Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

The invalids beginning to winter in the village kept her even busier; Ned had to hire an extra girl to pick up what Nora could no longer do. She bought a notebook, two good pencils, a little satchel in which to carry her supplies. She kept track of the invalids’ progress: The young man on Harriet’s porch, still at an early stage but sent here by his parents after both his sisters died, has a little fever, every night, which has been going on for months. A dry cough that comes and goes; sometimes a sore throat, sometimes pains in his chest.

There were men who were worse, whose fevers seemed to be burning them up; and men who looked better, and coughed less, but who felt so tired and melancholy that they’d forgotten what it was like to anticipate something with pleasure. Once in a while someone hemorrhaged bright blood, foaming and terrifying. Then one of the women would come running with ice chips to suck and a cloth packed with snow, which would lie heavily on the sick man’s chest: so cold.

Nora tried to explain her new work to Ned. “This is what I’m meant to do,” she said — although the swiftness with which it came about had taken her by surprise. “It’s what I learned while we were apart, it’s how I make use of myself.”

“As opposed to this, you mean?” He gestured ruefully at the room filled with mounted heads. “I won’t argue, if it’s what you want. But I wish …”

What did he wish? What she wished, perhaps: for the dead and vanished to return. Once, during a spring cleaning, she caught him staring out the window while holding a woman’s walking boot in his hand.

“What is that?” she asked. It looked as old as she felt; the black calf was so worn it was almost limp, and one of the buttons was missing.

“Isn’t it obvious?” He turned back to the window. “Erasmus left it with me,” he added, as if to keep her from asking more questions. “For safekeeping, the last time I saw him.”

By then she knew that, after their arctic trip, Erasmus Wells and a few other people had stayed for some months in the neighborhood of Ned’s first cabin. Then they’d headed north again, leaving Ned behind. “His wife’s?” she asked.

“His mother’s,” he said. He dropped the boot into her hand. “It got so damp over the winter, I thought I should set it outside to dry.”

Mold had grown on the tongue, beneath the laces. “I can sponge this off,” she said. “Does he want it back?”

“How would I know?” Ned said bitterly. “All I ever knew was that the mother’s name was Lavinia, and that she died when the boys were young. But I said I’d keep this for Erasmus, and so I have.”

“You’ve never heard from him?”

“Not from him, not from Copernicus. Not once in all these years.”

It was with them, she thought, as it had been for her with Francis and then with Colm Larkin. Never a word. Where had all of them gone? Only she and Ned had returned to each other from the past.

5

Elizabeth enters the inn, as she always does, by way of the kitchen door. Through the empty room, past the draped chairs and appliances, the cold stove, the dim cabinets full of glassware; up the stairs to Ned’s private apartment.

“Elizabeth,” Ned says, stepping back to let her in. Still he holds himself quite straight, although he’s shrunk several inches. Next to the stove in the front room is the armchair where he spends much of the winter months. She sits across from him, in what used to be Nora’s chair.

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

“Very well.” He’d say this, she knows, unless he were dying.

“Your hands?”

“Not too bad.” He holds up the twisted joints for her inspection. “I worked all yesterday on a vixen for Mr. Claremont. And still they didn’t hurt much last night.”

“That’s good,” she says. She doesn’t ask to see the stuffed fox; for the last few years, since Ned’s vision began to fail and his arthritis has worsened, his mounts have been painfully shabby. The skins gape at the seams, the eyes don’t always match. Michael praises them, thanks Ned for doing them, and then destroys them secretly, substituting specimens of his own.

As Ned continues to describe his projects, she nods, remembering the quiet celebrations they used to hold in this room on Nora’s birthday. A ginger cake with lemon icing; mittens and a book as gifts. Surely Ned remembers these as well — but still he says nothing about his sister, talking instead about his new curved knife. When he pauses, she asks the question that has brought her here: where might she seek a replacement for Mrs. Temple?

“I don’t know,” he says. “No one is ever going to be Nora.” Such a relief, the way he understands what she’s actually asking.

“No one seems to know anyone suitable,” she says. “And one of my boarders is failing, I’m going to need help soon.”

“Who is it?”

“Martin,” she says. “Martin Sawyer.”

“Oh, what a shame.” For a minute Ned stares past her. Then he says, “Why not look in New York again? You could have Clara do some preliminary interviewing for you, and send up the most promising, like she did with Mrs. MacDonald. That worked out fine.”

“It did,” Elizabeth says reluctantly. “But I hate to ask for her help unless I really need to. She gets so involved, and then she wears herself out.”

“She likes to feel useful,” Ned says. “When’s the last time you wrote her?”

“October, I suppose. Maybe September. She wrote me back right away.”

“Doesn’t she always?”

Ned and her mother, Elizabeth knows, have been corresponding for almost twenty years. Both of them over seventy now, but still Ned sits down at least once a week and describes for Clara everything interesting that’s happened at the inn, or at the cottage next door, or — when he’s privy to it — within Elizabeth’s boardinghouse. Clara responds, or so Ned claims, with reports of her daily life among what’s left of her family in New York. Elizabeth has never been sure what lies behind this long exchange of letters. Simple affection, loneliness, some romantic urge?

“If Martin—” she begins to say, but Ned swiftly interrupts her.

“I can’t believe things have gone so fast with him. We were fishing together in May.”

“I remember that,” Elizabeth says. Martin had been so proud of the new lures hung from his handsome vest. So delighted to present her with his pack-basket heavy with trout.

“I wish …” Ned says, before he falls silent. As he gazes out the window, Martin, in his room at Elizabeth’s house, gives up all pretense of sleep and squirms against his pillows until his head and shoulders are raised and his knees sloped sufficiently to support his writing board. Next to him are several pencils and a tablet of paper. Although this is strictly forbidden — one is not to read during the afternoon rest hours, not to chat, not to write, not even to turn the pages of a magazine — Martin has decided to write a letter.

Dear Mother, he begins.

He will write, he thinks, about the departure of Mrs. Temple, whom he liked despite her lack of humor and a tendency to chatter. Her hands, when she rubbed his back and chest with liniment, were both gentle and strong. She never fussed when he coughed blood. She could change his bed without getting him up, rolling the sheets and blankets into slim flattened tubes along one flank, then gently easing him over the ridge and onto the clean linen. Elizabeth, so scrupulous about every aspect of her house, will surely hire someone equally skilled, but it won’t matter to him.

Today, he writes.

Shouldn’t he be writing the truth? What is really happening to him, what it feels like. He felt such comfort, as a boy, unfolding his secrets to his mother. And such isolation when, after his father died and he became sick himself, she stopped listening and insisted on his health.