Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [24]
My eye! Oh, ’twas nothing, madam. A trifle.
Beware, my good fellow, or I’ll take my vengeance here and now!
Aye, there are savages abroad that make your heathen Nipmuc and Narragansett the very lambs of God!
Tortured? Punished? Heroic? No one knew for sure. He had a thousand stories of imprisonment by Turks; banishment to forests; brigands, highwaymen, pirates.
NO ONE in Salem, admittedly, was a match for Gabriel Legge. Many were stronger, of course, and as for the disposition to place strength in the service of pugnaciousness, the young men of Salem had few equals in the Bay Colony. But Gabriel Legge had a quality—exercised a charm, some said, cast a spell—over men and women alike. And there was always the absence behind the patch, evidence that if charm and persuasiveness failed him, he knew other, darker devices.
He painted great word pictures of a future Salem as great as London, of wealth and grandeur, noble parks and public buildings, and rows of opulent houses appointed with the finest decorations of the Old World and the New. And Gabriel Legge seemed to embody those qualities in his height and accent; he was truly fit to rule, some said, like the worthy inheritor of a bequest not yet given.
And the men wondered if Hester Manning would be fine enough for Gabriel Legge? Hard to imagine the smith’s daughter dressed as a lady, traveling from court to court, or even holding her own in Salem or Boston. She might have been too refined, too high and mighty, for the likes of local boys, but those very same boys began to see the awkwardness—the dullness—of Hester around Gabriel Legge. They noticed her trying all the harder to please, to be ladylike, however, and they felt a hint of Gabriel’s disapproval, even in his kindly smiles toward her. He is the disconcerting agent of Providence in this history.
HANNAH WENT for long lonely walks each morning that May to flee the contrary love she detected in her two mothers’ sharp-tongued injunctions. “Moderation!” Susannah Fitch cautioned, afraid not only of the mob psychosis of the street, but also of her daughter’s destiny that was beginning to shape itself. But Rebecca, whose blood quickened her, and whose memory for its very remoteness knew no abatement, counseled confrontation. “Raze it, raze it, even to the foundation!” whispered her mother’s ghost.
The ghost wore the outline of an Indian sewn on her sleeve. Indian lover.
On one such May morning, Hannah was skipping along a sheer, stony promontory near the new clapboard dwelling of Captain William Maverick, her footsteps as printless as an elf’s, when she heard a man’s throaty cry of grief. She loosened the knotted ribbons of her bonnet to see and hear better.
All around her was order, continuity, contentment. Winds scraped sibilant music off the moss. Hardy columbines pushed through the tiniest cracks in the rocks. Spring grass greened afresh between dried-out stalks of mullein. Dead, fallen-off branches ringed and enriched the roots of aged elms.
Who was crying out to her in so much anguish?
Winds lifted the bonnet, freeing her hair to curl around her face and surge around her shoulders in tense, electric waves.
She lunged for her bonnet, but it whirled out of reach and spiraled down to the shore and finally snagged to rest on a clump of weeds. The bonnet was lost. All the same, she inched as close as she dared to where the promontory sheared away. She crept through a thicket of violets. Sorrowful voices floated up to her.
Three fishermen were beaching a small boat, men who pushed their prows through the horizon. Now the horizon had swallowed one of them. She recognized first of all Captain Maverick, the closest inhabitant to the scene. The