ANGEL AND APOSTLE
ANGEL and APOSTLE
DEBORAH NOYES
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Unbridled Books
Denver, Colorado
Copyright © 2005 Deborah Noyes
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Noyes, Deborah.
Angel and apostle / Deborah Noyes.
p. cm.
Summary: Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne from Nathanial Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” tries to make sense of her life and her self while a young girl in 1649 Boston.
ISBN 1-932961-10-0 (alk. paper)
[1. Self-perception—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Puritans—Massachusetts—Fiction. 4. Massachusetts—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775—Fiction.] I. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804–1864. Scarlet letter. II. Title.
PZ7.N96157Ang2005
[Fic]—dc 22
2005015903
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Book design by SH • CV
First Printing
For Elizabeth Jones
The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end.
—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The Scarlet Letter
ANGEL AND APOSTLE
With Mother slumped in the stocks, he settles before her, circling his knees with long arms. He lays palms together as if he would pray, but instead the words come tumbling again like petals from a failing rose: “As a young man in London—I beg your hearing once more—I oft lurked in playhouses, a frustrated scribbler. That instinct has lately returned, and to speed my nights I’m writing your story, our story, from which I am removed for your sake.
“How will I tell it? Shall I grant you a nobler lover? Shall I let you have, for posterity, your sainted minister? And why not, too, a twisted demon of a husband—an old cripple, perhaps? Few in more tolerant times than ours will fault you then.
“I can do this much if it’s all you’ll allow, or at least act the roles in turn, for I will try anything, be anything but this merely”—he finds his feet again, swiveling in a fool’s bow—“outcast from your heart.”
When she will not suffer a glance for his antics, his voice rises like floodwater. “Will you not take passion over loathing? Would your pride not affix better to that?” He paces, and his long shadow plagues her. “I confess the quill falters in my hand. But history, at least, should revenge you. Tell me,” he commands, “cannot life become art—to save itself?”
Now she lifts her head with effort, and she is lovely, this muddied muse, my mother. “Spare me more words,” she says. “They spray from you like water shaken from a dog. Leave me. Please.”
For a moment more he stands on the damp grass, gathering resolution, and then he lopes away. “Pray,” he calls back, over and over in memory, into the silence of a vanished morning. “Remember me . . . who looks out from your child’s eyes.”
SIMON
When I tell you that I honor my father, you will think me false. “The lies of an infant witch—” Simon once teased, “none but the prince of Hell has time for.”
Believe what I say, I shouted in jest, seething with disappointment. Whatever I say, or see me curdle your butter. It’s all sport to me.
Simon only laughed, as well he might. If it were true that I knew dark arts, I would have saved him while I could. I would have restored his sight and turned time back at the cellar door. Instead, at the inquest, I became invisible. When Nehemiah’s eyes looked for me there on the public floor, they found only my grief, puddled like his brother’s blood—a deeper color than ever Mother wore embroidered at her breast.
But before death there was a garden. There were children taunting, for I served as well as any Quaker the amusement of Boston’s godly youth.
It was the Lord’s Day, and we were idle—I with the sting of stones at my back, they shrieking like brats possessed. Because I knew that no pack of holy pygmies would brave the wood without master or mother, I ran and ran, willing myself be an otter and the shade be water. How cool it was and dark, my wilderness. How sweetly it repelled them. With their brat-threats dying in my ears I crashed through a thicket and found in a clearing, as stark as any miracle, a gabled house with a skinny lad in its kitchen plot.
How do I fashion him in your thoughts?
Let us say this boy was still, as still as marble, and riveting for it. What’s more, he was as stately in his solitude as the townsfolk I daily spied on (blasphemers and nose-pickers all) were shrunken in theirs. I would come again and find him on a little three-legged stool, milking his cow with deft hands, and again, when he would be whittling by the wall in the sun. But on this day he was sitting, just sitting on a house chair in the green-specked mud of the garden, with his strange, pale eyes shifting in their sockets. His hands were beautiful birds chained to his lap.
He must have heard me, but I stood and caught my breath, watching him. When it came my voice was still ragged from the chase. “Why have they planted you there in the shade like a mushroom?”
He looked not before him but straight up, as if my words came from beyond.
“Here,” I called. “Past the fence. By the beech tree.”
“I won’t find you there.”
“Why not?”
The boy I would come to know as Simon turned to my voice that Sabbath day, and I considered how much deeper his was than I might have imagined, a man’s voice, though he looked to be no more than a scrawny boy. Were I old enough to know better, I would have blushed. Instead I crept closer and scooped a handful of dry leaves from the ground. Leaning over the fence, I showered his boots with them. He did not look down.
“Have you no sight?”
“Who is it wants to know?” he demanded. “A girl pursued hither like a sow?”
“I do.” I caught my breath again. “Pearl.”
“And who is your father?”
“I have a mother.” I murmured her name, courting the barely perceptible nod, the gossip’s grin. It didn’t come. Then he was deaf, I mused, as well as dark. “And you,” I pronounced, arms crossed, “are a stranger here.”
“I’m new to this plot but not these shores. We come south from Cape Ann. My father’s at sea. My brother will be here yet.”
“And your mother?”
He tilted his head. The palms of his hands kneaded his knees. His every movement was slow and measured, nimble as a fox crossing a streambed. “Your voice travels,” he said. “First here.” One hand made a sweeping arc. “Now over there. Are you