[My fan fic about Pearl Prynne, a fey character from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter.]
1650 – 1662
Rain furled in gray auroras through the afternoon sky when Pearl, in her eighth year, first arrived at Derring-on-the-Wolds. Mist ran like young colts across toiled fields, and sheep huddled against the wet wind on the green, cropped hills.
The young girl peered at this mossy landscape through the leather blinds of a swaying coach, wide-eyed – for this was all hers.
On the long ocean crossing, she had scrutinized the property maps that came with the bequest-packet handed to her personally by Governor Bellingham of the righteous Colony of the Massachusetts.
She only now appreciated what she had received in the governor’s mansion at the reading of old Roger Prynne’s will … or, rather, the last will and testament of old Roger Chillingworth, as he had disguised himself for a season, to burrow into the intimacy of his wife’s minister and lover and plot as Satan’s emissary against the adulterous reverend’s soul.
Child Pearl compared her memory of the map to the rainy shadow-realm veering past. Among distant wooded sea-slopes, the downpour’s deepening haze moiled to fog that flowed along stony shelves and pooled in dells and meadows as if materializing this terrain directly from her mind.
She chirped with glee to recognize a cartographer’s squiggle as the village brook. Its gray willows flared out of the low pall. And there, deep in a coomb where a rutted road’s crooked mile ended, she spied the estate’s town, a hamlet of turf roofs, soggy gardens and a brindle cow sheltering under an oak.
Her mother, Hester, seemed less pleased at the bounty trundling by. For her daughter’s sake, she had fled the hypocrisy of the Puritan colony in the New World with an avid hope of removing Pearl from the petty and provincial gossip that had tainted the child’s first years.
Might Chillingworth’s wealth offer not only sanctuary from the past but elevation to a new and more nourishing life? With that high-minded aim, Hester returned to the country of her youth, far from the village austerity of her lowly and pious origins, and came to a haughty place: Derring Manor, a bluestone castle that crowned the countryside with crenelled towers and turrets atop a bluff of red gritrock and yew terraces.
Beyond a lofty gate of foliate iron and a great lawn feathered with mist, the household staff received them in the vault of a porte-cochère attended by graven, rampant lions.
Owen Wilton, all of twelve yet tall as a man, stood with the household steward and the head gamekeeper. He was first to greet them. Long hair bedraggled, breeches splattered with mud from his long ride out of his estate, he offered his hand as Hester descended from the coach.
He had come to Derring Manor thinking to appeal to his new neighbors’ Christian charity: As Puritans, they might have sway with Parliament and could move the local magistrate to issue the ratables writ that his father, Viscount Amberly, needed to retain title of his ancestral land. But before the lad could begin his urgent entreaty, he laid eyes on Okwari.
Pearl’s Indian escort exited the coach directly behind Hester. Attired in bearskin mantle, black cloth skullwrap, spangled buckskins and moccasins, the painted aboriginal loomed immensely in the coach door.
With one stride, he shouldered between Hester and Owen and forcefully butted the boy to his haunches. This was the closest contact Owen would ever have with the Indian, and it stamped him with a violent recognition of loyalty as an animal state that, in his parlous years to come as a highwayman, he would strive to emulate. For days afterward, he smelled the stupefying scent of bear grease and incense grass that would not wash off.
Hester quickly helped the lad to his feet, apologizing copiously. She had wanted nothing to do with the aborigine but could not refuse his service. He had appeared at Chillingworth’s deathbed and had mercifully and skillfully tended her dying husband in his last days.
With his fateful, final breaths, the husband she had passionately betrayed insisted she accept Okwari as Pearl’s protector. The brave’s name meant ‘Bear,’ for he belonged to the Bear Clan of the Kaniengehaga, the ‘People of the Flint,’ known to the English as the Mohawk.
Roger Prynne had lived among them in a physician’s capacity, studying their medicinal secrets. It was his long sojourn in the deep woods with the Mohawk away from his young wife that had tragically tested her fidelity.
Okwari came as tribal recompense for the shameful cuckoldry the old physician had suffered during his stay among the Mohawk. The Englishman’s formidable healing art had won such prodigious respect that the tribe honored his death wish for a bodyguard to protect his namesake child in the dangerous world of men.
Pearl had fancied the formidable tribesman at once, embracing his language – their secret language, which she quickly acquired during their ocean crossing. His way with the spirits fascinated her. He had earned an accomplished reputation as an archpriest of the god Aireskoi, ‘Master of War,’ and Okwari was not his name. No one but the priests of his clan knew his real name.
He believed what the elders of Pearl’s Puritan kin swore about her, “In giving her existence, a great law had been broken, and she lived as a plaything of the angels, an elf-child, a demon offspring.”
He revered her as a supernatural creature and observed with acute attention and ineffable understanding all that she did. She was for him a pure vision, a being of spirit.
Hester felt relief when he established his abode in the woodlands far from the manor. Around a small fire pit, he erected a conical construction of sapling poles covered in animal hides.
