A light appeared before us, a double candle held by Betsy. “Tips, what a rude expression. With whom have you been associating who would speak in such a way?”
I asked, “That screaming is Goody Carnegie? But she’s kind and dear.”
Betsy said, “She calls through the woods, looking for someone who harmed her, they say. ’Tis also said she’s running from witches from whom she’s stolen secret poisons and potions. Or that she’s a witch herself trying to catch a fairy.”
Portia said, “I believe she’s fey, and captured herself. Not a witch. That would be evil and she does not seem evil.”
“As if you would recognize evil in anyone,” Betsy chastised. “You are too kind to see the sin in others. You think everyone is as sweet and good as yourself, sister.”
My hands shook with such trembling as if they were not part of me. While this conversation was softening my fear, I wanted light and much of it. “If you please, bring your candlestick in and light mine.” The two girls followed me. I recovered the dropped taper, found two others, and lit them all. “Why does someone not help her? Is there no medicine for her? No person to keep her? Why, she will take fever in this cold.”
“No one can help a madwoman,” Betsy said. “Though if people truly believed she was a witch they would have drowned her long ago.”
I thought of Christine Hasken. Hanged for stabbing a horse. Goody Carnegie, serving me bread and excellent cheese. I said, “What if we pray for her? Could we not do that at least?”
Both the girls looked at me with startled faces. Goody Carnegie howled again, much removed this time, so the wind carried the moaning under the eaves of the house and it no longer sounded like a human voice. Finally, Betsy placed her candlestick on my dressing table, hugged me, and said, “You are so dear, Miss Talbot. Kindness even to a madwoman. I hope you will always be our friend, even if you get home to your island.”
The wind continued for several hours, and I slept little. I thought of poor Goody Carnegie. Christine Hasken knitting stockings. Lonnie, the wee dafty one. Birgitta and the goats. When I slept, I dreamed Ma cradled me in a hammock on the leeward porch of our house, and the smell of flowers lulled me to sleep. The smell grew stronger and more pungent. I awoke with a start. One of my candles had burned to the end, layering melted wax around itself, and Rachael’s letter, moving in a draft coming through the windows, had gone over the candle and the last ember of flame had touched the corner of it. It had just begun to smolder, putting off that fragrance that replaced the flowers in my dream. I pressed the burned part and took off the ash, then smoothed the missal. It might have been moments from setting the room on fire, even burning down the house, perhaps killing me in my sleep along with all the others.
The feeling that I had looked upon my own death filled my heart with terror, filled my eyes with tears. I went to the window and pressed my hand against the leaded diamonds where now a pinhole of breeze came through all the day, air rushing in, not letting any out. How could so much air come into a place, and yet it felt as if I could not draw a breath? “Ma,” I said aloud, “spring is beginning. I will come home this year. I will come to you.”
Mr. Roberts agreed to take me once again to the solicitor’s office, where, he said, he awaited word on urgent business. There might be a letter there for me, he said, as he had instructed any correspondence from my mother to be held there.
“But, sir, why did you instruct that? Am I not a free person to receive and profit from my own correspondence?”
Mr. Roberts frowned, but cheerily, although for a moment I saw that cold glimmer of steel, keen as the blade of a cutlass, cross his features. “Of course, Miss Talbot. Of course.”
As we approached Boston, Mistress Roberts said to the air before her, as if in casual conversation with no one in particular, “I hear the Spencers are expecting young Master Wallace soon. I heard it from Anne Prescott herself.”
“Indeed?” Mr. Roberts replied.
“Yes. And he will be calling within the week.”
“Wonderful,” he said.
She spoke again to the air. “It is of course known all about that he intends proposing to our Serenity. Her dowry is larger than anyone else’s one could name. Now that he is landed, too, there should be no impediments to that path, which has been laid for five years at least.”
“No, certainly. Of course,” he added.
“And, have I your permission, sir, to call upon the dressmaker regarding some silk for a wedding gown for our most precious daughter?”