Fitcher's Brides (32 page)

“It is time to know your
heart
!”

The last word echoed around the hall. Amy jumped at the sound of it. It had been nothing like when her father tried to preach. While he often persuaded her, his words were flat and stumbling. Fitcher was speaking to her and about her. No one else. He described what she knew about herself. The question—the fearful dilemma that he had expressed so well—was how to purify the heart before the angel looked upon and judged you. It was fine to announce your wish to shed your sin, but quite another to succeed. His sermon was an extension of the cleansing he had begun last night, that she had discovered only this morning. She would be shriven. He must shrive her. She could not do it alone.

Nevertheless, she dreaded the act of contrition, for she must—if she confessed all—admit to her relationship with Notaro. She might admit it to an angel (for an angel would know already), but not to Fitcher. Not to her husband; and surely not on the first day of their own new life.

The others left for breakfast until only she and her husband remained in the hall. When Fitcher came up the aisle, he halted beside her. His face expressed no emotion, as if he were waiting for her to assign it one.

Amy reached for his hand and clutched it with both of hers. She looked up into his ice-blue eyes and said, “Thank you, sir, for reminding me of my sinfulness. My behavior of yesterday—I admit that I love your wine too much. It was—it was only right that you punished me for my wickedness.”

His towering look softened. “Then you recognize this condign punishment?”

“I do.”

“You were insufficiently punished in your former existence?”

“I was, yes. Papa, he—they didn't know.” She tried not to let her voice quiver as her lip did, but it was difficult. “I mean, they knew nothing of what runs so deep inside me. The secrets of my heart are as you describe them.”

He drew his hand away. “Then I shall make it my duty to purify you here. I can forgive much, but not sullage. My wife must be pristine and unblemished come the day we meet our Lord.”

“I want to be.”

“Good. Good.” That seemed to resolve the matter for him. He said, “Now, dear Amy,
dear
bride, I have gifts for you that I couldn't present you with last night.” He paused to let that statement prod her once more on the matter. “I'll bring them to your chamber after breakfast. You must go and eat with the others. The shifts don't last very long. When you're done with your meal, I'll join you in your room.”

Holding out both his hands, he raised her to her feet and then walked with her through the doors and across the foyer.

 

After a meal that was bland and unsatisfying, Amy tried to help with kitchen duties, but didn't know what she was supposed to do. She looked for someone to give her orders, but no one did. They moved around her like ants around a piece of wood, their routines already established without her. She didn't know whether she could ask—no one spoke during the meal, and silence reigned in the kitchen as well. Confused and frustrated, she withdrew to her room.

She walked silently along the hall. The door to her chamber was open and Elias Fitcher was already inside. He'd thrown open the window and curtains, and light like a fireball blazed now through the gauzy canopy at the head of it. Fitcher stood beside her bed, holding her stockings like a bouquet beneath his nose. He must have sensed her presence, because all at once he dropped the stockings. His smile was already in place by the time he faced her.

She walked into the room.

She saw on the bed a large garland of flowers, possibly the same ones that had bedecked the altar the previous day. In the center of them sat a white box tied in pink ribbons. Fitcher stepped back and gestured toward it.

Someone had made the bed—the covers were straightened and folded, pillows arranged decorously.

Amy knelt on the bed to retrieve the box. She turned then, with one knee tucked under her, and faced him as she undid the ribbons.

“This is a little something, a trifle,” he said.

She opened the box and pushed aside the tissue within. She took out the marble egg between her thumb and forefinger.

“Careful not to drop it,” he warned.

“I would never.” The egg was milky white and shot through with blue mineral veins. She rolled it across her other palm. The smooth surface was polished and unblemished. The tiny veins sparkled.

“Now,” he murmured, “I hope that you will carry it with you wherever you go. It joins me to you, knowing you have that in your hand, or in your pocket, or somewhere about your person. Its properties are, I think, quite soothing.”

She agreed. Even as she stood there, its coolness in her hand seemed to insulate her from the humid heat of the room.

“Here,” said Fitcher, and he took the egg from her. “Unlace your gown and lie upon your stomach.”

She glanced warily from him to the armoire and back again, but she obeyed. She unbuttoned the front of her dress, then shrugged it down to her waist and pushed down her undergarment. She climbed upon the bed then and lay facedown.