Initially, she forbade Pearl going there, but from the first the child successfully argued that the Indian’s companionship had been ordained by Hester’s husband, whose name Pearl bore and whose wealth sustained their sumptuous and peaceful lives.
The imp child knew her way through her mother’s sorrowful heart, and Hester relented. However, her maternal anxiety eased only after she learned of the shaman’s vow that bound Okwari with spiritual thews compelling as any Biblical oath.
To implacable Aireskoi, the warrior had sworn never to touch Pearl, for this child existed as a worldly form of a higher estate. Okwari breathed solely to safeguard her existence with his very life. If that covenant required bodily contact with her, his allegiance ended, for such a one who had touched a creature of spirit forfeited power in the physical world and continued in this life as an exaggeration of shadow. Of what use was such a husk as a man let alone a warrior?
To counter Okwari’s heathen influence, Hester sought out and retained for Pearl the spiritual counsel and tutelage of an eminent academic and doctor of theology, Dr. Randall Putney Cobb, Cambridge dean of Emmanuel College and revered author of the celebrated Puritan monograph, “Mortification Shall the Soul’s Vestment Be, Careworn Habiliment against Wickedness.”
Pearl had acted indifferent and even rude with the two previous divines Hester had beckoned for interviews to Derring Manor. But the elf-child delighted in the dwarf figure of Dr. Cobb and immediately accepted him as her earnest friend and soul’s companion.
For his part, the austere dean entertained severe doubts that a rigorous education could profit any female child much less an illicit offspring of lust.
Yet, he arrived starry-eyed, attracted by Hester’s generous inducements, resources sufficiently grand to mortar up all his spiritual ambitions for an edifice of Biblical study and theological writing that would embower generations in a scholarly house of God.
He stayed on, however, because the child captured his affection. She was no ordinary mother’s daughter. When she rushed to him with a gleeful cry at their first meeting and her mirthful eyes looked into his wary brown orbs, something mystical poured into him.
The soul in her embraced him. He felt that, like a glow of hearth fire penetrating dreamily to his bones.
In his journal, he would record: ‘All the complexity of creation had dragged its many parts into the sacred space behind that child’s puckish face and found resolution there, a natural puzzling out where every piece of the Almighty’s stupendous mystery knew its berth.’
And he, as well, had proper station in her eyes. Straightaway, she identified him not as a perversity of nature, some ridiculous homunculus or errant design of diabolic display but an intimate and one who, like herself, had experienced the truth of Isaiah 45:7 – I make peace, and create evil.
At age eight, already she could articulate that canonical dialectic, “The Maker devised you small and unnatural, Dr. Cobb – even so, you keep covenant with Him. How so but that you are a holy man. The Maker made me of sin, you see, and yet I am not unholy. Surely then, you are the teacher mercy intends for me.”
With wonderment, the dwarf philosopher received the prodigy’s embrace and gawked up at the mother’s knowing smile. He sent for his library and moved into the manor that day.
Much of his instruction took place outdoors, for young Pearl’s expansive nature possessed a native grace and whimsical flow of spirit not amenable to rules.
Though gruff of countenance and austere with his colleagues, the puritanical dean reveled in the pedagogical challenges posed by the perversely intelligent and capricious elf committed to his charge.
From the first, Dr. Cobb fashioned a dramatic methodology to suit his rambunctious student, who would not sit still for Greek and Latin unless he wore a tunic and escorted her through a grove of satyrs and hamadryads to the ivy-covered remnants of Roman ruins at the far end of her estate.
Sparking joy and comprehension in this ingenious child’s wild, bright and deeply black eyes demolished all chagrin of his unbridled foolishness. At last, the bantam scholar knew a childlike happiness denied by his creaturely deformity during his own formal and sanctimonious upbringing among Calvinist elders.
His barking laugh soon became a common feature at Derring-on-the-Wolds, riotously marking each day’s didactic progress.
Happiness suffused Dr. Cobb so thoroughly he objected not at all to including in Pearl’s daily tutorials the orphans of war whom the Merciful placed in his care. Nor did he resist inclusion of Royalist children entrusted to him by the sympathy of his mistress.
Pity jarred the heart of Hester when the ancient sycamore at the neighboring estate of Ravenshead served as a gallows tree. Baron Greasley, his brother and two manservants fed crows from those boughs, and their corpses tolled in the wind a full week as admonition for malignants and rebels raising arms against Parliament.
The forfeiture of Ravenshead would have followed swiftly and the whole household turned out to fend for themselves in the countryside had not a doddering great-uncle of the baron reeled from his sickbed to post upon the main gateway his oath of allegiance to the Commonwealth.
Hester, moved by compassion for her neighbors, paid to Parliament the formidable taxes levied against Ravenshead and bolstered the Greasleys’ argument of allegiance to the Commonwealth by extending the venerable Dr. Cobb’s pedagogy to the deceased baron’s daughter and sole heir, Acacia.
