The Wolves of Andover

CHAPTER 9

THE STRENGTHENING SUN had passed the noonday hour, and already Martha had hung clean shirts and breeches along low-lying bushes, dividing her time between watching the level of the boiling water in the great iron wash pot and spying on Will as he marched up and down the yard, a stick balanced over his shoulder the way he had seen Thomas balancing the long barrel of his flintlock.

The quiet, solitary preparations of the wash had come as a soothing ritual after a frantic morning preparing the house against the plague. They had learned of the outbreak from the Taylors’ nearest neighbor, who shouted out the news from the road, not wanting to come even so close as the yard to prevent contagion. Martha had painted the lintels with vinegar, smoked the rooms with sage, and regardless of the warmer breezes bringing the scent of early iris throughout the house, she had closed all the windows tight to keep any errant winds from bringing ill humors into the house.

She had not spoken more than a dozen words to Thomas since the evening he told of the hound, Gelert, and the meaning of the tale, or lack of it, had rankled her as though she had swallowed a smelt whole, one whose bones had stuck in her belly long after the flesh had melted away. The hot and piercing rage she had felt after the wolf attack had passed away, taking with it the savage dreams; but now, in place of anger she had a restless, almost hostile, curiosity about the Welshman.

She pulled a tiny fragment of cone sugar out of her apron and called to the boy. She smiled at his eagerness to grab at the sweetie and she toyed with him a bit, holding it just out of his grasp before placing it with her own fingers on his tongue.

She pulled him down to sit with her on a patch of drying grasses, the sun hot at their backs, and asked, “What, then, do you know of Thomas?”

He answered, smacking his lips, “Thomas has been all t’ way to London.”

“You mean New London, don’t you, Will?” she asked, giving him a doubtful look.

He boldly reached into her apron, looking for more sugar until she pushed his hands away, shaking her head.

“More,” he demanded, his mouth opening like a baby bird’s.

“Tell me, then,” she said with mock seriousness.

“He was t’ London, old London, and he fought the king, with Cromwell. John told me an’ he hasn’t told you.” He began to squirm, and she knew he would tolerate only a few more questions before he dashed away.

“Want more?” she asked, taking his hands in hers, tethering his restless form a moment longer. “Tell me and you’ll get another pinch of sugar.”

“He’s got a great… a great…” He faltered, his attention captured by a squirrel gnawing at a seed in the garden.

She shook his hands to draw him back. “A great what, Will?”

“A great wooden trunk,” he said, following the squirrel with his eyes. “Next t’ the bed.”

“And what’s inside?”

“A coat. A’ old red coat,” he answered, jerking his hands free, and he ran, brandishing his stick, for the squirrel.

A coat, she thought, disappointed. There was nothing remarkable in that, unless there were other, more telling things inside the trunk. The cone of sugar was almost gone, and she wondered how much more she could extract from the boy before there was none left for so much as a pasty. She pestered him off and on for the remainder of the day, but Will could reveal only the little he had heard and seen with his own eyes: that Thomas had fought against the Old Charles during the English war and that Thomas kept the wooden trunk at all times near the place where he put his head at night. She finally gave up her questioning when he began to look at her as a goose regards a butcher who is standing with a sprig of parsley in one hand and a small ax in the other.

She lay in her bed that night, turning over in her mind the few things that Will had told her, and decided that when morning came, she would question Thomas more directly about his past. Her fingers crept up to the space beneath the pillow and she felt the smooth edges of the red book there. She had not yet been able to tear out the pages as she had intended to do, the pages where she had deposited her troubling thoughts. The book seemed to her to be an integrated, almost animate, thing. It had a spine and a hide and within the coverings were stiff, rustling pages that moved the air about like the wings of a bird. Ripping out the glistening paper would be like plucking the white feathers from a goose while it yet lived. It came to her that she would soon have to hide the book from the prying eyes of others if she could not bring herself to blot out the clandestine words.

At first light, upon the last of the breakfast dishes put away, Martha announced to Patience that she would go to the river for leeks and that Thomas should accompany her.

When Patience raised a brow at her, Martha said, “There may be Indians.”

