Provings

Chapter 5

When Nancy heard her husband's entreaty from his sick bed, it was as if a light was lit within her. She realized that she had given in to death, that she had accepted it as the inevitable fate of all whom she loved. It was for that reason she had donned her widow's weeds earlier in the day, and since then she had been sinking steadily within their dark comfort toward a familiar depths. But Edwin's words stopped her descent; she realized that all was not yet lost. She resolved to answer his plea and do everything within her power to save him. When Lucius shoed everyone from Edwin's bedside and swooped in with his black bag full of medicines, Nancy, full of new resolve, hurried down the corridor to her own dressing room.  

She tore at the buttons of her mourning dress, loosed the ties and ripped the dress over her head. She felt the devil behind her, something she and her brothers and sisters would say when they were spurred by fright to run through Warren's Hollow. The hollow lay just past the far field of their farm. A creek ran through it and they would play in it on a summer's day. But there were stories of a Pequot Indian warrior caught and killed there in an abominable fashion and a lingering curse, so when the sun went down and the long shadows darkened the hollow, they feared the place. She felt that now, like the devil would catch her if she kept the black dress on. But it was not her he would catch, it was Edwin - she felt she had to get the dress off as fast as she could, before death could claim him as it had Erastus and her children.  

Nancy was a young widow when she met Edwin less than four years before, having just recently lost a son, a husband and a daughter in quick succession. She had been just nineteen when she married Captain Erastus Davison, almost thirty years her senior. And while it was not exactly a love match, it had been a good one; Erastus was a kind, if distant, husband and she had done her best to please him. The marriage had honoured her family, brought low by the death of her father several years before, and she was thankful for it. She had taken quickly to her new role in society and in the Davison clan, a large one with several nieces and nephews her own age who readily accepted her; but it was after her daughter, little Nancy, was born that she had found true fulfillment. She had loved her daughter more than she ever suspected it was possible to love another being and her heart was similarly filled when her son, William Erastus, was born two years after that.  

But the Davisons were plagued by consumption; it had claimed three of Erastus' sisters and a number of his nieces and nephews and they were not spared. From an early age little Nancy was delicate, but it was young William Erastus, who had seemed such a strong infant, who went first. One day he had a slight cough and then he simply withered away; despite all the good doctors did, he died at only sixteen months of age. Erastus changed after that and she supposed she did too; mourning can make one insensitive to others and they had both been stricken with grief. She had hardly spoken to Erastus it seemed when a year and a half later he died suddenly in a fall from a horse. He had been in New Haven at the time, seeing to his business interests, which was something he had done often during that year and a half; and then he was gone. She had clung so tightly to little Nancy after that, rarely leaving the girl's side.  

Her little girl was such a knowing child, so good and pious, like a wee angel. She would speak of her father and brother as if they were still near, as if they kept watch over them always; and when she did, Nancy believed it too. Sometimes her descriptions were so vivid that Nancy wondered if the fey child could actually see her father standing before her. While at first Nancy had welcomed this seeming congress between the living and the dead - among the members of her family - it became increasingly apparent that little Nancy's visions, for that is what they seemed to be, spoke more of her own loosening from the bounds of life. At eight years old, in a euphoric swoon and calling to her father, she passed away.  

For all Nancy had suffered before, it was her daughter's death that hit her the hardest. She had worn her mourning blacks since William Erastus had died, but she had succumbed to them after her beautiful daughter left her.