A curly blonde and haughty child a year older than Pearl, Acacia scorned her neighbors for their impious origins and, to her mother’s boisterous vexation, would not take lessons from a Puritan or tolerate the hypocritical company of Pearl, a Puritan by-blow.
Even Dr. Cobb’s robust applications of the birch switch instilled no Christian tolerance in the proud heiress. She had set herself against the world and would have persisted indifferent to consequence had Ysabeau Bourbonnaise not come to Derring-on-the Wolds.
Imagine the twinkle in a jewel set free of its glass cage, or chinaware turned into music, fragile and free, syncopating laughter and movement in a stately rush. Such was effervescent ten-year-old Ysabeau.
Daughter of the Protestant comte d’Obernai, she had lived as a refugee all her young life, her family scattered among nobles of France sympathetic to those aristocratic Huguenots who had lost ancestral properties in Alsace-Lorraine during the Thirty Years War.
“Bag and baggage,” she had sprightly introduced herself, rhyming with ‘bog’ and ‘garage,’ repeating what the coach driver had said of her.
Abashedly, she had smiled at Hester in the manor’s front hall, a beam of sunset in pleated silk, a pink-haired doll among tapestries and low-silled windows. She had curtsied with chin high.
Alarmed by the French king’s policy that forcibly married daughters of his Calvinist subjects to his most brutal dragoons, Huguenot friends of Dr. Cobb had requested asylum for the comte’s youngest daughter.
Hester received her as her own child forsook years before in dark of the strait way. But the youngster, highborn and proud, could not accept charity. This was an issue of honor for a daughter of la noblesse.
Though she spoke no English but what she aped, she assigned herself as lady’s maid to young Pearl. She tended to Pearl’s daily routines with graceful esprit and continental sophistication.
Before long, Pearl spoke fluent French, and the two quickly let their mutual heart-flow of playful spontaneity and tenderness bear them along into an endlessly deepening and imperturbable friendship.
With whispered confidences and soft giggles, they plotted everything together, including the salvation of their fractious neighbor Acacia Greasley.
Ysabeau’s blue blood charmed Acacia. Strawberry bright hair coiffed in angelic plaits and coiled as ringlets atop a head held with viceregal and purposive deportment, the comte’s daughter embodied nobility and seized Acacia’s interest before the foreign girl spoke a word about her worthy ancestry.
And when she did recount her bloodline issuing from the inception of the Carolingian dynasty, all of the vain young baroness’ equivocal concerns about Puritan influence and calumnious exposure to baseborn Pearl evaporated.
Thereafter, Acacia arrived daily at Derring Manor with kindly gifts for her hostess from the winery, cheese cellar and orchards of Ravenshead. And so, Dr. Cobb found his instructive skills taxed to the limit devising curricula for three very different and exacting girls.
The real difficulties for the gumptious dwarf began a year later with his fourth and most dangerous student. Owen Wilton, barely an adolescent, hid in the stables at Derring when Cromwell’s army of saints came looking for him.
Hester had honored young Owen’s desperate request by writing to the Council of State and securing for Viscount Amberly a ratables writ to retain title of his estate. Yet, within the year, the viscount joined Charles II in Scotland.
He died standing in his saddle at Worcester leading a cavalry charge against Cromwell. Parliament sequestered his estate and issued a warrant of arrest for Owen. The local magistrate determined that the rebellious lad should sweat out his family’s contempt of authority as an indentured servant under the savage sun of an indigo plantation on Dog Island in the West Indies.
Taciturn men in black coats with impenetrable scowls marched through Derring-on-the-Wolds oppugning the identity of every young man. When they came to the manor stables and found Owen shoveling manure, Hester herself came forth from the great house and shamelessly identified him as a ragged and wayfaring yeoman’s son whose family the pox had carried off three years earlier. She stared down the challenging stares with serene defiance, an expression well-learned during the public contumely she had suffered across the sea at the surly hands of similar brutes in black who had stood her upon a scaffold with her infant as a spectacle of sin. Owen fell in love with her that day.
Extravagant feelings thronged his adolescent heart and despoiled every ambition except making Hester Prynne his wife. With insatiable desire, he contrived opportunities to approach her, waiting outside her bedchamber in the morning to offer daily reports on the fettle of the horses.
When she disclaimed all interest in the estate’s animals, he appeared in the manor chapel morning and evening for prayer and praise.
Dr. Cobb, fully aware of the lad’s hopeless infatuation, delighted in pressing the lovesick boy’s piety by having Owen read lengthy passages of scripture and then tediously questioning him, keeping him in chapel until Hester had completed her spiritual observances and departed undisturbed.
Thwarted in his traditional approach to love, the desperate suitor resorted to extortion. He confronted the calamitously beautiful woman with a yellow rose in his hand at the most secluded opportunity, behind the chapel under lindens that coined sunlight on the manse’s walkway.
With a despondent air, he threatened to turn himself in to the local magistrate and betray her complicity in his evasion of the law unless she embraced him as her lover.
