The Invisible Hour, page 19
“I can’t seem to stop eating,” Mia said apologetically. Just this morning the thought of food had made her ill and now her stomach was empty.
“You eat a great amount for one woman,” Elizabeth said thoughtfully.
“I’ve come a long way.”
“From where?” Louisa wondered.
“New York,” Elizabeth was quick to answer.
Mia gazed around as she devoured her breakfast, taking in the rough-hewn kitchen, the stove fed by wood, the pump beside the large black sink, the earthenware dishes for everyday use. Already the room was blazing hot, and it would be far worse later on, when the air turned muggy. While her mouth was full, Mia asked, “Is Nathaniel out walking or is he in the owl’s nest?”
The sisters exchanged a fleeting look, with Louisa going quite pale. Perhaps this woman was a faerie or a witch, although her hunger made her appear mortal enough. Mia took more toast for herself without even asking and then spooned on gobs of elderberry jam and wolfed the food down. She was certain she had never tasted anything as delicious as this breakfast, or sat at a more inviting table, with a jug of pink snapdragons set out, and the butter in a glass dish, already melting. This world was slower and smaller, but the details were brilliant, each a spot of shining color in a muted background. She felt heavier, but in a good way, as if her nerves had been calmed now that she was far away from Joel Davis. At last, she had the receipt of fern-seed.
“What do you know of the owl’s nest?” Louisa asked. “And how do you know our brother? Are you the woman he spoke about when he was so distressed?”
Elizabeth cut in. “Our mother is resting, and our brother is a hundred and thirty miles away, so once you’re done with breakfast, I will walk you home. Surely, you’re longing to get back.”
“Where is he exactly?” Mia hadn’t even stopped to think that Nathaniel might not be at home, writing.
“He’s in the western part of Massachusetts,” Louisa announced before Elizabeth could hush her.
“I intend to go after him.” Mia took what was left of the bread and butter that had been set out and rudely wrapped it in a napkin, which she then stowed in the pocket of her dress. She had never been more famished or more in need of all her strength. She turned to Louisa, who she already knew to be tenderhearted from Nathaniel’s descriptions, and whose eyes were filled with concern. “Please, tell me exactly where he is.” She was met by a renewed silence, and soon saw that Elizabeth was glaring at her sister, doing her best to ensure that Louisa would say nothing more. “Fine.” Mia nodded. “If anything happens to me on my travels to find him, I will blame you both.”
Louisa threw her sister a panicked look, fearing they might be the cause of some catastrophe. And as it was, their guest now took ill. Perhaps the heated conversation had affected her adversely, perhaps she had eaten too much, but Mia now felt sick to her stomach. She excused herself, stepped outside, and was ill near the bushes. The sisters watched her from the threshold.
“Ebe,” Louisa pleaded, for her first instinct was always to do good in the world. “What if Nathaniel would want to see her? What if he’s desperate to do so?”
Elizabeth’s face was grim. She didn’t like what she was looking at. A woman on the walkway being sick in their garden beside the twisted vines. “He’s been involved romantically in the past, and it has never led to anything that did him the least bit of good.”
“If you won’t talk to her, then I must,” Louisa said, knowing that would get a rise out of her sister.
“I’ll handle it.” Despite her own sense of impending disaster, Elizabeth went out to speak to Mia. “We discussed this and agreed. You will ruin him.”
“I swear if I ever thought I could or would, I would leave immediately. Let me have my chance. Shouldn’t I at least have that?”
Elizabeth was no longer convinced this was her battle to fight. She wished someone would give her her chance, for anything or anyone, for a single dream. “If you must know, our brother is in Blackwell. He’s gone to fish.”
Mia took his destination to be further proof of their interwoven fate. “Then he’s gone for blue trout,” she said with certainty. “I grew up in Blackwell. I know the rivers there.”
* * *
ELIZABETH ESCORTED MIA TO the Mannings’ stables. Because it was a stifling day, Elizabeth carried an umbrella to keep the sun off her pale, freckled complexion, while Mia didn’t seem to care if her skin burned or if her boots were caked with mud. Once they reached the stables, they learned that the fishermen’s carriage was not expected back until the start of the following week and there was no other carriage to be had. The clerk suggested that Mia take the new train line, which would go out west via Boston to Albany with a stop before in the Berkshire hills, in the town of Blackwell. This would mean changing trains three times and spending two days on the journey.
“Are you certain you’re feeling well enough for such travel?” Elizabeth asked.
“Of course. I’m perfectly fine.”
Elizabeth gave her companion a look. Was it possible that Mia had not figured out what was obvious to Elizabeth as soon as Mia began to wolf down her food? “Do you have no idea?” she asked Mia. “Are you that much of a fool? I assume Nathaniel is the father, but even if he is, if you think a fish can breathe that air, you are terribly mistaken. And what becomes of the child of a fish and a sparrow? Where does that child abide?”
Mia sank down on a wooden bench. Her head was pounding, for she immediately knew Elizabeth’s statement to be true. She had thought she was ill, or the weather had exhausted her, but that wasn’t it at all.
