The Holder of the World (6 page)

10

GABRIEL LEGGE’S
father turned out to be an indebted drunk from Morpeth, not a shipowner from Danagadee. Ancestral lands in Northumberland, those that had not been seized by creditors or lost in successive lawsuits, had been given out to Gabriel’s far-older brother, the sober but dull-witted Morgan Legge. Gabriel looked upon his place in the birth order—second son, fourth child—as providential. No land to root him, and not a groat’s worth of family fortune to tempt him into staying and currying favor.

“Can you imagine me herding sheep? Married to a ewe like my wretched brother?” It was true; Morgan and his wife, named Felicity, whom Hannah called Fleece, and brood of children did come south once to pay their respects and to inspect the homemaking skills of the New World bumpkin their brother had hooked. Hannah had the impression of having been visited by a flock of geese rather than blood relatives.

Homemaking skills, in the world of Morgan Legge, had decided linkages with submission and stupidity. It was mandated that the wife should not outshine the husband in anything but parental wealth. In the case of Fleece, a serving girl on a neighboring farm, this condemned her to permanent eclipse.

Hannah, orphaned by secrecy and a bee sting, had set great store by family, having forbidden herself to think too deeply of her mother. It did not seem possible that actual blood relatives could not unlock a secret, did not possess in abundance, a side of oneself otherwise hidden or left undeveloped. Morgan, squat, short, fair and balding, with two eyes and seven children, wiped that expectation from Hannah’s mind. She was grateful for the absence of family, the absence of definition and expectation.

She had married a man as singular in his society, as inexplicable to Morpeth, as she was in Salem. His life was a mystery to her, fabulously rich when he chose to embellish it, but otherwise a blank. He could describe the interior of a Mongol tent, the smell of camels, the pink flesh inside the trunk of a raja’s elephant, but he could not, or would not, answer the simplest question about the ships he sailed or the captains he served. He pointed out to her that his life was provisional. In the parts of the South Atlantic and Indian oceans that he plied, the odds were better than even that any voyage he undertook would be his last. She would be well looked after; that’s all he could guarantee.

WHEN
Hannah Easton Fitch Legge left Salem for England in 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had been in existence for sixty-two years. Time enough for a full range of political responses to have evolved. New World Man was either an ungrateful wretch wallowing in moral regression, or the upright angel of God’s green promise, reaping the rewards of sober rectitude. Reading those responses today—the charges and countercharges—is a shock: we have not changed in three hundred years. The colonists were not grateful or respectful enough to the Crown and the Mother Country; the colonists were ignorance personified and insufficiently ashamed of their backwardness; the colonists were proud and self-reliant, New World giants to Europe’s dwarfs. England’s Noblest Party, England’s Folly. The New World was hard and savage; it was soft and bountiful. It was evil, it was innocent. England was refined and cultured; it was soiled and sinful. Probably every colonist and every Englishman ascribed to one or many of those views, serially or simultaneously, whatever the nature of their mutual contradiction.

Hannah personally knew many old men and women in Salem who’d arrived on the
Arabella
with John Winthrop in 1630, and who had been intimately involved with every aspect of establishing a colony. It was unclear if by their beliefs they honored more the pristine, God-given nature of the world they first beheld, or their own vain scratchings on its surface. Firsters, she called them, those who believed, passionately, that the first time anything had been made, built, eaten, sold or raised was inevitably the best. They believed that God had guided their hands in those first harsh years, not permitting them to fail; therefore any second-generational dwelling, any frivolous or decorative activity, were by definition the devil’s vengeance. She was aware of Firsters’ disapproval, the implied fall into sin and perdition that greeted every change. From the Firsters, whom Robert and Susannah Fitch admired, Hannah had always kept her distance. Each death of an
Arabella
passenger, which called for public mourning and which offered a ritualized occasion for a renewed accounting of the colony’s moral slackness, followed by a momentary rededication to values no one intended to live by, struck Hannah as unseemly idolatry.

And there were those in the Bay Colony who counted themselves fortunate to be America-born, free of the taint of Old World strictures, who believed with a kind of reckless arrogance that America had not only purified but also enlarged and redeemed the human soul. The idea of England as a soiled and fallen world, as opposed to merely a savage one, was part of their catechism. They were proud of their backwardness; they mocked the dandies as they disembarked; they reveled in using and broadening their own American accent, which had already ironed out the multifarious wrinkles of British regionalism.

