THE FROST HAD not broken. She knew before she opened her eyes.
Silence lay abed beside her husband. His breathing was slow and steady. The children snuffled softly in their blankets. Beyond the log walls of the cabin a single bird braved the cold to greet an unnatural dawn. Its voice rose and rose, spinning to shrill, impossible heights before falling quiet, and only when it was gone did Silence rise. She pushed the curtain aside, stoked a small fire in the woodstove, shed her nightdress for her day clothes. Her throat was tight, her mouth tinged with the metallic taste of fear. It was too cold. Spring was late in coming. The trees would not blossom. The wheat would not grow. It was too cold.
She moved without noise, stepping over her children. Seven small sleepers all in a row. Her mother had borne only one child that survived infancy, as had her grandmother before her, but what they had lacked in fertility Silence had made up and more. Her littlest, Grace, born five years ago in a flood of blood and pain, was curled like a kitten in a nest of blankets by the hearth.
It was May of 1816, but there were no leaves on the trees, no grass sprouting in fresh green shoots, no apple blossoms covering the hills with a delicate spring blush. There was only cold and frost and the eerie dry fog that sat upon the land like smoke, never washing away with the frequent rains. It was a wicked spring, a bitter spring. Yesterday her sons had come home with eyes blacked and lips bloodied by the fists of boys in town who blamed them—blamed her—for the ill-fortuned weather.
The townspeople remembered when this had happened before: during the summer of 1805, when her mother, Fearful, had died, and fifteen years before that, at the passing of her grandmother Rejoice. The apple trees had turned brown in mourning, the flowers withered, the grass dried: the entire Lovegood orchard cast into an unnatural autumn. It had not lasted—the wicked weather faded after the dead were buried and the living had shed their tears—but the memories endured.
This time, unlike before, the cold reached beyond the orchard and chilled the whole of the valley, the whole of Vermont, perhaps the whole of the world. Neighbors were packing their carts to move south. The Smith family had already gone to their cousins in Virginia. The Van Tassel brothers were looking even farther afield; they planned to board a ship in Portsmouth that would take them to Charleston, where, it was said, snow never fell, and certainly not at the end of May.
John had asked her, two days ago, if they might consider leaving as well. He had asked with hunched shoulders and lowered eyes, knowing before he spoke what the answer would be, but Silence had allowed herself to consider the question. She had never been anywhere beyond the Hollow—they were calling it Abrams Valley these days, giving Enoch Abrams and his wretched family all the more reason to puff their chests as they strutted through field and town—and she could not even imagine what they might find outside this valley. The world, when she allowed herself the luxury of contemplating it, stretched forever in every direction as an endless expanse of trees, shadows as dark as night and twice as cold, and it took her breath away, the hugeness of it, how far a person might walk and never see home again.
“We will stay,” John had said when Silence did not answer. “The weather will break soon.”
Silence gathered her shawl around her shoulders and stepped outside. The morning was gray and still, trees and earth and sky the same color that was not a color, branches blending into clouds where the forest reached for the dawn. She knew with a certainty as solid as the mountain peaks that John was wrong. The weather would not break. The trees would not blossom. Her fingers itched to take up a knife as her grandmother was said to have done—long ago, when she was a woman alone in the wilderness—to slice her skin and drip blood over the trees starving for warmth, for life, to give of herself freely to wake the orchard from below.
But she could no more coax the apple trees to bud than John could force the sun to shine. Silence broke a thin layer of ice in the water pail. Fetching water was Prudence’s task, but Silence was loath to wake her on so bleak a morning. The children would be hungry, and John’s face would grow pinched with guilt as they grumbled, and he would check his mean stores of bullets and powder, offer an empty promise of fresh meat before vanishing into the mountains again. Dreams of crackling fatty venison sustained them no more than crops that did not sprout, apples that did not blossom, yet dream they did, as their bellies rumbled and their skin grew thin.
Every time John left, Silence believed he would never return. Her mother’s voice, lost to her these eleven years but still clear in her memory, whispered in her mind in every idle moment, and most insistently in the quiet before she slept: He was a good man once, but he will change. He will falter. He will leave. That’s what men do. We haven’t anybody but ourselves to trust.
