The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,21

for a while, his head down, muttering to himself. He grasped the back of a chair as though he would fall without it, but after a time he lurched his way to the table and sat down heavily next to me. His breath smelled strong and sweet and the whites of his eyes were veined with red. Margaret and Henry sat staring at their hands, their heads bowed as though waiting for punishment. Until that time I had never seen Uncle other than smiling and in a good humor.

“Uncle, what is wrong?” I finally asked. “What has happened?”

He faced me, his head swiveling ominously on his neck like a falling capstone, and said, “Magic, Sarah. I’ve been practicing magic again.” His words were indistinct and run together, as though his lips had lost their shape. He leaned towards me, putting one finger up to my mouth. “Husssshhhh . . . I’ll tell you a secret, shall I . . . Sarah? I’ve been trying to . . . disappear.” The word at the last was all but lost in his soured breath.

I looked to Margaret but her eyes were down-turned, and Uncle tapped me on my head to mind his words. “I’ve been trying to vanish, but as you can see, I’m still here. Still here in Billerica. This desert of yeomen and yeomen’s wives and their brats and pigs and dogs . . . I am a man of letters, Sarah! I served with Captain Gardner as his surgeon . . .”

He paused for a moment, his voice rising towards anger. His unsteady gaze searched the room as he sighed and slumped farther into his chair. I studied Margaret’s still, passive face and was comforted by her calm. But it was Henry’s face that set me to pity. From under his lowered lashes, tears streamed and scalded his sallow face to pink. His lips quivered and shuddered and, for all of his bullying of Hannah and me, for all of his cruelty, he was still a boy who lived and died on his father’s good words. Uncle reached for me, fumbling for my hand, and said, “You are still Margaret’s twin, are you not?” I nodded and he nodded in kind, painfully squeezing my fingers. “You are as much of a Toothaker as any of us. I’ll be father to you now . . . a better father than ever a man with blood on his hands could be. . .”

Margaret stood suddenly, saying, “Father, it’s time for us to go to bed.” She grabbed at my apron and pulled me after her to our room. Very soon after came Henry, scratching at the door, asking to sleep on the floor next to us. For a long while we heard Uncle moving roughly about the common room, until with a groan he bedded down on the floor close to the hearth. I slept only fitfully that night, partnered with dreams of carnage. In my night visions I saw Father approach a hog’s pen, his timber axe balanced over one shoulder. He picked out a grown, bristled hog, dwarfed in size next to his towering height, and dragged it screaming like a man into the shadow of the barn. There was a hidden scuffle, a sweep of whistling air, and then the slapping, meaty sound of metal severing flesh.

IN THE SECOND week of March, Margaret and I sat knee to knee, buried deep in the straw next to the sow’s pen. The air was thick with a pungent smell like melted copper and something else. Like cured meat left too long in hanging. The wind outside blew hard against the planks, causing errant wisps of snow to filter in through the walls. The sow had just given birth to her piglets, and we were watching them suck noisily against the swollen teats, pushing one another away with their snouts. There were six piglets in all and we had made a game naming them after villains of the Bible. The fattest gray piglet we named Goliath. The greediest, a little spotted one, we named Judas. Then came Pi-lot, Herod, and Pharaoh. The last was a handsome banded female. We sat quietly together, my head resting on Margaret’s shoulder, my fingers playing lazily with a strand of her hair fallen from her cap.

“I wish your father were here. He would know a proper name for the piglet.”

Uncle had regained his more gentle spirits and had not returned to the house in a