Alis

7
Master Robert was there, Thomas, and another of the Elders, a fair-haired woman with the long-nosed features of a shrew. They faced Elizabeth across the room that looked out onto the square. This time the Minister was there, too, leaning on a stick, his gentle old face troubled.
“My dear Robert, surely you can wait a little? His back is not fully healed, my wife tells me; he hardly speaks. And we must not give up hope that he will return to faith and be one of us again. How can that be, if we send him away?”
Alis remembered the Senior Elder from the day of the punishment. It was his thin voice that had pronounced sentence, his stiff face that had watched impassively as the flesh was flayed: it was fruitless to expect pity from him. His dry, rasping tone grated on the ear.
“Indeed, Minister, we must always hope for repentance, but the man was not chastened by admonition. Neither, it seems, has punishment effected any change in him. Mistress Elizabeth would doubtless have told us if words of penitence had fallen from his lips.”
He paused but Elizabeth did not speak. He turned toward Alis, who had been standing by the door, expecting any moment to be dismissed from the room. He looked at her coldly. “Alis, is it not?” He did not wait for her answer. “You have been tending the man. Have you heard him express contrition for his ways? If so, speak.”
For a moment her voice would not come. Then she cleared her throat and said a little huskily, “No, Master Robert. He has said nothing.”
She was trembling. He turned away again. The Minister looked at him out of faded blue eyes.
“We must give him more time, Robert. I will strive with him. Let us not despair of his soul lightly. Besides, he has barely recovered. He is not to be harried.”
The other man’s thin face did not change. “We have been patient, have we not? None has troubled him while he has lain in your house these many weeks.”
Elizabeth moved abruptly. “Does not the Book say, Like years under the sun are the days of the Maker while he waits for the sinner
to turn? If the Maker can wait for years, surely you can manage a few more weeks.”
Robert made no sign that he heard her but addressed the Minister again. “It is an ill thing for the man to remain in the Community, Minister. It will seem that we repent of our rigor.” He paused. “Which we do not.”
The Minister turned to the shrew-faced woman. “Mistress Rebecca, assist me to persuade our Senior Elder. Master Robert is rightly for discipline, but a little gentleness, too, will surely serve our ends as well or better. You have children. This man is some woman’s son, too.”
“And it is because I have children that I will not countenance his presence among us any longer.” Her voice was loud and hard, at odds with the weak face. “Shall we let unbelief, like a fever, infect our young? Let him be cast out, as we have agreed.”
The Minister looked startled. “Agreed? It has not been agreed. You have come to discuss it, have you not?”
Robert gave the woman a sharp look. “The Elders have spoken together, Minister, and we are of one mind. The man must go.”
The old man had been leaning heavily on his stick, but now he straightened up, and the benevolence was gone from his voice.
“Since when did the Elders meet without the Minister to settle so grave a matter?”
“Forgive us, Minister.” There was no courtesy in the formal words.
“Your views are known. They were considered.”
The old man was clearly angry now. “But I was not there. There is much I might have said.”
For a moment Robert looked at the Minister out of his cold eyes. His dry voice scratched the stillness of the room. “It would have made no difference.”


They had gone and there was time to digest defeat. Elizabeth looked grimly at her husband. “We must get Samuel away in the morning, and then we must make plans to be gone ourselves, Jacob. I doubt we shall be safe here much longer. And if our power is gone, we can do no good.”
The old man said pleadingly, “Let us not despair yet, Elizabeth. Surely there are some of the Elders who may be swayed?”
She took her husband’s hand in hers. “Dear Jacob, if there are others who think as we do, their voices have not prevailed. No doubt, means have been found to persuade or silence them. And think of this: we have one grandson—all that is left to us of our dear daughter. How long do you think it will be before they move against him if we resist? And that is supposing he does not himself provoke them. They will want little enough excuse, and they watch for the chance, I am sure.”
Alis jumped. This was what Lilith had said.
The Minister was nodding. “You are right, Elizabeth. I am foolish. And it is not only Luke.” He was smiling but his lips trembled. “You yourself are likely enough to provoke them, my dear wife, as fearless for good as you are. And it would be death to me to see you hurt.”
He turned his head away to hide the tears that rolled down his old cheeks. Alis thought with loathing of Robert and Thomas.


