Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [23]
But no wedding came of the epistolary negotiation. If Hannah Easton or Hannah Fitch broke Solomon’s heart, he did indeed get over it. Records show he fathered fifteen children by three wives, but that his Candlers & Provisioners burned down in 1703 and he never rebuilt or restored his fortune. He died a debtor and an alcoholic in 1713. And if Hannah ever learned of Solomon’s interest, approved or despaired of Robert Fitch’s extraordinary intervention, no record of her feelings exists.
“Incestuous, obviously,” my cynical self, my well-trained feminist half, reading these notes, has told me. “The stepfather and stepbrother wanted her to themselves. They needed the money she brought in. She was an old maid of twenty, and we know she was a damned handsome woman. There must have been men beating down the door, and the old coot must have spread the rumors of her madness from Marblehead to Barnstable.”
I am aware of multiple contingencies. It is the universe we inhabit. She might have been a prisoner; they might have been her tender guardians. The fact is, she stayed in Salem with the Fitches through the famous witch trials, in which she played a small role as counselor of women who fled marriages and husbands they no longer understood. Some of her customers who had patronized her with colored silks suddenly came to her on the street begging shelter. We know the Fitches feared their stepdaughter would be next, that she would personally intervene in some witch’s trial, offering testimony that could only implicate her or her family, and that she could not depend upon her childhood woes as a reliable indulgence before a judge like John Hathorne or, worse, confess to having unnatural thoughts, impure impulses herself. They hid her wild embroidery; they barred entreaties; they monitored every visitor. Only the oldest friends, the Mannings, were allowed access.
Through the terrible winter of 1691, Hannah remained indoors, fed the news by her chair-bound brother, sung to and prayed over by her uncomprehending mother and father.
9
IN 1692 Hannah was twenty-one, still a maiden, and with slim expectations of being married—as we have seen. The barrenness of her future had to do with genealogy and poverty, and the hints of noncompliance, of contrary independence that her character had begun to reveal.
In the evenings she embroidered landscapes—frost stiffening blades of grass, pumpkins glowing like setting suns, butterflies dusting colors off their pastel wings against cassocks of black silk and breeches of black velvet. In fact, there was a wildness about Hannah. People sensed it. When she raced down Herbert Street, bolts of silk clutched against the dark wool of her bodice, they found themselves adding on her head an imaginary tiara of tightly furled red roses.
Hester Manning still had not married, which is not to say there had not been opportunities, entreaties and even the hint of a misalliance. Young men were now barred from the male camaraderie around the smithy’s anvil. The raw communion of souls, the opportunity to view men, stand near them, even talk with them on the basis of some familiarity and power—she was, after all, daughter of the forge, occasional squeezer of the bellows, stoker of coal, forager among the clinkers with the long tongs—had been taken from her all because of the sudden appearance of Gabriel Legge.
He claimed to be the son of the owner of the Swallow, three hundred and twenty tons. He had come from London, but hailed from Ireland, to scout the colonies for investment, for new forms of imports and exports to the New World to mark its growing stature, its great wealth and taste for finer things. But the old Friends of the Forge, meeting now at a public house rather than the blacksmith’s, guessed the scouting trip was for a wife, that his time limit was the three weeks it would take to load the Swallow with its cargo of hides and timber, and that his eyes had fallen on everyone’s darling, Hester Manning.
Or rather, his eye had fallen. Gabriel Legge, though tall and dashing, had an eye patch. In a