Belle Cora: A Novel (32 page)

I took my hand away, not knowing whether she would scream and shout for her mother again. But she didn’t, though her pains were obviously acute.

As time went on, it seemed to get even worse. She ground her teeth so hard I thought she might break them. Tears streamed sideways, right and left, from her eyes. When the moon had gone a third of the way across the night sky, I said, “Maybe I gave you too much. It could be that you are going to die after all.”

I hated her enough to be at peace with that idea.

She began to pray, commending her soul to Jesus. The whole ordeal took her much longer than it had taken me, for some reason, and she was not really done until dawn and the rooster’s crow. She had fouled the bed, but there was no blood.

“I bet you’d like to sleep,” I told her. “But you shouldn’t. Your mother would want to know why. You’d better get dressed. Oh, and clean yourself up.”

“You’re going to hell, Arabella.”

“I expect so. Maybe when I get there you can show me the ropes. Tell me how to pull the carrots, and which cow likes to put her tail in the milk.”

THE DAY WAS CRISP AND CLEAR
. I wore a yellow cotton traveling dress, a homespun woolen shawl, and a white bonnet. I carried a carpetbag and walked along the road to town like an innocent, apple-cheeked dairy maid. All was not well with me, and it would not be for a long time. But at least I did not have Matthew’s child in me.

I walked up the slate walk of Mrs. Harding’s house. “Arabella,” she said with a fraudulent smile, and I knew immediately that I had lost my position.

She had me sit on the couch beside her and said I was a wonderful girl. She enjoyed my companionship. I would be a fine wife to the man of my choice one day. However, as I was perhaps aware, there was talk around town about me and her sons. She had thought the matter over while I was at my aunt’s house. She’d decided that, to put a stop to the gossip, I should absent myself from her house for the time being.

“But, Mrs. Harding, that wouldn’t stop the gossip. That would just make everybody think it was true!”

She knew that. She did not mean to fool me. She expected me to swallow the lie.

“Oh, I don’t think so, Arabella. I’m sure you’re wrong. It’s you being in the house, such a pretty girl as you are, and the boys the age they are, that makes people talk. It’s probably best for you to be in a house where the children are younger.”

I asked her if she knew of such a house. She said she would ask around. If she heard of something, she’d let me know. “That reminds me. Ephraim Towne was here and brought a letter for you from Jeptha.” Handing it to me, she suggested, “I think it is a very personal letter. Maybe you should take it with you.”

I realized much later that she must have had a pretty good idea of the letter’s contents, and she wanted to be spared the hysterics she anticipated. I didn’t think of it then; I could only wonder why he would write me a letter, and why send Ephraim instead of coming himself. I felt sick. I felt a weakness in my wrists and elbows. It seemed to take all my strength to unfold the page. A few bits of red sealing wax fell on my skirt; a heavy clump of it stayed on the edge of the paper as I read:

It was too awful for tears. It made me dizzy. I cried out Mrs. Harding’s name as if the house were on fire. She came. I asked her if she had spoken to Ephraim when he brought the letter. She said she had. Did Ephraim say where Jeptha was? I asked. Yes, she said, he had taken a coach to Rochester; he was taking a cheap, circuitous route to the seminary. “Isn’t that what he told you in the letter?”

“Oh, Mrs. Harding, he’s given me up! He thinks I deceived him!”

“Oh dear. Oh, he can’t mean it!”

“Do you think so, Mrs. Harding?”

“I’m sure he’ll change his mind. How could he give up a lovely girl like you?”

She knew as well as I did what could make a pretty girl unsuitable for marriage. All the same, I threw my arms around her and wept. I’d have wept on the breast of a dressmaker’s dummy for an instant of motherly comfort, and to delay the time when I must walk away from this house and face whatever in the world came next.

We then heard the brass knocker on the front door. “Don’t, Arabella,” said Mrs. Harding, as I ran down the hall to get it. Such was my desire for it to be Jeptha, here to beg my forgiveness, that at first I did not see that standing before me was Emily Johnson, a bucktoothed girl whom I knew from school. She was dragging a trunk.

Behind me, Mrs. Harding said, “This is unfortunate.”

“Mrs. Harding said to come at noon,” Emily explained.

“I’ll get my things,” I told Mrs. Harding.

MY LEFT HAND GRIPPED THE HANDLES
of two carpetbags. In my right I carried a leather portmanteau that had traveled with me to my uncle’s
farm when I was nine years old. I walked down to Mill Race Street, past neat two-story clapboard houses, past dogs, past children who knew my name and would soon be telling their mothers they had seen Arabella Godwin leave Mrs. Harding’s house with all her things.

I took familiar shortcuts through the fields to Melanchthon’s house, and wept in Anne’s embrace, giving her a selective account of my troubles that excluded the rape and the pregnancy. I told her that Agnes had spread lies about me, and that I could not bear to go back to the farm, because Agatha always took Agnes’s side, and that Jeptha and I had quarreled over that. Anne disliked Agnes, and she believed me, though probably she knew I wasn’t telling her everything. She said that I could stay.

