Angel-Seeker

  At the door to the dining hall, Jerusha met her with a cry of rage and a slap upon the face.

  Rebekah froze where she stood, shock making every detail vivid. The room contained about eleven women, all of them staring. Someone dropped a pan, and it clattered on the floor. The smell of burning bread pushed an acrid thread of scent through the hearty aromas of cooking meat and frying eggs.

  “You lying little tramp!” Jerusha screamed, grabbing Rebekah by the arm and slapping her a second time across the cheek. “The minute your father returns this evening, I will tell him what you’ve done, and he will throw you from the house.”

  A murmur of surprise and speculation from the women in the room. Rebekah could not look at them. She stared up instead at her mother’s stormy, furious face.

  “What—what have I—”

  Jerusha slapped her a third time, though Rebekah tried unsuccessfully to flinch away. “Midnight—one o’clock—I come to your room. The baby is screaming, and I need your help. I need to sleep. But you’re not there. You’re not in the water room or the kitchen. You’re nowhere in the house. Where can you be, a young girl in the middle of the night?”

  Now the response from the crowd was full of dismay and condemnation. Whispers and words flew around the room.

  “But I—” Rebekah stammered.

  Jerusha shook her so hard her vision blurred. “Were you out in the garden? No, for I looked! A cold night, but you might have come down with a fever and searched for a cool place to calm your blood. No one was in the garden, but the gate was unlocked. Someone had unlatched it sometime in the night.”

  Gasps and a rising buzz of speculation from the listening women.

  “I don’t know who—who opened the gate,” Rebekah said. “I was—I didn’t leave this house! I was—”

  Jerusha hit her again, even harder. Rebekah felt her cheeks spangle with bruises. Her heart had compacted itself to such a small, desperate ball that her chest was tight with pain.

  “You liar! You awful, wicked, lying, dreadful girl! Where have you been all night? Who have you been with? What terrible things have you done?”

  Rebekah could not answer. Her mind would not frame the lie; her lips could not shape the words. I am dead, she thought, and prepared for the next swift blow.

  “Jerusha, you foolish, hysterical woman,” came a dry voice from the hall behind Rebekah. “What crazy ideas have you got into your empty head now?”

  Jerusha jerked Rebekah away from the doorway, and Hepzibah stepped through. The old woman looked frail and exhausted, as if she had had no more sleep than Rebekah had, and needed it more.

  “No crazy ideas, awrie,” Jerusha said in a low voice, her fingers tightening spasmodically on Rebekah’s arm. “Just a wretched truth. My daughter so far forgot all her training, all her dignity, all her worth, to sneak from this house last night. She was gone for hours, and I do not know how she managed to return, because I locked the gate behind her and expected to never see her again.”

  Before Rebekah had had time to digest that terrible piece of news, Hepzibah laughed. Actually laughed. “Oh, to be young and full of fantasies again,” she said in her gravelly voice. “You stupid woman, don’t you know where your daughter was last night? She was with me.”

  Jerusha was so astounded, she dropped Rebekah’s arm. Both of them stared at the old woman. Hepzibah patted Rebekah on the shoulder.

  “I know I told you I didn’t want anyone to know about my back,” she rasped out. “But, Jovah’s bones, child! I didn’t expect you to take a beating on my behalf.”

  “I—I didn’t know what to say,” Rebekah choked out.

  Hepzibah nodded. Her sharp little eyes were fixed on Jerusha’s face. “I can’t sleep. Night after night, I can’t sleep,” the old woman said. “Your daughter—who is a good girl, and you’re too dull to see it—your daughter has come over many a midnight to rub oil on my back. Last night wasn’t the first time she fell asleep on my mattress, and I felt too guilty to wake her and send her back to her own room. Let her sleep, poor thing. An old woman can’t grant a young girl too many favors.”

  “But she never said—and the gate!” Jerusha exclaimed.