Hannah, though aware of both tendencies among her countrymen, found herself easily embarrassed by their expression. Nothing in colonial society had demonstrated its unalienable claim on her affection. Nothing in English society, or among recently arrived Englishmen, excited her contempt. The English, like her husband, seemed vastly more exciting and knowledgeable and appreciative than the men of Salem; on the other hand, their scrutiny extended to realms of social rank that seemed to her false measures of value.

And England itself, though it might be an exhausted force, as colonists liked to think, still compelled a fascinated study. Like all things fallen, it held a certain attraction. The moral superiority that grew out of the contest with savagery was but one category of excellence. There was wealth and trade and culture, history and the great common pulse of humanity, that surged from the streets of London. That, too, counted.

Always dutiful, she kept a diary
(London Sketches by an Anonymous Colonial Daughter
[University Presses of New England, 1967]) intended—or at least contrived—as epistles to a distant mother, for sharing with Susannah back in Salem. Three were published in Boston papers (heretofore unidentified as to authorship), with some twelve holograph pages having been preserved in the Colonial Archives Wing of the British Museum. They offer as vigorous an assessment of English life in the Dutch King William Ill’s years as any on record. She didn’t travel often into the city, saw no plays, had few friends. Her husband was often gone to sea. She was, in other words, an ideal correspondent, the perfect reporter. Seeing no one, going nowhere, doing nothing, she learned to cultivate her own garden.

There were those she had known in Salem who dreamed of a “return” to England, who viewed their years in the colony as a fiduciary sentencing preferable only to imprisonment, an abbreviated means of establishing property and a name for themselves uncontended by a thousand others immediately more qualified than they were. In her letters, she addressed those friends, calling them (in the manner of “Firsters”) Desponders.

Her letters are addresses from England to Expatriates and Nativists.

Consider my old friend, Dr. Aubrey. Thinking himself a superior Specimen of Training & Dedication, most especially to Colleagues (how he grinds his Teeth at the Thought, the Impudence of implied Equality!) trained in the Colonies, he deigns to serve in poxy Boston-town expecting no less than Knighthood for passing two winters apart from the subtle shadings of social Nuance held dear in his native Yorkshire.… For
Colonial Indifference to protocol, which we might translate as perceiv’d Insults to his imperial Self, our medical Servant closes down his Office and grants Interviews to all and sundry, assuring that his Leavetaking shall be no less attended than his Arrival
.

Unremark’d in our obedient and worshipful Press is the fact he had charged his Patients at three times the Tariff of Physicians trained in unsavoury local Colleges like Harvard, and that the perceptible rate of Recovery among his patients is less than the Average that local
Sachems
might affect from the Gathering and Brewing of Herbs and tree Barks.…

But she was no less shrewd in the skewering of colonial custom.

A gentle neighbour, to whom I give the name Mister Mowberry, return’d but a fortnight from the town of Duxbury, has latterly regal’d me with a tale of utter Degradation wrought by zealous upholders of colonial Virtue
.

Your gentle correspondent knows well of what she speaks, having witness’d in fair Salem such brazen Gatherings of shiftless Acorns
.

Consider a gentleman prepar’d to export to the Colony the purest product of England, namely the wealth of its culture and mental training, who borrows against inheritance in the pursuit of credentials in Land-Surveyance & Committment of Quitclaim, only to arrive in Boston, expecting no more than a civil welcome, to be greeted by stone-throwing ruffians who mock his clothes, his cultivated accent; estate-agents in his chosen City who refuse the Let of lodgings lest he pay a
year’s deposit in advance; & the Assurance from those courthouse Jesters who constitute our native Aristocracy, that no Claim adjudicated by an Englishman has a chance of being Recorded.…

GABRIEL LEGGE
was a compulsive seafarer, signing on as a mate whenever he could secure a boat. He’d be gone for six months at a stretch, then home for a few weeks, jolly as always, establishing a market for the silks and gemstones he’d secured on his travels. For Hannah, whom he’d wooed with tales of adventure and travel—in some cases transparent with fabrication if not outright fraud—forbearance settled in as the handmaiden of passion. She, who had been raised in a home in which Robert Fitch was never absent, but the income depended upon her sewing for the barest subsistence, accepted the crude arithmetic of survival:
man out the gate, worth the wait; man in the house, mend your blouse
. Lacking a reliable means of comparison, Hannah counted herself a contented wife.

Since she was to write so movingly of sexual passion in her later years, in a voice that is unique among women in her time and place, I have tried to read carefully between the lines of all her correspondence. Her written record is one long chronicle of discoveries, her curiosity extends to every branch of knowledge she ever had contact with. Except sexual love, at least with Gabriel Legge. They lived together in Stepney fewer than three months before he shipped out the first time.

