“The opportunity has not so far occurred, no.”
“I thought not. Well, then.” She eyed him consideringly. “We have preachers who will come to speak at meeting—but anyone may speak at meeting, upon any subject, if the spirit moves him or her to do so.”
“Her? Women speak in public, too?”
She gave him a withering look.
“I have a tongue, just as thee does.”
“I’d noticed,” he said, and smiled at her. “Continue, please.”
She leaned forward a little to do so but was interrupted by the crash of a shutter swinging back against the house, this followed by a spatter of rain, dashed hard across the window. Rachel sprang to her feet with a brief exclamation.
“I must get the chickens in! Close the shutters,” she ordered him, and dashed out.
Taken aback but amused, he did so, moving slowly. Going upstairs to fasten the upper shutters made him dizzy again, and he paused on the threshold of the bedroom, holding the doorjamb until his balance returned. There were two rooms upstairs: the bedroom at the front of the house, where they had put him, and a smaller room in the rear. The Hunters now shared this room; there was a truckle bed, a washstand with a silver candlestick upon it, and little else, save a row of pegs upon which hung the doctor’s spare shirt and breeches, a woolen shawl, and what must be Rachel Hunter’s go-to-meeting gown, a sober-looking garment dyed with indigo.
With rain and wind muffled by the shutters, the dim room seemed still now, and peaceful, a harbor from the storm. His heart had slowed from the exertion of climbing the stair, and he stood for a moment, enjoying the slightly illicit sense of trespass. No sound from below; Rachel must be still in pursuit of the chickens.
There was something faintly odd about the room, and it took him only a moment to decide what it was. The shabbiness and sparsity of the Hunters’ personal possessions argued poverty—yet these contrasted with the small signs of prosperity evident in the furnishings: the candlestick was silver, not plate or pewter, and the ewer and basin were not earthenware but good china, painted with sprawling blue chrysanthemums.
He lifted the skirt of the blue dress hanging on the peg, examining it curiously. Modesty was one thing; threadbareness was another. The hem was worn nearly white, the indigo faded so that the folds of the skirt showed a fan-shaped pattern of light and dark. The Misses Unwin had dressed quietly, but their clothes were of the highest quality.
On sudden impulse, he brought the cloth to his face, breathing in. It smelled faintly still of indigo, and of grass and live things—and very perceptibly of a woman’s body. The musk of it ran through him like the pleasure of good wine.
The sound of the door closing below made him drop the dress as though it had burst into flame, and he made for the stairs, heart hammering.
Rachel Hunter was shaking herself on the hearth, shedding drops of water from her apron, her cap wilted and soggy on her head. Not seeing him, she took this off, wrung it out with a mutter of impatience, and hung it on a nail hammered into the chimney breast.
Her hair fell down her back, wet-tailed and shining, dark against the pale cloth of her jacket.
“The chickens are all safe, I trust?” He spoke, because to watch her unawares with her hair down, the smell of her still vivid in his nose, seemed suddenly to be an unwarrantable intimacy.
She turned round, eyes wary, but made no immediate move to cover her hair.
“All but the one my brother calls the Great Whore of Babylon. No chicken possesses anything resembling intelligence, but that one is perverse beyond the usual.”
“Perverse?” Evidently she perceived that he was contemplating the possibilities inherent in this description and finding them entertaining, for she snorted through her nose and bent to open the blanket chest.
“The creature is sitting twenty feet up in a pine tree, in the midst of a rainstorm. Perverse.” She pulled out a linen towel and began to dry her hair with it.
The sound of the rain altered suddenly, hail rattling like tossed gravel against the shutters.
“Hmmph,” said Rachel, with a dark look at the window. “I expect she will be knocked senseless by the hail and devoured by the first passing fox, and serve her right.” She resumed drying her hair. “No great matter. I shall be pleased never to see any of those chickens again.”
Seeing him still standing, she sat down, gesturing him to another stool.
“You did say that you and your brother proposed to leave this place and travel north,” he reminded her, sitting down. “I collect the chickens will not make the journey with you?”
“No, and the Lord be praised. They are already sold, along with the house.” Laying the crumpled towel aside, she groped in her pocket and withdrew a small comb carved from horn. “I did say I would tell thee why.”
“I believe we had reached the point of learning that the matter has something to do with your meeting?”
She breathed deeply through her nose and nodded.
“I said that when a person is moved of the spirit, he speaks in meeting? Well, the spirit moved my brother. That is how we came to leave Philadelphia.”
A meeting might be formed, she explained, wherever there were sufficient Friends of like mind. But in addition to these small local meetings, there were larger bodies, the Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, at which weighty matters of principle were discussed and actions affecting Quakers in general were decided upon.