“God help the Indians,” John mumbled, handing the older man the flintlock.

Martha gathered her shawl around her shoulders, and without looking behind her to see if Thomas followed, she walked purposefully towards the river. When they reached the embankment, Thomas walked ahead of her and she fit her shoes to his footprints, sunk deeply into the soft, loamy soil, up the steeply angled hillock towards the river, which lay in a depression on the other side. Halfway to the crest, he motioned for her to sit on a fallen log and wait. He disappeared quietly over the ridge, moving with caution through the undergrowth, using the barrel of his flintlock to prod his way forward through the tangle of maidenhead ferns.

He was gone for a short while, but she soon heard a low whistle and saw him at the ridge, farther south this time, waving for her to come on. She climbed with some difficulty the last short distance to the top, pulling on roots and jutting rocks to scramble over the peaked ridge, and saw the river running fast and clear below her. Carefully hitching up her skirt, she sidestepped down the far embankment to the water’s edge. The boggy ground was chilled, but she felt warmth on her upturned face through branches of willow and beech. She smiled in surprise at the coltsfoot growing like borrowed sunlight along the shaded dimples at the river’s edge; and on the opposite shore she spied columbine, its red blossoms stirred into motion by hummingbirds.

Thomas had propped himself against a beech, crooking one foot up on a jutting root, and was looking to the right and the left, scanning the bank and the stream for any movement. His silence was of a belligerent sort, like a guard dog gone mute, so she turned her back on him and began pulling up the tender shoots of leeks, which yielded easily in the damp earth.

She soon had a small sack filled, the wet green stalks soaking the coarse linen, their sharp odor staining her hands and apron. But she was loath to leave the spot and decided to look for wild onions as well. When she caught him, through the reflection on the water, looking at the back of her head, she said in an offhand manner, “I am told you have been as far as London.”

There was a long silence as she picked through the plaited shafts of river grasses before she heard him say, “Aye.” She waited for tale-telling or bragging of some sort, but the silence stretched into minutes. “Well, then,” she prompted, “you must now think Billerica flat and rude.” She turned to face him, her expression challenging.

He abruptly swept away the small battery of flies hovering below the brim of his hat and answered, “There’s good in it. Here ’n there.” He met her gaze and stared long past the point of courtesy.

Finally dropping her eyes, she fussed with the linen bag and said, “Will was told you have been a soldier.”

He shifted his weight restlessly against the tree and lowered his chin in the way she had come to recognize as a defensive stance and exhaled heavily, compressing his mouth for a moment into a thin, tight line. Then he inhaled slowly and said, “When I were a boy in Wales, the first thing I kenned from my father was to look out across the land to tell the dry ground from the wet.”

Martha waited for the story to continue, but after a silent pause, she said, “I don’t understand your meaning.”

“It means, missus, that the world is a very large place. Full of mean marshes and moors, as well as meadows an’ streams. And if you don’t want to bog down and drown yourself, it’s keen to learn where to step lightly an’ where to tread not at all.”

He pushed himself away from the tree and was soon climbing back up the hill to the crest, never looking to see if she would follow. Martha stared after him gape-mouthed before she quickly picked up her skirt and scrambled after him.

“Wait… wait,” she called and he paused at the crest until she joined him, breathing heavily for a moment and struggling to speak again. “I meant only… to know that which is…” She stopped with a flush of uncertainty when he turned to face her. “I meant only to learn that which is proper as to who you are and… what you are about.”

He studied her for a moment before saying, “I were born near Carmarthen. In the uplands.” He balanced both hands on the barrel of the standing flintlock, crossed at the wrist, in a practiced way.

“So then, you were a farmer?” she asked, and suddenly to her own ears she sounded tight-lipped and sour.

“No,” he answered, looking to the middle distance at the clearing where the Taylor house sat, sending long plumes of dove-gray smoke from its chimney. “My father were a farmer. The year I were born, in ’twenty-six, the winters were so cold that the hand froze to the hearth back. My father had thirty acres of grazing and five for planting. He had four cows, two bullocks, one horse, fifty-two sheep, and a family. He lost most of it that winter and spent his whole life trying to catch back the past. When I were fifteen I left.”