  Hepzibah shrugged. “Maybe it was never locked. Everyone forgets a chore now and then. And as for Rebekah never saying a word, well, I asked her not to. I am old and despised enough already. I don’t want pity on top of it.”

  “No one—no one despises you, awrie,” Jerusha said. “You are my husband’s beloved sister.”

  “And you are an empty-headed, hot-hearted, foolish woman,” Hepzibah declared. “Are you done mistreating your daughter? I would ask her to bring me a plate of food to the table. I find I am not feeling so strong this morning, and I need to sit down.”

  “Yes—I—Rebekah, go get food for your aunt,” Jerusha said.

  No apology first. No apology expected. A woman could abuse her children, just as a husband could abuse his wife, and no one questioned her behavior. Still, Rebekah felt her face must be bright red as a dera berry, half of the color brought by violence and half by mortification.

  “Sit. I will bring you whatever you like,” Rebekah said to Hepzibah in a voice that was almost a whisper.

  “A little of everything,” Hepzibah said. “I’m hungry.”

  There was almost complete silence as Rebekah moved across the room to where the cooks had laid out a buffet. Hector’s other two sisters were standing nearby, and Gabbatha reached out and brushed Rebekah’s arm as she passed by. A gesture of sympathy. The other one gave her a tremulous old woman’s smile. Out of the corner of her eye, Rebekah saw her mother slowly leave her stance by the door and sit down at a table by Hector’s cousin and her daughter. Instantly the three women were in a low-voiced discussion, the other two women no doubt reassuring Jerusha that she had done the right thing. A girl gets wild impulses. Even if she did nothing wrong this time, who knows when such an idea might sprout in her head? Better to warn her now. Better to frighten her so deeply that she never forgets it. Better now, before she does something terrible and it’s too late for her.

  It was not the first public fight this room had witnessed between Jerusha and Rebekah, between other women and their daughters. But it was the first time Hepzibah had spoken up to champion anyone. Rebekah moved down the buffet table, filling two plates with food, and could not imagine why Hector’s sister had come forward to save her with a lie.

  Hepzibah was already seated with her two elderly sisters, all of them deep in gossip about one of the girls in a neighbor’s house. “Thank you,” Hepzibah said when Rebekah brought over her plate, but in such an absentminded way that it was clear she did not expect Rebekah to sit with them. Rebekah carried her plate to another table, where Hector’s niece Hali was sitting with two other girls.

  “I hate my mother,” Hali said, and they all laughed. That was all that was said on the topic for the whole meal.

  The rest of the day passed in an odd, unreal way, Rebekah moving through each sluggish moment as though her whole body was weighted. She went to her mother’s room to take charge of Jonah, but then her mother complained that she was so tired, she had to have some rest. So Rebekah brought him with her to the fabric room, letting him crawl through the bolts of cloth and knock over trays of needles. When he turned crabby and fretful, she brought him to her own room and laid him down for a nap, lying beside him on the mattress. Both of them slept for two hours, and Rebekah could have slept even longer if he hadn’t woken up and begun to poke at her eyes with his small, curious fingers.

  “Frubo,” he said in delight when she sat up.

  “Frubo indeed,” she said, running her hands through her hair and yawning widely. “I wish I knew exactly what you were trying to say.”

  It was an hour or more before dinner, a time of day when many of the women of the house retreated to their rooms to nap or read. Rebekah scooped the squirming baby into her arms and went down the hall to knock on Hepzibah’s door.

  “I’m he
re, come in, don’t let an old woman sleep,” came the grumble from the other side. Rebekah pushed open the door and went in.

  In fact, Hepzibah was sitting at her desk, writing a letter. She had a sister who had married an unusual man; they had moved away from Breven and gone to live in Semorrah twenty years ago. Hector had had nothing to do with her ever since, because she lived like any Semorran woman, barefaced and brazen, but Hepzibah had kept in touch with her all this time. Rebekah could not think of anyone else the old lady would be writing.

  “Oh. It’s you,” Hepzibah said, and folded over her paper.

  “I just came—I wanted to thank you.”

