The Chatham School Affair

“Such a fine lady, the way she talks and all. So smart, don’t you think?”

“Yes, she is.”

Sarah hesitated, now suddenly reluctant to ask what she had perhaps come to ask me all along. Then the wall fell, and she spoke. “Do you think that such a fine lady as Miss Channing is—talking so fine the way she does—that she might be of a mind to teach me how to read?”

We headed down Myrtle Street together the following Sunday morning, Sarah walking beside me, a basket of freshly baked cookies hanging from one arm, her offering to Miss Channing.

At the bluff we swung to the left, passed beneath the immense shadow of the lighthouse, then down the curving road that led into the village.

“What if Miss Channing says no,” Sarah asked. “What if she won’t teach me?”

“I don’t think she’ll say no, Sarah,” I said, though I know that part of me hoped that she would, wanted Sarah to be refused so that she would have to consider the other choice I’d already suggested, far bolder, as it seemed to me, edged in that frenzied sense of escape whose attractions had begun to overwhelm me.

“But what if she doesn’t want to?”

I answered with a determination that was new to me, an icy ruthlessness already in my voice. “Then we’ll find another way.”

This appeared to satisfy her. She smiled brightly and took my arm with her free hand.

Still, by the time we’d turned onto Plymouth Road, her fear had taken root again. She walked more slowly, her feet treading very softly over the bed of oyster shells, as if it were an expensive carpet and she did not want to mar it with her prints.

“I hope I look all right, then,” she said as we neared Miss Channing’s cottage.

She’d dressed as formally as she knew how, in what looked like her own schoolgirl version of the Chatham School uniform. Her skirt was long and dark, her blouse an immaculate white. She’d tied a black bow at her throat and pinned a small cameo to her chest, one that had belonged to her mother, her sole inheritance, she told me.

It was not a look I admired, and even as I gazed at her, I imagined her quite differently, dressed like Ramona in The Gypsy Band, bare-shouldered, with large hoop earrings, a lethal glint in her eye, a knife clutched between her teeth as she danced around the raging campfire. It was as adolescent a fantasy as any I had ever had, and yet it was also tinged with a darkness that was very old, a sense of woman as most lusty and desirable when poised at the edge of murder.

?    ?    ?

At Milford Cottage Sarah glanced down at her skirt and frowned. “There’s dust all over the hem.” She bent forward and brushed at the bottom of her skirt. “Sticks like glue,” she said, finally giving up. Then she lifted her head determinedly and I felt her hand tighten around my arm. “All right,” she said. “I’m ready.”

We walked down the little walkway that led to the door of the cottage. Without a pause Sarah knocked gently, glanced at me with a bright, nervous smile, and waited.

When no one answered, she looked at me quizzically.

“Try again,” I said. “It’s early. She must be here.”

Sarah did as I told her, but still there was no answer.

I remembered the occasion several weeks before, when I’d come to the cottage at nearly the same time, found it empty, as it now appeared to be, Miss Channing strolling along the edge of the forest.

“Sometimes she takes a walk in the morning,” I told Sarah confidently, although I could not be sure of any such thing. “Let’s look around.”

We stepped away from the door, walked to the far side of the cottage, then around it to the rear yard, toward the pond. A heavy morning mist still hung over the water, its lingering cloud rolling out over the edges of the land, covering it in fog.

For a moment Sarah and I stood, facing the pond, the impenetrable mist that drifted out from it covering the small area behind the cottage.

Nothing moved, or seemed to move, neither the air, nor the mist that cloaked the water, nor anything around us, until suddenly I saw a figure drift slowly toward us, the thick gray fog thinning steadily as she came nearer so that she appeared to rise toward us smoothly, like a corpse floating up from a pool of clouded water.

“Miss Channing,” Sarah said.

Miss Channing smiled slightly. “I was out by the pond,” she said. “I thought I heard someone at the door.” Dimly I could see the easel she’d set up at the water’s edge, a large pad of drawing paper already in place upon it, all of it still shrouded in curling wisps of gray cloud.

“This is Sarah Doyle,” I told her. “You may remember her from when you had dinner at our house the night you first came to Chatham.”

Sarah lifted the basket toward her. “I brought you some cookies, Miss Channing,” she said nervously. “I baked them special for you. As payment, ma’am.”

“Payment?” Miss Channing asked. “For what?”

For an instant, Sarah hesitated, and I could see that she believed her entire future to be at stake at that moment in her life, all her limitless prospects to be placed in someone else’s hands.

“For teaching me to read,” she said boldly, eyes on Miss Channing’s face. “If you’d be willing to do it, ma’am.”

Miss Channing did not pause a beat in her response. “Of course I will,” she said, and stepped forward to take the basket from Sarah’s trembling hand.

An hour later they were still at it. From my place at the edge of the water I could see Miss Channing sitting at a small table she’d brought from the cottage and placed beneath the willow tree. Sarah sat opposite her, a writing pad before her, along with a sheet of paper upon