“Philadelphia Yearly Meeting is the largest and most influential,” she said. “Thee is right: the Friends eschew violence, and seek either to avoid it or to end it. And in this question of rebellion, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting thought and prayed upon the matter, and advised that the path of wisdom and peace plainly lay in reconciliation with the mother country.”
“Indeed.” William was interested. “So all of the Quakers in the Colonies are now Loyalists, do you mean?”
Her lips compressed for an instant.
“That is the advice of the Yearly Meeting. As I said, though, Friends are led of the spirit, and one must do as one is led to do.”
“And your brother was led to speak in favor of rebellion?” William was amused, though wary; Dr. Hunter seemed an unlikely firebrand.
She dipped her head, not quite a nod.
“In favor of independency,” she corrected.
“Surely there is something lacking in the logic of that distinction,” William observed, raising one brow. “How might independency be achieved without the exercise of violence?”
“If thee thinks the spirit of God is necessarily logical, thee know Him better than I do.” She ran a hand through the damp hair, flicking it over her shoulders with impatience.
“Denny said that it was made clear to him that liberty, whether that of the individual or of countries, is a gift of God, and that it was laid upon him that he must join in the fight to gain and preserve it. So we were put out of meeting,” she ended abruptly.
It was dark in the room, with the shutters closed, but he could see her face by the dim glow from the smothered hearth. That last statement had moved her strongly; her mouth was pinched, and there was a brightness to her eyes that suggested she might weep, were she not determined not to.
“I collect this is a serious thing, to be put out of meeting?” he asked cautiously.
She nodded, looking away. She picked up the discarded damp towel, smoothed it slowly, and folded it, plainly choosing her words.
“I told thee that my mother died when I was born. My father died three years later—drowned in a flood. We were left with nothing, my brother and I. But the local meeting saw to it that we did not starve, that there was a roof—if one with holes—over our heads. There was a question in meeting, how Denny might be ’prenticed. I know he feared that he must become a drover or a cobbler—he lacks somewhat to be a blacksmith,” she added, smiling a little despite her seriousness. “He would have done it, though—to keep me fed.”
Luck had intervened, however. One of the Friends had taken it upon himself to try to trace any relatives of the orphaned Hunter children, and after a number of letters to and fro, had discovered a distant cousin, originally from Scotland but presently in London.
“John Hunter, bless his name. He is a famous physician, he and his elder brother, who is accoucheur to the Queen herself.” Despite her egalitarian principles, Miss Hunter looked somewhat awed, and William nodded respectfully. “He inquired as to Denny’s abilities, and hearing good report, made provision for Denny to remove to Philadelphia, to board there with a Quaker family and to go to the new medical college. And then he went so far as to have Denny go to London, to study there with himself!”
“Very good luck, indeed,” William observed. “But what about you?”
“Oh. I—was taken in by a woman in the village,” she said, with a quick casualness that did not deceive him. “But Denzell came back, and so of course I came to keep his house until he might wed.”
She was pleating the towel between her fingers, looking down into her lap. There were small lights in her hair where the fire caught it, a hint of bronze in the dark brown locks.
“The woman—she was a goodly woman. She took care I should learn to keep a house, to cook, to sew. That I should … know what is needful for a woman to know.” She glanced at him with that odd directness, her face sober.
“I think thee cannot understand,” she said, “what it means to be put out of meeting.”
“Something like being drummed out of one’s regiment, I expect. Disgraceful and distressing.”
Her eyes narrowed for a moment, but he had spoken seriously, and she saw that.
“A Friends’ meeting is not only a fellowship of worship. It is … a community of mind, of heart. A larger family, in a way.”
And for a young woman bereft of her own family?
“And to be put out, then… yes, I see,” he said quietly.
There was a brief silence in the room then, broken only by the sound of the rain. He thought he heard a rooster crow, somewhere far off.
“Thy mother is dead, too, thee said.” Rachel looked at him, dark eyes soft. “Does thy father live?”
He shook his head.
“You will think I am exceeding dramatic,” he said. “It is the truth, though—my father also died upon the day of my birth.”
She blinked at that.
“Truly. He was a good fifty years my mother’s senior. When he heard that she was dead in ch—in childbirth, he suffered an apoplexy and died upon the spot.” He was annoyed; he seldom stuttered anymore. She had not noticed, though.
“So thee is orphaned, too. I am sorry for thee,” she said quietly.
He shrugged, feeling awkward.
“Well. I knew neither of my parents. And in fact, I did have parents. My mother’s sister became my mother, in all respects—she’s dead now, too—and her husband… I have always thought of him as my father, though he is not related to me by blood.” It occurred to him that he was treading on dangerous ground here, talking too much about himself. He cleared his throat and endeavored to guide the conversation back to less personal matters.