At the first touch of the egg to her back, she made a little gasp. As lightly as a feather Fitcher rolled it over the welts. The first time, the sensation stung ever so slightly, like nettles brushing her skin; but afterward only the coldness of the marble remained, and she felt comforted. She looked from where she lay at the mirror on the dresser. She saw herself in shadow, and the Reverend Fitcher glowing in the light coming through the window. The imperfect mirror warped the image, made his figure twist, cut hers in two with a shard of light. An instant later the sun passed behind a cloud and they both were cloaked in shadow. She moaned, and the sound surprised her. She luxuriated in the sensation rolling down her back. The egg dipped down to her buttocks and rolled up again, like a blanket to cover her, to let her sleep.

He withdrew the egg. The room was warm again, and he stood, waiting for her. She got off the bed, her hands covering her small breasts. She couldn't feel the welts on her back now. She glanced over her shoulder at the mirror. Her back appeared smooth, free of any marks.

Seeing her confusion, Fitcher lifted the leather cat from the cupboard door. “This,” he said, “is for punishment. This”—he held out the egg—“for palliation. It does not cure, but makes the punishment bearable, just as punishment makes our sins themselves bearable.”

He dropped the egg so that she had to catch it, thus uncovering herself. She pressed it to her breast. Blushing, she stood exposed, and for a moment thought of Michael Notaro—the look on his face when she'd first let him see her breasts—and remembering it, knew she needed more punishment yet.

“I must attend now to my duties,” he said. “You'll have yours, too, which I'll show you. This evening, we'll take up the matter of purification.” He started to turn away, but hesitated. “Oh, and I will lead at least one more crusade between now and the new life. To Boston, to Providence. When I'm gone, you will be the person in charge here.” He hoisted a ring of keys out of his jacket. “These will give you access to everything in Harbinger—with a single exception.” He held out the clear glass key. “This one is not to be used. What it unlocks is not to be opened. Do you understand?”

“Not to be opened, yes. I understand.”

He smiled, “Of course you do, my dear,” he said. “All of you do.” It struck her as an odd thing for him to say. He must mean everyone in the community.

He put the keys back inside his jacket and left Amy in her room, with the cold marble egg like a stone heart between her breasts.

A
MY HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING
that she was living her sister's life.

Fitcher directed her to make candles, but this proved to be next to impossible in the summer heat. Tallow refused to maintain a shape. It dripped off the hung wicks like blood from sacrificial lambs. It stayed in the molds, but when she flipped them over in the cold water and took out the candles, the bottoms went soft and they began almost immediately to bend.

Vern was the one acquainted with the chandler's art—not she. She had only watched and couldn't have told the difference between tallow and spermaceti except for how it smelled.

Rooting around for a solution, she went into the cellar of the shop and found boxes of candles her sister had made. The cool cellar kept them intact: There were dozens of boxes containing hundreds of candles lying in straw. Vern had prepared enough light to repel an army of darkness. Amy picked one up and looked at it. It was hard, not melting. Somehow Vern—and it had to be Vern's handiwork, didn't it?—had fashioned ideal candles, candles that could stand up to anything short of a direct attack of sunlight, candles like vampires asleep in their boxes. Amy was both amazed and thankful. She swore never to speak ill of her sister again.

She brought out a box. By herself she lugged it up to the house and left it in the foyer, where people could see it and take candles as they passed by after their meals. The first box lasted three days. She added up what she had stored and speculated that they might last until cold weather returned, and she could make tallow ones. After that would come October, and then she wouldn't have to worry about making candles anymore. In the Next Life, divine light would accompany them wherever they went.

In the afternoons she returned to the house to listen to her husband's sermon before her meal. He spoke with such passion, such fire, that she couldn't help but be persuaded by him. Often now she found her father and Lavinia in attendance at the sermons. Sometimes she spoke with them afterward. Her father had never been one for small talk, and always seemed itching to return home, where Kate manned the turnpike alone. He would ask how Amy was, but not how the reverend treated her. Not that she would have told him about her fearful course of purgation. She wished he would have let Kate come in his place, but never seemed to get the opportunity to say so. Lavinia was always there, always ready to interrupt, as if clairvoyant of what Amy wanted.

At night she waited in her room for Fitcher to come. The nights were warm now, and Amy wore only the lightest cotton chemise to bed. She sat in front of the window, holding the egg in her hands. If there was a breeze, she let it blow her dark hair and cool her skin.

He always came in quietly. She almost never heard him arrive. Sometimes he was right upon her before she realized it, and she jumped in terror at the sight of him. Their meeting became a ritual. He would hold out his hand, and, trembling, she would lay in it the marble egg. She would go to her place beside the bed, draw off her clothing, and kneel. The first lash was always a shock. He seemed to withhold it almost as a taunt, infusing the final moments before he struck with terror. She bowed her head and prayed: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hal-
lowed
”—the whip would fall—“be thy
name
.”

