The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,57

my bucket, I said to Mercy, who was sucking on the wound in her hand, “I hope it rots until every finger on your thieving hand falls off.”

I turned to go, but the folds of wool wrapped around my neck were not enough to stop the sound of Mercy’s voice, hard and carrying. “You all heard,” she said. “She cursed me. She has a witching way. But why else? She is her mother’s daughter.”

Before I entered the house, I sat in the yard, rubbing my head. The skin on my skull knocked painfully with the rhythm of my heart, and one shoulder felt bruised and tender. The palms of my hands were scraped from falling and I gently brushed at the dirt in the wounds. Perhaps it was true that I was like my mother, as everyone seemed to think so. Perhaps the very desire to set myself apart from her proved that I, in fact, had her contrary nature. I was not pretty and quick like Margaret or bland and pliable like Phoebe Chandler. There was a glittering hardness about me like mica and I thought of my fingers wrapped around the rock I had carried against Samuel Preston. Camp dogs will fight and tear at one another for days until a stranger comes too close to the fire, and then they will turn as one and attack the intruder. And the world was full of intruders.

But I did not yet want Mother to know what had happened. I could not bear the knowing look that said, “You see, I was right about your uncle.” I looked down at the bucket and saw it had not spilled much. My dress was torn under the arms, but I could say I had slipped and fallen and so pass scrutiny. I had to calm the beating of my heart, for just as Mother was keen in knowing the changes in the weather, so was she clever in finding out my hidden thoughts. The best way to escape notice was to stay close to my brothers. I would lose myself in the mix and fray of their clattering movement and become like a board piece in a game of Nine Man Morris, a game that my father loved well. The goal was to line up three pins in a row, jumping your opponent’s pins quickly and with a great show of confidence, confusing and weakening the other player. The winner was the one to remove all of his opponent’s pieces first. It was a game of cunning and forethought, but the key to winning was to keep moving.

No one that night regarded my torn dress, although Mother asked me, as she scrubbed at the wounds in my hands, if I had fallen into a ravine. But I was soon forgotten in the press of welcome as Robert and his niece appeared, and from that time until late we stuffed ourselves with suckling pig and flat cakes. Father had trapped two beavers, and we had their tails on a cast-iron platter, shimmering and bubbling in rivers of their own fat. We ate ribs of smoked venison, cracking open the bones with our fingers to suck out the rich marrow. And when we were full to bursting, Mother brought out a pasty she had made with sugar and wild rhubarb that was both sweet and sour together. Richard sat awkwardly with Elizabeth on a bench by the fire, both too drowsy and shy to speak.

I fell to sleep with my head on the table and was carried to bed, my hands sticky and red from the rhubarb. I woke once during the night and remembered it was the 17th of November and that I was then ten years old. I felt under my pillow for Margaret’s sampler wrapped around the pottery piece. I crept out of bed and softly climbed the stairs to the attic, careful not to wake my brothers, and placed both the cloth and the shard in the bottom of my grandmother’s trunk. I closed the trunk and felt my way, shivering, back to bed.

Winter came in hard and fast towards cock’s crow. I could hear the rising wind rushing in like a maid late for her own wedding, the snapping and rustling hem of her skirt scattering snow and ice across the frozen ground. Sleep soon found me, and when I woke again, the drifts of snow were so deep as to shrink the boundaries of our world to house