Page 30 of The Invisible Hour

Nathaniel locked himself in his room and tried to write, but he met with no success. The writing he conjured added up to nothing at all. He felt as he had at the age of nine when he’d been separated from the rest of the world because of his injury. He knew he was meant to write the book that would mean so much to Mia, but words seemed as elusive as sparrows, flying out the open window as he tossed away crumpled pieces of failed work. He wished he’d begged Mia to allow him to read the book she carried with her, so that he might have memorized the words he now feared he’d never write. She had insisted it might ruin him to know too much, but wasn’t he ruined anyway?

He gave up and put his pen away and concentrated on walking. He thought of the things people did for love, what fools they were, ruining their lives, giving up their homes and families, wanting someone so badly nothing else mattered. None of life made sense to him now, and he saw guilt and hurt everywhere. He searched the meadows and fields for the places it was said witches were buried for they had not been allowed to be interred in holy ground. Their last resting places were under beech trees and out by the high land overlooking the harbor. Nathaniel went down on his knees to beg for forgiveness. He’d begun to wonder if the magic he’d experienced was meant to make him suffer so that he would pay penance for his family’s history of brutality and make amends for the deeds of his great-great-grandfather the judge. Nathaniel stripped off his clothing and stood naked under the moon and told the devil to take his soul if that would give him back the woman he wanted. But no evil spirit claimed him; there were only the bats fluttering in the trees in a nearby orchard and the mosquitoes rising in cyclones from the grass. Three months had passed, and Mia had not returned to him. He stood in the place where he had first spied her asleep in the tall grass, but all he saw were clouds of birds circling above him.

To write was to bleed, and since Mia had left, there was nothing inside him. He needed to prick himself to draw blood, to allow the hurt inside him to flow out. But writing was nothing to him now, mere fantasy and foolishness. Instead of sitting at his desk he continued to roam the hillsides with his arms stretched out, a scarecrow dressed in black, thinner and more angular than he used to be, his hair so long he tied it back with a leather band. He waited to lift into the sky, and yet he remained on earth, with his only escape to be found at the taverns. He had come to understand the men who slept in alleyways, the brokenhearted and the ruined. He cursed his own good fortune in finding Mia in the field, and he wished he’d never known what happiness was. Worse than never having had something was to have had it and then have it taken away.

THERE CAME A TIME when Nathaniel failed to return for two nights. When they had no word from him, the family could only imagine that the drink he was consuming had taken him over, as it did many men in Salem, rich and poor alike. Their mother took to her bed, besieged with worry that her son might do something rash. Men in his condition could easily harm themselves by accident or on purpose, stumble off the dock, pick a fight with the wrong antagonist, wind up murdered in an alley, robbed of what they had. When there was no other choice, Elizabeth donned a hooded black cape and went after her brother. She was intent on escorting Nathaniel home before some tragedy could befall him. She alone knew what tortured him, and because of this, she was willing to go where a woman of good standing was never seen.

Unlike Mia, who had understood what it would mean to herself and to Nathaniel if she stayed, it seemed to Elizabeth that her brother had lost the ability to tell fiction from fact. What Elizabeth feared most, more than alcohol or bad company or delusions, was that Nathaniel might ignore his great talent, and that was something she would not allow. Had she his opportunities, she would have written five books already, or perhaps ten, but since the world was closed to her, and the door was wide open for him, she would not stand by as he threw away the realm of possibilities which existed in the books he was destined to write.

Walking along the wharf, Elizabeth stopped to observe a ship that would soon be leaving for Barbados. How she wished she could hide away below deck and travel to a tropical land where no one knew her. Her imagination was considered far too large for a woman to possess, and she could well imagine what was out there somewhere. Blue skies, endless seas, a whitewashed house that was hers alone, shelves of books, dark rum, a bed with white cotton sheets, a place where she would not be forever known as Nathaniel’s sister. Ebe wished she could dress as a boy, and sneak onto that ship, and live a life of freedom in the masquerade that a false identity would allow. She longed to do as she pleased, as her brother said his imaginary woman from another time had done. How she wished that she, too, could dress without care, walk the streets late at night, write and read as she pleased, and not be judged as a woman.

Elizabeth burned as she imagined her mirror life, a world which did not avoid passion and risk and possibility. She suspected that the colors of this life would consist of brilliant shades of blue. Her mouth was set in a grim line, for in Salem she only saw in black and white, and gray of course, the gray of the landscape and of the horizon, the dim shade of the Puritans’ legacy, the monotone of the life she led.

Elizabeth peered in the windows of several taverns, at last locating her brother in a hovel. Women were not allowed in such establishments, unless they sold their services, but Elizabeth entered anyway. She went directly to Nathaniel to drag him from this disreputable place. The sailors drinking there hooted and clapped and raised their mugs in a toast when they saw a lady in their midst.

“That’s right, girlie,” one called in a rough voice. “Go ahead and teach that fellow how to behave. It looks like you know how to be a man, miss, better than he does.”

