Everyone’s surprised, and he uses that to his advantage, darting across the room and out the door that leads to the taproom before any of the actors can give chase. Behind him, he hears Placide yelling for Anderson to bring him back, but by then Jack has exploded out of the tavern and into the dark night.
GILBERT
Maddie is alone in thekitchen house, kneading dough, when Gilbert lets himself in.
“Is it a little early for all of that?” he says as he closes the door behind him.
Maddie presses her knuckles deep down into the dough. “Friday still bread day, last time I checked.”
“I was hoping you’d all be in your beds. That I’d wake you with my knocking, and you’d tell me Louisa showed up hours ago.”
Maddie frowns and pounds the dough with her fists. Gilbert can hear her knuckles crack. “I was hoping you’d tell me you just finished delivering her into her mama’s arms.”
“I couldn’t find her.” He can scarcely get the words out. Certainly can’t look Maddie in the eye doing it. A fine layer of flour covers the table where Maddie works, and Gilbert runs a finger through it, tracing the beginnings of his own name. “It was a mess over there. People being carted off in all directions.”
“She wasn’t nowhere?”
Gilbert shakes his head no. “How’s Sara holding up?”
“You know how she loves that child. But what choice she got other than to put her feelings aside?”
“She over at the main house?”
“And will be till kingdom come,” says Maddie as she puts the ball of dough in a bowl and covers it with a damp cloth.
“Missus Elizabeth in bad shape?”
“The worst I’ve ever seen her.”
“Worse than after Mr. Mayo died?”
“And the little boy, too,” she says as she measures water and flour into a clean bowl, then reaches for the salt.
Gilbert didn’t know Sara when Louisa’s father and brother died, butshe had told him how, after those two deaths, which came one right after the other, Elizabeth changed. She stopped going places, stopped seeing people, stopped even coming downstairs for meals. Most important of all, she stopped mothering Louisa, and it fell to Sara to love the poor child twice as hard.
Half the time, when Gilbert came ’round to visit Sara in the evenings, Louisa was still in the kitchen house, practicing her French or copying words out of her blue-backed speller. He got in the habit of greeting her with aBonjourand aParlez-vous français?, which she had told him on one of his early visits meantDo you speak French?While Maddie fixed him a plate, Louisa would ask after the smithy, want to know if what Sara said about him pulling out people’s teeth with a special key was true. “Only when business is slow,” he’d say with a sly smile that she didn’t know quite what to do with.
Louisa was a good egg, but Gilbert was careful around her. He knew she didn’t like sharing Sara with him; her mouth twisted up like a corkscrew if his hand so much as fell on the curve of Sara’s waist. Once, when he’d pulled Sara onto his lap, drunk with wanting her, he’d looked up to see Louisa staring at him like he had horns growing out of the top of his head. Sara was their prized possession, and Gilbert realized quickly that if he didn’t want to jeopardize his visits, he was going to need to make real nice with Sara’s four-and-a-half-foot-tall keeper.
He made it his mission to win Louisa over, just as surely as he’d won over Sara. He started bringing her little gifts—a rosette he made out of scraps of leather, a flute he fashioned out of a piece of river cane. Once, when Sara scolded Louisa for always losing her hair ribbons, he showed up with a pretty hook he’d hammered out of a scrap of copper, a hole stamped in the top. “I figure it’d be just the right size for hanging ribbons,” he said with a wink.
Before too long Louisa was asking Gilbert his opinion on the length of her skirts and telling him long, winding stories about her school friends. He tried to follow along, but all those white girl names sounded the same, and they were each as mean as the next. “Which one’s Maria again?” he’d ask for the third time, and Sara would thump him in the back of the head, which made Louisa laugh.
When Gilbert knew he had Louisa on his side was the day he asked her about a book she was reading, and instead of just reciting the title and getting back to it, she slid the book across the table and said, “You want togive it a try?” He had looked at Sara then, trying to ask her what he was supposed to do with an offer like that, but all she did was shrug her shoulders.
Louisa taught Gilbert how to read in fits and starts over the winter of 1808. She was thirteen years old, which must have made him about twenty-eight, give or take. At first, she used whatever she had on hand, a copy ofTristram Shandyor Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, and just pointed out the small words that were easy for him to wrap his tongue around. But eventually she went looking for her old primer and started at the beginning.
AInAdam’sFall
We Sinned all.
BThy Life to Mend
ThisBookAttend.
CChristcrucify’d
For sinners dy’d.