Silence shook away the echo of her mother’s nervous prophecies. Fearful had chosen her husband poorly, a lazy man and a wastrel who mightn’t have been Silence’s father at all, if village tale-tellers were to be believed. But Silence was not her mother, for all that she could feel her like a wraith behind her shoulder or a poison in her blood. John was not clever, but he was steady, and right now, on this grim morning, there was work to be done that could not wait for the black cloud of her mother’s memory to pass. She picked up the water pail, flung the chips of ice over the ground. The earth around the cabin was hard and slick, frozen overnight into bumps and troughs. She chose her steps carefully, eyes on the ground. She could ill afford a fall.
When she looked up, the Abrams men were there.
Enoch Abrams and his brothers stood at the edge of the orchard, where the trees met the muddy track. Enoch was the eldest, the tallest and broadest and most imposing; Gideon and Zadock looked as though they had been cast in the same mold as their eldest brother, but more clumsily, with grittier clay and less care. Gideon carried a flintlock musket on his shoulder. Zadock, a pitchfork.
Enoch carried only his leather-bound Bible.
“Good morrow, Sister Derry,” he said, and his voice, his booming preacher’s voice, it trembled through the orchard with force enough to shake icicles from branches.
Silence straightened her shoulders and narrowed her eyes. “My name is Lovegood, Enoch Abrams, and you are trespassing without leave on my land.”
Gideon Abrams snorted, loud as a horse. “The land is your husband’s, as your name would be, if he were man enough to control his wife.”
“How early you rose to carry these childish insults to me.” Silence did not let her voice tremble. Men like Enoch Abrams craved the fear of others more than sustenance, more than water. “Does your good wife know you are about this morning?”
But shapes moved in the orchard behind the Abrams brothers, and her bravado quailed. A dozen men or more emerged from the gray morning shadows. There was William Prewitt from across the Hollow, and his two grown sons. There was George Dobbes and his brother Eliot, both gaunt as skeletons from having survived the fever that took their parents. The Howe boys, all three of them; the youngest was no older than her girl Pru but wore a countenance of such twisted anger he might have been an old man. Many of them were armed, if not with guns then with spades and pitchforks. The Twisdon boy, no more than fourteen and motherless since autumn, carried a hatchet.
Silence had only a water pail, and an empty one at that.
The sharp metallic taste of fear was in her throat again, and with it the steady thumping drumbeat of her heart.
“We have not come to sow hardship where already too much has been sown,” Enoch Abrams said. “We have come as friends and neighbors. We entreat you to hear us.”
Silence marveled that the Bible did not burst into flames in his hands, so shameless were the lies spilling from his wormlike lips.
“The whole of the Hollow can hear you,” she said, “yet you have said nothing worth hearing. What do you want?”
A murmur passed through the gathered men. It did not surprise them to hear a Lovegood woman speak so forthrightly—but if they had been strong men, able to hear a woman’s voice and not quiver in cowardly disgust, they would not be following Enoch Abrams. They avoided her eyes, every man and boy. When Abrams took a breath to raise his voice, Silence knew what he was going to say before he said it.
“We want you to lift the curse you have set upon this valley,” he said.
So there it was.
Disappointment tasted like blood, like iron, like biting through her tongue. Her mother’s warnings come to pass, her orchard’s frailty, the predictability of men, they all tasted the same. The whispers that had been gathering all through this liars’ spring now blossomed into accusation, rooted in fear more fertile than the still-frosted earth. She looked at each of her neighbors in turn, but not one looked back. They were looking to him, to Enoch Abrams and the Bible he held.
“I have set no curse upon the land,” Silence said, but words were nothing but breath when spoken by a woman, and her denial only fueled their suspicion. The Twisdon child raised his hatchet and shook it menacingly, looking so much like her own boys when they played at soldiers that her heart ached with the absurdity of it.
“You are not a God-fearing woman,” Enoch Abrams said. “Your mother was not a God-fearing woman. Your grandmother—”
“Was not a woman at all,” said Zadock Abrams, to a snicker of laughter.
