The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,18
cow. Bucephalus rocked to and fro in his stall, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. I had brought a bit of apple from the cellar to quiet him, and, as I drew near, I saw a man cowering in the straw.
I stood for a moment in silence as the man looked fearfully at me from beneath bundles of cloaks and shawls. He was a young man, his face ruddy from the cold. But the flesh under his eyes looked scorched, the fluid pooling in the bottom lids as with a fever. I thought of my brother’s face flushed with sickness, the skin below his eyes gray and unwholesome. The man held his hand up, in supplication or in warning. Margaret had come to stand behind me, and I could hear the sharp sound of her breath. His lips tried to form words but he could not at first speak, as though his tongue were swollen to the roof of his mouth. Finally he said with great difficulty, “I pray thee have pity and give me water and food or I shall die.” He groaned and shivered beneath the straw. We began to pull away and he reached out to us like a man drowning. “Please, I will not harm thee. I will take food and rest awhile and then I will leave.”
Margaret moved closer to the man and said accusingly, “You are a Quaker.” The man lowered his head, panting, but did not speak. “If my father finds you trespassing here, he will turn you over to the constable.”
The man struggled to stand, pulling himself up by the stacked boards in the stall, but sank back down onto his haunches. I tugged on my cousin’s cloak and I whispered, “Should we not bring him food? He looks very bad.” Margaret pulled me away some distance so that we could speak without being heard.
“Father says that Quakers are heretics and are to be shunned. And besides, this one may be poxed.”
“Oh,” I replied, not knowing what a heretic might be. I looked over at the man and pitied his misery. Margaret suddenly grabbed hold of my wrists and, leaning closer in to my ear, said, “We shall help him. It would be our secret. We must not tell Mother or Father, for then we will surely be punished, and harshly, too.” I smiled at her and nodded. I was more pleased by the prospect of sharing this dangerous secret with my cousin than of helping the stranger. “We shall have to be very cunning. Mother keeps a close watch over the larder.”
After the noon meal, Margaret told some fable about forgetting to put out grain for one of the animals and I was amazed at how easily the falsehood slipped from her mouth. We managed to take to the barn bread and meat and a cup of cider without being discovered but took care to stand well away from the wretched man. He was so starved that he swallowed his fill without his teeth so much as touching the food. He drank the cider and then fell back into the straw as though dead. We watched him sleeping there for a while, listening to the coarse sounds coming from his windpipe.
Margaret asked me, “Isn’t he handsome, though?” And I agreed, even though he looked to me like any other young man I had ever seen. We left him there in the stall, whispering to his sleeping form that we would return the next morning with more food.
That evening Margaret and I lay close together in her bed, watching the last of the light from our nightly stub of candle, our feet and hands entwined as tightly as two cold-water eels. Aunt had become so attached to Hannah that she took my sister to sleep with her every night. Captured in the crook of my cousin’s elbow was a poppet that Aunt had made. It had black rope hair and a crimson skirt. The cloth had a soft sheen to it, so it caught the light, and the feel of it beneath my fingers was like the skin of a lamb newly shorn. Uncle had returned with the cloth from Boston, where many fine ladies wore skirts or bodices of such color. Aunt was too modest to wear such a fabric but took a small piece of it to make a skirt for the doll. Margaret whispered to me that her father had gotten very angry when he saw what Aunt