She took the rose and, with a languid, unblinking stare, pricked her forefinger, then pressed the bead of blood to his lips.
Neither he nor Hester ever learned if that tragic smear of betrayal across his mouth proved sufficient restraint for young Owen, because soon thereafter his mother’s brother, Bartholomew Warren, Earl of Exton, paid to Parliament all his family’s penalties and taxes and summoned Owen home to Amberly.
Hester’s disquieting comeliness aroused anxiety in most of the men of her circle, including the Puritan ministers who attended the theological convocations hosted at Derring Manor by Dr. Cobb.
Alarmed by the amorous stirrings that plunged their spiritual ruminations into disarray whenever Hester moved among them, they regarded her with oblique, disapproving glances, cognizant of her sinful story.
Relentlessly, they challenged her authority. The laxity of strict Puritan observance among the household staff and the frivolities tolerated in the hamlet demonstrated Hester’s incompetence in the eyes of the clergy.
Several times during these years of Pearl’s childhood, the sainted visitors to Derring Manor petitioned for the removal of Hester as legal guardian and trustee of her daughter’s estate on grounds of her impiety.
But Pearl’s mother had a formidable ally in Dr. Randall Putney Cobb. He knew precisely the most latitudinarian magistrates and clerical guardians of the faith to invite to the district governor-general’s judiciary chambers for review of Hester’s propriety.
In webs of pipe smoke from tobacco liberally distributed as novelty gifts from Pearl’s plantations in the Chesapeake, the gnomish minister entangled with theological magniloquence every disparagement challenging his mistress.
Though well-defended publicly, Hester had no need of protection in her private life. Her heart for all men remained an unwritten map. Stained with sin, wrinkled with shame, and torn with lifelong sorrow, she looked past her own fulfillment and enjoyment in this life to that of her child’s.
For Pearl, she lived. And for Pearl, she cultivated the expectation of a whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness, a prospect that would shape her child’s destiny to the very limits of the world.
With puberty’s onset, and Pearl a refugee of childhood, her mother’s precepts of sacred love found bold and dangerous assertion from an unexpected quarter. The villagers of Derring adored Hester for her lax enforcement of the puritanical laws imposed by Cromwell after the Commonwealth gave way in 1653 to the far stricter regime of the Protectorate.
In Derring-on-the-Wolds, neither manor household nor denizens of the hamlet suffered the Protectorate’s demands to remain indoors at solemn prayer on Sundays, fast weekly, or avoid festivities on holidays. Savoring of life’s pleasures, the inhabitants of Derring knew enchanting peace and happiness, conducting their lives as if in a fabled fairy tale.
Throughout the growing season, farmers came tramping up the dawn singing to their fields, merrily serenading the green earth through the day and unfurling a wake of twilight broad behind them. Winter robed herself as a bride, and the tenants busied themselves at their crafts, their larders replenished by ale, baked puddings and quinces from the manor.
Farmers worked the estate’s extensive acreage, trapping hares and hunting deer while owls cried in the ice cathedrals of the forest. At Christmas, bonfires hove monumental splendor against the brimming night, and Pearl with bright anthracite eyes danced in the shuddering glare with the village children.
Ysabeau, nostalgic for the niceties of her genteel childhood in France, preferred the hearth fire at Ravenshead beneath hunting trophies of elk and boar heads, where Lady Greasley and Acacia entertained her with traditional English wassailing songs and proper servants dishing up beef with oysters, eggnog in crystal goblets and almond cakes on silver plates.
Come spring, the French lady’s maid plucked thistle burrs from Pearl’s long dark hair and heard about her escapades with the Green Man among the deep woods.
The hamlet’s cheerful rustics had introduced the twelve-year-old to their pagan worship. Through the woodside’s mossy avenues, they had traipsed with wildflowers in their hair to an ancient oak overgrown by ivy that had uncannily involuted to a masculine shape of laughing visage.
Pearl swore Ysabeau to silence about her Sunday visits with the Green Man after chapel. In exchange for her friend’s confidence, Pearl shared all she learned in the zigzag chambers of the forest.
She told how the wind took its leisure in the Green Man’s house of squeaking hinges. There, at midsummer, the sun performed mystic rites with incandescent shadows and sooted boulders, and the people danced to chanted songs older than the Bible’s psalms.
When Pearl divulged that the hamlet’s crones applied drops of her virginal menstrual blood to their root-milk elixirs to cure cowpox, Ysabeau entreated to know about love potions.
Nicolas duc du Creusot, Ysabeau’s fiancé, visited Derring Manor in his brocade vest and riding leathers every other Easter to affirm their families’ alliance. The young noblewoman desired more than anything to fix his adoration inviolably.
Her scattered family’s survival depended on the wealth and prestige her Catholic marriage to him would ensure, and the dispossessed girl feared losing the heart of the handsome duc whom she loved for his broad shoulders and the wind’s flash in his eyes.