  Hepzibah gestured to an overstuffed red velvet chair, covered with a brightly patterned shawl, and Rebekah sat. Jonah wriggled from her arms and scurried across the room on his hands and knees.

  “Let him go,” Hepzibah said. “You sit and talk to me.”

  “I wanted to thank you,” Rebekah said. “For helping me this morning.”

  “For lying for you, you mean.”

  Rebekah nodded. “Yes. I don’t know why you did it.”

  Hepzibah snorted. “Because your mother is a stupid woman who does not understand that she lives in a prison and that any sane woman would want to break free of it.”

  Rebekah merely stared at her. Hepzibah gave a parched laugh. “Oh, the prison works for me well enough now. I’m an old woman, and I like to live in a house that someone else provides, eating food that I don’t have to cook. I can sit in the garden on a sunny day, and sit under a roof when it rains. I have an easy life. But I’m old. The life wasn’t so easy when I was young.”

  “Did you—when you were younger—”

  “Not going to tell you of any of my rebellious actions! You’re as foolish as your mother, and just as little to be trusted. But I wasn’t a happy girl. I wasn’t a happy wife. I don’t imagine you’re very happy either.”

  “I was,” Rebekah said, “until recently.”

  Hepzibah nodded her head. “Well, don’t tell me anything you’ve been doing. I don’t want to know it. I don’t want to stop you, but I can’t protect you. I just want you to know that. There will be nothing I will be able to do for you if you are found out.”

  “You have done so much for me already—today—”

  “And I am willing to play that game again. But if you are caught outside these walls, nothing I say will save you.”

  “I’m going again tonight,” Rebekah said.

  Hepzibah nodded. “I was sure you would. Be careful.”

  “I will be.”

  “Do you need money?” the old woman asked.

  Rebekah just looked at her for a moment. Jansai women never had cash, since they were never out in public places where they might spend it. All the household expenses were discharged by the men. “I don’t think so,” she said. “But why do—how do—”

  Hepzibah brushed her hand through the air. “My sister sends me some from time to time. It is a good thing for a woman to have her own coins, in case—well, just in case.”

  “I won’t be leaving Breven,” Rebekah said.

  “No? And you’ll marry this Isaac in—what is it now, a little more than three months’ time?”

  “Yes.”

  Hepzibah leaned forward. “Think long and hard before you do that, kircha,” she said, using the term more fondly than her mother ever had. “A Jansai marriage is not so wonderful a thing. For a girl who is not so docile.”

  “Hector has decided,” Rebekah said. “I have no choice.”

  “Do you not?” the old lady said. “Don’t throw away the choices you do have. And you know better than I do what they might be.”

  Across the room there was the sound of objects falling and then Jonah’s long, accusing wail. Rebekah leapt to her feet. “Oh no, I’m so sorry, he’s pulled down your tapestry—”

  “Just what I’d expect from a son of my brother’s,” Hepzibah said with a sniff. “Destruction and turmoil.”

  Rebekah crossed the room to extricate him from the folds of fabric and upended hanging rods. “Let me give him to my mother, and then I’ll come back and fix this. I’m so sorry—”

  Hepzibah laughed, her dark little eyes alight with amusement. “You can fix it tonight,” she said, “when you come in to rub ointment on my back.”

  Rebekah was caught so much off guard that she actually opened her mouth to explain where she would really be this night. And then she realized it was a joke. Amazingly, she started laughing, too.

  It never would have occurred to her that she would be sharing any jest with Aunt Hepzibah. Particularly one like this, not actually funny.

  “If you ever do need oil rubbed into your back—” she began, but Hepzibah snapped, “My back’s just fine,” and they both kept on laughing. Rebekah was still smiling as she delivered the baby back into her mother’s arms.

  “Thank you,” Jerusha said, and that was their only conversation for the day. If you overlooked the conversation at the door of the dining hall that morning.

