Effigy (9 page)

“You will recall, Miss Graves, the topic of our last discussion, the domestication of
Bombyx mori.”

“I do indeed, sir.”

“Excellent. Now, common as this little fellow is, you mustn’t imagine his to be the only species responsible for producing the world’s silk.”

Mr. Humphrey had in his possession a selection of books, the pages of one of which he now laid open. Coming to stand alongside
Ruth in her chair, he lowered the exposed folio into her line of view. The engraving thereon was so delicate, so compelling, she couldn’t help but trace it with her finger’s tip.

“Life-size, if you please,” he murmured.

Here were no pale, captive insects. The Tusseh silk moth of India spanned an entire page, fully six inches from wing tip to wing tip. The caterpillar was an arching monster, strung together out of sacs rather than segments, bristling with starry tufts of hair. What was more, the species was untamed, untameable. Those who would harvest its fine produce were obliged to watch over the great worms wherever they chose to spin.

In the dream it is Ruth who stands shepherd to the pendent cocoons. The jungle is hot and dark. For a time all is quiet.

The bats come first, chittering patches of night. Then their opposites, the white and whistling birds. Snakes brighten the leaf litter. Cats—several times tabby-weight—balance in the overhead boughs.
Mangrove, crepe myrtle
—marvellous names for mysterious trees. There are even dogs, thick-shouldered, bristling with copper fur. To reach the cocoons they must leap to heights quadruple their own. And they will, if no one stops them.

But this is no nightmare. The dream-Ruth is fearless. She plucks leathery wings from the vine-draped vault, crushes hissing tongues beneath her heel. She is equal to the leaping red dogs, equal to everything that comes on.

Close to sleep now, Ruth shifts her loosely shut eyes, bringing the ghost of that engraved page clear. Such moths. Bodies like furred, truncated thumbs. Wings made lovely by brave design—primitive figures of stark, unblinking eyes.

Thankful wakes with a start, her neck awry. She’s alone in the parlour. Night has fallen and no one has bothered to wake her—they haven’t even left her a candle. The half-worked bodice lies across her lap. She can’t fathom its colours in the gloom—black appliqué on velvet of a midnight blue. A garment her mother’s milk-and-coal colouring would have rendered lethal. One she would have judged sinful to wear.

Thankful may not have the complexion, but there are other ways to make a dress work. She has a character firmly in mind: a French noblewoman driven by circumstance to depend upon the charity of strange men.

In the dark, Thankful locates her last stitch, knots the thread and bites it through. The pincushion is a cool and spiny thing. She sticks the needle in deep and sets her work aside, making sure to arrange it bosom-up on the side table, where it will rankle in Mother Hammer’s eye. Rising, she finds her neck is well and truly cricked. She must carry herself with care or risk a headache. Foolish to have dropped off like that, upright in the midst of them all.

She navigates across the parlour, arms waving like the fronds of some underwater weed. Once through to the dining room, she feels her way from chair back to chair back, pausing to turn and peer at the hunched shadow of the clock. Its face is silvery, the placement of its hands unclear. She suffers a wash of imbalance, clutches the chair at hand—the youngest boy’s place—and clings there a moment.

Overhead, a floorboard sounds its weakness. The room directly above Thankful ought to be empty, it being the bedchamber she calls her own. It can’t be Hammer—he’s away in the city overnight. Letting go of the chair, she moves blindly into the front hall. Before her the kitchen stands in darkness. Mother Hammer
abed then.
Or not
. A quarter turn, half a dozen sliding steps and the toe of Thankful’s slipper touches stair. She gropes for the banister and ascends.

Light-footed or no, she’s not fool enough to imagine sneaking up on the first wife—there may as well be bat’s ears under that whitening hair. Still, she proceeds softly. At the round of the landing, the wall before her bristles with framed mottoes. She sets three of them askew before continuing on.

Ruth’s door stands at the head of the stairs, then more of the first wife’s embroidered words. Thankful takes a breath and steps into the wash of weak light escaping her chamber’s open door. Backlit by a lamp, Mother Hammer rises up on her knees before the gleaming dresser. Every drawer gapes, several spilling their bright insides. Thankful pictures the front-heavy dresser toppling, crushing the first wife where she kneels.

It’s not the first time Mother Hammer has run her big hands over Thankful’s things. God knows what she thinks she’s looking for—a length of rubber piping, perhaps. A bottle of vinegar or soapy spirits. Some pronged, indelicate device.
What does she take me for?
Thankful leans against the jamb. Let the witch snoop, watch her slink away.

Mother Hammer keeps on about her business as though unobserved, rifling through the bottom drawer, shaking out item after item as though searching for insects in their folds. She stands with the last of these still in hand, assuming her full height fluidly, like a lamp wick turned up high. The garment is a precious one, a bed jacket of buff and grey feathers worked in a cunning design. Thankful fashioned it four years ago—she remembers, it was more than a month’s work. Its front panels mimic the face of an owl. Two well-placed holes allow her nipples to stand in for the glowing eyes.

“Careful with that.” She smiles. “It’s one of his favourites.” Then she sees that the other hand too holds something in its grasp. A shape like an unnamed organ, pale pink and shimmering. Thankful feels her smile stiffen. Mother Hammer lets the owl jacket fall and, in a counter motion, brings the small, scented pillow hard against her nose. Thankful’s breath deserts her. She’s grateful for the support of the jamb.

“You think this will hide it?” The first wife gives the sachet a violent squeeze before casting it to the floor. “You think a few petals can cover the stink of your sin?”

Silence swings like a footbridge between them, and then Thankful giggles, a sound that surprises them both. It shakes the older woman. She snatches up her lamp, says nothing as she pushes past.

Thankful watches her shunt away down the hall. “Sleep well, Mother Hammer,” she calls softly. She can’t help herself. The first wife hasn’t a clue.

The Tracker sits cross-legged before his fire, loosing the leather-bound book from his thigh. It’s been in his possession for a decade, and though he has paged through the journey it depicts a thousand times, he has yet to do so by the light of day. Tonight he confines himself to those drawings that move him distantly, taking care not to smudge the dark lines of which they’re made.

One, about a third of the way in, shows a wide plain peopled with giants. It is the only buffalo herd the Tracker has known, his own land closed in by mountains, the great beasts present there in legend alone. So much meat, so many heavy hides. Little wonder the people of the plains are mighty.

Turning several pages in one, he lands on a drawing that never ceases to make him frown. A stone-faced Mormonee stands with his arms knotted across his chest. Behind him countless sacks spill corn. His stance is familiar to the Tracker, a certain stiffness that comes of refusing a hungry stranger food.

Closer to the end of the book, the Tracker finds a picture he cannot help but like. A white man, young and keen, drives a path through waist-high grass. The Tracker is neither white nor nearly so young, but he has lived this drawing untold times. His earliest memories are set in such meadows, deep sinks of grass girded by slopes of juniper, piñon, sage.

The first time he was allowed along on a rabbit drive, he plunged into the high growth to one side of the path and found himself in over his head. A panicked spinning on the spot wound the four directions into one. He came close to yelling, reducing himself to a nuisance—or worse, a funny story to tell the women and elders—but managed to bite back the cry.

Only then, heart in his mouth, hammering at the backs of his teeth, did he remember the fifth direction—sky. Suddenly all was open. The sun hung where he’d left it, climbing up from the land beyond the camp. Turning the back of his head to its glow, the Tracker brought his palms together and parted the way, keeping on until his own thin path met the beaten-down track of the men. Rabbits are not buffalo, but still he gloried in the hunt that day. Still the People were fed.