“Did you… were you close to anyone?” A quickening breeze blew, uplifted from the river, and a piece of her hair floated across her eyes, momentarily blinding her.

He slowly reached out and grasped the hair, carefully rolling each strand around one finger. “I had a brother who died at seventeen, elder than me by three years. His name was Richard.” He rolled the strands again in the opposite direction, like unspooling yarn, and carefully tucked it back behind her ear. “He could run. By God, he could run. He ran every race in Carmarthenshire and won every prize. But the Welsh uplands have a temper all their own. And the very crags and heath that made him fast took away his heart at the end.” He dropped his hand and said softly, “Ni edrych angau pwy decaf ei dalcen.”

She shook her head, confused. He said, “It means, ‘Death spares not the fairest forehead.’ I held tight to my father’s farm in my brother’s stead for one year. And then I walked away for good.”

She stared at his solemn mouth and at the dark stubble on his cheeks, growing like a crown of briars surrounding the pale and weather-worn flesh that were his lips, and unthinking, she placed a cautious finger to the deeply recessed hollow at the base of his throat and felt his pulse strengthen under her touch. His eyes darted to the side and his head followed quickly, looking over her shoulder, and grasping her arm, he began to pull her roughly after him down the hill towards the settlement. He whispered to her, urgently, “Don’t talk. Don’t look back until we are safe within the house. Say nothing to the missus.”

She tried to crane her neck around to see what lay behind them, but his loping walk caused her to run hazardously down the hill, and she stumbled in her effort to match his long strides. He whistled John from the barn and whispered to him urgently, gesturing towards the river, and placed a silencing hand over John’s arm when the younger man’s eyes went big and round. Once inside, Thomas bolted the door, posting himself at the open window. When Martha came to stand next to him, he pointed back to the embankment where they had talked moments before. She observed nothing at first and then she saw a slight shifting of the landscape at the crest; dun-colored shapes moving in concert, heaving subtly as though the earth itself had learned to crawl.

Patience, seeing the men returned to the house, served up the midday meal, a thin ladle of soup with dried deer meat and the last of the bread baked days before. She chatted on happily about the leeks brought from the river and the fineness of the weather, of her absent husband, and of the seedlings coming up in the garden, unaware of the guarded looks passing between Thomas and John, and of the alarm that kept Martha rigid and silent in her chair. Thomas sat closest to the door with the flintlock at arm’s length and soon the only sounds were of the scraping of spoons against the pewter.

Her bowl finally empty, Patience stood and stretched with her knuckles against the small of her back. She looked at Martha and, frowning, asked, “Are you ill? What’s the matter?” Martha’s eyes tracked instinctively to the window, and before anyone could stop her, Patience strode to the door, slipped the bolt, and opened it wide. She screamed and staggered backwards, her arms flailing wildly in front of her. Both men stood from the table with such force that their chairs upended behind them. With astonishing speed Thomas pushed Patience roughly aside and stood, his flintlock raised, at the open door.

Thrusting the children under the table, Martha planted herself protectively in front of Patience, waving her farther back into the house. She felt a rapid, hot breath at her neck and turned to see John standing next to her, quaking and sweating, with a small ax in one hand and a large-tined fork in the other.

Patience, her voice shrill with terror, cried out, “They will kill us, Thomas…” He raised one hand sharply to her to be quiet but kept the long sights of the rifle pointed into the yard. Martha braced herself for the blast from the barrel, but after a moment there was no explosion. She stepped closer to the table, thinking to arm herself with a knife, and from her new vantage point she could see beyond Thomas’s bulk into the yard.

A man stood motionless and alone not twenty feet from the door. He was wrapped in doeskin and furs, his chest and arms naked, a club with a knotted head hanging at his side, and on his skin were the angry, festering sores of the plague. The man watched them watching him until the sound of Joanna’s voice, frightened and plaintive, floated out of the house. The man’s eyes drifted sideways and tracked over the windows and roofline, all the way to the barn, and then returned to stare at Thomas. A racking chill suddenly passed through the man’s body and he coughed heavily, pulling his furs more tightly around himself. He extended his arm out for a moment before bringing his fingers up to his mouth. When no one in the house moved, he repeated the gesture.

