place that her voice might have been the voice of the Meadow itself.

"I didn't really intend to come here," Kit found herself explaining. "I always meant to come back, but this morning I just seemed to get here by accident."

Hannah Tupper shook her head, as though she knew better. "Thee must be hungry," she said, more briskly. "Come, and I'll give thee a bite to eat." She hitched herself awkwardly to her feet. Reminded of the time. Kit leaped up and shook out her skirts.

"I must go back," she said hastily. "I must have been gone for hours."

The woman peered up at her. Her eyes, almost lost in the folds of leathery wrinkles, had a humorous gleam. A toothless smile crinkled her cheeks.

"Thee better not go back looking so," she advised. "Whatever it is, thee can stand up to it better with a bit of food inside. Come along, 'tis no distance at all."

Kit wavered. She was suddenly ravenous, but more than that, she was curious. Whatever this queer little woman might be, she was certainly harmless, and unexpectedly appealing. Like the school children, she had accepted Kit without a question or suspicion, and like a child she scuttled ahead now, confident that Kit would accept her in the same way. Giving way to her own impulse, Kit hurried after her. Late as it was, she was far from eager to return to her Uncle Matthew's.