Fitcher would ask her to list her sins as he whipped her. She described a lifetime's worth—secret things, words spoken to her sisters in anger, an episode where she'd touched herself, pretending it was a man, the ways she had manipulated situations to get Vern or Kate into trouble, instances when she'd said aloud she wanted to kill one of them—the list could be made endless. What siblings didn't, sooner or later, wish one another ill? She withheld only Notaro's name. That large, final secret sin she would not admit to. She loved him. She would not betray him.

One night as the leather cat snapped across her skin, Fitcher asked her, “Are you like your sister? Have you known any men before you came here?”

“No,” she said at once. She wasn't like Vern. Vern with Henri was not like her with Michael Notaro, and she chose to interpret “before you came here” as here to Jekyll's Glen with her father and Lavinia. She hadn't known anyone. Hadn't wanted to know anyone before then. She couldn't be made responsible. “No,” she repeated, reaffirming, settling it in her mind.

Each whipping seemed more brutal than the one before. One night the intense pain pushed her beyond tears, beyond agony. It was as though she moved outside her body and floated over him, where she could watch the knotted strips bite into her back, the welts rise up beneath them, red lines slashed like ribbons from her shoulders to her bottom. Her bare feet protruded beneath her, and he resorted to whipping her soles. She felt none of it. Someone approached her, and a voice whispered in her ear, “You are free now.” The sound gathered her on invisible wings. Her spirit soared. She turned her face to the sky and said, “Thank you,” and Fitcher, his arm raised, stopped. She could see him even though he was behind her.

He dropped the whip, then bent down and lifted her. From her vantage, she looked frail and tiny, no bigger than a child in his arms. He placed her upon the bed, stretched her out. Then, with the egg, he smoothed her skin. The poison of perdition leached out of her and into the egg. Held by some angel, she hovered overhead and watched. His hand let go of the egg, left it lying in the small of her back while his fingers brushed gently over her backside, and down into the crevice between her thighs. Her body on the bed moaned and her spirit floating above dissolved.

She lay upon the bed, dreaming of his exploring hand, wanting him to delve deeper. She turned over to embrace him.

There was no one there. The room was dark. The cold marble egg lay upon the mattress. It had been that touching between her legs, that sensation casting her dream.

She cupped the egg in her hands and curled childlike around it. The rest of the night she didn't dream at all.

 

At the end of the week, as she was walking to the house from the village, she overheard someone outside one of the camp tents speaking of a dance that night. It was a dark-skinned boy no older than she, and he was describing the dance to whoever lay inside the mildew-darkened tent. He said they danced in the barn at the far end of the village. He didn't seem to be aware of who Amy was. She asked if the Reverend Fitcher attended. The boy rose up and replied, “Sometimes, but he don't dance. He just watches.”

After the meal, she located Fitcher on the back porch of the house and asked him about the dancing. “It is a healing thing they do,” he said, as if describing the behavior of a different species. “A release of energy, a way to overcome their exhaustion, to free themselves in a way from earthly bounds. You would like to join in, I take it.”

“If I might be allowed.”

“If you feel the need, then most certainly you may. I myself will be on hand to safeguard them. For while it is a harmless, even beneficial pastime, there are always some who would warp it like a bad piece of lumber into some unnatural shape. Rather than allow that, I will enter the dance myself and lead it. I must stand vigilant always for signs of depravity. Of course, not from you, my dear Amelia. You've come far through your penance.”

“Yes,” she agreed. She did not mention—barely even acknowledging herself—that she hoped to see Michael Notaro there. It had been weeks since she'd even laid eyes on him.

 

The dancing began before Amy and Fitcher arrived. They strode through the orchard, and past the dark shops. He spoke of the stars in the heavens, of God's purpose in creating the lights of the sky—“to entice us, to give us mysteries to solve in our lives.”

Amy said nothing. She was listening to the music, watching for the light spilling from the barn, which glowed from behind the buildings like a hidden fire. Like a lowly earthbound star.

Then ahead, in the gleam of lamps and candles, the dancers sashayed across the floor, back and forth in a formation she recognized from years gone by, when Vern had shown her how to dance. She had only danced with Vern and Kate, never with a man.

The people were strangers to her. Some of them interrupted their pleasure to acknowledge her husband. They bowed or nodded, just as they'd done to her the time he'd taken her family on his tour. She'd thought the welcome was meant only for strangers, newcomers.

Off to the side, Michael Notaro stood against a post watching the dancers. He had one knee bent, and held a cup of something. His look was dark and brooding. He seemed thinner, and his hair unkempt. Secretly, she delighted to see him so; not that she was cruel, but she wanted to know that he truly cared, that their separation had been difficult for him, too. She saw him and knew that he missed her.

