The Endless Forest
Page 74

“Good day, Friend Maddie. I was told I would find thee here, but I hardly believed it.”
She stands, wiping her hands on her apron and searching her memory. A Friend by his speech and dress, and someone she once knew, by his tone.
“Good morning,” she says, turning a little so the sun is out of her eyes and she can see her visitors more clearly. “Do I know ye?”
The taller man extends his hand and she takes it. Large and firm and cool to the touch. His fingernails are cleaner than her own. From under the brim of his hat he looks down at her with eyes the color of periwinkle. His brows are very dark, and when he smiles at her the left one lifts into a peak, as if he doubts her word. And now she recognizes him.
“Friend Gabriel,” she says. “How—what—”
“First may I introduce my good friend to thee? Maddie, this is Cornelius.”
“Cornelius Bump,” the other man tells her as he shakes her hand. Bump is a man of twenty-five or so, with milky white skin and hair the vivid color of blanched carrots. Even his whiskers are copper bright. In the polite conversation of strangers he tells her he is come to Paradise to visit his sister and good-brother, the Todds.
She hears Curiosity at the gate. “Come,” she says. “Come and meet our visitors. This is Cornelius Bump, Martha Todd’s brother.”
“Half brother,” Cornelius Bump murmurs, and Maddie nods her acknowledgment.
“And Gabriel Oak, of Baltimore.”
“Family?” Curiosity extends her hand gracefully, first to one and then to the other man, and neither of them hesitate to take it.
“Gabriel is an old friend of my family,” Maddie says. “Our fathers are—” she pauses to work it through, and Gabriel answers for her.
“Second cousins, once removed.”
“And you’ve come all the way from Baltimore.” Curiosity’s eyes are bright, her expression easy and friendly. She has that talent, she can speak to strangers in a way that makes them comfortable.
She says, “Should I put on water for tea, Caroline?”
“Caroline?” Gabriel Oak looks between them, that brow peaking again.
“So I am known here. It is my husband’s wish.”
“Ah.” He doesn’t look away, and she takes this to mean that he has had news from home, that he knows about her marriage. “I will try to remember. Where is thy—?”
The wind plucks the paper of larkspur seeds out of her hand and sends it flying. Gabriel Oak follows it, and she takes the opportunity to ask Cornelius Bump a question.
“Will ye take tea? There is new-made bread this morning, and butter.”
“I must go on ahead to my sister,” he says. Then he raises his voice so that it will reach his friend, who is striding back toward them, the folded square of paper in his hand. As they watch Gabriel takes off his hat—he still wears the broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat favored by the Friends he grew up with.
“Gabriel, you must stay for tea,” Bump calls. “There is time enough for you to meet my sister and her family.”
Time enough.
What that might mean is something that Maddie thinks about without pause for the next hour. While tea is poured and bread cut and the pot of butter brought up from the cellar, she wonders how long Gabriel Oak intends to be in Paradise.
Instead they talk about news from home. The little that Maddie knows she tells him, and he returns this favor. He is better informed than she is; the mother of an old friend has died, children have come into the world, Friend Michel Learner has lost all he owns to speculation.
“Have you been to Baltimore recently?” Curiosity asks, and he shakes his head. He has a kind smile that comes slowly but then stays. “I have letters now and then from my sister Susan.”
Galileo comes in to fetch some line for fishing and stops to be introduced. Gabriel studies Galileo closely, almost as a doctor studies a patient, to see how he is put together.
He says, “May I take thy likeness, friend?”
And there it is, the subject Maddie has been hesitant to raise. The reason Gabriel Oak left Meeting and his family and went off to wander through the world. He draws.
Now he takes some paper and a tin box from his pack and puts them on the table, spreading the sheets to show. The world, as he has seen it.
Vanity and excess and worldly indulgence, and unacceptable to the community of Friends. To his father, who was such a quiet, serious man. Strict in every sense of the word.
Galileo and Curiosity can hardly believe what they see spread out before them. The streets of Manhattan, a place they have only heard about in stories. The harbor at Baltimore. Boston, and a half dozen villages north of there in the Massachusetts wilderness. People of all ages and races, at work or rest, children playing under a stand of oak trees, chickens in a barnyard, an old woman scouring a pot.
“It’s like a—” Galileo hesitates, reaching for the right word. “It’s like looking through a glass window.”
“You have been just about everywhere, seems like,” Curiosity says.
“Yes,” Gabriel tells her, his gaze on Maddie. “I have traveled far.”
These are the things she remembers about him: how on a first day in June he gave testimony at meeting, and never once said the name of the Lord God or of his Son Jesus Christ. That the girls watched him with pleasure, and he returned all their glances but never showed favor to any one of them in particular. How he helped her carry a heavy basket home when they met in the street one day, and spoke to her of the evening light in a way that opened her eyes to color. How terribly concerned his parents had been. How tenderly he helped his sister into the carriage, when she was heavy with child. The troubled looks when his name was mentioned. How exciting it was, and how frightening to know that someone sixteen years old might leave everything and walk out into the world. How she envied him. How she wondered about him for years, and listened for news whenever she crossed paths with any of his people.