The Island of Doves Read Free

on a chipped crystal goblet. She was careless and she was willful—the marriage was yet another trial for him to endure.
    Only Susannah knew the terrible truth of it all, and there wasn’t a soul on the earth to whom she could tell it. She had no family left, and Edward allowed her no friends of her own in Buffalo.
    “My father
trusted
you,” she said to him more than once, back when she still held out hope that he might come to his senses.
    “Your father was weak,” he had replied. “A fool.”
    But her father had never even struck her on the hand when she was a child to correct poor behavior. Susannah had not known this kind of violence. Sometimes, the morning after one of his episodes, Edward brought her a gift—a cluster of amaryllis bulbs with skins like parchment, a magnifying glass to use in her work with the plant specimens—though he never spoke of apology, never spoke at all, in fact, of what had taken place. And Susannah would wonder if she had misremembered. She felt betrayed by her own instincts, her own memories.
    Madame Martineau was folding layers of fabric along Susannah’s waist when she whispered, “These pleats are easily let out, should you find yourself with child.” When she saw Susannah’s expression change, she clucked her tongue. “You’d be amazed what one can hide under a well-constructed dress. You’ll be out and about until quite close to your time.”
    Susannah stared at herself in the mirror and thought of the teaspoon of Queen Anne’s lace seeds she chewed each morning to keep her womb barren. Edward, of course, had no knowledge that she was meddling with creation. She had learned the method from a pamphlet she found wedged between botany texts in a bookshop near Washington Square, just after Edward beat her for the first time, and she knew it would be her salvation. If she did not have a child, she thought, she had a better chance of escape. She had been hopeful then. Now she wondered whether she would spend the rest of her life in this hell. She was just twenty-three years old and Edward was just thirty—hell could last a long time.
    After she and Edward first arrived in Buffalo, Susannah noticed the flowers—
wild carrot
, some called it—growing next to the roads into town. In the hottest part of the season the white flowers began to close, the long sepals pressing in on the spent blossoms from all sides like the ribs that held the fabric of a parasol in place. Susannah gathered as many clusters as she could in her apron each day, delivering them to a basket covered with a board in her greenhouse. Hiding them was unnecessary—Edward rarely came out to the greenhouse, and when he did, he merely scowled at her “collections.”
    Susannah wondered whether the method was an old wives’ tale, but she was willing to try anything. She knew she understood anatomy better than Edward did. He viewed a woman’s body as a mysterious vessel that did not operate according to reason or system. He would climb the stairs from his study where he worked into the late hours and nudge her awake, long after she had fallen into a deep sleep with a book splayed on her chest, and it never occurred to her to refuse him. Two flesh become one in marriage. As he heaved above her, rushing his seed to new places inside her he hoped to claim, he made the sounds of a laborer at his toil.
    Once recently he had rolled off her and in a flash of vulnerability rested his cheek on her arm and asked, almost whimpering, “Do you think it will happen soon? For I should very much like to have a son.”
    And she smiled blandly and nodded, her heart so hard against him that even this show of tenderness couldn’t make a difference. She saw in her mind a long line of the children they had never created, a row of cradles lined with fleece, a boy, then a girl, then two more boys, then three girls, stretching off into the distance like a road that no map had charted. She felt nothing for these babies, though it