The crones, eager to oblige Pearl’s lady’s maid, nevertheless would not venture onto the wild ground above the sea-slopes where grew the golden lady blossoms necessary for love-philters. Cutthroat brigands and manslayers, lawless marauders of the king’s broken armies, ravened that high country.
So many a wayfarer had disappeared among those dragonish boulders, even the Protectorate’s soldiers took the long way around the boundary land, muddying their boots in stream beds and laboring across corrugated fields rather than risk ambush on the high road above the brambly gorges.
Within three days of the crones refusing Pearl, the first of the manslayers appeared upon the hillcrests, hanging naked upside-down from the arthritic bough of an old rowan tree. The gutted corpse dangled maroon lobes of viscera, a feast of marvels for the ravens.
Strewn upon the blood-blackened ground, buttons, ribbons, bodice laces, traveler’s flasks, kerchiefs, ruffs and linen caps marked out trails across the shambling heights to graves of the hanged man’s victims.
Eight more eviscerated bodies swung from mongrel trees in the days to come on that slantwise country, each with clews of garters, buckles, pins and periwigs that disclosed ditch graves crammed with corpses of the waylaid.
As word spread of the vigilante killings, the district’s governor-general sent arquebusiers from the elite Regiment of Horse to ferret out the barbaric executioners. Men in buff leather coats, bucket-topped riding boots and lobster-tailed pot helmets occupied the estate for a fortnight.
While these armored commandos beat about the coppices and thickets of the high meadows and posted sentinels upon the forlorn ridges, all in Derring-on-the-Wolds kept to their best behavior. Everyone attended daily prayers and no one stepped outdoors on Sunday.
Following orders from the arquebusiers, the villagers lined up for field sweeps and headlong ascents of the hills, crushing bracken and briers. These assiduous searches turned up several bandits but no secret militia.
The unauthorized and barbaric executions continued all the same. Naked malefactors lay decapitated on the rock shelves, scalps stuffed down their severed gullets. The rawboned heads sat as trophies by caves and caprocks that hid the bodies of their victims.
Hester knew who was killing the brigands but said nothing to the arquebusiers. Relatives of the killers’ victims converged at Derring-on-the-Wolds from across the countryside to recover the remains of their loved ones, and their wretched solace assured Hester’s silence.
To the consternation of Pearl, who wanted her land purged of killers, Hester demanded that the Mohawk warrior return to the American wilderness unless he ceased all savagery.
Over the years, the demon offspring and Okwari communed frequently in the green shadows of the summer forest and by winter in the warrior’s animal-hide kanonhsa. Always, they met on a bridge between the common and spirit worlds, and he spoke to her from the acute animal perceptions of this existence as though she were transparent to the life beyond.
He usually greeted her, “Kontihshehstonnis—torats otsìtsya ohshehs … ratorats oyàta—tkahthos.” Honey-bees hunt the flower … as I seek thee.
He gave her gifts: rabbit-fur moccasins, abalone shell jewelry, and eerily life-like dolls with articulated bract-limbs and placid faces of lacquered apple-flesh.
With reverent solemnity, he often inquired of her, “Karònya—hsotha kenh wenhniserate kahwatsire—etshenryes?” What spirits dost thou find this day in the grandfather-sky?
And then, she would tell him her dreams, fantasies, and stories. He listened attentively to this news from the far world. Her reveries were his day’s provenance. And her personal desires, no matter how trivial, arrived as axial tethers winching him step-by-step beyond human.
When she informed him that the killings of the cutthroats had to stop, his angular, predatory features, starved taut, were by a sudden brightening of his farded, pugilistic eyes fused to a kind of clairvoyance. “Onekwenhsa—hyatons thetenre!” The blood-writing ended yesterday! There were no more brigands on her estate to slay.
Over a twig-fire, they burned cedar chips and passed through the resinous fumes a fingerbone from one of the slain thugs to point the bothersome soldiers away from this land.
Two days later, the governor-general reluctantly withdrew the Protectorate’s elite soldiers for more urgent service suppressing revolt in the wilds of Ireland, and the villagers celebrated the recovery of the estate’s uplands with a fiddle stomp across the rugged hills henceforth dubbed Heaven’s Shoulders for having shrugged off evil.
Cloud and mist often lay like the sky’s trousseau on those summits. Under ragged spruce, golden lady blossoms bloomed in springtime, foraged by the crones for their love philters, which inspired sweethearts to climb steep paths in summer seeking privacy among the moss-padded boulders.
This was Okwari’s gift to Pearl’s tribe. He had stalked and slain murderous men to bring love to these people, because the plaything of the angels desired Heaven’s Shoulders for her people.
Looking down on the crooked brook from under the rowan where he had hung the first cutthroat, the priest of implacable Aireskoi sniffed the lace handkerchief daubed with the crones’ love-philter that Pearl had brought for his inspection.
“Iontshi’nionhkerokewahtha,” he dismissed. ‘Handkerchief,’ he had said, signifying that the lacy cloth contained no magic.
