*   *   *
  
    Constance’s business in town had been the conclusion of a few minor lawsuits. Her father’s policy with arrears in rent was to let it go for a quarter or two before bringing the matter to law, and she had always done the same. Nevertheless, there were always, each session, one or two tenants who could not pay, and Constance had not worn cloth dresses every day as a child because her father forgave all his tenants’ debts.
 
   This should, of course, have been Nathaniel’s business, but he had refused to go because he wouldn’t understand any of it. Constance had pointed out that he would never understand it if he didn’t make some effort to do so. Natty had turned and left the room at this point, which Constance took as a sign that he knew, even if he wouldn’t admit it, that she was right. “You purpose let your children see your sister cipher out your accounts?” she had said to the empty staircase. The house was quiet, and there was no question that Natty heard her.

    The General Court met the day after Master Gorton’s sermon. The body in full, which included the house of deputies, the smaller court of seven assistants, and the governor, convened in the morning, found little to do, and dissolved. After lunch, the assistants had taken care of more weighty affairs : important contracts, wills, weddings and civil suits above the value of ten belts of wampum and a bolt of cotton. Constance’s own had been the last wedding to fall into this category, and there were none today. After a second recess, the court’s attention turned to more mundane matters. There were suits for fraud, suits for breach of contract, and suits for arrears of rent, which included Constance’s business. This was dispatched in the smaller rear room of the building, where there was a fire, as it was not considered appropriate for Constance, who, landowner or not, remained a woman, to raise her voice in public. When the governor and assistants had returned, frowning slightly at having to return to the chill and drafts of the larger room, general business recommenced with suits for mercantile debt. This last category included Thomas Hutchinson.

    The long, low-ceilinged court room was crowded, and the windows on both sides had been thrown open. The magistrates sat at a table in the front of the room, the secretaries at a smaller table to one side, and the rest, plaintiffs and litigants, witnesses and rubberneckers, squeezed onto the rows of benches that had, that morning, been occupied by the deputies. Constance, had gone outside briefly after the conclusion of her own suits, and when she returned found the court room more crowded than she had expected. Not a tall woman, she had to press to the front of the crowd along the rear wall so as to be able to see. As soon as they recognized her, or, at least, as soon as they took note of her clothes and demeanor and guessed the three or four people she might have been, several of those seated in front of her on the benches offered her their seats, but she declined and remained standing.

    Hutchinson was sitting on one of the benches toward front of the room, looking rumpled and oddly resigned. Several times, he took off his spectacles, polished them on the end of the little length of cotton he wrapped around his neck over the collar of his shirt, and put them on again. His copper-haired servant sat next to him, and continually twisted around to take in the crowd behind him. Adriaen, sitting at the large table with the other assistants, noticed that Constance was there, and tugged the brim of his hat to her. Constance, not wearing a hat, nodded.

    The court quite naturally found for Phipps, Hutchinson’s landlord. Hutchinson’s goods, including plate and cotton, were ordered seized for payment of his back rent and other miscellaneous bills – others of his creditors had thrown their lot in with Phipps in hopes of getting their money more quickly – with any remainder, after his creditors were satisfied, to be returned to Hutchinson within fourteen days.  
 
Hutchinson did what Constance had rather expected he would do. He contested, politely, and when given the final nay on the matter, sat down, took off his hat, ran his hand over his hair, put his hat back on, and let things take their course. He stood to lose his blue coat, his boots, his spare shirts, his sheets, the cotton he placed over his supper table, and all of his drinking glasses. An exception was made for his spectacles, after Hutchinson had explained what they were and given a demonstration of their use by lending them, briefly, to a slightly short-sighted member of the court. The artifacts in question, already boxed up as ordered (Hutchinson had balked at this, it seemed, until it was pointed out that he and his hired boy could take them back home again with them if it should happen that Phipps lost) and placed in a stack at one side of the room, were transferred to Phipps, Hutchinson signed in the court register that he had handed them over, Phipps signed below Hutchinson that he had received them, and the matter was at an end.

    Phipps, looking pleased with himself, thanked the magistrates, took his boxes, and squeezed his way through the crowd and out of the courtroom. The secretary was already calling the next case. Hutchinson sighed, stood up, pulled his blanket over his shoulders and threaded his way down the aisle toward the door. His servant, hands in his pockets, followed along behind. Constance was close to the door, near enough that she could have reached out and caught hold of Hutchinson’s blanket as he passed, but neither of them saw her.

*   *   *

    She waited through three or four other cases, intending to speak to Adriaen, but in the end left before the court had concluded. It was already twilight. The street was empty, and it had grown cold enough that she could see her breath. She put on her mittens, awkwardly, holding her packet of leases and contracts, neatly wrapped in a sheet of caoutchouc, Mechica rubber, cradled in one arm. She and Deliverance, who had been left in the care of Mistress Davenport for the day, would stay another night with the governor’s family and go back to Cambridge in the morning. No use riding icy roads at night with a child along.
   