Without taking his eyes from the man, Thomas said quietly over his shoulders, “Missus, go and put whatever food is on the table into a sack and bring it fast to me.”

The beginning sounds of protest from Patience brought a swift black look from Thomas. She quickly pulled the children from under the table and ran for her bedroom, desperately slamming the door behind her. With shaking hands, Martha scooped the remains of bread and meat into a cloth and handed the parcel to Thomas, who walked without hesitation into the yard. Ignoring John’s insistent tugging at her skirt and hissing into her ear, “Stay in the house or yer get yerself killed…,” Martha moved forward to stand in the doorway. She watched Thomas hold out the parcel, waiting calmly and patiently for the food to be taken.

The man in the yard had not retreated at Thomas’s advance. Rather, he had planted one leg behind the other, tilting himself backwards to take in the Welshman’s height. The man himself was not tall—Martha guessed him to be in fact shorter than herself—but there was a straightening of his spine and his arm extended outward, fingers encircling the sack with a gentle, almost delicate touch. The sack disappeared inside the folds of the doeskin, and slowly turning without a word or glance, he disappeared into the woody bracken opposite the entrance to the road.

Martha looked back at John standing in the middle of the room, his weapons held aloft. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, “put down the ax. Did y’think to cleave him in two and then eat him?” He sat heavily in a chair, placing the fork back on the table.

Thomas closed and bolted the door and took up his post again at the window. After a time he carefully shut and locked the sash in its casing, and she came to stand next to him, waiting for him to speak.

“That Indian was Wampanoag on his way back north, if he weren’t to die of the pox first,” he said. His breath appeared and reappeared on the glass in veiled patches. “Had they been Abenaki it’s likely you and I wouldn’t be here talking. They were all with plague or they’d not be begging.”

“They…?” she asked, startled. To her eyes there had been only one man in the yard.

“There were half a dozen more in the woods not forty feet away,” he answered.

She pressed her nose closer to the glass and scanned the woods for movement. “Will they come back?”

He shrugged and passed his hands over his eyes. She studied his profile, the darkened flesh trenched beneath his eyes and the scar that split one brow in two. “Am I Gelert?” she asked. He turned to her, and she asked again, “The hound killed by his master? You said the tale was about me.”

“No,” he answered. “You’re not Gelert.” His breath was moist in her face, scented with wild river onions, green and pungent, but he soon turned back to watch the woods and he didn’t speak to her again for hours.

THE MAY WINDS brought rain from the direction of Boston, the air sharpened with the taint of salt water, and Daniel Taylor appeared on such a morning through undulating currents of dampened air, his canvas coat turned black and heavy from the wet. He arrived as Martha and Patience stood in the yard, quickly gathering in the washing that had been hung to dry earlier that morning when the sun had burned free of the clouds. The women had mistaken the crashing and rumbling of the carter’s wagon as approaching thunder until they saw the barrel-chested gelding appear steaming and straining over the crest of the road.

Patience covered her face with her apron and sobbed at the sight of him. At his first embrace he said to her, “Now, now, my own little wife, I am home. Come see what I’ve brought you.” He carried into the house bundle after bundle of cloth as well as hides, tools, and foodstuffs: two barrels of small beer, a firkin of ale, one large keg of wheat, two cones of sugar, and a caged cockerel.

He proudly pulled out crates of woolens and linens for new shifts, caps, and aprons, smiling at his wife’s delighted surprise. In a friendly hug, he yanked up a startled Joanna, frightened at the appearance of this strange, unshaven man, but she quickly smiled when Daniel showed her a corncob poppet made, he said, by a Carribee slave. Seeing Will standing alone and frowning at his own lack of presents, Daniel set Joanna down and soberly gestured for his son to approach. With a serious face he pulled from a bag a tiny ax and presented it to the boy, as though the gift were the rarest of finds. Will yelled a full-throated cry and ran from the house, bringing laughter from everyone but John, who said, shaking his head, “Best hide the new rooster.”