Pearl did not dispute him, though Ysabeau had sent her beau a silk scarf dowsed in the elixir and his billets doux arrived more frequently and wooed her far more amorously. She decided to determine for herself the efficacy of the love-philter.
With the general invitation to neighboring estates for Derring-on-the-Wolds’ midsummer festival, Pearl included a personal note to Owen Wilton, each corner dipped in love-philter.
Owen and his burly Uncle Bart, Earl of Exton, arrived the morning of St. John’s Day with their household entourage and an ox-drawn cart carrying a caged bear. The villagers gawked at the massive beast. Hester fervidly confronted the rowdy earl, prohibiting him from baiting the bruin with his mastiffs for the festival’s amusement. While they argued, Owen took Pearl onto the manor’s champaign to show off his falcon.
The peregrine hung high in the blue heavens like a prayer, then stooped, a deadfall of feathered lightning, and snagged a rabbit from its haphazard run.
Pearl gasped soft as a sigh. Later, sitting in the grass before the bear cage, they held hands under those close-set bestial eyes, those drops of night gliding attention through some far expanse.
Ysabeau distracted Hester with her glee at the men in stilts dressed as a dragon while Pearl slipped away with Owen.
Soon afterward, Dr. Cobb retreated from the mirthful explosions of gunpowder, the rope walkers, fiddlers and hobby horse dancers. He weaseled through a hedgerow gap just big enough for a dwarf, taking a shortcut to the chapel for some pious seclusion. And he emerged under the skirts of a girl in the amorous throes of kissing and bussing, smooching and slavering.
Disoriented by ruffled petticoats, the minister profaned himself repeatedly before all breath evacuated his lungs when he recognized the lovers as Pearl and Owen.
“Ye lewd imp!” Owen shouted and clipped the small man sharply across the jaw with his boot.
By the time the clergyman regained his senses, the couple had fled.
Compromised by the unconventional manner of his discovery, Pearl’s tutor and spiritual counselor did not report her impropriety to Hester. And when, two days later, he did sit with Pearl on a stone bench in the yew alley where they met to read the Epistles of Cicero, he avoided touching his bruised chin and said nothing of what he had seen of her and the young viscount – other than to observe that Owen had spent most of the festival eve dancing about the bonfire with Acacia Greasley.
Pearl abandoned her faith in love-philters that midsummer’s night. But for several years thereafter, she cherished the hope that Owen Wilton might one day love her.
Love had become the theme of her life early on when, yet a child in the wilderness cottage of the New World, she had studied in her horn-book the letter A, that grand letter her mother wore upon her bosom.
In those juvenile years, she ascertained firsthand from Hester’s pain and her paramour’s dark fate that love is a doubtful tenderness, which may become bitter scorn if not met with sturdy pride disciplined into self-respect.
Her silly experiment with the crones’ love-philter notwithstanding, she applied to her heart’s desires her mother’s hard-won respect of sacred love. She gladly welcomed Owen during his frequent visits to Derring, listened adoringly to his lute serenades and ribald sonnets, yet would not surrender to his glib seductions.
In her sixteenth year, she even swam nude with him across a cat’s tail pond of folklore willows under an indigo dusk, her first romantic interlude, and her first time with a naked man.
For that swim, she had trimmed her pubic hair in the fashion Ysabeau pronounced haute couture at the Parisian court.
Owen’s heart wrenched in his chest at the sight of her. Moonlight wobbling on the water, they embraced, and he would not release her when she pulled away, the game over, his infinite yes astounding even him – until Okwari stepped through the willow curtains.
After that, their romance became coy. He knew she awaited his proposal – as did Acacia and two other eligible peeresses in London. He visited the capital frequently with Uncle Bart to help manage the earl’s import company, which provided Arabian beans for the coffee houses.
Owen’s apology remained the same for all his young women, a dire secret he confided with gallant reluctance: Dutch piracy off Yemen had sundered Uncle Bart’s trade argosy and, to pay the onerous taxes imposed by the Protectorate upon the estates of peers and so avoid debtor’s prison, he and his uncle busied themselves as highwaymen.
With intelligence gleaned from Uncle Bart’s London coffee house, they identified Puritan traders transferring ducats, gelders and êcu from dockside custom houses for conversion to English currency at the secure premises of goldsmiths near the traders’ countryside estates.
As long as the young cavalier engaged in such perilous adventures, he dared not assume the staid responsibilities of a family. Yet, as his sonnets so sonorously attested, he lived not as an angelic being but a man whose season of youth craved his heart’s cultivation.
Acacia gladly gave body and soul to nurture the intrepid heart of her highwayman. She loved him more and more for his long absences, believing that his whole time away from her he spent preying on her family’s enemies.
He was her hero and her lover, and she resented his occasional visits to Derring manor. Though Ysabeau faithfully reported to her friend that Pearl offered only chaste affection to Owen, Acacia hated her ill-born neighbor for filching her truelove’s time and attention.
