As hard as she’d studied them, once the jury left the room Alice couldn’t remember them as they’d been. Oddly, now, they all seemed to look like Mr. Morton. What might he have thought if he’d been sitting on the jury? Would he have argued in her defense if the others had turned against her, or would he have gone along, thinking to cause himself the least trouble? She tried to remember what she’d thought of Mr. Morton’s face when she’d first spied it on the deck of the ship from London, but she saw only its later versions. She gave full credit to its many kind looks along the years, but she couldn’t escape his final one. She closed her eyes to block it, as if he actually sat there in the room, and saw a circle. A rope. She opened her eyes and tried to conjure another image out of her old library of comforts: the house in Philadelphia, the high-walled ship, the widow’s house; Freeman carrying her from the fire and wrapping her in a white sheet. She trusted Freeman yet. She did. She did. The widow and I will take you home. That was what he had said.
So then, she would imagine that.
Alice saw herself at the widow’s house, sitting at her wheel, the widow at the fire stirring a sauce, Freeman at the table studying the newspaper. She saw Freeman look up at her and smile with a new affection born out of all those days together at Barnstable; she saw the widow look up and smile. Alice could feel her own smile. And yet something was wrong. Three smiles, and she could not connect them one to the other, all at the same time.
The sheriff announced the jury’s return, and the courtroom came awake like the Satucket marsh birds at dawn. Alice studied the jurymen’s faces as they entered, but all appeared bent on maintaining the look of a wall; she could make a case for one Morton among them, but for the first time she believed she saw a Verley too.
The chief justice said, “Gentlemen of the jury, are you agreed in your verdict?”
One of the older jurors stood—the one who had played with his waistcoat buttons—not Morton, not Verley. “We are agreed, Your Honor.”
“How say you?”
“We find the defendant not guilty.”
A great noise went up in the courtroom, a noise Alice didn’t know whether to take for good or bad. She looked to Freeman and saw that he stood beaming on her like the sun itself; that he could smile so at her swelled her heart with an exquisite ache, as if it were full of laughing and crying both, as if it were full of all of life. Her life. Oh, how could she ever have thought him unhandsome? How could she have failed to trust him?
The chief justice quieted the court. He said, “The prisoner shall be remanded into custody to await trial at Suffolk County Court on the secondary charge. This court is adjourned.”
The crowd rose to its feet in a boisterous, choppy wave and began to spill over itself for the doors. Alice looked about in confusion for Freeman; he stood bent over the clerk’s table signing papers. The clerk spoke to the sheriff; the sheriff and Freeman worked their way to Alice’s box, and the sheriff unlocked it. Freeman took her arm, drawing her back with him, away from the mob. Alice stumbled alongside him, as if dazed from a blow. What had the chief justice said? What secondary charge? She tugged at the hand that gripped her elbow. “What did he mean, sir, ‘secondary charge’?” Freeman didn’t seem to hear her, so she called out again, “What secondary charge, sir!”
Freeman continued to draw her toward the rear door; he continued to smile. He said, “You’re exonerated of the murder charge, Alice; there lies the important thing. But you must answer yet to the charge of running away from your master, and this must be done at the Suffolk County Court in Boston, as we discussed in gaol.”
Alice pulled free of him, backing away from him. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. He couldn’t betray her so! She had trusted him, she had told him of Verley, she had told him every terrible private shameful thing, and he had used it only to get her out of one court and into the next. Could he not know, could he not see, that it meant nothing, nothing, to walk free of this courtroom if it meant walking into that other? She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t. She couldn’t move one foot closer to that road. She felt herself sinking to the ground; she felt so certain that she’d sunk she couldn’t understand how the courtroom walls appeared to be moving past, as if Freeman had her by the arm again, as if, indeed, she walked with him out the courtroom door.
He was speaking yet. “You mustn’t let yourself get lost in the one small dark thing while the larger one shines so bright. I’ve arranged with the court to stand surety on your recognizance; you’ll return to Satucket to await a date at Suffolk when the circuit returns there in August; I’ll see you there myself, where we’ll tell your story to the justices there as we told it here, and with just such result. You need fear nothing, Alice. You may trust me with Suffolk as you trusted me with Barnstable. Now come, we must find the widow.”
They made their way outside and toward the street. The widow came up and hugged her violently. Nate was there, staring at her as if he’d never seen her in his life, making no move to ride in on the same wave and offer his own hug, but his hands weren’t in his pockets, his elbows didn’t wag; it was no joke now. The crowd moved in to gather around Freeman and offer their congratulation; it seemed to Alice the crowd was all that held her upright for her shivering. She felt as cold as she’d felt in that bloody bed in February and would have welcomed a fire despite the July heat, but Freeman looked in no great hurry to be shed of the people around him.
