Their Private Happiness
Part One
As the frost faded into flowers and the air began to lose its punishing chill, their hearts became filled with gladness. They liked to walk out in the morning, among the grasses, and smile at the sun. And they remembered again that life could be pleasant and the world did not always have to hurt. And their hearts leapt at this knowledge and they remembered too that birdsong would soon fill the forests and the long winter was coming to an end.
When the birds did begin to sing, their faces lit up with delight at the half-remembered pleasure, which in the course of frozen months had become again novelty, and they felt once more the soaring joy of warmth and life.
And the gladness of the world seemed as though it had been created to mirror their own gladness in one another, for the two of them found themselves more deeply in love than they had yet been, and for the first time they began to speak of marriage.
Though his parents had passed the previous year and his inheritance still carried with it the heaviness of loss, Artan found himself light at heart as he hadn’t been in three years – since his twentieth birthday, the day before his mother’s illness had first shown.
He found this new happiness in the walks that he and Editha take together on Sundays after the service had ended. Increasingly, their walks took them further and further from the village of Canshire.
But they despite their secrecy, they never did more than hold hands as they walked high in the hills and among the new-flowering trees, remembering all the while the need for propriety and the terror that would be visited upon them should they break any taboos. The first time Editha slipped her hand into his, a cold January had been threatening storm and Artan had wondered whether she was still the frightened child he remembered from schooldays – the orphan girl who kept to herself. But the second time she did it, Artan realized that she wasn’t a child anymore – she was only two years his junior and already a woman grown. And he realized, too, that he wanted very much to hold her hand as they walked among the fields of flowers and enjoyed their private happiness.
It was when the weather had warmed and the birds had begun to sing that they first began to speak of marriage and Artan realized they had been walking together for many months now, through the grey days of autumn and the snows of winter. Suddenly, with the hyacinths in bloom, a change came in their relationship and for the first time they knew that they were going to be married and this knowledge made them very happy. And as April waxed full and waned into May, it became even clearer to them that there was no reason to wait.
They resolved to be married quietly, for they had been courting quietly – without fully realizing at first that they had done so. The village wasn’t a bad village, and the villagers always took care of Editha, seeing as she hadn’t had parents, but they hadn’t exactly welcomed her either. Her presence was always a reminder to the other families of the death that stalked them all. And even when she hadn’t been melancholy herself, she reminded the villagers of the tragedy which could befall even ones so young as her mother and father.
And so the village had kept an eye at her, but held her at a distance, too. And with Artan being newly the head of a household – even a household of one – and the heir to a modest inheritance, there were many families in the town hoping to marry him off to one of their daughters, and it would displease them if it turned out he had settled for a poor, orphan girl who had never had a new dress in her life, but had always had to rely on the charity of others to provide her with slightly-worn dresses.
They had resorted to great tricks and subterfuge to walk together undisturbed after Sunday services, going home and then doubling back and leaving the village by one way and coming back by another and never going or coming at the same time. And as they developed these elaborate rituals of secrecy, they had come to feel more intensely the strangeness of their conduct and how disturbing it must look in the eyes of their community. Though their walks had always been chaste and they did not so much as kiss until their wedding day, surely nobody would believe the truth. Instead, people would believe Artan had impregnated a poor, orphan girl and resolved to marry her only when it became obvious that honor would require nothing less. And if she never showed signs of pregnancy or gave birth to a child, the story would be that shortly after their marriage Editha had miscarried, or the pregnancy had been ended quietly.
But one Sunday in early May, they resolved to bear the calumny of their gossipy village and to marry at once and be happy, rather than live in secrecy and at a distance for any longer. They went to the parish priest and convinced him both of their love for one another, and of their chastity and propriety in courtship. He told them he was satisfied and said he would marry them at once if they found witnesses. So Editha brought a distant cousin into her confidence and Artan told Willow, his longest friend and one who had sworn to stand him always, of his intention to marry Editha. And this party came together that very next day and in the sight of these two witnesses, Editha and Artan stood before God and were married by the parish priest. And they embraced each other and kissed for the first time. And that night they were man and wife.
Soon, the town discovered the news. And as Artan and Editha had expected, the news was not taken well. Though Willow publicly affirmed that he believed their courtship had never veered into impropriety and that God himself had brought these two together in love, and though Editha’s cousin said the same – which caused her no end of strife and ostracism – and though the parish priest commanded the townsfolk that “what God hath joined together, let no man or woman tear asunder,” the talk of the town was that the private happiness of Artan and Editha was an offense against the entire community, which after all had raised them up from birth and given them everything and which therefore ought to have a say in their matrimony.
It started when Gretna Barnard and Daisy Simmons and Vandrea Ustead told several of their friends that they knew for a fact that Editha was already pregnant when Artan married her. They didn't know this, of course, because she wasn't, but within a day the whole town knew. Artan found that people looked at him differently when he walked down the street. Old women who had previously waved to him from their porches shut their doors loudly. Old men who used to tip their hats to him now crossed the street to walk on the other side of the road. His friends told him they didn't care if he'd been hanging around with Editha, but they wished he'd told them. He assured them that she wasn't pregnant, but they just told him it was no skin off their noses.
Editha found she couldn't go anywhere. She'd moved into Artan's house on their wedding night, but now when she went out – to buy food, or to procure various items he wanted around the house, older women raised their eyebrows or furrowed their eyes at her. And women her own age – like Gretna and Daisy and Vandrea – snorted at her or made rude remarks. Even worse were the women just a few years older, with whom Editha desperately wanted to be friendly. They wouldn't even look at her or talk to her.
Editha was let go quietly from her apprenticeship in the local seamstresses guild – which only had five seamstresses. Artan had been planning to use some of his inheritance to go into business with a couple of older men in the town who liked to invest in new ventures with the potential for steady profit. They had been drawing up the designs for a set of offices, which they planned to build and lease to local professionals in medicine and law and accounting. But now, his business partners said they didn't want his money, even if it meant that they wouldn't have the funds for the building as originally planned, but would have to make do with a smaller set of offices.
Before, Editha and Artan had wanted nothing more than to spend time alone together. Now, they found they could do little else. It might be expected that newlyweds who found themselves ostracized from their local community on account of one another might have cause to quarrel. After all, newlyweds without such strain on their relationships are often fond of quarreling.
But instead, they found themselves pushed more strongly together. After one particularly bad day in town – when Editha had broken down in tears at something Vandrea Ustead said to her when she tried for the twentieth time to tell everyone who would listen that she was not pregnant, had never been pregnant, and hadn't known her husband until their wedding night – Artan told Editha that if all those in the town who had formerly been kind deserted them, they would have enough if they had each other. Artan said that if the whole world were to be set against them, all they could do was to stand firm and right and true to each other. "God knows we are innocent of all we have been accused of," he said, for by this time they had been accused of many sins beyond the rumors spread by Gretna Barnard, Daisy Simmons, and Vandrea Ustead.