GABRIEL WAS
an artful salesman; on each official voyage he did some buying and selling of his own, and always for outrageous profit, and always brought home a pouchful of Golconda diamonds the size of acorns. He wasn’t greedy like the ship’s captain, who took with him cargoes of porcelain and cut glass, hunting dogs, horses and cases of rum. The Captain brought back gold-handled flyswatters, brocades fit for duchesses, spices that smelled up all of London. What manner of bejeweled insect earned its dispatch from a gold-handled swatter? Gabriel’s tales of the wealth of India, its utterly useless wealth, employed to no end, ignorant of investment, leading to no greater social good, seemed calculated to confront, to subvert, even a reluctant Puritan’s finer sensibilities. To admire a thing in and of itself, to honor an activity merely for being, these were alien and uncomfortable concepts.

Gabriel got his kicks from haggling, not from hoarding. He wanted Hannah to overcome her Puritan failing of frugality and spend. And Hannah did, at first to oblige her husband; later, because she loved fine things. She decorated the house in Stepney; she made and sold garments from the exotic cloths; portable curios, like jeweled smoking pipes and flyswatters, she sent to Susannah, Robert and Thomas with trustworthy emigrants.

The maritime trade museum in William Maverick’s old house just outside Salem holds many of those objects under glass. Even Mr. Satterfield fails to understand: Hannah’s hands are on everything.

For what could Gabriel Legge do in London? He was as much a stranger to the city as she. He saw himself a nectar-gathering bee, bounding from flower to flower, returning to his Queen only when dusted with gold. His name for her was Queenie. He was to her the Jack of Spades, for his one eye, his mysterious and slightly mischievous ways.

And so, the first and second years, 1692 and ’93, while Gabriel traveled the Orient, barely surviving storms off the Cape, pirates in Madagascar, an uprising by the bedraggled and degraded dwellers of St. Helena, where an earlier governor had notched the ears of malcontents and threatened to do the same to sailors, Hannah polished her correspondence, observed the world that passed outside her cottage, tended her garden, content, too, with the harmonious arrangement of houses and gardens all around her and with the tidiness of the meadows and the shallow placidity of the little ponds just beyond—and fell, briefly, in love.

So content, in fact, that she did not suffer the despondency that is as much the prelude to as the aftermath of a wayward passion.

11

THE NEWS
of Gabriel Legge’s death arrived loudly and irreverently with a toss of gravel on her sleeping-room window. “Widow Legge, a message.” A large, obviously seafaring young man, inebriated but sociable, startled her at dawn as she was poking the grate to light her morning fire. His bulky, uneven body blocked the door frame. He had obviously slept aboard his ship, and the fumes of close companionship and nighttime rum had not yet lifted.

“Widow Legge?”

She blocked the word. The name was not uncommon. Up close she could see he was far younger than his deformities—congenital, vocational and accidental—had made him. Probably her own age, younger than Gabriel, but toothless, ill-fed, with the tops of his ears practically serrated from so many penal notchings.

“I am the wife of Gabriel Legge,” she answered.

“Then double’s the loss, I warrant.”

He dangled a familiar purse in front of him and dropped its heavy, metallic contents in her hand. For the first time she actually believed the unthinkable might have occurred. It was Gabriel’s.

“A good chap, brave and decent to his crew. Died defending King and ship’s company agin the Portugee. Most chaps what dies at sea leave nought but brats and a crone behind. A less honorable man would not have gold to dispense, my lady. Many’s the last request that goes unhonored, if you follow my thinking.”

She did, sufficiently, to endow his fidelity, and to safeguard her husband’s good name. “Did you see my Gabriel—at the end?”

“Nae. We, ah, engaged the Portugee ourselves off Zeloan. The captain at pain of a slow dishonorable death divulged the names of East Indiamen and English ships he’d boarded and scuttled and what survived of their crews. None, I fear. He has a cuttlefish for his confessor now.”

Like that, at age twenty-three, she was a widow. Her third “epistle” to the Salem press was on the comforts of widowhood, the acceptance of God’s design, the smaller pleasures of seasonal blooms, on attuning oneself to the cycles of nature, the assurance that one’s husband had served the King bravely, and that his contributions and honor had been loyally engraved in the collective memory.

The letter lacks the bite of the other two. At the very moment of dramatic grief, of total loss, Hannah’s spirit failed her. It is a letter no different from any of its time, eloquent and predictable. She had moved on.

