Chapter 6 #2
Mrs. Calder's parlor smelled of coffee and floor wax, and the furniture had been moved back against the walls.
Ashworth sat in the big chair by the window in his black coat, his prayer book on his knee, and Mrs. Calder stood at his shoulder like a woman guarding a stove she did not trust. Mr. Frederickson slept upright in the corner with his spectacles down his nose.
Nathan stood by the door with his hat in both hands, and Lydia, in her good collar, took Clara's flowers — windflowers, picked that morning along the Holt fence line — so her hands would be free.
"I was married in this room," Lydia said quietly, beside her. "Christmas Day." She said nothing else about it.
The words were the same words she had heard at other people's weddings all her life, and she had never once thought about what they cost to say until they were coming out of her own mouth.
To have and to hold. She said it to a man she had met on a train five weeks past, in the room where her sister had married for love at Christmas, and she kept her eyes on the window and her voice level and gave away nothing, because giving nothing away was the one thing she knew how to do without fail.
To love and to cherish. She said that too.
She had promised herself she would not think the word love while she said it.
She thought it. Then it was said, and could not be unsaid, and she was glad the window was there to look at.
Beside her Cole said his part in the voice he read the lessons in, plain and carrying, and his hands were steady, and if it cost him anything she could not have told it from his face.
"By the power vested in me," Ashworth said, "I pronounce you man and wife."
He closed the prayer book. He did not say the rest of it. For a moment everyone waited for the rest of it, and the clock on Mrs. Calder's mantel went on ticking, and Mr. Frederickson woke up and looked around for the coffee.
"That does for the law," Ashworth said. He considered the two of them, standing a careful arm's length apart, and his voice when it came again was dry and very tired. "The day you two come to me honest, I'll marry you again. Properly. I'll stand up for that one."
"You'll sit for this one and like it," Mrs. Calder said, and went for the coffee, and the little room became a small party.
There was bread pudding. Nathan shook Cole's hand hard and said nothing at all.
Nobody spoke of honesty again, and Ashworth drank his coffee in the big chair and watched the two of them over the rim of it.
Sunday morning she went up the aisle on her husband's arm.
Nobody said a word to her face; a word to your face was not how it was done here.
But the talk dipped when she passed and picked up again behind her, a shade lower than before.
Mrs. Garrett was warm to her, warmer than the occasion wanted.
Vane shook Cole's hand at the door and had somewhere else to look while he did it.
She had done sums in other people's faces all her life, and the sum in the faces that morning was a simple one: the board wants a married man, and the girl from Kansas married him inside the month, and the call not yet decided.
Mrs. Pritchard was waiting on the walk after the service, in her good black, her hands folded. She did not raise her voice. She never had to.
"Mrs. Reeve. I'll wish you joy, since it's the custom.
And I'll tell you what the county is telling itself, since nobody else will do it to your face.
The board wants a household in that parsonage.
Every soul in this church knows it. And a fortnight after the whole county learned it, here you stand, married.
I can do sums, Mrs. Reeve. I did them in the pew this morning, and I was not alone. "
Clara had an answer ready about spring weddings — bright, quick. She did not say it. The woman in front of her had not said one word that was false.
"You've not helped him," Mrs. Pritchard said, quieter.
"A single man in that pulpit was only a pity.
A man who would marry to get it is something worse.
And there are plenty saying so now without me.
" She inclined her head, precisely, the depth the occasion required and not a hair more, and went down the walk to where Willie and his mother waited at the gate.
Twenty feet off, in the church door, Cole was shaking hands down the line of the congregation, saying the small Sunday things, too far off to hear a word of it.
The parsonage was quiet that evening.
Clara put the last of her things away by lamplight — the dresses on their pegs, the linens in the press, Helen's letters in the table drawer.
When she had finished, the trunk stood empty in the middle of the floor.
It had stood half-unpacked since March, and now there was nothing in it at all, and she looked into the bottom of it for a while.
She had got what she asked for. A house she was not a guest in; the school promised back to her the day the call settled on him; her name changed; the pencil in her reach at last. And the call might never settle on him now.
She had married him to win him the call, and the marriage might be the very thing that lost it — and then the two of them would be bound to a bargain that had bought nothing at all.
She set the trunk in the corner, out of the way of the door.
Down the hall the study was shut, and under the door lay a thin line of lamplight. It was there when she banked the stove, and it was there when she went to her room, and if he moved at all behind it, she never heard him.