Silence gathered her shawl around her shoulders and stepped outside. The morning was gray and still, trees and earth and sky the same color that was not a color, branches blending into clouds where the forest reached for the dawn. She knew with a certainty as solid as the mountain peaks that John was wrong. The weather would not break. The trees would not blossom. Her fingers itched to take up a knife as her grandmother was said to have done—long ago, when she was a woman alone in the wilderness—to slice her skin and drip blood over the trees starving for warmth, for life, to give of herself freely to wake the orchard from below.
But she could no more coax the apple trees to bud than John could force the sun to shine. Silence broke a thin layer of ice in the water pail. Fetching water was Prudence’s task, but Silence was loath to wake her on so bleak a morning. The children would be hungry, and John’s face would grow pinched with guilt as they grumbled, and he would check his mean stores of bullets and powder, offer an empty promise of fresh meat before vanishing into the mountains again. Dreams of crackling fatty venison sustained them no more than crops that did not sprout, apples that did not blossom, yet dream they did, as their bellies rumbled and their skin grew thin.
Every time John left, Silence believed he would never return. Her mother’s voice, lost to her these eleven years but still clear in her memory, whispered in her mind in every idle moment, and most insistently in the quiet before she slept: He was a good man once, but he will change. He will falter. He will leave. That’s what men do. We haven’t anybody but ourselves to trust.
Silence shook away the echo of her mother’s nervous prophecies. Fearful had chosen her husband poorly, a lazy man and a wastrel who mightn’t have been Silence’s father at all, if village tale-tellers were to be believed. But Silence was not her mother, for all that she could feel her like a wraith behind her shoulder or a poison in her blood. John was not clever, but he was steady, and right now, on this grim morning, there was work to be done that could not wait for the black cloud of her mother’s memory to pass. She picked up the water pail, flung the chips of ice over the ground. The earth around the cabin was hard and slick, frozen overnight into bumps and troughs. She chose her steps carefully, eyes on the ground. She could ill afford a fall.
When she looked up, the Abrams men were there.
Enoch Abrams and his brothers stood at the edge of the orchard, where the trees met the muddy track. Enoch was the eldest, the tallest and broadest and most imposing; Gideon and Zadock looked as though they had been cast in the same mold as their eldest brother, but more clumsily, with grittier clay and less care. Gideon carried a flintlock musket on his shoulder. Zadock, a pitchfork.
Enoch carried only his leather-bound Bible.
“Good morrow, Sister Derry,” he said, and his voice, his booming preacher’s voice, it trembled through the orchard with force enough to shake icicles from branches.
Silence straightened her shoulders and narrowed her eyes. “My name is Lovegood, Enoch Abrams, and you are trespassing without leave on my land.”
Gideon Abrams snorted, loud as a horse. “The land is your husband’s, as your name would be, if he were man enough to control his wife.”
“How early you rose to carry these childish insults to me.” Silence did not let her voice tremble. Men like Enoch Abrams craved the fear of others more than sustenance, more than water. “Does your good wife know you are about this morning?”
But shapes moved in the orchard behind the Abrams brothers, and her bravado quailed. A dozen men or more emerged from the gray morning shadows. There was William Prewitt from across the Hollow, and his two grown sons. There was George Dobbes and his brother Eliot, both gaunt as skeletons from having survived the fever that took their parents. The Howe boys, all three of them; the youngest was no older than her girl Pru but wore a countenance of such twisted anger he might have been an old man. Many of them were armed, if not with guns then with spades and pitchforks. The Twisdon boy, no more than fourteen and motherless since autumn, carried a hatchet.
Silence had only a water pail, and an empty one at that.
The sharp metallic taste of fear was in her throat again, and with it the steady thumping drumbeat of her heart.
“We have not come to sow hardship where already too much has been sown,” Enoch Abrams said. “We have come as friends and neighbors. We entreat you to hear us.”
Silence marveled that the Bible did not burst into flames in his hands, so shameless were the lies spilling from his wormlike lips.
“The whole of the Hollow can hear you,” she said, “yet you have said nothing worth hearing. What do you want?”
A murmur passed through the gathered men. It did not surprise them to hear a Lovegood woman speak so forthrightly—but if they had been strong men, able to hear a woman’s voice and not quiver in cowardly disgust, they would not be following Enoch Abrams. They avoided her eyes, every man and boy. When Abrams took a breath to raise his voice, Silence knew what he was going to say before he said it.
“We want you to lift the curse you have set upon this valley,” he said.
So there it was.
Disappointment tasted like blood, like iron, like biting through her tongue. Her mother’s warnings come to pass, her orchard’s frailty, the predictability of men, they all tasted the same. The whispers that had been gathering all through this liars’ spring now blossomed into accusation, rooted in fear more fertile than the still-frosted earth. She looked at each of her neighbors in turn, but not one looked back. They were looking to him, to Enoch Abrams and the Bible he held.
“I have set no curse upon the land,” Silence said, but words were nothing but breath when spoken by a woman, and her denial only fueled their suspicion. The Twisdon child raised his hatchet and shook it menacingly, looking so much like her own boys when they played at soldiers that her heart ached with the absurdity of it.
“You are not a God-fearing woman,” Enoch Abrams said. “Your mother was not a God-fearing woman. Your grandmother—”
“Was not a woman at all,” said Zadock Abrams, to a snicker of laughter.
Enoch continued undeterred: “For as long as your unnatural line has claimed this land, there has been evil upon it. This witch weather is proof of the corruption within. My family and I, we were content to leave it be when it harmed only your own—”
“You have never been content to leave it be,” Silence snapped, anger roiling through her in a cold black wave. “Your grandfather did not leave it be when he set his fool’s militia upon my grandmother under false pretenses. Your father did not leave it be when he hounded my mother to the grave all for want of a few fertile acres. Do you think me a fool, to believe in your good intent? This spring may be wicked, that I do not deny, but it is not my doing, and my family suffers as much as yours. You have been so blinded by your greed for our—”
“Mum?”
She had not heard the cabin door open. She knew before she turned: it was Prudence, always Prudence, early riser, hard worker, a child who had never caused her parents a minute of fuss. She stood in the doorway, her small pale face etched with worry.
“Go inside, child,” Silence said.
But there was John at their daughter’s back, his hand on her shoulder to push her aside.