  Dinner was quiet, and Rebekah left early to go lie down. She was always tired these days, it seemed. No wonder, of course, when she spent half the night awake and out of the house, leading a secret, second life. But Obadiah would leave in a day or two, perhaps even as early as tomorrow morning, and she could sleep away every one of the weeks he was gone from her.

  She rose from her mattress a couple of hours before midnight and bundled up her boy’s clothes under her arms. As before, she stood outside her own door a long time, listening to the noises down the hall. As before, she moved absolutely silently through the sleeping corridor. But this time, on a hunch, she did not take the stairway down toward the kitchen, but up, toward the third story. And from there, she took the winter stairwell up again, pushing open its flat doorway and climbing onto the roof.

  The angel was there, waiting for her. She threw herself into his arms and covered his pale face with kisses.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  By now, Elizabeth and David had settled into a routine that seemed to suit them both. He was not a man who seemed to require, as Faith put it delicately, that his physical needs be met with a great deal of frequency. Nor, as Elizabeth put it more bluntly, did he satisfy those physical needs with a great deal of finesse. But he seemed to like the idea of regular sex, without having to go to much trouble to achieve it, and it was Elizabeth’s goal to make his life as trouble-free as possible.

  So she began to organize their relationship. Each time she saw him—which was always late at night in his own room, no romantic dinners or flowery speeches required beforehand—she inquired into his schedule for the next week or so, and they would agree on the time she should return to his room. Sometimes he forgot, but she never raged or reprimanded him. She simply left him a note: “I see you’ve been detained. I’ll come back tomorrow night.” And he was always happy to see her that following night, no matter how inebriated he might be.

  His skills as a lover never improved much, but since her expectations had gone down to zero, neither of them was ever disappointed.

  And the life suited Elizabeth well enough. She felt she was finally in control of her destiny, working toward all the things she had ever wanted to achieve. She possessed an angel lover—who, truth to tell, took very little of her time and even less of her heart—and the remainder of her life was filled with relationships and activities that she found most agreeable. She and Faith had become truly close friends, confiding all the rather grim details of their previous lives and sharing all their observations about their current existence. They both hated Shiloh, they both adored Tola, they loved the same foods, they had the same goals. They were soul mates.

  Faith’s own fortunes had turned brighter, as she had begun a romance with a rather callow young angel named Jason. Unlike Elizabeth, Faith seemed to feel some real affection for her angelic suitor, though she was under no illusions about the permanency of the relationship.

  “But he’s very swee
t,” she told Elizabeth over dinner one night. They were both earning enough that they could afford a night out once a week, and they looked forward to this evening above all other events in their lives. “He told me yesterday that his mother would like me. And of course you know she wouldn’t. But I think if we were up Gaza way where she lives, he might actually take me to meet her!”

  “She’ll like you well enough if you have his baby.”

  Faith sighed. “And I thought this month—I really thought—well, you know, I was three days late. But then—” She shrugged. “No baby.”

  “Listen,” Elizabeth said. “They’re a little expensive. But Mary’s sold me these herbs that are supposed to enhance fertility. You can only take them on certain days, and you can only take them three times a month. I tried them, and they gave me a headache for a week. But if they help—” She shrugged. “You could try some.”

  “Oh, yes! I’d love to! But why can you only take them three times a month?”

  “Because they’ll kill you if you take them too often.”

  Faith’s eyes grew big. “Then I guess I’d better be careful.”

  So Elizabeth asked Mary for a set of the herbs to sell to her friend, and the healer only reluctantly agreed. “You’re not lying to me, are you?” the small woman demanded. “You’re not pretending these are for somebody else, and then planning to take them all yourself?”

  That hadn’t even occurred to Elizabeth. “No, of course not! It’s just that Faith’s seeing this angel, and he’s very good to her, but who knows how long it will last? So she wants to improve her chances while she can.”

  “Well, you be sure to tell her all the warnings,” Mary said, shaking some of the dark crushed leaves into a little vial. “This is a very dangerous drug.”

  “I’ve already told her,” Elizabeth said. “We’ll both be careful.”