Logic
It has been seven years since the death of Elisabet Turner. Most unmarried women who died in childbirth would have been forgotten long since, or mythologized into cautionary tales to offer to the youth: See? they say. This is what happens when you sin. This is how the Devil claims his own.
Most unmarried women were not Elisabet Turner.
She had never once even hinted as to the identity of her child’s father, and had been so unfortunate to look upon that the thought of a passing hunter or Frenchman down from the Canadian territories forcing himself upon her had been simply beyond consideration.
The only man anyone could remember her spending much time with was the village priest, Father Clemence, and he had always been a man of unshakable faith.
Then she had passed, and he had taken in her daughter as a foundling, even giving her his own surname to carry—as a man might do when faced with his own bastard.
The whispers grew louder after that, and only continue to swell year after year.
Floretta Bearse looks nothing like her mother.
She looks nothing like Father Clemence, either, but people seem content to overlook that as they murmur about whether the priest’s ward might not be his child by blood as well as by baptism.
She is straight of spine and long of limb, tall for a girl of her age, with a face like the flower that is her namesake, ever turning toward the sun.
Her features are sweet, her voice melodic, and despite the questionable status of her birth, more than a few of the village sons have begun to look at her with approval.
Perhaps that, atop everything else, is why so many have begun to gossip about her origins.
It might be a kinder world if she were to be allowed to remain Floretta Bearse, a copper-haired child picking wildflowers in the shadow of the Massachusetts forest, unaware of storms that walk like men, of midwives who appear from nowhere and offer impossible choices.
She would grow up clever but ordinary in the shadow of those trees, would marry and have children in the common way, and all the changes she was destined to force upon the firmament would go unmade.
But Ilithyia would be a liar, and if there’s one thing gods can’t stand, it’s being turned into liars. The future is seen: the future is set. Some things, once set in motion, cannot be turned aside.
Floretta is running through the fields when a half dozen of the village men come to her adoptive father in his office, forcing their way past the closed door with claims of concern for his spiritual health.
He is the spiritual center of their community.
If they worry that there might be rot at the root, it is his duty to soothe them, and so he welcomes them inside.
At first they speak in vagaries and pleasantries, skirting around the subject they have all come here to discuss. None of them wishes to be the one to bring up the true reason for their visit.
“If you’ll forgive me, I have a sermon to prepare for this weekend—” begins Father Clemence.
“The girl is wild, Father,” says one of the men, almost frantically. “I was never one of those who thought Goody Turner guilty of witchcraft. She was a simple soul who never did anyone any harm.”
And yet you use an archaic title for her, a title most commonly associated with tales of witches, thinks Father Clemence, and holds his composure.
“But the girl,” continues the man, and the others nod, murmuring their ascent. “Her mother was sickly, yet she has never ailed a day. She runs wild when not at her lessons, with no woman to teach her the proper way of things. She lures our daughters from their chores into the fields.”
“She means no harm,” says Father Clemence, voice hot and tight with anger.
He isn’t any louder than he would normally be; his control is better than that of the men before him.
But he’s lived with the girl for seven years, and he knows her better than he knows anyone else in his parish, knows her fears and her fantasies.
He knows these men are here out of fear and concern mixed in almost equal measure, which forms a slurry of something similar to but not entirely like love.
And he knows he’s going to lose this battle.
He was expecting to lose it years ago, is lucky to have gotten nearly seven years.
(He is also, although he doesn’t realize the true relevance, the only one of them to know the truth of Floretta’s parentage, or at least to know that he is not, could not be, in any version of this world, the father.
He chose the priesthood out of both a true higher calling and a distaste for the company of women; were he stationed in a larger city, he might have betrayed his vows by now with one of the lithe and laughing boys who haunt the taverns and the public houses.
But here, in the tight tangle of a small village, he’s been able to remain pious and pure.
Elisabet Turner was no temptress, and even if she had been, he would have been above temptation.
No, he took the girl out of a feeling of obligation not because he had sired her, but because he had somehow allowed one of the most vulnerable among his flock to be led astray.
Someone got Elisabet Turner with child, and her halting, incoherent confessions of sin and selfishness had only left him afraid that his stewardship had allowed her to be preyed upon by something far beyond his ken.)
“Now,” says one of the men. “She means no harm now. But Father, surely you can see that the child of an unmarried woman will present an unfair temptation to our sons as they grow. She cannot be compromised, cannot be defiled, for she is already marked by the circumstances of her birth.”
Father Clemence is distantly relieved that the man has avoided the word “tainted.” Once they begin to speak of taint as if it were something that could truly be carried by a child, there is no defense he can offer.
Not as a man of the cloth, and not as the moral center of this village.
“What would you have me do?” he asks instead, and his words are a thin film of earth and root above a great muddy sinkhole, a hidden horror into which children can tumble and be lost forever. He sounds hollowed out.
“Her mother, Goody Turner … she had an uncle,” says one of the men, and the future is set.
God help them all.
John Baker is precisely the sort of man Boston was constructed to create, a hard-pressed diamond formed from good New England coal.
He’s everything Elisabet was not, tall and strong and straight as an arrow, with a spine that could easily have been sculpted by God himself.
Despite his age—he must be in his early sixties by now—his hair is still thick and lush, a dark copper shade that mirrors without quite matching Floretta’s.
The resemblance between them is stark enough to illustrate their differences.
This is not a man inclined to smiles and softness and the gathering of wildflowers.
And while it might seem reasonable that a grown man would have different interests than a little girl, there are men who walk in the world with an air of wonder about them, a softness which says they would pick wildflowers, were that an option.
There are men who have clearly remembered how to dream.
There are also men who have remembered but conceal that knowledge behind a veil of hardness, a shale crust spread across their wonder and their whimsy.
John Baker is not such a man. He has pressed himself into the shape he wanted to wear, has molded himself like marble, and there is nothing left of him that does not serve a proper purpose.
He looks around with cold eyes as he steps out of the carriage that has brought him here, to this small village in the shadow of the Massachusetts trees, where his sister lived her short and difficult life before she was consigned unto the soil, where his niece did the same.
He is here because he has been summoned—summoned, him, like a common assistant!
No one here should have any authority to call for him, and yet they did, and so he has come, out of curiosity as much as pride.
He would like to know why they think they have the right to interfere with his business, before he burns their bucolic little hamlet into ashes.
John Baker was never a man who took easily to being challenged or presumed upon in any way, and the slow death of his entire family has only reinforced his desire to be the master of his fate in all possible ways.
He does not want to be here. The letter he received, from the village pastor no less, did not properly explain why he was needed, or why it should matter that he appear in person.
Elisabet is dead. He knows that much, was sent the news some years back: there is no good reason for his presence.
He closes the carriage door, the sound sharp and foreign in this miserable place, and waits for someone to come and tell him why he’s been disturbed.
A door opens, and a thin, sandy-haired man in clerical vestments steps out, squinting in the thin sunlight that manages to break through the clouds overhead.
Between the weather and the trees, John’s not sure these people have ever truly seen the sun.
It would explain the obvious poverty of the land, the way the fields lie half-fallow in the autumn air.