The Witch of Blackbird Pond - Elizabeth George Speare [81]
One day in mid-April she walked alone down South Road. She could not go far, for the river was still very high from the melting snows. It had overflowed so that the fringe of poplar trees on its banks stood deep in water, and the cornfields were transformed into endless lakes. Blackbird Pond had been swallowed up, and Hannah's house, had it still been standing there, would have been flooded up to its thatched roof. Poor Hannah, how had she endured this ordeal year after year, watching while the water crept nearer and nearer, stowing her valuables higher in the rafters, moving away goodness only knew where to wait out the season in some deserted barn or warehouse, and creeping back when the water receded to scrub out her house and replant her soggy garden? Kit was thankful, as she had been so many times when the wind howled and the snow piled higher, that her friend was snug in a proper house. But she knew a pang of homesickness, nonetheless. The little cottage had been very dear to her.
She perched on a sun-dried rock and sniffed the air. There was an earthy indefinable scent that stirred her senses. The new shoots of the willows were a sharp yellow-green. The bare twigs of the maples were tipped by swelling red buds. A low bush nearby had blossomed in tiny gray balls. She reached to touch one curiously. It was furry and soft as the kitten that Prudence had held in her arms that summer afternoon. All at once Kit was aware that this New England, which had shown her the miracle of autumn and the white wonder of snow, had a new secret in store. This time it was a subtle promise, a tantalizing hint of beauty still withheld, a beckoning to her spirit to follow she knew not where.
She had forgotten that summer would come again, that the green would spread over the frozen fields, that the earth would be turned up to the sun and the seed sown, and that the meadows would renew themselves. Was this what strengthened these New Englanders to endure the winter, the knowledge that summer's return would be all the richer for the waiting?
Yet the spring air held a sadness too, sharper than all the loneliness of winter. The promise was not for her. I am going away, she thought, and for the first time the reminder brought no delight, only a deeper longing. She did not want to leave this place, after all. Suppose she should never walk in the meadows again? Suppose she should never sit in the twilight with Mercy, or see Judith in the new house, or the girl Prudence would grow to be? Suppose she should never see Nat Eaton again?
Suddenly she was trembling. She snatched at the dream that had comforted her for so long. It was faded and thin, like a letter too often read. She tried to remember how it had felt to stand on the deck of the Dolphin and see before her the harbor of Barbados. The haunting joy eluded her; the dream shores were dim and unreal. Why had she closed her heart to the true meaning of the dream? How long had she really known that the piercing happiness of that moment had come not from the sight of the harbor at all, but from the certainty that the one she loved stood beside her?
If only I could go with Nat, she realized suddenly, it wouldn't matter where we went, to Barbados or just up and down this river. The Dolphin would be home enough.
"There is no escape if love is not there," Hannah had said. Had Hannah known when she herself had not even suspected? It was not escape that she had dreamed about, it was love. And love was Nat.
It must have been Nat from the beginning, she admitted now, and with that knowledge came a sureness that she had never known in all the last bewildering year. Memories of Nat came crowding back to her—agile and sure-footed, as she had first known him, leaning far out on a yardarm to grasp a billowing sail—throwing back his head in laughter, or shooting hot sparks of temper—sitting on a thatched roof in the sunshine—coming miraculously out of the fog that morning, bending tenderly to lift a frightened old woman into the rowboat—and as she had seen him last, standing erect