AS HER EPISTLES
to Salem indicate, she’d never led an entirely solitary existence during the months of Gabriel’s absence at sea. I have no doubt of her chastity in the conventional sense; her years in England may have corresponded to the era of Restoration comedy, but Stepney was far outside the drawing rooms of fops and dandies. She confined herself to the bleak society of her fellow Stepney brides, the doctors, the emigrants and repatriates who sought her out for nostalgia’s sake. But now, as befitted her new role of widow, she did withdraw completely.

When temptation struck, it would approach by stealth, consistent with her helpful and compassionate nature. In November 1693, during a week of rains that rendered the road outside her cottage a treacherous sea of mud, the axle of a speeding trap broke, spilling the driver and his wife, as well as a boy of seven, into the flooded gully that served as a sewer and lined the roadside. Man and wife survived the accident, she with a broken collarbone, and he with nothing worse than scrapes and bruises. But the boy was thrown onto the stone bridge that spanned the gully and linked Hannah’s cottage with the road.

Hannah had been out the door at the sound of the axle’s cracking and was already dashing to the road when the child was thrown sharply against the stone bridge. From the sound of the skull’s cracking she knew the boy was quite possibly doomed; it was the sound she most dreaded in the world. By the time she reached him, the boy was sitting in the water, attempting to stand, not yet aware of the gravity of his wounds, and the father was shouting against the hiss of rain, “Eh, lad, you took a crack, dintja?” when Hannah gathered the boy in her arms and cried, “Never you mind your trap. Fetch the Doctor for your boy!”

The mother was moaning. The boy turned to his father, smiled and tried to lift his hand, and suddenly stiffened, eyes rolled back, tongue gagging in his throat.

THE BLOOD
was everywhere, smeared over the dark dining table and cloth she’d embroidered, and deep up her arms as though she had been playing in the cavity of a fresh-stuck pig; when the mother, father and the Doctor arrived half an hour later, wet, mud-plastered from the slick road they’d been forced to walk and the spattering from traps and carriages that had doused them, and the mother, her arm immobilized against her bodice by a torn man’s shirt, the boy, whom they’d left in apparent good health with nought but a bruise and a caution, was laid out like a corpse with a blood-drenched witch spooning great gobs of gelatinous blood from a hole she’d bored above the boy’s right eye.

“Hag from hell!” the father cried. “You’ve taken my boy.”

“Quick, my leeches,” the Doctor commanded. The father had been entrusted with the medicinal bottle of squirming black worms, short, thick and thirsty, tapered at the sucking end for tight body crevices just like this one.

“Yes, the leeches,” said Hannah. In her experience treating skull wounds, she’d found more patients were lost to the logic of tightly binding the wounds, attempting to repair the shattered bone and hold it in place by bandaging, than by removing the shards and keeping it open, at least till the bleeding stopped.

The father pushed Hannah aside, threatening to kill her, to expose her as a ghoul and witch.

The Doctor was expert in leech arrangement. Each found a pool of dead blood and began draining it. They elongated and broadened themselves, each tiny black filigree becoming finger-wide and long as the rusty-red pools receded. Then the leeches began their migration to fresh sources of blood, the bright red blood from the tiny vessels prone to easy puncture.

“Pull them off now,” Hannah insisted. The father raised his fist at her approach to the boy, and the Doctor hesitated. His tested black beauties had not yet begun to show their ingenuity.

“I have treated these injuries,” said Hannah. “You must trust me.”

“Madam, I am a physician and bleeder trained by the Royal College.”

“And I am a survivor of Indian massacres,” said Hannah. “The boy has bled enough. Now we must close him up. Sir, be good enough to remove your leeches.”

She refused permission to move the boy, and so he lay on her dining table, the handcrafted cherry table that Gabriel Legge had brought on the
Swallow;
she knew the herbs to boil with the bandages and the importance of changing the dressings and permitting the wound to drain. And all the while, she lectured the Doctor and the parents on the practice of medicine in the Bay Colony, how frontier warfare placed a premium on cranial nurses, how timing was all, how infection wiped out the most delicate surgery, how unpredictable paralyses could result.

None of this seemed logical to the Doctor. He had only his own reputation and that of his domesticated leeches to worry about. As the flesh around the boy’s wound turned red and septic, he applied the leeches to the swelling, bringing it down considerably. Then the boy grew pale. If only nature had invented a blood-injecting animal as effective as the leech, something puffed up with blood that deflated itself through a sharp mouthlike organ.

The leeches did their work, Dr. Aubrey (for that was his name) explained several days later when the boy awoke from his coma. His vision was bad; his left arm and leg were numb; his speech was slurred. All in all, the Doctor attested, the results were better than he had expected. Without the prompt intervention of a trained physician with a thorough knowledge of the bleeding portals, however, the boy would have been lost. The housewife was to be congratulated—and forgiven—for her quick, if unconventional, thinking. What she did was instinctual, issuing from a good heart and not, as originally charged, an occult affinity.

