Free Colony by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

comfort when he built here. It was only a short journey up from the dock, you see. Easier on the servants too. Of course, no one in that original little group of settlers ever expected people to actually buy up the land between them and the water and build more…imposing homes. There was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement among the originals. But of course Braebonnie was built much later by, I believe, some people from Connecticut. We didn’t know them; they didn’t care for Retreat after all and sold almost immediately to the Potters. I must say I’ve always been relieved to have them so close by; fellow Bostonians, you know. Even if the house is…a bit excessive for a simple summer colony.”
    Braebonnie was indeed large—it had perhaps twenty rooms—but it sprawled down the cliff in a weathered, mossy pile of shingle and stone so sweetly and unassumingly that it did not seem to me the least imposing. I loved it. I always have, ever since that first summer. So many of my happiest memories of Retreat were born in Braebonnie, when Amy and I were young together. I love Liberty too, of course; it is all I have of youth and Peter, and it is unquestionably home to me. But it is so somehow like Mother Hannah—square, upright, uncompromising—that I often fancy I can see her in the cedar-dark old rooms, straight-spined and austere and moving with her silent, sweeping tread, or hear her voice in the emptiness. As I said, sound is queer here by the water.
    “Get out of here. This is my house now,” I have said to that disapproving shade more than once. And to exorcise her I have cut her lilacs down to size, and added a long sun porch that commands the sea, and enlarged all the back windows and added many, so that the sound of the water is the last thing one hears at night, and the dancing stipple of sea light on the ceiling is the first thing one’s opening eyes see in the morning. She would absolutely have hated all of it. Mother Hannah was always more annoyed than exalted by the sea.
    After the ritual of welcome, which never varied until Mother Hannah’s death—the cool little kiss, the light embrace, the offered cheek smelling of talcum and smooth linen stored in cedar—she opened her arms to Peter and held them so until he came into them, and when she had him firm, she closed her eyes and rolled her cheek back and forth in the angle where his neck met his shoulder, smiling as rapturously as a nursing kitten. There were tears on her satiny cheek when she finally let him go and stepped back to look at him.
    “You’re far too thin,” she said. “And you’ve lost your lovely tan. You shall have days and days in the sun simply vegetat-ing, and Christina and I are going to feed you till you pop.
    If you’re this worn out now, what on earth will you be when you start your position?”
    Mother Hannah could never bring herself to say, simply, “teaching.”
    “I haven’t lost an ounce, Ma, and I’ve been sailing every day for the past week at Northpoint,” Peter said. “Winnepesaukee is right there. Stop fussing. Maude feeds me like a pig.
    She’s turning into a great cook.”
    “I’m sure she is,” Mother Hannah said, smiling her little V
    smile at me. “These pretty southern girls are born knowing how to please a man, I expect.”
    Both my neglect of her son and my overblown southern carnality hung in the air between my mother-in-law and me.
    I smiled brightly at her. She had forgiven
    Peter, I knew; the household appointments and the handsome roadster said as much. I also knew she had not forgiven me.
    The daughter-in-law she would present tonight to her world assembled at the dining hall was so patently not the one she would have chosen that it must have seemed in her wintry eyes grotesque.
    “I’m trying hard,” I said. “I never cooked at home, but taking care of Peter is number one now.”
    “Yes,” she said.
    Peter’s father kissed me, I thought, with genuine pleasure and picked up my