Daniel sat and called for food and in between bites of his dinner rattled off an account of his travels. “I’ve been as far north as Salisbury and hope to go even farther on the next leg, perhaps as far as Portsmouth if there be enough clearing of woodlands up past Strawberry Bank. You can’t believe the farmsteads opening up between Casco Bay and Kittery. Pelts, timber, fish—more than one man can trap or catch in a lifetime.” His round and sympathetic face clouded only once, when he spoke of the whispering up and down the coast of Abenaki Indians chafing at the land and furs taken by the Englishers, and of the raids on settlements lying vulnerably close to the edge of the forests.

“It’s the French north of the Eastward,” he said, scratching at his scalp still burning from the lye soap he had used to kill the lice he had picked up in some bedstead in Boston. “They’re stirring and stirring the pot, making friends with the heathens so they’ll knock us about the head and drive us all the way back to England.” Patience began to cry again, and with a few words Thomas related the visit by the Wampanoag man and of the plague that had visited both colonist and Indian alike. Daniel made placating sounds, distracting his wife by saying, “Here, look, Patience. Have you seen the bowls I have brought you? Look how bright the pewter is.”

Martha made panbread for the evening supper with the new flour, molding a tender blanket to hold the old rooster that, over the protestations of Will, who wanted to try his new ax on the bird, was butchered and dressed by John within the space of an hour. Patience waited impatiently for Daniel to finish his portion and retire with her to bed, but he didn’t leave until he had generously shared the new ale, not twice, but three times with John and Thomas. When he finally took his wife’s hand, she led him off to their room saying, “Oh, Daniel. It’s been such a struggle managing all by myself.”

John hid a creeping smile, draining the dregs of his ale, and Martha threw him a warning glance, snatching away his cup. The children had been sent to her bed, and when she crawled under the blanket, fitting her body carefully between their huddled shapes, she was surprised to see that Will was still awake. His eyes turned in the direction of the wall where the rhythmic sounds of the creaking bed ropes that supported his mother’s bed drifted through the thin walls, and he began to cry. She shushed him and, placing her hands over his ears, pulled him tight to her own body until she felt him go lax and heavy in her arms.

In the morning, it was clear to Martha that the bed ropes weren’t the only things squeaking during the night. Prompted by Patience, who dug a sharp elbow into his side, Daniel cleared his throat and announced that a Reverend Hastings, newly appointed minister of Billerica, would be coming to dinner within a few days. He droned on at length about the minister’s qualities of piety and of his recently acquired status as widower. Martha had been wiping the bowls clean and felt pulled into the sudden cessation of talk as a clod of dirt into a tunnel of wind. Seeing the expectant looks of her cousin turned in her direction, she realized Daniel had been speaking of the reverend for her benefit.

Casually, he rattled on about the trading he had recently done with the minister, the frugal nature of his habits, the austerity of his bearing, the dignity of his house. Martha brooded on whether the Reverend Hastings would be like the reverend from her childhood; the man who, despite her best efforts, entered her thoughts at times like a clot in sour milk. If so, Reverend Hastings would have no apparent vices of his own to make him humble or soft in his opinions of others who had sinned. He would be dry and sharp and, worst of all, full of purpose. He would carry within the folds of his cloak the breath of winter and peer at everyone with pale robin’s-egg eyes, uncovering and revealing every speck of unlawfulness in moral conduct, and his hands would make a punishment of every caress.

Signaling to John to begin the morning’s work, Thomas stood up and walked out the door, shading his eyes briefly in her direction, as though he had come upon her naked. She turned away, suddenly angry, snapping the cleaning rag aggressively across the boards of the table, spraying the floor with remnants of cornmeal. She said to no one in particular, “I’ll not be trussed up and bundled off to the first man, reverend though he may be, who comes sniffing around. By God, I’ll not.”

For the first time in days, persistent thoughts of hen feathers filled her mind. Ripping the apron off her waist, she threw it to the floor and fled from the house, keenly aware of the astonished looks traded between her cousin and Daniel.