Alice endured what seemed a longer time than the jury had taken to form their verdict before Freeman began to ease them into the road. She looked around for Nate, to see if he followed, but she couldn’t find him. They stopped and started and stopped before they burst free of the well-wishers and continued at a decent pace until they reached a plain, solid, two-storied building bearing a small but determined plaque declaring it the office of EBENEZER FREEMAN, ESQUIRE, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. Alice saw the house and sign and thought that if she’d seen them before she might have understood better what would have happened to her; Freeman wasn’t a man to boast of his skills, but he would apply them with a quiet will; he wouldn’t veer before the wind; he would do what it took to gain his verdict. He would return her to Suffolk.
Freeman’s housekeeper must have been put on alert, for a fine roast turkey awaited them, and in no long time the celebrants had gathered around a deeply weighted table to feast on food and merriment. Freeman and the widow chatted over the various turns in the courtroom for a time, and then the widow addressed her.
“You sit quiet, child. You must be quite wrung out from this.”
“Yes, madam.”
“Indeed, you must feel it far beyond what I do, and I feel it to my teeth.”
“Yes, madam.”
“And you, Mr. Freeman,” the widow said. “All these months—”
“Yes.”
Alice looked up at the brittle sound of the word and found Freeman’s eyes fixed on her, not happy. Well, of course. He would expect her to be merry. He would expect her to be grateful. That Alice might expect him to know what his verdict cost her was her poor luck; if he hadn’t known it when she told him her story, he wouldn’t know it on this earth. But she knew what she owed him. She said, “I wish to say, sir, how grateful I am,” but to her own ears it sounded poor stuff to weigh against a life. She tried it over. “I know that in my life I cannot repay my debt to you—”
“You may repay me by looking the least bit glad of that life, Alice.”
“Yes, sir.” And she tried, indeed, she tried, but it didn’t come near, and she knew it. Freeman knew it. He set his tankard on the table with the kind of care that spoke of an internal violence. He said, “I must speak to Davis,” pushed back his chair, and went out.
FREEMAN’S HOUSE CONTAINED a finished second story with two comfortable chambers; the housekeeper put Alice and the widow in the east one; the west one no doubt belonged to Freeman. The bed tick that the women shared had been well stuffed, the linen cool and crisp; it was that bed more than any words of Freeman’s or the widow’s that brought Alice to an understanding of what Freeman had done for her. She might have slept this night on her old, damp pallet in the gaol; she might have wakened to a ride to the gallows, perhaps in the same rough cart with the same rough men who had taken her from Satucket.
The widow seemed in no mood to chat with Alice, which pleased Alice well enough. She pretended to fall quickly asleep and lay still until the widow’s breathing had dropped into the slow, shallow rhythm of real sleep, but Alice knew she would be experiencing no such thing for herself. She lay and listened to Freeman’s house sounds: the scraping of a shovel against the hearth as the housekeeper banked the fire, the tap of her heels as she retired to her bed, the click of a downstairs bedroom latch, the muffled striking of a clock, the distant noise of the tavern, the occasional pounding of a horse in the road. She couldn’t hear the ocean. After a time she heard the outer door open and close, a man’s tread on the stair, the west chamber door opening and closing: Freeman, in for the night then. Alice listened some more but heard nothing. She thought back to how she lay and listened to the house on the night of her escape from Verley; she thought, again, of circles. Oh, to be brought back there! She began to tremble. The widow stirred. Alice lay breathless until her trembling subsided, but after a time her limbs began to ache from the effort to keep them still; she slid from the sheets and crept down the stairs into the keeping room.
The banked fire gave off a faint, peachy glow that guided Alice to the candles on the table; she took one up, went to the fire, picked up a coal in the tongs, and blew on it until it fired the wick of her candle. Alice’s mental state on entering Freeman’s house had been such that she’d noticed little of its furnishings; she lifted the candle now and looked around her. The keeping room was as any keeping room was, full of the ordinary workings of day-to-day life; Freeman hadn’t spent his money here to excess, although the candle did pick out a modest gleam of brass and silver among the earthenware and iron; the keeping room told her nothing of the man she hadn’t already guessed. She looked at the closed door to a small room next to the pantry, no doubt where the housekeeper slept; she crept past it into the parlor. She stood in the middle of the parlor and turned in a circle, the candle held high, to discover what clues to the man this room held: a pair of smoky portraits of a wigged gentleman and a woman in a lace neckerchief, their eyes the only spots that took up the light of candle; two ladder-back chairs and a card table along the wall; a case of drawers along the other; two stuffed chairs by the fire; a pair of closed cupboards framing it. She crossed the parlor to the front hall, crossed the hall to the door opposite, and stepped through.
