12

I stand at the window, watching down the street with eager eyes for Nathaniel. I will know as soon as we meet if my conviction that I am his heart’s occupation is correct.

It is October, and will be the first time we lay eyes on each other in nearly three months, since his mysterious travels north. He sent a letter that he would return the Cuba Journal to me, and I replied eagerly, inviting him to come today. Mother moves between hanging laundry and caring for George and Father, who has now taken ill, and Mary is visiting Elizabeth in Boston, so Nathaniel and I will have privacy.

It is a fine autumn day, and I will suggest a walk outdoors. Since my return from the seaside, I have resolved to spend more hours at exercise than at rest, more time in the moving air of nature than in the still breath of illness and lethargy in this house. I have even maintained my refusal of morphine. Mesmerism has helped my head, and I am nearly as strong as I was in my Cuba days.

I return my attention to Elizabeth’s letter, and feel strangely stirred by her latest recommendation that I complete an illustration for Nathaniel’s story “The Gentle Boy,” to be issued as a small book, financed by Miss Susan Burley, one of Salem’s most prominent arts patrons. I will need to draw swiftly, since a publication date has been agreed upon, and the engraver must have sufficient time to work. Elizabeth has enclosed the text for my perusal. I am lost in the reading of this simple yet sad tale, and just as it concludes, I am startled to hear Nathaniel’s voice behind me.

“Have you heard of the daguerreotype, Miss Peabody?”

I drop my papers, and in moments he is at my feet collecting them. He turns his face up to me, the autumn sunshine bathing his tanned, glowing skin. The impulse that passes between us is so strong that he closes his eyes. Yes! He has felt it. He kneels with one fist on the floor as if to gain his bearings and says, “It is an invention that presses your likeness into silver, by some magic. How I wish I had a daguerreotype of you standing in the light, my reading angel.”

He has called me his angel!

He pushes off the floor and stands to his full height, so I must look up at him. His gaze returns to the papers, where Elizabeth’s letter is now on top of the pile.

“I can see by the handwriting that this letter is from your eldest sister,” he says. “I know she must have asked you to illustrate my story for me, because it is I who suggested it to her.”

I flinch that he has seen her first, and the man not only sees my face, but answers my jealous thought as if I uttered it aloud.

“Elizabeth and I have only written to each other, dove. You are the first Peabody sister I have beheld since my travels.”

Dove. I am assuaged.

“How did you get into my house without my admitting you?” I say, a cheeky lift in my voice.

“Your dear mother was in the backyard hanging sheets, and saw me coming. I took a new way to your house, hoping to surprise you. She was going to escort me to you, but your father called through the open window to her, and she left me to find you on my own.”

“And is it not heaven to stand here together in the light shafts without anyone between us to divert our attention?” I say.

I am aware that Elizabeth is still between us in the letter, and I pull the papers from his hands and drop them on the table. He swallows like one deprived of water for a long time.

“Come, Nathaniel. I want to walk out of doors with you and hear about your adventures.”

It is the first of many walks we take that fall. The first of many excursions in each other’s company to artistic salons. The first of many visits in which the shy writer becomes a fixture in our parlor. Sisters, brothers, parents, and friends flit in and out of our company, like birds dipping for drinks in a cool pond, but we exist more and more in a private oasis. I complete my illustration for his story, and he makes his first public recognition of our mutual affection in his eloquent dedication of the book to me. Painters, patrons, and Nathaniel himself praise my illumination of his words through my art, and it seems to me the very symbol of what I prophesied years ago in my poem.

My unknown is now known.

On a December night, he sits in my parlor at the fireside, Christmas cranberries strung on the tree, flickering candles warming every corner of my home, ribbons and wreaths hung in abundance by the dear hands of students and neighborhood children. Nathaniel has presented me with a flower I gave him months ago, pressed into a brooch of crystal for me to wear over my heart. I gave him a volume of Wordsworth’s poetry. But my sweet, poor love has never had a piece of art from anyone, and it is all he longs for. Tonight I will draw him and put every drop of my feeling for him in it. I will give it to him as a taste of myself, which I also wish to give to him in body and soul.

“Do sit still,” I tease. “You attempt to distract me with your foxy glances and your fidgeting, but I will not be waylaid.”

“Did I ever tell you of the fox I met in the mountains of New Hampshire, on my solitary travels?” he says.

“No, and now is not the time. Whenever you speak of your wilderness adventure, you are overtaken by a need to pace, and I want you motionless.”

“Then I shall sleep like Van Winkle, and when you finish, you will not recognize me. I will be ancient and white haired, and a mere shadow of the strapping man I now am.”

My charcoal sculpts and shades the smoothness of his lower lip, and I am able to complete this drawing in a single sitting. I can see Nathaniel clearly with my artist’s eye, and I have no reservation about giving this extension of myself to him, because I know that I have found the one who is meant for me. I use my finger to soften the shading on his lips and around his eyes, and pass the paper to him. He puts his hand over his heart.

“Your fingers flatter me. I know I am not this beautiful, but only become so in your gaze.”

“You are wrong. I see you as you are. And I will know your face at every coming age, and it will be familiar and welcome to me always.”

He turns at the seriousness in my voice, and stares into my eyes. Clear as if he has spoken aloud, I hear in my mind the words, I love you, Sophia. Do you love me?

Yes! I think. I am yours.

And then the smile begins, the angelic transformation that lifts his entire face from his forehead to his full, soft lips, basking me in its glory.

January 1839

We are engaged. Secretly.

Once the kisses begin, we are intoxicated with each other. Separation is sweet frustration because it allows us the poetry of love letters and the joy of reunions, but the absences feel like small eternities. How I long to proclaim our love to the world, but Nathaniel is terrified that doing so will hurt Elizabeth, and shock his mother and sisters.

When Nathaniel’s father died, Nathaniel became the man in the house at a young age. Provided for by uncles of varying sternness and indifference, Nathaniel enjoyed a unique closeness with the women of his family, though it was assumed rather than expressed. Ebe has an almost unnatural devotion to Nathaniel, and if he tells her he plans to marry and leave them forever, he is afraid of the great pain that will meet them all. In a way, he thinks it will be like his father leaving and dying all over again.

Then there is Nathaniel’s wish to earn a steady living to support me, and this has led to his acceptance of a job—with the assistance of my Elizabeth, who knows everyone—as Boston’s customs inspector. The salary is fifteen hundred dollars a year, so he will make no fortune, but he may count on the political appointment while the Democrats remain in power, and he will make a name and reputation for himself.

I scheme to get to Boston, where my two sisters and my love now reside, and it is not long before I am studying with the sculptor Shobal Clevenger. Though I will be under his tutelage for only a short time, every minute I am not sitting with the master, I will be with my other master, my love, my husband, for this is how we now refer to each other—husband and wife—though there has most certainly not been any communion of body to make it so. No, it is our complete mingling of spirit that has married us, with maybe just a bit of kissing and touching to quiet the fires.

Mother must sense my combustibility, because she cautions me by mail as much as she did while I resided in Cuba about how often I see Nathaniel, and how I must restrain my ebullience of feeling. She does not know that her request makes as much sense as asking the falls at Niagara to cease their gushing.