Pearl, born outcast of the reputable world, an imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, who had lived her first eight years with no friends and no right among christened children, could not abide Acacia’s enmity.
She did all in her beguiling power to redeem herself with the baroness, first as a child welcoming her to Derring manor and the estimable tutelage of droll Dr. Cobb, then as a stripling visiting Ravenshead with gifts of books and fashionable garments from the Continent, and afterward as a young woman ready with a smile and a happy embrace at every local feast and holiday that commingled their households.
When all this failed to win her neighbor’s affection, Pearl accepted Acacia’s malice as the nakedness of her soul – and loved her for it.
Acacia rebuffed Ysabeau’s earnest solicitations of affection for Pearl. Astounded, the French countess failed to understand how anyone could resist the emphatic charisma of this exquisite creature. From the first, as a mere child, Ysabeau had adored Pearl’s rich and profuse beauty, a loveliness that shone with cryptic and vivid tints in her lustrous complexion, in her eyes possessing intensity both of depth and lambency, and hair that darkened from girlhood’s glossy brown into tumbling tresses nearly akin to black.
There was fire in her and throughout her, and Ysabeau responded to it with a combustive reflex, a feverish wonder, as if the sponges of blood that cored her bones were soaking up the incubus heat directly from this child of disreputable love.
Just inhaling the woodsy, feral scent of her filled Ysabeau with hapless internal commotion. Much as she enjoyed visiting with Acacia and communing as two sisters of the noblesse, she far more treasured her time with Pearl.
Was it Pearl’s unpremeditated imagination, her full play with caprice? That shameless, glittering laugh? Or the bouquet of her that seemed to hook eternity the same way that the festoons of sunset captured time in place? These questions rang empty, for with Pearl the answer was always ‘yes.’
The fathoming onset of adolescence launched Ysabeau and Pearl together on a spacious mystery voyage into each other. They knew true intimacy. A kind of music flowed between them in silence. And when they gave tongue to their discoveries, they recognized themselves in each other.
They appreciated keenly that this voluptuous divinity disclosed by their curious explorations would appear to everyone else as unnamable negligence, and they restrained themselves to behaving in the presence of all others as a lady and her lady’s maid.
Only Okwari knew. He witnessed night breathing on them in groves of silver birch and alder. His glittering finch song plunging on the breeze warned when interlopers approached as the girls frolicked naked on daffodil hillsides.
He recognized their right to each other in the sheltering coves of the forest. Very calm the sea spread upon mirror sand those autumn days when they raked for clams. The Mohawk brave baked the harvest in kelp while the young women rocked in each other’s arms making a cradle of dunes their sacred place.
Winter found them lingering in bed, reading Nicolas’ love letters and Owen’s sonnets, confiding mutual expectations of their stealthy pleasures finding even greater fulfillment gloving their husband’s desires.
In Pearl’s seventeenth year, Oliver Cromwell died. The villagers of Derring celebrated with raucous fanfare. As they had in their grandparents’ day, devotees of the Green Man began burning their Sabbath fires openly under the tolerant reign of the Scottish monarch, James, friend of witches.
Hester could not conceive of any more certain portent that her stay at Derring-on-the-Wolds had properly ended. Her daughter had attained to the flush and bloom of early womanhood, her wild, rich nature softened and subdued by nine genteel years at Derring Manor, the privilege of wealth and due care making her capable of a woman’s gentle happiness.
What choices of love and marriage might straddle Pearl between heart and reason, Hester’s debauched history disbarred her from counseling. She contented herself to trust in her daughter’s stability and dignity of character. Spring 1659, she departed confidently for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to her seashore cottage where had been her sin, her sorrow, and yet to be her penitence.
Alone in the world for the first time without her mother, Pearl discovered something indecipherable possessing her, an ample solace that seemed to arrive from far beyond the world, a kind of God-given prestige into which she could lose her fear. Almost overnight, she had come into her own.
Everyone in her circle sensed this, and during the tumultuous months of anarchy that marked the collapse of the Protectorate, she brought grace and strength to the household.
With dismayed Dr. Cobb, who debated fleeing abroad to escape his enemies, she read an early draft of Paradise Lost sent by the cleric’s more gravely endangered friend, John Milton, secretary for foreign correspondence in Cromwell’s council of state. In that brawny verse, they found such “patience and heroic martyrdom” [ix] that they resolved to stand fast at Derring Manor against the countrywide mayhem that followed the dissolution of Parliament.
For several weeks, they even provided sanctuary to the beleaguered secretary himself in the summer of 1660 when a warrant went out for his arrest. In gratitude, the blind poet scrawled in Dr. Cobb’s journal, “Begin, then, brother, toward heaven’s ascent with this glorious understanding: dreams presume to achieve the impossible. Faith provides the will.”
The previous year, in the vehement summer of 1659 when chaos reigned while Parliament and the New Model Army fought for power, Owen Wilton staggered out of the night, opalescent with fear. Dragoons had apprehended Uncle Bart during a coach robbery, and the panicked nephew had barely escaped capture.
