Logic #2
(The true explanation would be harder for him to understand, or to accept.
Gods have always walked the world, have always spread their seed where it may not have been wanted, and have always abandoned the gardens they plant in such a manner.
Elisabet’s storm had no more loved her than a mountain loves a songbird.
He had seen her from a distance, the broken, ugly girl who saw more than most of her kind would ever dream, and he had desired her, and then he had taken her, and that had been enough.
Had she lived, he would not have magically returned to be a father to her child; he was always going to leave her.
Her daughter, though … her daughter was a different, even older story.
Elisabet Turner was the lover, for a night’s duration, of a god.
Her daughter was the child of one. Floretta would always be special in some regards, always be watched by distant, questionably approving eyes.
The sky had been clouded almost since the moment of her birth, her father’s domain watching over her.
Those clouds saw every slight she received from the villagers around her, every moment of rejection, every cruel comment delivered to a child too young to fully understand them.
The storm did not punish, not directly. But the clouds blocked the sun and the rain did not fall, and the crops withered on their vines.
The land had been sour since Elisabet Turner’s death, and because a storm is not properly a father, the god who had sired her child didn’t understand that all he was doing was making things worse for the girl he was trying to protect.)
John stays where he is, impatient but unwilling to approach the priest, unwilling to seem like the petitioner here, when he has been summoned.
Still, he’s relieved when the priest sees him and turns in his direction, moving with reasonable speed across the cracked and oddly muddy ground.
How it can be dry enough to crack and muddy at the same time is a small mystery, one that must remain unanswered evermore, for the priest is growing closer, a look of strange reluctance on his face.
“Mr. Baker?” he asks, and his voice is suited to his figure, slight and weaker than it seems like it should be.
This is their man of faith, the spiritual center of their community? This is the man who sent for him?
John Baker sticks out his hand with a strongman’s confidence. “Father Bearse?”
“Most call me Father Clemence,” says the priest, taking the offered hand and shaking with surprising strength. “But yes, I am Clemence Bearse.”
“And I am John Baker.”
Silence falls between them, less companionable than inevitable. Father Clemence recovers his hand, shaking it as if to restore feeling to his fingers.
“I wrote to you,” he says. “I was hoping you would answer my invitation.”
“Is that what you call it? It sounded more like a summons as it was written.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” says Father Clemence, uncomfortably. “I was hoping to catch your attention, sir, and knew I would need a compelling argument to draw you from Boston to our little village. None has seen you here since—”
“Since my sister’s death, I’m well aware,” says John, brusquely. “I had no intention of ever returning to this place. I still don’t understand what drew her to settle here, so far from everything she’d known.”
“She was a pious woman who raised a pious daughter. You should be proud of her, and find joy in her memory.”
“I find joy in her memory, but not in her choice of habitat. Why am I here?”
“Your niece, Elisabet—”
“Is as dead as her mother. I remember that as well. I am not so callow a man as to forget my losses, even as I was unable to attend her funeral. I sent money. If this is about some unpaid debt Elisabet left behind, I have already done my duty by the girl.”
“She did leave something behind,” says Father Clemence, with deep and evident discomfort. “It was not a debt in the material sense, but in the spiritual sense, for do we not all owe faith unto our families?”
“What are you on about?”
“Your niece died in childbed.”
John Baker goes very still. Someone happening upon the scene might be forgiven for thinking the priest was in conversation with a statue, and not a man of flesh and blood.
In his stillness, his resemblance to Elisabet is easier to see.
They have the same coloring, and his handsome features are a more refined version of hers, which were never beautiful, but had a certain striking harshness to them, one which translates better to a man’s face, unkind as they might be for the world to say.
The world has never been particularly focused on kindness.
Nor has it been particularly focused on reality, and while there is no true reason that the shape of a brow or the angle of a nose should be more suited to a man than to a woman, people often see them that way, and their seeing is often enough to reshape the world.
Father Clemence looks at John Baker’s stillness and is relieved.
The man’s obvious distress is not showy or loud, but he’s been a priest long enough to have seen grief in all its many forms, from the keening wail of a mother burying her son to the quiet weeping of a husband burying his wife.
He knows sorrow when he sees it. He sees it now, and that seeing awakens a small kernel of hope in his heart, a belief that his dear Floretta will have a safe harbor waiting for her in her uncle’s arms.
He would be horrified if he could see John Baker’s heart.
John’s stillness is not sorrow, but calculation, the frantic freeze of a man running numbers against the future and coming up with answers he doesn’t fully understand.
Any grieving he was going to do for Elisabet was concluded years ago, when she refused his invitation to Boston.
In his eyes, she had died long before her body ceased to be the house where she dwelt.
John takes a breath after what seems like an interminable time, and says, in a voice like a tomb door slamming shut, “The babe died with her, of course, or you would have called me long since. Have you found the man who defiled my niece? She would have invited me to her wedding, had she enjoyed one.” Unspoken is the fact that any celebration larger than a roast chicken and a honeyed cake would have been funded by his accounts: he had never subsidized Elisabet’s hardscrabble days, but he knew his duties as her closest male relation, and he would have fulfilled them, had he been called upon to do so.
Father Clemence shakes his head. “No, Mr. Baker, I’m afraid the father of Elisabet’s child was never identified. She refused to say, even unto her deathbed.”
“I see.”
“As to the babe, we did send word.” Once, by post, in an unremarkable envelope which had gone mysteriously astray before it reached its destination.
Gods can interfere in more than rain, and in the beginning, Elisabet’s storm had been content to see her child stay in the shadow of her mother’s bones.
“You never replied. I assumed, at the time, that you didn’t have an interest. I apologize if I was mistaken. ”
John’s gaze sharpens. “The child lived?”
“She did.” The admission is simple, small, and drops like a stone into the still waters of a well, sending ripples swinging wide but making not a sound.
“I have sheltered and kept her these seven years. She has her letters, reads both English and Latin with reasonable skill, and can do her sums well enough to keep a household, when the time comes for her to set out on her own. She is a biddable child, clever if a bit wild, and has been one of the great joys of my life.”
“I see.” John scowls at him a moment, making it clear without saying so directly that he believes the man is lying when he claims to have sent notice of the girl’s survival.
He won’t question the word of a man of the cloth, but he can say it with his eyes.
“Then why, if you thought I had no interest in my own kin, have you chosen to contact me now?”
“Well, Mr. Baker, she is approaching seven years of age, and some among my congregation begin to question the appropriateness of her dwelling in my household.”
For the first time since this conversation began, John is startled enough to bark a quick, sharp laugh. “You mean they don’t like their priest living with a girl he’s not related to? Might tarnish your holy virtue?”
“She’s not old enough yet for anyone’s virtue to be at risk, but yes, there are some who would prefer I avoid even the impression of impropriety,” says Father Clemence, stiffly.
“Floretta has been a great comfort to me in these hard years. The harvests have been lean, you see, and the village suffers so as our larders run bare—”
“Floretta? Did Elisabet name her that?”
“No. My housekeeper did. Floretta Bearse is the only name she has ever known or answered to.”
John wrinkles his nose in evident distaste. “We’ll fix that soon enough,” he says. “No niece of mine will face the schools of Boston with a name like Floretta.”
Father Clemence droops, even as relief blossoms on his face. “You’ll see to her care, then?”
John scowls. “Of course I will. She’s my niece. She should have been with me from the beginning.”
“Indeed.” Father Clemence nods. “Then we see the world set right.”