When she reached the house on Water Street, it was dark. Light shone around the edges of the closed shutters. The hired girl, Alsoomse Putnam, opened the door and stood smiling at Constance as if she knew of some joke at the latter’s expense. “I do hold you an’t look for no tea, Mistress Haward.”

If this was meant to be a joke, Constance had no desire to discuss the matter. “Tell Master Hutchinson I do linger on speaking to him some.”

“Truly, Mistress Haward.” Alsoomse looked as though she were trying not to laugh. Irritated, Constance wondered what in God’s creation could possibly be so funny. But she never found out. The hired girl ran back upstairs, beads bouncing and the rows of dyed porcupine quills at the hem of her dress swinging back and forth. “Master Hutchinson!” Constance heard her open a door. “Master Hutchinson, Mistress Haward from Cambridge do linger on speak to you some.”

There was a short pause. “Tell her I’ll be down in a minute.”

Alsoomse descended the stairs with much more leisure than she had climbed them and delivered this message to Constance. Then she disappeared into the kitchen, and Constance heard her singing as she began to scrub the pots and dishes from supper.
   
*   *   *

    Hutchinson had come back from the court and feeling no desire for any supper – God only knew how he’d pay for it, if he did – had shut himself in his study and sat down at his desk. He had no desire to read, and besides that it was dark and the lamp, one of the commission’s long, beautifully pear-shaped glass lamps, was out of oil. His paperweight, the little brigantine in glass, was on the table, resting on a few sheets from a report that he had written several months before and forgotten. In the dark, the rigging was invisible. Hutchinson took off his hat, rested his elbows on his knees and pressed his hands against his eyes. 
After a while, he stood up, walked across the room to the window, opened the shutter, closed it, walked back to his chair, and sat down again. He had no idea what he intended to do. They had enough corn, pumpkin and meat for the rest of the week, perhaps. Alsoomse would have to be sent home, perhaps with a few dishes or some of Hutchinson’s books as payment for all her service. Possibly the daguerrotype of the Eiffel Tower; she had expressed some interest in that. He would tell Cabitt to go and get married and buy a farm if it pleased him. No doubt the orderly’s boots and blue Commission coat would do as a down payment.

    “Master Hutchinson –” Alsoomse opened the door as if she had not been told a hundred times about knocking first and leaned inside. “Master Hutchinson, Mistress Haward from Cambridge do linger on speak to you some.”

    Hutchinson sighed. He did not want to talk to Constance Haward. She was a rather tiresome woman, now that he thought about it. She was pious and affected and no doubt the affectations concealed nothing at all of interest. Her vanity was obvious and her speech grating.

“Master Hutchinson?” Alsoomse was still in the doorway.

Mistress Haward was also gracious, intelligent and elaborately, painfully polite. Hutchinson sighed and rubbed his eyes. She certainly did not deserve to be sent off into the night at this hour, whatever it was that had brought her here. “Tell her I’ll be down in a minute.”

    When he came downstairs she was sitting in the front room, next to the fire. Alsoomse had lit a lamp and placed it on the table, and Mistress Haward had taken off her outer blanket, the fur one with the clasps, and draped it over her lap. She had a package with her, something flat and square, wrapped up in a gutta-percha-like material they called caoutchouc which she had placed on the floor by her feet. Hutchinson, introduced to the wonders of caoutchouc during a rainstorm in the autumn, would have been far more worked up over this material had he thought he would ever get back across the weather to tell anyone about it. She had pulled off her mittens, set them on the bare table by the lamp and folded her hands in her lap. Constance Haward had beautiful skin, Hutchinson thought, but perhaps her hands got dry in cold weather. Abigail’s did. “What cheer, Mistress Haward.”

    “What cheer, Master Hutchinson.” She was watching him with an expression he couldn’t make out at all, eyeing his wrinkled shirt collar, his red eyes and uncombed hair. “I did look along your suit today.”   

    “Did you? I didn’t see you there.” Hutchinson took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and sat down in the other chair. “So you were a witness to yet another family disgrace. We’re famous debtors, we Hutchinsons.”

    “I an’t never heard it.”

    “Well, I don’t see how you could have.” Then it occurred to him that she might mean that she didn’t consider it relevant, what the rest of his family might have done. Hutchinson put his spectacles back on. “I’m sorry, Mistress Haward. I’m a bit off tonight. This whole business is rather trying.”   

    “Truly.”

    Hutchinson sighed. He would try to put a good face to this, even if it was an unusual hour for a social call. She was kind enough to come and see him, he would be kind enough to behave like a civilized person. “Did you have some business with the court?”

    “I do think on helping you some, Master Hutchinson.”

    Hutchinson could think of nothing to say. It seemed rather fitting, that he should turn into a charity case.
“You’re very kind, Mistress Haward. But I couldn’t possibly.”

    She was watching him, perhaps unsure what he meant, or considering how she might best respond. “I do have some land, ah? Mag use it and you do lean that way.”

    Hutchinson smiled in spite of himself. “Do you intend to make a farmer out of me, Mistress Haward?”

    “An’t got no other employment, truly.” This observation was made with a delicacy that Hutchinson rather appreciated.