She and Fitcher entered the barn. At once two people jumped up and offered him the bale of hay on which they'd been perched. He thanked them and sat down upon it. Amy took his hand and tried to draw him back onto his feet. “Won't you dance with me, Elias?” she asked. Despite everything, she thought she could coerce him.

He replied, “Not just now, my dear. You must find someone else to entertain you awhile.” His glance flicked from her to something across the room. Even before she turned, following his gaze, she knew. He'd looked at Notaro, as if he knew what was in her mind.

By now word of Fitcher's arrival had spread through the barn. Notaro glared their way resentfully through the rows of dancers, as though angry and frustrated that they should rob him even of this small retreat. He pushed off from the post and walked over to a group of women. A moment later, one of them stepped out with him into the center of the room. They joined the dance in progress, and once they'd fallen in step, Notaro looked straight at Amy once and thereafter pretended she didn't exist.

Fitcher called, “You there, come over here.” She turned back, fearful that he'd called to Notaro, but he was gesturing to a blond-haired boy who was standing off to the side of the dancers and who might not have been any older than she.

He came forward with obvious reluctance, giving her a troubled look. “Reverend?” he said.

“My wife needs to dance, Mr. Gibbons, and I would greatly appreciate it if you'd be so kind as to accommodate her. You don't have a partner, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Then it's settled. Amelia, this is Orlando Gibbons, who has been here almost since we laid the first stone at Harbinger.”

The boy bowed and offered his arm, but his eyes met hers with worry, almost fear. She accepted his arm and together they walked toward the dancers. The dance was just ending, and so they waited while some dancers left. Amy looked for Notaro, saw him walk away from his partner and out of the barn.

Orlando Gibbons leaned close to Amy and said, “I'm most sorry about your sister. I did like her very much.”

“My—you knew her?”

“She came to this dance one time, when your husband was away. And I met her and danced with her just like now. She'd been ill, too ill to go with the reverend upon his crusade.”

The fiddler played introductory notes and they moved up the floor and took their places among the two rows of dancers. Amy picked up the steps quickly. It was a reel of the sort she'd done with Vern a few times in the parlor back in Boston. She thought of Vern back there right now. “Ill or not, she should never have deserted him, Mr. Gibbons.”

“No, I suppose not,” he said, then danced away from her. Upon his return, he said, “The reverend has pretty terrible luck that way. I think God tests him to see if he's worthy to lead.”

She wanted to ask what he meant by “that way,” but now the dance led her to another partner, and she cast her eye about for Notaro as she promenaded back to the center line. If he had returned, he was hiding from her. Fitcher, on the other hand, seated prominently, was engaged in a discussion with a red-headed woman whom Amy hadn't seen before—or was she the same one who had danced with Notaro? Yes, she thought, it was. Fitcher glanced her way, then said something sharp to the woman. She lowered her head, took his hand and kissed it, then moved off through the crowd and out of the barn.

Amy changed partners again. She had to pay too much attention to the dance, which distracted her from what was going on around her, the little puzzle pieces of larger events. She stepped to the edge of the dance area and turned to step back to her partner. He had gone, and in his place, dancing opposite her now, was her husband. His hands were on his hips and he grinned at her surprise. As they closed, he commented, “I do so love a good fiddle tune.” The look of glee on his face surprised her.

They danced around each other, and it seemed to her that the music changed, its tempo picked up although she continued to step in time and felt no faster herself. She sensed movement outside the line of dancers and found that everyone was standing up. They moved apart, in pairs, in groups. Like a fire the dancing spread across the barn. Fitcher clapped his hands, and others picked it up. The pattern changed, no longer a reel. People were whirling in place, spinning around each other, a living astrolabe of wheeling bodies. The forces gathered her up and spun her in her own orbit, around Fitcher, around the floor. She slid past Orlando Gibbons. He didn't even notice her. His eyes were rolled to the ceiling as if focused on Heaven. A palpable wave of ecstasy washed over her. Her body tingled. She shuddered divinely, linked arms with someone, and they flung each other into new orbits, remarkably never crashing into anyone else. She had no idea where she was going but her every step seemed choreographed.

She rolled against someone, laughed, and found that she'd linked arms with Michael Notaro. Where had he come from? She ought to have been shocked, embarrassed. She should have pushed away, but she couldn't release him. The wide-eyed look he gave her might have been terror, as if he also didn't know how he'd come to be there, but he didn't let go either. He said, “Amy, I love you.”