It’s easier to let Christmas slide, knowing that a real holiday is on the horizon. The Second Regiment Light Dragoons hosts its annual Twelveth Night celebration at a tavern in Sheffield the second week of January. This is an occasion the colonists would have acknowledged; this is the night they would have costumed themselves and danced and flirted. So Cheryl lays out her blue brocade Jesuit gown and silver-embroidered stomacher. Roger presses his best white shirt with pleated ruffles and his burgundy frock coat with matching silk death’s heads. Cheryl pins and re-pins the stomacher to her corset. Roger slides his new flask into a trouser pocket.
The forecast is for snow. This, at least, is what Rebekah tells her parents, waving a glowing device.
“There’s a severe weather warning,” she says. “Heavy snow all night, accumulations up to twelve inches.”
“It’s winter in New England.” Roger grins.
“Seriously, I don’t think we should go,” Rebekah says. “The roads will get worse while we’re out.”
“That’s why we have four-wheel drive, isn’t it?” Cheryl says.
Remember the colonists, she wants to add. They would have had to ride horses.
They discuss it no further. Cheryl and Roger are united in the opinion that today’s world is governed by fear, that full-grown adults have become paralyzed by a terror of Nature, that capable citizens have allowed themselves to become infantilized by alarmist authorities. They will be warm in their woolen stockings and outerwear. The kids zip parkas over their sweatshirts. Cheryl wishes that Rebekah might have at least put on a skirt or brushed her hair. Young people had once met matrimonial prospects at dances like this one. Why couldn’t the same happen for her daughter? Would it be so unlikely that Rebekah might meet someone suitable tonight, one of the sons of the regiment commander?
The drive is an hour on back roads. When they arrive at the tavern—a pub with neon beer signs in the window—the snow is drifting down beautifully, patterning Roger’s great coat with fleeting constellations. Inside, they are heartened to see that everyone has come. Cheryl shrugs off her cloak, does a twirl to show off her skirts. “Huzzah!” call the men, flush-faced and rowdy. She loves these people. What outstanding luck to have found this community, like a portal through time. When they are all together, there is a thrilling sense of covert celebration, something of a speakeasy in the way they drink and dance out of the view of the others, the “regulars,” those who would judge and mock. Here, they are the real winners. They are the ones with ardent friendships, in the oldest sense. They are the ones guided by true principle.
Some are operating in first-person mode, the men speaking with loud round vowels, colonial gusto. Roger takes a tankard of porter. Cheryl accepts a mug of cider. The children recede to a corner table and drink soda.
When the contra dancing begins, Cheryl tries to pull Rebekah onto the floor to introduce her to a boy named Caleb, someone’s visiting nephew, skinny but elegant in a pair of striped silk breeches. Rebekah shrinks away when her mother tries to grasp her hand. Finally, perhaps in sympathy for poor Caleb, Rebekah rises to her feet. The beginning of their dance is halting, embarrassing, but then it seems to return to Rebekah, the memory of dancing this way as a girl. Her face loses its wrenched smirk and relaxes into the anticipatory gaze of a woman. Her movements, even in sweatshirt and jeans, are graceful and fluid, and by the end of the dance, she is smiling. Caleb delivers a deep bow.
“Did he ask for your phone number?” Cheryl asks in the car.
“No. Well, yes,” Rebekah murmurs from the backseat.
“Well then,” Cheryl says.
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“How do you know?”
Roger drives the Jeep slowly over the unplowed road. The snowflakes streak through the night, large and wet, splattering against the windshield. On the country road between towns, they notice that the houses are dark.
“Power’s out,” Roger says plainly.
No one speaks again for the rest of the ride. The Jeep grinds through the snow, the windshield wipers creating a blurred porthole. There are no other cars on the road. It is, indeed, like passing through an eighteenth-century night.
At last they are on Cannonfield Road, steering its familiar bends. When they reach the Slater house, Roger touches the brake.
“Do you think their water’s turned off?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Cheryl says. “I suppose it’s none of our business.” As she says this, a thought shoots through her, sly and precise, like a silver fish beneath a frozen lake.
Roger looks at her, then drives on.
As the rest of the family prepares for bed, Cheryl sits at the virginals for a few moments. She plays the first bars of “Greensleeves” quietly, intentionally. She plays the notes as a kind of invocation, tuning her ear to the spiritual guidance of the Cook family. She repeats the phrases, closes her eyes, and after a moment feels her spine straighten and her lungs expand, as if Comfort has joined her. Her hands stop playing and rest on the keys. She breathes deeply, gathering her courage like a minuteman before battle.