“I know better than most of you, that much is obvious,” Elizabeth replied, which quieted the crowd and made them glare at her. They didn’t need a woman schooling them or talking back, certainly not one so plain in appearance and full of herself.

“I think you might get us killed,” Nathaniel said, slurring his words, a frown on his handsome face.

“Then walk quickly and don’t look back,” Elizabeth suggested, linking her arm through his.

They hastily left the wharf and headed home, with Nathaniel stumbling beside his sister. All the while, he continued to apologize for not taking better care of her and the rest of the family until Elizabeth commanded him to hush.

“Stop blaming yourself,” she insisted.

“What made me think I had the right to happiness? You surely don’t expect that for yourself.”

“But I do, dear brother,” Elizabeth answered in a surprisingly gentle manner. “I just know I’ll never get it.”

It was no surprise that a woman was at the heart of the mess her brother had found himself in. Nathaniel’s extreme good looks and charm had led him into entanglements he had later regretted, although, it was true, this situation seemed to be different. Still, Nathaniel had always been a true romantic, and Elizabeth envied him that trait. Had she not been forced to live within the constraints of a thousand rules, she might be much the same, falling head over heels with anyone she happened to meet. The very idea of something that would never happen made her wince.

“Do you think I can’t see you are in the hold of some spiritual agony?” Elizabeth said to her brother. She felt duty bound to remind him that what he wrote was not the waking world in which they lived their lives. There was no magic here in Salem, Massachusetts, and no mysteries. Mia would ruin his life, Elizabeth vowed, and he would ruin hers in return. “She spoke to me of other times, but, Nathaniel, we are not living in a dream, as much as we might want to. Do you not think I don’t wish for miracles and magic every time I look into a mirror and see who I am and what is expected of me?”

“And what is expected of me? To forget the woman I love?”

“You cannot have what is not meant to be and if you try, you will break your own heart, Brother, and you will break hers as well.”

Nathaniel knew he was lucky to have such a wise sister and he responded after some thought. “You’re correct, as usual.”

“Of course I am,” she said. “Just as I’m correct when I speak about your greatness as a writer.” Elizabeth was a pragmatist; had she not been, she would have leapt off the dock to dash herself upon the rocks. Instead, she told herself that each day must be a garden in which she grew whatever was possible given the season. “You’re alive and well,” she consoled her brother. “Think of all of those who are not.”

Their home soon loomed before them, the closed shutters, the peeling paint, the heavy drapes concealing the gloom within. “We do not live in our house,” Nathaniel said, so tipsy he could hardly stand. “We only vegetate.”

Their garden was filled with twisted vines brought across the sea from the Barbary Coast a hundred years earlier by their sea captain ancestors, transplanted to each house where they had lived. It was nearly impossible to see the lilies that struggled to bloom in the shade, or the herbs Louisa did her best to cultivate, for all that they grew was overtaken by the stubborn vines that simply refused to die, even when pulled out by their roots.

“You never leave your den,” Nathaniel said, referring to Elizabeth’s small, cluttered chamber. “And I never leave the upper story of my owl’s nest.”

“You’re on the ground now,” Elizabeth said pointedly. Self-pity from a man was something she could not abide, not when she had a woman’s issues to deal with. It was time for him to consider his good fortune and privilege. “You could easily walk away and leave that haunted room of yours.”

Nathaniel understood that Mia had done the right thing. She had gone back to her proper life, the one in which she found his book in the library and was saved from the life she had been leading in some way he didn’t quite understand. The question of whether or not he would ever write that book was a heavy burden when all of his words were sparrows, and each one flew away and couldn’t be caught no matter how he might try.

AFTER FETCHING NATHANIEL FROM his drunken evening, Elizabeth convinced the family that something had to be done. True, she felt somewhat responsible for her brother’s despair, but she kept that to herself, never mentioning Mia. She had done all she could, now it was time to meet with their uncle Robert so they might come together and set things right. They all agreed it was preposterous to imagine that Nathaniel’s condition had been brought about by the family curse, that inheritance of guilt placed upon them by the witches their ancestor had sent to the gallows, and yet they wondered if they weren’t meant to suffer more than other people. Louisa reminded them local folklore claimed that no one in their family would ever be happy.

“Who on earth is happy?” Elizabeth said, annoyed, her high-pitched voice breaking the spell of their shared despair. This was a practical matter, she declared, and Nathaniel had been ill before, after his accident when he was a boy. They were all well aware that his anguish often occurred in the dead of winter, when he couldn’t stop writing and refused to leave his room, and now summer had become a season of despondency as well, and soon enough they would be headed into autumn, a time that affected him strangely as well.

It was decided that Nathaniel was suffering from nerves, as many young men and women did. No one would dare to speak of madness, for they would not allow such a fate to befall their dear Nathaniel. He was brilliant, and a dazzling mind was a challenging thing to possess.