Freeman’s office. A long desk held two neat squares of piled papers, an inkwell, and three quills; one ladder-back chair sat behind the desk and one in front; a pair of well-worn stuffed chairs had been divorced from each other, one to hug the fire and another the window. But the walls were what took her; except for an additional outer door and the window, they were covered floor to ceiling by bookshelves. The light picked up the gold letters that ran across the worn leather spines packed cover to cover, thick between thin, short between tall. Alice stepped close and let her eye wander at random, picking up names familiar to her from Freeman’s discourses with Nate: Locke, Cicero, Plutarch, Homer. She stepped closer and pulled out a thin pamphlet too narrow to carry its title on its spine: A Lecture on Earthquakes, and was surprised that she could recognize the name of Nate’s Harvard tutor, John Winthrop, as the author. It sat on the shelf flanked by The Theory and Practice of Brewing on one side and The History of the Pleas of the Crown on the other. Next came Sir Edward Coke’s Reports of Cases and Sir Francis Bacon’s New Abridgement of Law. There at the earthquakes, then, sat the line between Freeman’s professional life and his personal one, the two halves strangers to each other’s contents, perhaps, but their spines touching just the same, the line between them invisible.
Had Freeman read all these books? Alice little doubted it. She drew the candle along the shelves, trying to pick out which spine looked the most worn; she settled on a single, small volume of the Works of Shakespeare. She pulled it from the shelf and examined the contents: Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew. The book fell open at the middle; a swamp maple leaf had been pressed between the pages of The Merchant of Venice. Not Alice’s favorite tale, but one did not press leaves between the pages most frequently turned. Yet as she turned the page she noticed faded pen marks against many of the lines: But love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit…Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath…in such a night…Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls, and sigh’d his soul toward the Grecian tents, where Cressid lay that night…. Alice turned from the Merchant to Much Ado and again found marks: Is not marriage honorable in a beggar? Is not your lord honourable without marriage?…By my troth, my lord, I cannot tell what to think of it but she loves him with an enraged affection….
Alice closed the book and replaced it where she’d found it. If the marked passages held new clues to Freeman, they weren’t the clues that Alice wanted. And besides, how many years ago had he marked them? Since that time he’d used the book to press his leaves in.
Alice looked around the rest of the room; she spied the stuffed chair by the fire and saw that it had kept the imprint of the man; she crossed the room and sat down in it, the arms of the chair enclosing her. She stared, again, at the shelves. The man of law, who had read all these books, who had bought all these books, who had freed her from the gallows, surely, surely, such a man could free her from Verley as well. In the courtroom, after the verdict, after the news of the second trial, she had thought of the word betrayal, and so she had felt it then, but she wondered if she could use that word now, having seen the man’s house, having seen his books. He wasn’t a man to bend to trickery. Indeed, as Alice thought, she remembered that during her sickness in the gaol there had been some talk of Suffolk, talk of another case she hadn’t dreamed could be her own. If Freeman had indeed explained the risk to her then, if he believed Alice to have understood him then, if Alice had in fact made no objection, how could she accuse Freeman of betraying her now?
But what if Alice had objected? What would Freeman have done? The same? Alice couldn’t know. She might stare at the man’s face until it blurred and she couldn’t know.
Alice made her way back to the keeping room, snuffed the candle, returned it to the table, and fumbled her way to the stairs. Freeman’s door sat tightly closed. She entered the room opposite and slipped quietly between the sheets; the widow’s breathing changed, but she didn’t move or speak.
Alice lay quiet, trying to pull up some kind of waking dream, any kind of dream, to lull her into sleep, but the old one of Freeman saving her from the fire wouldn’t work with the widow so near. She came closest with the image of the widow’s house, but the three smiles that wouldn’t meet disrupted her again.
By morning Alice could count for certain only one brief moment of sleep, from the first quail song to the first real fingers of sun, but Verley had managed to camp even there. He and Alice stood at the bar in a courtroom much like the courtroom Alice had just left. Freeman stood between. Verley’s hands reached for Alice, as they usually did in her dreams, and Freeman said, “I don’t want you to touch her!” But Verley towered over Freeman, his arm span wider than Freeman’s; Freeman couldn’t stop the hands from coming across.