The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,19

had done and he took away the entire bolt of cloth. What was finally done with it, she did not know.

My own doll was much plainer in dress but I thought it more skillfully made. Margaret, with her own hands, had sewn on the buttons that Tom had given me. The button eyes somewhat ruined the beauty of the doll’s face, giving it a baleful look, and they sometimes brought me anxious, terror-filled thoughts of my family dying of the pox.

As we closed our eyes for the night, the rhythm of our breathing paced like two horses harnessed to a sleigh, I asked, “Margaret, how did you know he was a Quaker?”

There was a gentle stirring next to me. “Because he said ‘thee.’ ”

“Margaret, what is a heretic?” Next to the pleasure of tapping the wisdom of my cousin’s head was the loveliness of saying her name.

“It is someone who goes against the word of God” came the answer.

“And why is a Quaker a heretic?”

Margaret did not answer right away and I thought she had not heard me, but soon I felt her breath stirring against my neck.

“A Quaker is a heretic because he makes himself answerable to no body of church, only to the voice of his own conscience. Quakers believe God resides within them like an organ of the body and speaks to them, causing them to shake and tremble as with ague.”

“And does God speak to them?”

“Father says no.” She yawned and her leg came to rest over mine. “They are greatly persecuted. Would God speak to those so shunned by ordained ministers? Sarah, go to sleep now.”

“Why, then, did you help him?”

She opened one heavy-lidded eye and the corner of her mouth turned up in a way I had seen her father smile, splitting her face into two halves — the lighter, smiling half amused with the changes of the temporal world, the darker half looking sunk into the insensibility of a madwoman, or a saint, close to tumbling into despair or enraptured seclusion.

“I wanted to help him, Sarah, because they told me to.” Her hand stayed cradled next to my face even as her eyelids began closing.

“ ‘They’ . . . Margaret, who are they?” I blew gently against her face to rouse her and she opened her eyes once more.

She slowly lifted a forefinger so that it pointed over my shoulder. I turned my head and saw only the heavy chest where we kept our few clothes. She pulled me closer and whispered, “The little people in the cupboard, Sarah.”

I watched her drop into sleep, her skin blue-white in the dark, her eyes moving slowly beneath the lids. The hair on my arms rose as with a cold breeze, and I glanced fearfully over my shoulder but heard and saw nothing save the wind outside our walls and the shadows draping themselves into the familiar, unmoving shapes of benign slumber. Her madness was a secret I would gladly keep, and, before I joined her in sleep, I moved closer into her warmth and kissed her.

The next morning we brought the man in the barn an apple and some bread. But he was not there. We searched every stall and climbed up into the loft but could not find him. And as snow had fallen during the night, there was not one track leading from the barn to signify that he had been real and not a straw man come to life through our imaginings.

LATE AFTERNOONS, JUST before the evening meal, Margaret and Henry and I would have lessons in reading and writing and history. This was done for the sole purpose of learning the Scriptures. I could write only a few words, and Uncle asked me if Mother had ever bothered to teach me. I told him she had not, although the truth was that my mother had tried to teach me to read and write but my defiance, and her lack of patience, had combined to keep me ignorant.

Margaret could read very difficult passages from the Bible. I would sit next to her, my chin resting in my hands, gazing at the movement of her lips as she pronounced the tantalizing and half-understood words of the prophets. The sound of her voice was like a gentle scarf being drawn across my ears. In the evenings, after the dishes and cups were wiped clean and the fire banked, Uncle would tell us stories of the first colonies and the time before, with the early