Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [26]
“The lass would fair tie me down to England and English ways,” Gabriel Legge said. Her passion was more to leave that place, Salem, and the boys around the forge, and her father, than to settle in another place with him. Especially a place of harrowing discomfort, unfamiliar and uncongenial to her narrow sensibilities. She would go only halfway round the world with him, the tiresome, well-trod half, to England. He had not guessed the depths of her fancy, if not for him, then for some of the stories he told.
“My stories all have a grain, a fair grain, of truth to them, Mistress Fitch,” he confessed, “and none are spun from whole cloth—”
“You are known for your rampant embroidery, Gabriel Legge. I feared only that you had begun to believe them yourself. I may be a simple girl who has seen none of the earth and its truths, and what you say of the oceans and the mountains may well be true. But, Mr. Legge, I know the heart of womenkind, and none do willingly yield their lives.”
“Perhaps this you would believe, Hannah Easton,” he said, and with that he took from the watch pocket of his silken vest a small sachet of gemstones, including a ruby more perfect than any she had ever imagined.
“This is yours. This and a thousand more like it are waiting for us.”
She closed her fist upon it. A cool fire burned her hand. He wanted an Empress of his own, fit for the Emperor of Dreams.
In the negotiations with Robert Fitch he remained the sober businessman, the shipowner’s son. He did not expect a dowry; a healthy, strong, God-fearing woman was all a man could claim a right to, although furniture was always welcome, and the Swallow in the harbor was still loading freight. For a cherry-and-maple highboy and dining table of solid cherry, the dowry was set. By the time of the Swallow’s sailing, Hannah and Gabriel were married. It would be ten years before she saw Salem again.
WHY WOULD a self-possessed, intelligent, desirable woman like Hannah Easton suddenly marry a man she recognized as inappropriate and untrustworthy? Why would she accept Hester Manning’s castoff, or betrayer? Guilt, perhaps, a need to punish herself for the secret she was forced to carry? Unconscious imitation of her mother, a way of joining her by running off with a treacherous alien? Gabriel Legge with his tales of exotic adventure was as close to the Nipmuc lover as any man in Salem; she sought to neutralize her shame by emulating her mother’s behavior.
Venn, who listens and is about to get more interested in the tale as it moves away from New England, has his own interpretation. Gabriel was obviously on a wife-hunting mission, the way many Indian students in America go back to India for a week and get married to satisfy their parents, then return with a stranger who can cook, bear children, and, eventually, be loved. In other words, why not? She got married because it was her time to get married. Just like you, he says to me, what if you hadn’t read Auctions & Acquisitions one morning? What if the name Pearl hadn’t leaped off the page? You got started on this the same way Hannah did when she walked out along the beach one day and saw the boat and the men hauling the body ashore.
So one morning she was content with her passionate needlework, smugly contemptuous of Hester and her suitor; the next morning she walked to the river because it was her time to be in the path of death, to witness grief, to hear Gabriel’s Strange defense of luxury, and expose herself to the possibility of life.
We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It’s a question of time, not motive.
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