It did not end there. Her identity had been discovered. The Doctor sought her out on other cases of head injury. She was not just a sailor’s widow; she was in some way a woman blessed with healing powers. People began coming to her for poultices, for bone setting, for the laying on of hands. Yes, it was true: she could regenerate skin after certain burns and other scarring. She knew woodland secrets. Some said she possessed uncanny powers, the sort associated with conjurers and devils (those who heal by suspension of God’s law can also inflict injury at long distance through the agency of the Prince of Darkness), and wasn’t it passing strange that she hailed from Salem, the very town where the prevalence of witches had called special courts into session and brought down God’s severest judgment on the most recalcitrant? She needed Dr. Aubrey’s defense and public-spirited protection, and got it.

In Salem, it had taken twenty years before her special qualities had come out, or at least before she began to trust the voices inside her. In England, it had taken only a year. And by the spring of 1694, the voice had found a shape.

The man’s name was Hubert—we don’t know his last name. Hannah was twenty-four, widowed for a year. He was her age, but in appearance much older, as befit his scholarly bent. His first visit to her Stepney cottage was due to injury—a compound fracture of his left arm—that had grown septic and threatened the need for amputation. He had been bled repeatedly but the reduction in swelling offered no permanent relief. Finally Dr. Aubrey had recommended the Widow Legge and her poultices.

Hubert was a man altogether different from any she’d known. Whereas Gabriel Legge was physically blessed—tall, straight and immensely strong (with the rakish eye patch that added a touch of abandonment and tragedy to all his adventures)—Hubert was bespectacled in the Dutch manner that had become fashionable with the accession of William and Mary. His corn-silk-blond hair was thinning, his ears were long and fleshy, his teeth yellowed from constant pipe smoking. He was educated in Mr. Newton’s New Sciences of Mathematics and Physics and held a position as a researcher with the Royal Society. He had traveled to the Continent and met his colleagues in France and Florence, and spoke of them not as rivals in politics, trade or military force, but as fellow discoverers of sacred knowledge.

In fact, Hubert’s ignorance in matters of the real world rivaled no one’s that Hannah had ever met. She sprang from alert, educated port-city people. Curiosity, within limits (which she frequently tested), was a virtue. Until Gabriel Legge, and then Hubert, Hannah’s investment in the word “discovery” had been limited to people far below her in education, and high above her in what might be called craft, wile and survival. The discoverers she had known proceeded not by experiment, like Hubert, but certain knowledge and unbending ritual, like the forest Indians, or the ministers of God. Their knowledge of the natural world, or the spiritual world, seemed to her immense but finite, learnable. Hubert’s knowledge, and his means of gaining even more learning, were of a different order. She knew many more things than he did. But what was knowable, in Hannah’s sense, was also discountable. He was interested in learning only those things that his own experiments also created. He could not teach his methods, or his results, to her.

He devised instead a system whereby her knowledge of herbs and barks and certain surgical practices followed a logical pattern. They were not isolated facts. What had seemed a set of arbitrary facts, that bandages should be clean, water should be boiled, bleeding should be cauterized and not prolonged by leeches, that certain natural aids had medicinal qualities, and that these practices often induced favorable results, pointed to a larger synthesis of knowledge.

And what could that be? Hubert believed in a medical heresy so bizarre that even to speak it would imperil his standing as a scientist. Nor was he a doctor. He studied Life Processes, and his observations suggested to him the possibility that illness and infection and perhaps even disease itself were not related to spells and self-generated evils, but to invisible and invasive forces from nature.

Hubert was not disturbed by her widowhood. He saw her only as a young woman of vigorous mind and spirit in need of more stimulating surroundings and a gentler community of intelligent women. He meant Cambridge, where she could find lodging and employment as a governess. She suspected that he also meant marriage, after a decent interval, but to his credit or his shame, it was never mentioned.

Gabriel Legge had left her sufficient money to indulge her own independence, at least for several years, and the control over it was entirely hers. Eventually, of course, she would have to marry again or find suitable employment, or perhaps even return to Massachusetts, but none of those decisions seemed pressing. She recognized, as Hubert spoke of the Continent and the unfettered life of the mind that he led, so different from the fancies that drove Gabriel Legge’s fabulous journeys, that the thought of travel excited her. She was tired of waiting at home, of not bestirring herself in the rich new world opening out at every hand. Even pouches of diamonds did not seem sufficient compensation for idleness.