She walked in circles around the yard until the pumping in her chest slowed. Daniel soon emerged from the house and, awkwardly gesturing an apologetic hand to her, began to hoe weeds in the garden. He threw himself into the work as though he would, in a single day, make up for all the time gone, and Martha thought she had never seen a man flail himself so at a task. Every limb was at odds with every other, elbows flying, knees bobbing, face as red as autumn cranberries, until, she thought, he would wear himself into the very soil. She looked at him critically for a while and then turned towards the barn, her arms crossed, regarding the shadow of Thomas passing back and forth through layered columns of sunlight from the open hayloft above.

In the barn she found Thomas running his hand over the flanks of one of the milk cows. The cow had been bawling fitfully for days, moving back and forth in a disquieting motion as it shifted its weight from one front hoof to the other. Thomas didn’t turn at her approach, but she knew he was aware of her presence. To make conversation she thought to ask him if the beast had stones in the belly, even though she knew it was a blocked hind stomach. Thomas had once remarked in passing to John that if a Welshman knew nothing else at all, he would know about sheep and cows and, for all their great size, the delicacy of their inner workings. She moved to cradle the cow’s neck in her arms, scratching at its cross-grained hide with her nails. It lifted its head, thick upper lip twitching, and Martha breathed in the smell of sour grasses fermenting in the maw behind the animal’s grinding teeth and knew from this that it was not fatally sick. Thomas knelt down, pressing his hands gently into the cow’s underside, shielding his face from Martha with the brim of his hat.

She sat down next to him and played with the straw between her fingers before asking, “What’s a Swedish feather?”

He turned to her, startled, with raised brows, as though she had asked him to jump off a cliff.

“John says I have a tongue like a Swedish feather.” She had asked the question in all earnestness, but when he moved to hide a smile, she bridled.

He straightened his mouth and answered, “It’s a weapon. A short pike with a steel-pointed blade. I say so as I have had necessity to use one.”

“And where,” she asked stiffly, “would you have had use for such a one as those?”

“Most times, missus,” he said, standing, “between the eyes and the belly.” He walked to another stall but soon returned with a flannel cloth and a bottle of oil. He uptilted the bottle onto the rag and commenced gently rubbing the cow’s hide, darkening it into circled, glistening patches. “I’ve been a soldier.” He looked at her significantly. “And I believe you know on which side I fought.” He set the bottle down, balancing it into the straw, and began carefully pressing his fingers into the cow’s soft underbelly, expertly probing the length of the entrails through the tightened, distended skin. “I were a pikeman, so I had use for such as a Swedish feather.”

“And did you live in London, as Will says?” she asked, and she was all too aware that her mouth had fallen slightly open, like a girl who is starving, fed with a very small spoon. She had once heard her sister’s husband, Roger, say that there was no greater place than London, or more wicked, as men walked with less reverence into a church than a tinker and a dog into an alehouse.

“Aye, I lived in that place. I left Wales, suddenlike, and by sixteen I were a man-at-arms.” He nodded for her to hand him the bottle again and he oiled both hands, rubbing them briskly together, warming them. She watched his splayed fingers moving knowledgeably over the cow’s hide, and when it bawled again in pain, he called to it chidingly, “Bod dawelu,” as though to a child protesting overmuch to a dose of physic. “You may reckon London a palace with streets of pearl and ivory, but they had cows and sheep there as well, the kind that stand on their two back legs. I lived in that cesspool until the war, called by my own conscience to fight.” He moved to help her from the straw and draped one long arm over the cow’s back. He looked at her evenly before saying, “And now I’ve told you enough to bring me trouble.”

She ducked her head, feeling his gaze raking the top of her skull. “Why do you tell me this?” she asked defensively.

“Because… I believe you know what it’s like to carry the weight of something hidden that can’t be spoken of. Not to friend, nor ken, nor to the closest partner of your bosom.”