The next morning at sunrise, Luke brought Samuel’s oldest horse into the square. He and Elizabeth had gone the previous afternoon to fetch a few belongings from the farm that was already occupied by new tenants.
“They were ashamed,” Elizabeth said with satisfaction. But it was all the satisfaction there was. Of the young woman Samuel called his wife, and to whom he had given the name Iri, there had been no sign since the day they had come to take him from the farm. She was said to be half-witted and almost without speech. She had appeared one year on the edge of the settlement and he had taken her in. She was with child now, though not yet near her time.
A small crowd had gathered. The Elders were there, of course, one or two looking uneasy. Alis had expected some kind of formal casting-out but there was none. In silence the people watched as Samuel mounted his horse, wincing as the movement pulled at the newly formed scars on his back. Then he was moving out of the square, the old horse plodding gently across the cobbles, disappearing between the houses and out toward the open farmland beyond.
“Where will he go?” Alis asked when they had gone indoors again.
Elizabeth shook her head. “I do not know. There are farms and villages that do not belong to the Communities of the Book where he might find refuge. But he bears the signs of his punishment and will meet with mistrust. Besides, they have broken him. How can he be a man among men again? If he had the woman to care for, it might be something, although she would be a burden, too, but no one knows where she has gone. And now, Alis, my dear”—she smiled sadly—“you must go home, I think, despite the fever. We shall have to leave here soon.”
Alis could not speak for a few seconds. The moment she had dreaded for so long had come. “Must I go straightaway? I . . .” She could not stop her voice from breaking a little. “I shall be very sad to go.”
“There is a wagon going north in five days’ time. And you will be glad to see your parents, will you not? I hope you will find them well. I wish I might keep you here until we had word that the sickness was over, but that cannot be.” She got up slowly, wincing at the stiffness of her back. Her face was lined and weary.
Alis looked at Luke, who had not spoken a word since Samuel’s departure. He had listened to his grandmother with close attention. He did not meet Alis’s eye but said quietly to Elizabeth, “Grandmother, if you do not mind, I will ride over to Mistress Ellen’s. She has been preparing her old wagon for you and might be glad of help.”
Elizabeth did not oppose his going, and he went swiftly from the room without so much as a glance at Alis. He had said he would not fail her, Alis thought miserably. Now he was ashamed to look at her.
The day passed in a dreamlike strangeness. She could not believe that her departure was really so close and she still had no way of getting to the city. After so long, she had come to think of finding her brother as a distant certainty: how it was to be accomplished she had not known, but somehow it would be done.
Now the future was upon her and it was not as she had planned. She tried to tell herself that Galin might have died of the fever. She thought again of confiding in Elizabeth about the marriage and begging to be taken with them when they left. But it was impossible. Elizabeth would surely send her home to obey her parents.
There was much to do in the household, for Judith had taken to her bed when the Elders had arrived the day before, and she would not leave it. She had been with Elizabeth for forty years. If the Minister and his wife went away, she would go with them. Alis envied her.
There were four days left. She thought of starting the journey to Freeborne and then leaving the wagon on some pretext as soon as she was clear of Two Rivers. But word might get back. Girls of her age and kind did not travel without protection—at the very least the wagon driver would be charged with watching over her. She wondered if she could steal a horse, but horses were valuable and she would surely be pursued—and fall into Thomas’s hands or Robert’s! She shuddered. Round and round it went in her head as she sorted bed linen and scoured pots—for she was doing Judith’s work now—but no solution came to her.
In the late afternoon, Luke came back briefly. They were alone in the kitchen for a few minutes. He looked anxious. “Alis, I am going to speak again to Ethan, to see if he will change his mind.”
She put down the pot she was drying. She knew she must get away before she was sent back to Freeborne, but her heart was heavy at the thought that she would see Luke no more.
“I wish I need not go,” she said, feeling the ache of tears in her throat.
He reached out and touched her hand. “I wish it, too.” His voice was so sad she was almost comforted. He minded as much as she did.
He did not return that evening. Had Ethan refused?


Sleep would not come and the attic was stuffy. Noisy, too! Judith had dosed herself into insensibility with some remedy of her own. She lay upon her back, shaking the bed with her snores. Softly Alis made her way down the stairs.