Enoch continued undeterred: “For as long as your unnatural line has claimed this land, there has been evil upon it. This witch weather is proof of the corruption within. My family and I, we were content to leave it be when it harmed only your own—”
“You have never been content to leave it be,” Silence snapped, anger roiling through her in a cold black wave. “Your grandfather did not leave it be when he set his fool’s militia upon my grandmother under false pretenses. Your father did not leave it be when he hounded my mother to the grave all for want of a few fertile acres. Do you think me a fool, to believe in your good intent? This spring may be wicked, that I do not deny, but it is not my doing, and my family suffers as much as yours. You have been so blinded by your greed for our—”
“Mum?”
She had not heard the cabin door open. She knew before she turned: it was Prudence, always Prudence, early riser, hard worker, a child who had never caused her parents a minute of fuss. She stood in the doorway, her small pale face etched with worry.
“Go inside, child,” Silence said.
But there was John at their daughter’s back, his hand on her shoulder to push her aside.
“What is this?” he asked, glaring at their gathered neighbors.
John looked untidy and half-wild, his shirt untucked, his beard untrimmed. Silence knew what they said about her family—her useless husband, her feral children, and her so cold and unnatural a woman—and in knowing, it was hard to hold on to the anger that had straightened her spine. The black wave of fury ebbed, and weakened, and became gray, gray as the wrongful winter day around them, gray as the hesitant morning light, and it seemed to her beyond absurd that she should be here with her water pail, defending a miserable little house and a miserable worthless husband and seven children she could scarcely look at some days, each one of them an ache in her belly that had not faded when they’d ripped themselves free, all because she wasn’t a witch and she hadn’t set a curse upon the land, and wouldn’t even know how, however attractive the idea might be.
Her husband was talking. Enoch Abrams was talking. They might have been speaking in tongues, for all their words meant to her, the empty rumbles of men. They would pretend now the quarrel was about their land, their religion, their rules, their pride, the things men claimed for themselves while women toiled behind them, working until their fingers bled so that husbands and sons could bluster and rage.
She looked back to the house. Prudence still lingered in the doorway, disobedient for the first time in her young life.
Go inside, Silence thought. Go inside, my child, go back to sleep.
“You will leave this land,” John was saying. He strode forward, more shambling than imposing.
Enoch Abrams’s lips curled in a sneer. “Your wife has brought wickedness to my valley. Our crops cannot take root because of the evil she has set upon us.”
“Your valley?” John scoffed. “Do these men gathered behind you know how you covet their farms?”
“Farms made useless by witchcraft,” Enoch Abrams countered. “By her witchcraft.”
He raised a hand and extended a finger. Silence did not let herself step back. She did not quake in fear and she did not flinch when John slapped Enoch Abrams’s offending finger down. She did not retreat when Gideon and Zadock charged toward him.
They would say, later, she was a woman of ice and stone, to watch open-eyed and unmoving as Gideon’s musket jerked and fired, to remain still as John yelped in pain, scorched by the muzzle flash if not the bullet, as he swung blindly in retaliation, as the Bible knocked from Enoch’s hands fell to the ground and the pitchfork brandished by Zadock, a barely formed man of greed and ire, swung and jabbed and found home in a hunger-tight gut.
They would say she was an unnatural woman to watch with such clear eyes as her husband, her own husband, stumbled with his hands clutched to his middle. The red seeping between his fingers was the only color on a gray, gray morning. Her neighbors faded into the wood, silent and cowardly, leaving a woman alone with seven children and a dying man, and a winter frost that would not break no matter how purposefully the days marched toward summer. They would say she was as cold as the unthawed ground to lift her eyes to the orchard as her husband passed, that the trees concerned her more than the man, but John Derry had not been born on this land. The orchard would shudder briefly for him when he passed, not weep as it had for her mother and grandmother. The lasting wounds would be hidden beneath the skin of the wife and children he left behind.
“Silence,” John said.
Prudence was crying, the other children waking, the morning full of sound and fear, but their screams might have come from another valley, or another world, so muffled were they to their mother’s ears. Silence’s hands were hot with her husband’s blood. She did not remember falling to her knees beside him. She did not remember pressing her palms to the wound in his gut.
“Silence,” he said, and he died.
She did not remember touching his face, but there was a smear of blood there, where his weathered skin met his graying whiskers, just below his eye.