“No, I suppose not.” Had he known he would come to this pass, he would have hoarded the jam jars, washed them out and packed them away in wood shavings as carefully as any Amerigan. Not to mention his writing paper. “But I don’t know anything at all about farming, Mistress Haward. Besides, I have no house, no tools – ” He shook his head, unable to even visualize the prospect of it.

    “Clear an’t see no other choice for you.”

    She was certainly right about that. Hutchinson tried to imagine himself as a small farmer, planting corn, weeding, filling his cellar with potatoes and pumpkins every autumn. Perhaps he could introduce some new techniques – straight furrows rather than mounds, a more rigorous weeding schedule. Beans and corn in separate fields. And there were always turkeys. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. It would be better than starving. Eventually, when he had begun to turn a profit, he might buy the land from Mistress Haward.

    But of course the idea was ridiculous. It was a rather comic picture, this vision of himself hoeing corn and picking beans. “I think you have a rather higher opinion of my abilities than I do myself, Mistress Haward.”

    The lamp on the table flickered. Probably it was running out of oil. “Mag try, ah?”

    “I’m afraid I would embarrass both of us.”

    After a moment, she got up and laid on the chair the fur blanket she had had across her lap. Her silver bracelets and the beads in her hair caught the light from the lamp. Acting out of what must have been a kind of modesty, she turned away from him before she took off the wool blanket wrapped around her body. Underneath she wore only an ordinary dress, something she might have worn in the summer, that left her forearms and the tops of her shoulders uncovered. She folded the blanket up and held it out to him. “Burse it, Master Hutchinson. I an’t purpose see nobody starve.”

    “Absolutely not, Mistress Haward.” Hutchinson stood up. “I couldn’t possibly. It’s far too much – and you’ll freeze, riding home like that.”

    “Better cold flesh than one cold soul, truly.”

    “I don’t think anyone could accuse you of that.”

“Take it, I do ask you.” She handed the blanket to him, carefully, so that their hands didn’t touch. It was warm, and of slightly better quality than the one he had. The wool was soft enough to wear next to one’s skin. A strand of Deliverance’s dark hair was caught in the fringe. “Thank you, Mistress Haward.”

“An’t nothing.” Mistress Haward turned to take up her fur-lined blanket from the chair and put it back on. No doubt Mistress Davenport would lend her something warm to go home in.

“May I ask you something?”

“Ask, truly.”

Hutchinson had been wondering about this, and her generosity had reminded him again that he wouldn’t mind knowing. “Did you choose to be called Constance when you joined your church? Or did someone else pick it out for you?”

    “I did choose it. Constance or Clemency, but I did lean more to the former.”

“I hope I haven’t given any offense.”

    “No.” She seemed unsure why he should ask about such a thing. “And you call me Constance I an’t never lay nothing hard on it.”

“I wouldn’t want to show you any disrespect.”

    “An’t Grace, Master Hutchinson, truly.”

    It was true, Amerigans had these strange layers of names that they wore like their winter clothing, each wrapped over the top of the next. But it was out of the question. There were lines that one ought not to be willing to cross so easily. “I think yours is a beautiful name, Mistress Haward, but for now I think we ought to treat each other like civilized people.”

    She smiled. “Do as please you, I do ask you.”

Hutchinson felt surprisingly cheered by this exchange, for all he was still a charity case.

*   *    *

    Later, after Mistress Haward had left, Hutchinson was upstairs in his study. The thought of a farm to run, for all it was rather a silly idea – one could not argue that – had given him an unexpected burst of energy. It was something, after all, was it not? He collected and organized all his miscellaneous papers by subject and date, glancing over some of them as he did and smiling at his own words. He sorted out official reports from letters to Abigail, as those two categories had become somewhat interleaved of late, for some reason. He picked up the single sheet of paper he had in her handwriting, a note dashed off over a year before in London. It was dated several days after their meeting at the train station, and she had written to him at the Commission to thank him for his kindness and assure him that she was well. She had not, however, appended a visiting card or an address at which she might be found, and they had not run into one another for some months after that.

    He had just re-folded this piece of paper when someone hammered on the door downstairs. Hutchinson set aside his papers, listening. He heard Alsoomse’s voice, but could not make out what she was saying. There were several people outside, and through the closed shutter of his study he could make out the light of a torch. Curious and unaccountably unsettled by this second unexpected interruption, he went downstairs. Alsoomse was standing in the open door, talking to someone outside. “No, he an’t, I an’t never know – ”
Hutchinson reached the door. “Good God.”

    Outside were two young men Hutchinson recognized from town, carrying a stretcher, on which, covered in a buffalo rug, was Henry Bridgewater. His left leg was sloppily bandaged and the foot, bootless, was wrapped in rags. His beard had grown in, and his hair looked as though someone had cut it with a blunt knife. His commission hat, from which the small gold Church insignia had not been removed, had been placed with him on the stretcher. Hutchinson thought for one uneasy moment that the poor boy was dead, but a touch to his cheek confirmed he was not. He was feverish and unconscious, but far from expired.