Hour of the Witch(6)
“Ah.”
“Does it still hurt?” Thomas asked. “Tell me it doesn’t.”
“Oh, I was completely unaware that I even had a bruise,” she said, and she took Thomas’s hand and squeezed it. Then she released her grip and retied the cloth strings of the coif.
* * *
In the night, Thomas climbed upon her and they made love, but as usual the sensations felt nothing like when she touched herself. She tried to fall asleep afterward when he was through and had started to slumber, and briefly she prayed for the miracle that somehow her womb would seize her husband’s seed and she would be carrying her first child before the first snow. But she remained agitated, and she knew it would be impossible to fall asleep unless she finished the job her husband had started.
Mary was not troubled by the reality that when her husband was passed out beside her in their bedstead—occasionally drunk, always exhausted, sometimes a little of both—her body was such that she could pull up the shift in which she would sleep and satisfy herself. Nor was she particularly alarmed that the sensations—the shuddering waves of pleasure, the way her lids would grow heavy and she, too, would nod off—never occurred when her husband would mount her, heaving, and they would couple. She didn’t even feel shame that what she was doing was somehow deviant, since her private little (and she would not use the word habit, because it wasn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t a habit) discovery was the most pleasurable thing that she did these days with her life.
And it certainly wasn’t why her husband had accused her of being a whore the other night. It wasn’t why he had hit her. He hadn’t any idea of what she knew now she could do. No one did, not a single human soul. No, her principal thought was her inability to decide whether this was a small gift from God because He had not given her a child, or a vice offered by the Devil that was going to keep her from conceiving. Ever.
On occasion, she wondered if this were a sign she was damned. The idea would occur to her on Saturdays when she would be boiling water so she could clean their clothes. It would cross her mind when she was tending the salad herbs in the garden or pouring hot wax or tallow into the pewter molds for the candles. It would come to her, alarming and unbidden, when she was mending a cloak or breeches or a shirt. Signs, after all, were everywhere; it was just a question of knowing how to read them.
And yet some nights long after sunset, even this fear was not sufficient to compel her to keep her hands between her nightcap and her pillow when she felt the urge: she would convince herself that she wasn’t destined for Hell because in all other ways she led a good life. An exemplary life. And though she understood that works alone could not buy one’s salvation, the fact that she wanted so desperately to behave well was a favorable indication.
Her hands between her legs, she thought of a boy back in England. He had gone to Cambridge and become an architect, and her father might have allowed her to marry him had her family not made the long voyage to Boston. Had the Devil put this fantasy into her head? She decided not, because the boy’s face had been downright angelic, and she couldn’t believe that even the Devil would dare to use such a pure face in his temptations.
As she finished, the bedstead creaked: the ropes underneath the mattress pulled the wooden joints against one another. She hoped Catherine was asleep downstairs, but if not, she would presume it was merely the master rolling over.
I am a raft of secrets, she thought, and she imagined herself on timbers from a shipwreck, the water around her endless in all directions.
The other night she had fantasized about her own son-in-law, Jonathan Cooke. When she had seen that fellow in her mind’s eye, when she had heard his voice and seen his eyes and his lips, she had tried to shun him, to send the image away, because the idea that it was he she was thinking about when she did this elicited from her pangs of self-loathing that were almost unbearable. But only almost. What did her God think of her when she thought of Jonathan? How disgusted would Peregrine, her daughter-in-law, be?
She recalled a moment when she’d held one of Jonathan and Peregrine’s daughters on her lap, and when he lifted the child back into his arms, their cheeks had brushed and their lips had neared. It had been accidental. It had to have been. As had the time when she had been wearing a skirt newly arrived from London, and after he offered a compliment that was nothing more than polite as they were starting down the street after church, his fingers had grazed her lower back. She had turned, a reflex, their eyes had met, and for a brief second she had felt a rush as if he were trying to tell her something. But then his gaze was elsewhere, and he was saying something to Thomas about a house he was building.
A line from one of Anne Bradstreet’s poems dangled just beyond her memory’s reach as she brought her fingers to the edge of her nightgown and dried them. It was a love poem her older neighbor had written to her husband, Simon, a man who for a time had been their governor, and she knew the inclusion of the verse in the book had embarrassed Anne. But the poet hadn’t even known that her brother was going to have a book published when he’d taken a stack of her poems with him to England. He left in 1650, and returned to the colony the following year with the bound volumes.
The rhyme, Mary thought, was about how much Anne missed Simon when he was away on business, as he was frequently. It saddened her to know that she would never miss Thomas if he ever had to travel. It grieved her that despite the fact he was right beside her in their bed, asleep atop the feathers that were such a luxury in this strange, needy world, he wasn’t even among the men whose images would fill her mind when she would reach between her legs and sate the mesmeric frenzy that some nights filled her soul.