Cheryl breathes in and holds the air for a moment, feeling the boning of the hidden jumps beneath her own clothing. Most women save their stays for formal events, but Cheryl has found that wearing at least an informal pair of jumps on a daily basis has improved her posture and general outlook. She has grown to dislike how she feels without them.
After the meeting, she sits for a while before bed with her thread and button forms. She replays the commission meeting in her mind until the repetitive focus of her work calms her. Threading buttons never fails to renew her sense of simple purpose. Upstairs, in her chemise and cap, she tells Roger about the outcome of her appeal at the meeting.
He leans against the headboard. “Well then, like Drayton said, it falls to us to keep an eye on it.”
Extinguishing the lantern, they draw the bed hangings around them. There is satisfaction in lying upon the four-post bedstead built by Roger, warming themselves with the coverlet embroidered by Cheryl, swaddling themselves in white linen sheets. Inside this soft fort, they can feel themselves recede from the arrhythmic thrum of the world outside, join the steady pulse of the past.
Winter is Cheryl’s favorite season in the Cook house: the short, stark days and early nights beside the hearth. In the pink-and-blue twilight, when Roger is finishing his work in the barn, she sits at her virginals near the window and fills the house with its silvery music. These are her most treasured moments, when she draws closest to the spirits of the house and the heavens. As she plays, she sometimes senses a presence beside her on the bench, feels the breath of Comfort on her neck.
The instrument is an exquisite reproduction, with an inset keyboard true to seventeenth-century Flemish construction, the lid’s interior hand-painted with a pastoral scene. She knows it’s a stretch to think an instrument like this would have existed in Hiram Cook’s house. There may have been spinets in some households, but few true, vintage virginals. Still, she likes to imagine that as well-heeled leaders of the community the Cooks might have been an exception, might have indulged themselves in this one small way.
The virginals was a gift from Roger upon their fifth anniversary of purchasing the Cook house, of truly beginning their lives here. Before that, they’d rented a ranch house in a neighborhood of matching houses. They had chosen Old Cranbury carefully. The schools were outstanding and crime nonexistent. But more crucially, they’d been drawn to the historic pedigree of the place. There would naturally be remnants of Puritan conservatism and modesty here. The people would show a corresponding moral fiber.
It did not take long to recognize their mistake. Their ranch-house neighbors did not acknowledge their arrival. The constant sound of weed whackers and lawn mowers disrupted their weekends. Barbecues, to which they were not invited, were visible on the back decks of adjacent homes. The children wore disposable clothing and used trashy language. If this was true here, then perhaps there was no untainted place left in the country.
But the history was everywhere. Together, Cheryl and Roger would drive in religious silence up and down Cannonfield Road, that alley of splendor, a mile-long corridor of heart-stopping antiques, untouched by the larger plague of neocolonials with fanlights and dormers. These houses were the uncontested patriarchs of the town, their faces proud and plain against the old wagon road, their date plaques like medals of honor. They researched the founders of the town, the original families, paged through archived letters and early land deeds at the library. During that first year, throughout the course of Cheryl’s first pregnancy, their love affair with the town’s brave settlers was ignited. It became evident that they had been summoned here, that they must act as torchbearers, defenders of the original residents and their ideals. In that first year, they had been delivered from the sidelines of town to the core, transformed from aliens to denizens.