Nothing stirred in the kitchen. She opened the door, crossed the little yard with its shrubs and pots of herbs, and went to breathe the cool air in the vegetable garden.
Restless in her misery, she thought she would walk a little, so she let herself out through the wooden door in the wall and stepped into the back lane by which she had arrived at the Minister’s house, six weeks before. How long ago it seemed. Now she must leave them, must say good-bye to Luke. And to think that she had disliked him at their first meeting! Troubled though she was, she could not help smiling when she thought of him leaning against the door frame, apologizing awkwardly for calling her a friend of Thomas’s. Then her heart beat faster as she remembered the touch of his hand that afternoon.
She walked on. Above her head, the clear spring sky was dusted with stars. When she had been a little girl, her father had told her that the Maker lived up there.
She found herself by the side of the prayer house, which stood apart from the houses of the square in a plot of its own. She thought she would go in and sit for a while. The building was never locked. Perhaps she would ask the Maker for help.
Quietly she felt her way through the vestibule and into the main chamber. A little starlight glimmered in the windows, but the body of the hall was velvety dark. She sat down on one of the benches. She could not think how to pray. Surely the Maker knew what she wanted. What difference did it make if she put it into words? So she gave up that idea and sat quietly, wishing that the tranquil night would never end. After a little while, she stretched out on the bench and lay looking up into the blackness of the roof.
She was dreaming of dry leaves crunching underfoot as she walked with her mother through the woods that edged her uncle’s farm. They were falling like snow from the great trees, slowly at first, then faster and faster, whirling through the air, more and more of them so that she could no longer see the path. She tried to cry out to her mother, but leaves filled her mouth, bitter and dry to the taste. She could not swallow or spit them out. She was choking. She could not breathe.
Abruptly she woke. She could see nothing. But the crackling of leaves was loud in her ears and her mouth was burning dry. For a moment she was bewildered, thinking herself still caught in the dream.
Then with horror, she knew: the prayer house was on fire. Covering her mouth and nose with her hand, she stumbled toward the door to the vestibule. In the thick smoke, she felt for the latch. She could not find it. The wood of the door was hot. She could hardly bear to touch it but she must find the latch. Again and again she passed her hands over the surface. It was not there! It was not there! She was whimpering in terror now. She would never get out; she would die. Even if she found the latch, there was fire behind the door. She would not be able to go that way. Desperately she prayed to the Maker.
Then she remembered that there was a door to the old graveyard behind the building. She could get out that way. But she could not remember where the door was. There were corridors and meeting rooms behind the main hall. The fire would catch up with her and she would be trapped.
The windows—that was it! She could get out of a window. She knew there was a passageway down the center of the hall. She inched forward with her hands out before her and found the back of a bench, then slid her hands along the top until, with a sob of relief, she found the space.
As fast as she dared in the thick darkness, she stumbled her way to the front, where the smoke was less dense. The left-hand window. She knew it opened easily. The Minister had asked her to open it before the last prayer meeting. There was a bench below it she could stand on. Her hands encountered empty space. For a terrible instant she thought she had lost her way, then she hit her elbow on something—yes, it was the lectern—and knew where she was. She found the bench and the window, running her hand up the side to the clasp. It yielded and she felt a rush of air. At the same moment, the door to the vestibule burst and fire roared inward, irradiating the smoke.
Desperately she pulled herself up and over the high sill. She meant to jump down, but her balance was gone and she fell, grazing her arm and landing awkwardly on the soft ground below. For a moment she was completely dazed, unable to move, but fear that the fire would find her gave her strength, and she knew that she must raise the alarm.
She staggered round the side of the building. Smoke was pouring out of the roof though—extraordinarily, it seemed to her—no flames were visible. She tried to shout, but her throat was so dry she could barely croak. She must warn them. They must come.
She made her way on trembling legs to the nearest house and hammered on the door. At first she could make no one hear. But then a window opened, then another and another. Soon there were voices and movement. The smell of smoke was in the air now, and the flames were visible. She stood by as people rushed to and fro, until a chain was formed to pass buckets of water from the pump. The smoky, flickering light danced upon their features, and their voices were lost in the roar of flames.
She staggered out of the square and at once the sounds became distant, the air cooler. Her throat was dry and raw, and her limbs ached. She must go home to Mistress Elizabeth.