Galore - Michael Crummey [46]
Virtue’s intended came by hours later, begging to be let in. He was drunk and insistent, slapping at the door with his open palm, and Virtue stood a chair against the handle to keep him out. He sang half a love song and then hammered at the door awhile longer. Lizzie came in from the kitchen to ask if she was all right and Virtue shouted out to him that he’d woken the mistress. —The mistress is it? he said. —You sure it isn’t someone else I’m disturbing? Virtue begged Lizzie to go back to her bed and he demanded to know who she was speaking to. He cursed her for a lying whore and accused her of taking a stream of men to her bed while he sat demure in the kitchen and talked of marriage like a fool. —Who is it? he shouted. —Tell me the bastard’s name.
—You’re drunk, Martin Gallery, she said. —You be on your way.
He came to the house the next day, gray with a hangover and remorse. Fighting back tears as he explained it was only love of the woman that made him so heatable, that he had no doubt Virtue was alone last evening and her refusing to let him in proved only her worthy character. He would be a fool not to see she was a Christian woman and he prayed she might find it in her heart to have him still. He was standing near the fireplace, his head bowed in an attitude of abject contrition, and Virtue watched him a full minute, thinking of his hand at her back on the dance floor. It was the first time since she left her home in England she hadn’t felt lonely. —You will not drink in our house, she said.
—I will not, he said.
—You will not speak to me in the manner you spoke yester evening.
—I swear to God.
Virtue took a breath. She’d never mustered a tone of such authority in her life and having some say in the affair gave her the impression she’d consented to it all.
After Gallery left the house, Lizzie came into the kitchen. She hadn’t cut her hair since she’d heard Callum sing for the first time, when she was still a child, and it had grown almost to her thighs. She’d been proud of the extravagance, the weight of it a constant reminder of him. She set a chair in the middle of the kitchen and handed the housekeeper a pair of scissors. Virtue weeping as the lengths fell away from Lizzie’s head, the dark scrolls mounding about their feet. —Burn it, Lizzie ordered before she left the room.
Through January and February and March the foul weather made a prison of the house. Lizzie grew to despise everything in it, her minder not the least. John Tom White drank regularly in honor of the upcoming nuptials he seemed to feel single-handedly responsible for arranging. He was giddy with his little triumph. He came to Selina’s House direct from afternoons spent at Shambler’s tavern and he treated every meal as a kind of personal victory celebration. —A horse of a man Virtue have got herself there, he told them.
He dropped dead in the middle of a toast in March, striking his head against the heavy table as he fell. Virtue thought he’d knocked himself senseless and she knelt over the bulk of him, laughing at the ridiculous man and shouting his name until Lizzie forced her to stop. —He’s not asleep, Virtue, for the love of God.
She held the back of her hand to her mouth and laughed. —He’s not dead? she said. And she bit her hand to keep from laughing again.
Virtue was sent to Barnaby Shambler who had become undertaker to the Protestants on the shore. John Tom White had been drinking on a tab for months, Shambler told her, and he refused to add to the uncollectible debt by burying the man. Virtue went to find Jabez Trim and when they returned to Selina’s House they found Lizzie sitting in a chair beside the corpse. Keeping John Tom company out of remorse for wishing ill on him so long.
—We got no choice now, Jabez said, but to fetch Devine’s Widow from the Gut.
The widow was already gone to her bed when Jabez arrived at the house. Callum woke his mother and he dressed to accompany them over the Tolt.
—You oughten to come, Devine’s Widow said.
—And who’s going to see you back after