He hid in Derring Manor’s wine cellar a fortnight while the army of saints heckled the estate and terrorized Ravenshead. The local populace had identified Acacia as the fugitive’s lover, and court officers with halberds escorted Lady Greasley and her daughter by ox-cart to Newgate like common criminals on charges of succoring a brigand.
Pearl paid a princely sum to free her neighbors from that noxious prison, which only curdled Acacia’s resentment to a viscous gall. That all her tomorrows had been purchased by this impudent by-blow set a spider crawling in her heart whose bites burned sharper the more her mother celebrated Pearl’s magnanimity and kindliness.
Pearl’s wealth and Puritan affiliates worked even harder to win mercy for Bartholomew Warren but in vain. On the Earl of Exton’s grim pilgrimage to the gibbet at Tyburn, Owen watched from the throng disguised as a drayman. He carried two primed muskets under his cloak and a headful of fancy that rescue waited only on his courage to act.
The hour of the hero flowed away in a redoubtable procession of arquebusiers and pikemen squiring the earl to the scaffold with the formality of a royal procession. The youth stood transfixed, gormless as a creaking tree.
Bravely clad in a white blouse of soft ribbed silk, black breeches and riding boots, a nosegay of purple heartsease at his breast, Exton advanced to the ill-omened stage with what dignity his gyves would permit, tossing smiles and amiable sallies to the stricken crowd.
He stared at his nephew in passing as if not recognizing him and declared with jollity, “‘Twas no vice to relieve these baseborn usurpers of their swag. This day I’ll toast from heaven’s majestic court all the king’s true men!”
The hanging did not go well. The earl dangled in the noose, strangling laboriously until horrified spectators pulled strenuously on his legs and hurried his leave of this depraved world.
That day, that hour, the grisly moment carried off Owen’s soul, every spark of music and poetry in him, wafted away to the uttermost conceivable extenuation of time. Into the broad countryside, he strayed and drifted as smoke across plowlands girt with hedge-rows and along avenues of trees between petty towns and vigorous cities. He was not seen again at Amberly until the grim republic collapsed mutely into history and Parliament, stunned to their senses by the ferocity of religious zeal, restored the monarchy.
Transported by the renewal of the old order, Lady Greasley died peacefully in her sleep on Christmas Eve 1660, shortly after receiving from Parliament a letter of apology for the “arbitrary injustice in consort with counterfeit and fanatic polity that so heinously deprived of life and dignity Ralph Greasley, baron of Ravenshead.”
Pearl was not invited to the funeral or, the following spring, to the cathedral ceremony wherein a bishop and episcopate officers vested Acacia Greasley with title and rights as baroness of Ravenshead.
Thereafter, Pearl reckoned the peril posed by the restored Royalists to her household and person. With the support of Ysabeau’s fiancé, she quietly began preparations for an extended tour of the Continent. She cherished the hope of returning to Derring Manor once the new king demonstrated his good will toward Puritans as he had promised in his magnanimous Declaration of Breda, offering for all Puritans “liberty to tender conscience.”
Owen returned from his exile of mourning attired with flamboyance. He had stood with the Cavaliers who met Charles II’s ship at Dover in May 1660, almost a year after the hanging of Uncle Bart. Throughout the following year, he had served the king in London as an envoy to the Parliament.
He wore mustachios curled upward and carried with debonair elegance a long cloak of black velvet over a corded silk doublet and a ruff of white pleated lace. Every inch the king’s man, he promised his childhood friend he would safeguard her estate at Derring-on-the-Wolds during her stay in Europe. He urged her as heartily as a brother would to leave quickly. Avid enemies of the puritanical republic – of which Acacia Greasley was merely the closest at hand – would gloat to see ill worked hard upon her and her midget minister.
“Escape may be exodus and turn again to exile,” counseled the dwarf when, days from their planned passage to Calais, a vellum embossed invitation arrived at the manor summoning Pearl Prynne to the Royal Wedding Gala at Hampton Palace on May 21, 1662. “Yet, Sister Pearl, if we present ourselves to Charles and his Portuguese bride with hope of preserving your English holdings, our next residence may be Newgate.”
Dr. Cobb would not consider going on ahead to the Continent without her. In his prayerful estimation, Pearl had become his sublime twin. Her girlhood had carried off his discontent with his lesser stature, and the woman she had become, for whose soul and mind he had cared and labored these dozen years, endeared him as fully as if she were his own daughter. He would not leave her.
Ysabeau, as well, refused to travel on ahead. And, of course, Okwari could only stand beside her and nowhere else. Whatever she decided, they would not let her go solitary, no matter the danger.
Alone in the world these two years without her mother, Pearl finally discovered that the indecipherable something possessing her, that ample solace arriving as God-given prestige into which she could lose her fear was, in fact, the love of the ones she loved and feared to lose.