Melanchthon brought another bed into Susannah’s room. That night, after my dreams woke me, Susannah came and asked me why I was crying. “I had a bad dream,” I told her. I fell asleep at dawn, and Anne let me go on sleeping that first day.

I HAD ALWAYS FELT UNDERSTOOD BY JEPTHA
. It had been the first thing I loved about him, and it was a riddle and a torment that he could have believed the things he said in that letter; that he could have been so sure of them that he would go without hearing me out. His first accusation (“I know about the baby you tried to make me think was mine”) was, of course, no more than the truth. I saw that my furtive behavior in the weeks since the rape, the great fact hidden from Jeptha, would have prepared him to doubt me. I had been deceiving him since then. But what in all the years before that could have persuaded him I was
essentially
a deceiver and there was something false in me at the core? I have given the question a great deal of thought over the years. I believe now that it was religion that came between us. We began to part the moment he was saved, for that was when I began to hide many of my thoughts and feelings from him, and he began to blind himself, incompletely, to uncomfortable truths about me. My falseness was on display for a whole year, in every one of those prayer meetings, every time he preached a sermon to me from the trees, and every time he talked to me about his deepest feelings, which I pretended unconvincingly to share.

WHEREVER I WENT, THERE WERE LOOKS
; everyone seemed to know that I had been in a fix, and gotten myself out of it somehow; and that
this was why I had been fired, and why Jeptha had left me. How much of the story came from Mrs. Harding, or Agnes, or Mrs. Talbot? It made me feel ill to think about it. In any case, I was disgraced, and because I didn’t deserve it, I believed that it could be undone. I had a sense of justice.

This was the source of my second great error, after my decision to permit myself to be alone with Matthew. Instead of taking the stage out of Patavium, going to New Jersey, and meeting Jeptha face to face, I stayed at Melanchthon and Anne’s house, and took thought, and formed what I considered a more intelligent plan. I would write to Jeptha, telling him everything. When he received my letter, either he would come here to kill Matthew or he would leave Matthew to God’s vengeance and send for me. He would send for me, of course, with a letter. What a wonderful letter that would be! It would make me clean again. I could wave that letter in front of everyone’s face: I would show it to Mrs. Harding, I would show it to Agnes, I would show it to Colonel Ashton.

I could not get Jeptha’s address from his family; they hated me. So I did what seemed logical. I visited Jeptha’s good friend and guide, William Jefferds.

He had moved again by then, to the farmhouse of Nathan Cole—father of Solomon Cole, the boy to whom Jefferds had once mistakenly handed
Aristotle’s Masterpiece
in place of the Old Testament.

Solomon’s mother answered the door. Time crept as the expression on her homely face went from surprise to pity, and I saw that she belonged to the small class of Livy’s women who were inclined to forgive a young girl’s weakness. When I said I wanted to talk to William Jefferds, she fetched him and tactfully left us alone in the sitting room. He asked after my health and my family’s health, and at last he said, “Why have you come to me, Arabella?”

In the presence of the good man, I broke down and told everything, except for one thing—I did not tell him about Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills; nor had I told Jeptha about them in the letter.

The top of Jefferds’s head had gone completely bald by this time. He wore his stringy hair long at the sides, and with the spectacles he looked like a sort of underfed Benjamin Franklin.

He nodded and murmured sympathetically while I told my story, but was silent for some time afterward. At last I asked, “Mr. Jefferds? What is it?”

He cleared his throat. “Do you have the letter?”

“Yes.”

“May I see it?”

From his words, I did not know whether he meant to read it or merely to hold it, but I didn’t ask; I just gave it to him. It was a relief to put myself in his hands. He stroked the folded pages and wax seal pensively with his dry little fingers. “You’re not looking forward to bringing this letter to Colonel Ashton,” he said, looking from the letter to me. I felt his gaze in the new way that I had come to feel people’s gazes since my disgrace. “Everyone in the store staring at you. And they would ask the colonel who the letter was addressed to, and he might tell them, or he might not, but he would tell his wife, and she’d talk, and maybe they’d find something wrong in it, and anyway they’d be talking about you again, when you’d hoped the talk had died down.” This was rather more than I wanted to hear from him, but it was all accurate. There was no postal box in those days, nor was there any post office in our little town. There was only the general store. The contents of a letter might be private, but everything else about it would be noticed and widely discussed. After a while he said, “I’m writing to Jeptha. I’ll include your letter with mine.”

I went back to see him every few weeks, giving him more letters, and asking if he had heard. I attended school and bore the stares of my classmates because Jefferds might have wonderful news for me. And one day he summoned me to his desk at the end of class and said: “Jeptha has written. See me in Cole’s house.”

When I got there, he showed me a page of a long letter. Jeptha had numbered it page 3 on one side and 4 on the reverse. It described the habits of other boarders in the minister’s house. There was a part about a girl his age, pious, pretty, and “unspoiled.” Then this: “As to Arabella, I ask that you do not write to me about her any more, & I ask that you do not encourage her. I’ve heard what she has to say, & I’ve heard what you have to say; I’ve closed that chapter. She ought to do the same.”

After that, I went a little mad. In this, by coincidence, I was not alone.

XXIV