Calling me in a voice I no longer knew, Mother took my hand and pulled me to her side, requesting we be left alone. I was scared of the blood, of the strange odor exuding from the woman who always smelled so sweet. Her violet lips and shadowed eyes made her a stranger. Tears began to spill and my nose began to run, even though I couldn’t have told you why. Drying my eyes with kisses, stroking my face with trembling, loving fingers, she made me promise that I would obey my father and, in a broken, weary voice, she revealed a terrible, shameful secret. A secret that even now, so many years later, I wanted to erase, to forget, to doubt. Yet it explained so much . . .
I hadn’t questioned her, I was shocked into silence. When she had finished, she sank back against the pillow and wrapped her arms around me. Lying across her swollen breasts, I felt her lips and hands against my hair, her hot breath on my head, the slow, ponderous beat of her heart, until, suddenly, I didn’t.
It was Father Clement, newly arrived in the parish, who gently coaxed me from Mother’s side, performed extreme unction, and held me as I wept. It was the good Father who allowed me to see Mother at peace, her body cleaned and wrapped, her face stripped of color and life, her lips and eyelids forever closed. He’d been so calm, so capable that night. I knew if ever there were a crisis, he would be the one to have by my side. Once the body had been carried to the church, the servants and Father Clement had sat across from each other in the kitchen; the servants quietly weeping, the Father praying. I had stood out of sight in the corner, unable to cry, unable to think or speak. I was like the shadows into which I’d shrunk. Crossing himself, Father Clement raised his head and I was stunned to see tears staining his cheeks; I’d never seen a man cry before. He looked at Saskia and said: “Death too often chases birth and triumphs.” His mouth trembled, but he lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “God forgive me,” he whispered, but we all heard. “Why does our dear Lord make even good women pay for the sins of Eve? Surely”—he dropped his chin and stared into a space over my shoulder—“surely, the debt has been repaid in full?”
I’d never thought about God in terms of debits or credits before. If I had, I’d have believed my gentle, kind mother would have earned, over and over, a place on earth and an eternal one in heaven. I once would have sworn that God owed her, not the other way around. But not anymore. With Mother’s whispered words my eyes had been opened. My mother was as brazen as Adam’s wife and as great a sinner. Reproach colored my cheeks but also pride that she’d trusted me with the darkest of confidences. I loved my mother with all my heart and I didn’t know how to reconcile what she’d told me with the woman who raised me, the woman I thought I knew. And what about the twins? Were they stained with her sin as well? Blessed Mother Mary knew Tobias was. What did these sweet little babes owe to God? Were they to continue to pay Mother’s debt by being denied her? What had I done to suffer such a loss?
That night, I burned with hate for God and Eve, the original sinner. I imagined setting fire to the Garden of Eden and watching the Tree of Knowledge flame, wishing what I’d learned could be reduced to ashes and blow away on the winds. Instead, I pushed what I knew into the recesses of my mind and determined that one day, when the time was right, I would seek the truth. Till then, I would keep what I knew as close to my heart as my mother had.
All this crawled through the maze of my mind as I listened to Father Clement’s prayer for my father. When he finished, he reluctantly released my hand and administered what succor he could to the household. Cousin Hiske didn’t interfere but quietly thanked him. Later that day, he sat vigil in the church for those whose loved ones had died on the Cathaline. I attended briefly, offering words of consolation and receiving them. This wasn’t just our loss, but the entire town’s. That the ship bore my mother’s name made it all the more painful. Guilt attended my every word as if, somehow, I was responsible for these good people’s pain. But it was my father who’d christened the ship. Returning home after Mother died to find he had two more mouths to feed (as he put it) and no wife, he’d spoken to Lord Rainford and, within months, another ship was added to Father’s small fleet. Father chose to name it after his dead wife. If anyone thought the gesture ill-omened, they hadn’t spoken out . . . not then.
In my mind, life was divided into two parts: before Mother died and after. There was another schism too, but I would only admit it in moments of weakness: before the secret and after. Between both was a threshold over which I’d been pushed and, at first, floundered. After Mother died, Father came home to absorb the news and, I thought, to comfort his children. Within twenty-four hours of Mother’s burial, after grunting at the twins as Louisa held Karel and I held Betje, Father left—for what port I did not know. Subsequently, he transformed into little more than an unpleasant presence that I tried to replace with older, happier versions until they too faded from memory.
Four months later, bearing a curt explanatory note from Father, Cousin Hiske arrived and promptly took over. Within the household she’d become my guardian, my torment. I regarded her now, trying not to feel resentful that the freedom I believed Father’s death would accord me was to be Hiske’s instead.
Within a few hours of learning Father’s fate, the head of the Merchants’ Guild and the mayor of Elmham Lenn, Master Dickon Fortescue, arrived with his daughter and my childhood friend, Betrix. Master Fortescue clumsily offered his sympathies before informing me that because my father had alienated himself from the guild by joining forces with Lord Rainford and therefore wasn’t obligated to pay tithes, he was unable to offer me the usual financial and other support provided to merchant families at these times. Betrix simply held my hand while her father stuttered and stammered, relieved when he’d done his duty and was able to leave the solar and join the other callers in the hall downstairs.
“I’m sorry, Anneke,” said Betrix after I recounted for her as calmly as I could Master Makejoy’s visit. “Papa would do something if he could . . . you do know that, don’t you? The other merchants . . . they won’t allow him . . . it’s just, your father didn’t—” She paused, hesitating to speak ill of the dead.
“Have many friends.” I would say it. The truth cost nothing. Not anymore. Nor did Papa hold any title or office in town. Once, he’d been an alderman and a juror, but those positions had been relinquished before Tobias was born. All my father had was his family and the sea. He turned his back upon one and the other claimed him. I extracted my hand from Betrix’s and stood, staring out the window at the procession of people continuing to arrive at the house. I would need to hear their platitudes as well. “Father made his choices and now—”
“You have to suffer them,” Betrix finished, and placed an arm around my shoulders.
Had anyone else said those words, I may have denied them. But I’d known Betrix for years. When Father refused to heed the guild and became independent (or so I’d thought) by going into business with Lord Rainford, Betrix’s mother, Else, and mine managed to ensure their friendship, and that of their daughters, survived. Up until Mother died, we’d shared so much—silly secrets and the frivolous dreams of the very young; our blooming attraction to various visiting knights or the sons of lords or wealthy merchants. The kind one has when the future is all rosy promise and a press of lips both harmless and pregnant with meaning. Once Hiske was ensconced within the house, taking control of Mother’s duties and many others as well, sacking servants and allocating their tasks to me and those who remained (“Idleness is the devil’s playground,” she’d say), she rejected Mistress Else Fortescue’s attempts at friendship, literally closing the door upon her. That meant Betrix was also denied. Though we’d exchanged furtive and even passionate letters of indignation and endless reassurances of sisterly love, and managed to meet in the woods and even at the market once or twice, Hiske’s snubbing of Mistress Fortescue (who, as far as she was concerned, as the daughter of a laundress, had married far above her station) meant our friendship eventually cooled. I’d been allowed to attend Betrix’s wedding, and I’d even squeezed in a visit after her son, Henry, was born. But I’d seen her stepping out with other girls, girls we’d once laughed at for their foolish antics and lack of learning. The truth was, I’d thought Betrix lost to me and mourned her long ago. Father’s death proved me wrong and for that I was very grateful. I learned that some things weren’t altered by time, not in an irreparable way anyhow.