“Perhaps you’ll tell Nathaniel about the child,” Elizabeth said, “and then of course he’ll marry you. He wouldn’t think of not taking responsibility, no matter if it will change all that’s meant to be. Other men might walk away, they do so every day. Every baby on the hill had a father, but the mothers were the ones held accountable. My brother won’t feel that way, and it will change everything. There is one life he’s meant to have, and this is not it.” They sat side by side, so close that people passing by might have imagined they were sisters.
“My mother ran away in order to have me. She gave up everything and never had a life of her own. I’ve often wondered what she would have done if she could have lived as she pleased,” Mia said. “What would you do if you could make your own choices?”
“I’d run away from here,” Elizabeth was quick to say. “I’d go to sea and write a book and have a child that someone else raised so I could be free.”
Mia smiled. “In other words, you’d be a man.”
“I would. Or a woman in your time,” Elizabeth responded.
“There are no promises in my time. It’s not everything you think it is.”
“I don’t need everything,” Elizabeth said. “Only something.”
* * *
WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT the station, Elizabeth bought Mia a ticket, for she had no money of her own. One way, Mia noticed.
“We both know you won’t be back,” Elizabeth explained.
“Do we?”
Elizabeth gave Mia an onyx-and-silver hairpin, so she could put her long hair up and not stand out. “I don’t expect you to return it,” she said. She wanted to know about New York and the library; she wanted to imagine what it was like to walk down the street at night and feel that you had every right to do so. She wanted to leave home, even if it meant never seeing the people she loved again. She could have cried right then and there if she’d been another person, if she hadn’t been trained to hide her emotions and do the right thing no matter what.
Mia unclasped the pearl necklace she had inherited from Constance. “For you,” she told Elizabeth. “To remember me by.”
“What makes you think I wish to remember you?” Elizabeth asked, her voice wary, but the truth was, she was pleased with the gift. The pearls were delicate, with a faint blue tint. She wanted to wear them in the moonlight, as she walked through the grass, as she boarded a boat that would take her far out to sea. She would do none of those things; all the same, the pearls were meant for her. Mia leaned forward unexpectedly and clasped the strand around Elizabeth’s throat. She knew from her readings that Elizabeth would not attend Nathaniel’s wedding to Sophia, and she smiled to think that perhaps it was because Elizabeth preferred Mia to the wife her brother would later choose.
Elizabeth touched her hand to the pearls and blushed with vanity despite her vow never to have self-indulgent thoughts. When Mia walked along the platform, Elizabeth followed reluctantly, still unsure if she had made the right decision in telling Mia where Nathaniel was. “I’m not certain why I’m helping you,” she wondered aloud.
“Because we care about his writing,” Mia said.
“What do you know of his writing?” Elizabeth scowled.
“I know it saved me. Do I need to know more?”
“You need to know that it saved him as well.”
The train had arrived, and the time had come for Mia to leave. The two women were connected by their love for Nathaniel, and so Elizabeth decided to say more.
“You would never have been happy here. I think you know that. There are no witches anymore, to be sure, but women are judged as if there were. Everything you wear and say and eat is meted out by a rule book. As you plainly see, I am not the one in Blackwell fishing. I am not the one with novels published. You know that’s not the world you want.”
Women wrote under men’s names, or used only initials, hiding their gender, for all they did was considered less important. There were some female academies with high tuition costs for women students, but they were not accepted at colleges or universities, except for Oberlin, which had just begun to admit female students.
“The world will change,” Mia said.
Elizabeth shook her head. “Not in time for me or for your daughter if you stay.”
Mia looked at Elizabeth, and Elizabeth laughed to see her confusion.
“Girls run in our family. My brother is the one and only treasured boy.”
Mia felt the quickening inside her as they stood on the platform in the heat of the day and then she knew. She was not about to hide in the woods invisible and she understood why her mother had done whatever she had not to lose her.
You were mine and mine alone. You were the best thing that ever happened to me.
The train was boarding. Mia threw her arms around Nathaniel’s sister, and as she did Elizabeth felt a sob rise in her throat. Her life was set, and could not be altered, but oh, she wished that it might be. She wished she’d been born a boy, or that she could slip into another time, or that Nathaniel could have all he wanted and still be the writer he was meant to be.
“So now you know,” Elizabeth said, taking a step away and blinking back her tears. “A fish may live in the same world as a sparrow, but they cannot marry their lives together, and a hawk cannot marry at all.”
Mia understood that Elizabeth considered herself to be the hawk. “You’ll do more than most men in your lifetime,” Mia told her.
“And will it matter? Or will they only remember what he did?”
Mia could not bring herself to tell Elizabeth that she was right.
“I don’t need to see into the future to know that is what will happen,” Elizabeth said. “He is my brother and a genius. But in another place and time, I might have been one, too.”
Elizabeth surprised herself then. She did not back away when Mia embraced her. “I’ll name her after you,” Mia said. “To make certain that she’s brave.”
A conductor guided Mia along, and once on board she was grateful to sink into her seat. She gazed out the window to see that Elizabeth was still on the platform. She waved and Elizabeth waved back, then Mia closed her eyes and leaned her head against the seat as they began to slowly move away from the station. She had come so far and now here she was, headed for the one place in the world she had vowed never to return to. She had to change trains, and she was exhausted, and she felt as if she was going back on her word by heading for Western Massachusetts. All the same, by the end of her journey, when the hills of Berkshire County were in sight, there was nowhere she would rather be.
