“One of us must bring Michael to see him,” Robert told her. Again he stood at the mantel gravely surveying her.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Brianna,” he said very softly, “the child is his, and he will know it when he sees Michael, if he does not suspect so now.”
“How can you say that?” Brianna cried, rising from her chair. “Who is to say that he knows we are here or even that there is a child at all?”
“He knows,” Robert said. Then he sighed. “His presence here does not make me happy, yet it cannot be denied. He is no fool, we both know that.”
“No, Robert! I do not want him to see him! Michael is our son. There is no reason—”
“There is every reason. By the law Michael is mine. But by blood he is Treveryan’s. We must trust him.”
“Trust Sloan Treveryan!”
Robert paused, shocked by her outburst. Each word he uttered cost him dearly, and yet he knew that he was right.
“He does not deserve that. He saved your life not once but twice, and for that I am eternally grateful. When he came for you in England, he could have taken you. You told him that you wanted to be with us—and he respected your desires, rather than his own. There is no reason to believe he would harm you now in any way. But for all that he did for you, he deserves to be shown his son.”
Brianna stood, shaking her head, her mouth going dry. “Robert,” she said at last, and the sound took great effort, “he cannot care. Our lives have gone separate ways.”
“If you choose not to see him, then I will do so.”
“No! If we leave it alone, he will sail away again!”
He smiled at her. “Are you afraid to see him?”
“No! I—I don’t know. Please, Robert, our life is set. We have done well here. I—”
“Let’s go to bed, shall we? It has been a very long day, full of tumult, and I am very tired.”
She lowered her eyes and swallowed fiercely at the lump that rose from her heart to her throat. She nodded.
Hours later she still lay awake. She did not want to see Sloan. She was afraid of him. Not that he would harm her—but he might destroy all the resolutions, all the contentment she had at last learned. While awake, she became aware of the sounds around her. The wind tore around the whitewashed frame of their home, howling and moaning, rising and falling.
She frowned, and twisted in the bed. Robert was sleeping, but was tossing about. She lowered her head to his chest but quickly withdrew with dismay, for it was not just the wind that she heard. His wheeze was terrible and he was gasping with each breath he drew.
She was worried, and wondered whether to wake him or let him sleep. She gnawed upon her lip with concern, then pulled her own pillow from beneath her and carefully lifted his head to set it higher. He mumbled something, and turned again. His forehead felt feverish, and so she climbed out of bed and hurried to the water basin, squeezing out a cloth to set upon his forehead. She did not go back to bed that night, and did not sleep.
In the morning she dressed with the first coming of light, bundled Michael into warm clothing, and went out to find the doctor.
Dr. Griggs came back with her and shut her out of the room while he examined Robert. He came out to the kitchen looking grim.
“A fever it is, not uncommon with this winter we’ve endured.”
“But what can we do? He cannot go on wheezing like that!”
Dr. Griggs sighed—and Brianna remembered that this was the same man who had diagnosed “witchcraft” as the cause of the girls’ illnesses.
“For a stronger man it would not be so serious. For Robert you must take great care. I’ve a physic to prescribe for him, and keep him still and in bed and never flat—he must be raised upward as he is now. He needs complete rest.”
“Yes, yes. I will see that he gets it,” she said.
Griggs wrote out his prescription and left her—anxious to return to the meetinghouse where the magistrates planned to continue their examination of Tituba. That morning Brianna could not be worried about the proceedings. She was too concerned about Robert.
The days passed slowly and torturously for her. There was Michael to tend to, and now Robert. With Robert in bed all the tasks on their small farm fell to her. The land needed to be readied for the spring planting, and fretting about that made Robert wheeze worse. Brianna had to be a cheerful whirl of energy, convincing him that she wasn’t burdened at all.
Eleanor came by on the seventh of March to tell her that the examinations seemed to be over; the “witches” had been sent to jail in Boston to await their trials, and with any luck it would all end.
