Alma Katsu - The Taker

“I would think my failings should be no reflection on my sisters,” I said, hoarsely, but I knew the truth. The righteous townsfolk would make my sisters-and my parents-suffer for my misdeeds. I lifted my head. “So… will you not tell the captain of my condition?”

My father stopped pacing and turned to face me. “I’ll not give the old bastard the satisfaction of knowing that my daughter could not resist his son.” He shook his head. “You may think the worst of me, Lanore. I pray that I am doing the right thing by you. I only know that I must try to save you from complete ruin.”

I felt no gratitude. Selfish as I was, my first thought was not of my family and their hurt but of Jonathan. I would be forced to leave my home and I would never see Jonathan again. The thought was a blade pushed into my heart.

“Must I leave?” I asked, misery breaking my voice. “Why can’t I go to the midwife? Then I could stay. No one would know.”

My father’s cold stare wounded me more deeply than another blow. “ I would know, Lanore. I would know and your mother would know. Some families may condone it but… we cannot let you. It would be a monstrous sin, even worse than the one you’ve already committed.”

So I was not only a bad daughter and a helpless puppet for Jonathan’s desires, but I had it in my heart to be a godless murderer as well. I wanted to die at that moment, but shame alone was insufficient. “I see,” I said, wiping at the cold wetness on my cheeks, determined to cry no more in front of my father.

Oh, the shame and the terror I felt that night. Today, looking back, it seems ridiculous to be so ashamed, so terrified. But then, I was just another victim of propriety, shaking and crying in my parents’ house, crushed under the weight of my father’s demands. A helpless soul about to be exiled to the cruel world. It would take many years for me to forgive myself. At the time, I thought my life was over. My father knew me for a harlot and a monster, and he was sending me away from the only thing that mattered to me. I couldn’t imagine going on.

The worst of winter passed; the short, dark days lengthening and skies that had been perpetually overcast, the color of old flannel, beginning to lighten. I wondered if I, too, was changing incrementally with the baby inside me or if any changes to my body were all in my head. After all, I’d always been slender, and in my predicament had lost my appetite. My clothing did not bind me, as I’d expected it would, but perhaps that was only guilt fanning my imagination. In odd moments, too, I wondered if Jonathan thought about me, if he knew I was being sent away and was sorry for having abandoned me. Perhaps he assumed I’d done as promised, seen the midwife and gotten purged. Perhaps he was distracted by his impending wedding. I had no way of knowing: I was no longer allowed to go to Sunday services and so my only chance to see Jonathan was taken away from me.

The days passed in dreary sameness. My father kept me employed every minute, from when we woke in the semidarkness of a new day until I laid my head on my pillow at night. Sleep brought no respite, for I frequently dreamed of Sophia: rising from the frigid Allagash, standing like a plume of smoke in the graveyard, circling my house in the darkness as a restless ghost. Perhaps her ghost found some comfort in my suffering.

I knelt at my bedside before retiring in the evening and wondered if it would be blasphemous to ask God to extricate me from this predicament. If banishment was to be my punishment for my grievous sins, oughtn’t I accept my lot rather than petition God for clemency?

My sisters grew sad as winter waned and the day of my leaving grew closer. They spent as much time as they could with me, not speaking of my departure, but sitting with me, hugging me, pressing their foreheads against mine. They worked furiously with my mother to mend my wardrobe, not wanting to send me away looking so rustic, and even made me a new cloak of last year’s spring wool.

The inevitable would not be delayed forever, and one night, when the thaw had settled on the valley in earnest, my father told me that the arrangements had been made. I would leave the next Sunday on the provisioner’s wagon, escorted by the town tutor, Titus Abercrombie. From Presque Isle, we would ride in a coach to Camden, then travel by ship to Boston. The family’s one trunk was packed with my belongings and left by the door, a paper with the name of all my contacts-ship’s captain, mother superior of the convent-sewn into the lining of a petticoat along with all the coin my family could spare. My sisters spent that night huddled against me in our wide bed, unwilling to let go of me.

“I don’t understand why Father is sending you away.”

“He wouldn’t listen, no matter how we begged.”

“We shall miss you.”

“Will we see you again? Will you come to our weddings? Will you stand beside us at our babies’ baptisms?” Their questions brought tears to my eyes, too. I kissed them gently on their foreheads and held them tightly.

“Of course you’ll see me again. I’ll only be gone a short while. No more tears, eh? So much will happen while I’m away, you won’t notice my absence at all.” They cried out in denial, promising to think of me every day. I let them cry themselves to exhaustion before lying awake the rest of the night, trying to find peace in the last few hours before dawn.

When we arrived, the drivers were hitching the horses to the wagons, now empty, having delivered loads of dry goods-milled flour, bolts of fabric, fine needles, tea-to the Watfords’ store the day before. Three large wagons, and six brawny men made the last adjustments to the harnesses and doubletrees, and watched sheepishly as my family huddled around me. My sisters and mother were pressed tight, tears streaming down their faces. My father and Nevin stood to the side, gruff and emotionless.

One of the drivers coughed, reluctant to impose but anxious to depart on schedule.

“Time to be going,” Father said. “Into the carriage with you, girls.” He waited while my mother embraced me a last time, as Nevin helped the driver load my trunk into the empty wagon bed. My father turned to me.

“This is your opportunity to redeem yourself, Lanore. God has seen fit to give you another chance, so do not be frivolous with his beneficence. Your mother and I will pray that you safely deliver your child, but do not think about refusing the sisters’ assistance in placing the baby with another family. I am ordering you to not keep the child, and if you see fit not to heed my orders, you would do just as well to not return to St. Andrew. If you do not transform yourself into a proper God-fearing Christian, I wish never to hear from you again.”

Stunned, I went to the wagon, where Titus waited for me. With a chivalrous dignity, he helped me climb onto the bench next to him. “My dear, it is my pleasure to chaperone you as far as Camden,” he said in the stiffly formal, though friendly, tone I’d heard Jonathan mock. I didn’t know Titus well as I’d never taken a class with him and only had stories from Jonathan by which to judge him. He was an older gentleman, on the delicate side, with the constitution of a scholar: bandy arms and legs, a little potbelly that had grown over the years. He’d lost most of his hair, and what was left had turned gray, leaving his bald pate with a wispy fringe in the style of Benjamin Franklin. He was one of the few men in town to wear spectacles, a spindly pair of wire frames that made his pale gray eyes seem smaller and even more watery. Titus spent the summer months in Camden tutoring his cousin’s children in Latin in exchange for his keep, since all of his students in St. Andrew worked on their family farms until school began in the fall.