* * *
NATHANIEL SAT AT A table in the rear of the tavern while his uncle went upstairs to nap. It was a sweltering day and there were flies buzzing around spilled pools of ale on the tabletops. Bees hit against the windows, drowsy in the last glints of sunlight. Nathaniel and Robert had been at the river since daybreak and had hiked ten miles or more through damp areas where the swamp cabbage grew and the ferns were as tall as a man. They’d stopped at a fisherman’s shanty where several local men were gathered, sharing the stories of that day’s catch. One fellow swore he’d caught a blue that was forty-five inches in length, not that anyone believed him. Another said he’d seen the ghost of a little girl at the nearby Eel River, and the men laughed out loud, in utter disbelief. Still another said he’d seen an eel step out of the slow-moving falls of the river and become a woman who’d gone to live in an old fisherman’s shanty, another story no one believed.
Berkshire County was filled with tall tales, and Nathaniel loved to hear them, true or not. This was a place where anything could happen, where bears roamed the hills, and children tended the sheep with collie dogs by their sides to protect them. Nathaniel had begun to fill a notebook with words and phrases. He wrote down the local tales, but he also remembered the words that Mia had told him about growing up in this wild place. Bewilderment, love, judgment, wild rosebushes, the deep heart of nature, the black flower, I wanted more for you than I wanted for myself.
Nathaniel and his uncle had shared a few drinks with the local men, rough whiskey in tin cups, and that was likely why Robert had been compelled to lie down when they returned to the inn, promptly falling into a deep sleep.
“You’ll forgive me,” Robert had said when he excused himself. “Fishing is hard work.”
“That it is,” Nathaniel agreed. It was also curative, as his uncle believed. It had centered Nathaniel’s thoughts and allowed words to come back to him, as if they were beads on a strand. The Berkshires reminded him how beautiful this world could be. He felt as if he had woken from a long sleep, as if he was a bear himself, one who’d thought his only purpose was to tell stories, when it now became clear that it was far more important for him to have the ability to love someone.
Nathaniel had mud on his boots and leaves in his hair, though he’d done his best to shake them out before coming into the inn. He’d left his pail by the back door, empty, even though they’d caught several blues, one of which was nearly fourteen inches, a monster that flushed a vivid plum color when plucked from the river. Any other fishermen would have dispatched the trout, smacking it against the rocks, bragging about the catch for months, but Nathaniel and his uncle Robert had set their trout free. That was the secret joy of their fishing trips. They never once kept anything they caught, they simply experienced the marvels all around them.
Nathaniel was himself exhausted; still, words continued to come to him on their own, as if called down by an angel. He took up his pen and pad again, and while sitting at a table in the barroom he made a list of the trees they had seen in the forest: sugar maple, red maple, black birch, yellow birch, hickory, red oak, beech, white ash, hemlock, pine. He was falling in love with words all over again, for each told a story in and of itself. He was starting from the very beginning, but he was starting all the same. He didn’t have a story, but he had the words to use should he ever have a story to tell. The word tree could be anything and everything. An apple tree in a shaft of sunlight. A conifer where crows were nesting. A sapling bent over the river, its roots turning a mossy green. A rosebush outside the inn, the crimson flowers tumbling down. This was how it began, with a world that was as real as a river, even though it was made of nothing more than words.
CHAPTER EIGHT WEST OF THE MOON
Mia arrived at the small train station in Blackwell, which would be torn down decades before she was born, for the train route had been stopped once the highway was built. It was a white-hot afternoon and before Mia began to walk toward the Jack Straw, she took a moment to sit on a wooden bench on the town green, across from the library. It looked as it had in her time, a brick and shingle building, with leaded glass windows and an oak door. Mia saw the town both as it was and as it would come to be. There was the grocery store, and the sheriff’s office, and the town founder’s house, which was said to have a garden in which only red plants grew, bittersweet, azalea, and a variety of red lilies that could be found nowhere else in the Commonwealth, along with climbing roses called Crimson Glory. Mia tried to imagine her daughter living in this world, and all she could see were the confines of the Community. You cannot walk barefoot down the street, or cut your hair short, or do as you please. You will do as others expect you to do. She crossed the green and stood in the doorway of the library. But you would always have this, the place where there were a thousand keys to a thousand doors.
One of the men working at the desk noticed Mia and approached her. “Can I help you, miss?” he asked, for he did not recognize her, and the library was private, a club for men to gather and to expand their minds with readings and discussions. The only public library in the Commonwealth was the Franklin Library, founded in 1790, begun with a donation of Benjamin Franklin’s books. The Boston Public Library would not be established until 1848. Most libraries were private, and it would be years until women’s reading societies were formed, to include women and girls.
“May I not borrow a book?” Mia asked.
“Is your husband a member?” the librarian asked.
“I have no husband,” Mia replied, and when the librarian shook his head, she was stunned. “Are you saying I therefore have no right to read these books?”