As he spoke, she had placed her own mirroring hand across the beast, making an unlinked arc of both their arms. She couldn’t look at his face, unnerved that he would know she had secrets to keep; instead, she intently studied the knotted joints of his hands and the calluses that shielded the pads of his fingers. She willed herself to think of the wooden trunk set next to his bed, and the red coat Will had told her was nestled within. There came to her then the stories that her father had told her of the long and bloody civil war in the old England thirty years ago; of the red coats of Cromwell’s New Model Army, an army that was, in its day, one of the best and most disciplined to fight in the known world.

She met his eyes and asked, “What could I possibly have to hide? I’ve never been anywhere, I’ve never seen anything.” A note of bitterness had crept into her voice and she tamped it down lest he think her shrewish. His hand, still coated in a fine membrane of oil, crept over her own, the calluses rasping and unyielding across her skin; but there was no proprietary feel to the touch, and he didn’t move his body closer to hers as a preamble to some coarser action, and there were no whispered words as a ploy to reach and grab.

“And the women of London. Were they lovely?” She regretted her question as soon as she asked it and waited for him to deride it as vanity, most certainly what the Reverend Hastings would have done.

There was a slow shifting of weight as though he was considering the best way to answer. “In London,” he began, “just before the Great War, fishwives and housewives stood cheek by jowl with great ladies. You could see the mayor’s wife pulling up her skirts against the muck like any oysteress. You smile, missus, but it’s the truth. During the days before the war, the women of that time were infected with the same fever as their men, and they matched them brick for brick in building the ramparts to shield the city against the king and his army. It was a fever we held on to because to cure it meant to wake again to tyranny. You ask what makes a woman comely?” He tapped one finger lightly against her temple and said, “Thoughts, missus. It’s thoughts that make a woman so.”

She had opened her mouth to speak when John shuffled noisily into the barn, calling out, “Missus, there’s a journeyman come for you. With a letter.” John had turned away slightly, and she colored to think he had come upon them having a conversation which had moved beyond the health of the livestock. She quickly buried her chin in her shoulder, hiding her expression, until John had left again. Slipping her hand free, she moved away reluctantly, saying, “You know a lot, for a farmer.”

As she passed him, Thomas’s head tilted back, eyes narrowing as though to focus better on something wavering and indistinct, and he countered, “Enough to know you’ll never be settled with some parson.”

As she stepped from the barn, she shook the folds of her skirt into order, all too aware that anyone seeing her then would think her a wanton emerging from a toss in the hay: bothered, flustered, her backside covered in straw. But she found the entire household gathered around the journeyman already being fed at her cousin’s table, a man so thin his shanks would have whistled in a high wind. He wiped his hand on his trousers and, handing her a folded piece of parchment, went back to stuffing his mouth with the remnants of cold porridge left over from breakfast.

Martha quickly opened the letter, written on the back of a fragment of a pamphlet from Boston trumpeting the arrival of ships from England, anticipating some homely bit of news about the Toothaker settlement ten miles to the north. She sensed Patience move up close to her and felt a flash of irritation that her cousin would seek to rob her of solitary discovery of news from her sister. The letter, in Mary’s hand, was brief; she had lost the pregnancy in her seventh month and was much taken down through the disappointment of her husband, Roger. She had written simply, “Please come.”

“Disappointment of her husband,” Martha muttered resentfully, remembering bitterly how ill her sister had been at the previous miscarriage. From the first she had laid eyes on her brother-in-law, she had always believed him to be a husband by convenience, and a father by accident. Her hand holding the letter had no sooner dropped to her side in a shared sense of grief than Patience asked, with alarm, “What’s amiss? Has anyone died?”

“Mary has lost her babe,” she answered and saw Patience grab instinctively at her belly. “And her son, Allen, is ill. I must go straightaway.”

The journeyman, finished with his meal, shook his head vigorously, saying, “Large bands of Wabanakis have been seen moving through the forests ’cross town. There’s no doubt they be on the path to malice. Stay armed and stay sheltered. I myself am staying in the next settlement until they have moved on.”

Patience grabbed at her husband’s arm, pleading, “Daniel, let John take Martha. We need Thomas here. To help protect us and the children.” Joanna, catching the near-hysterical tone in her mother’s voice, began to cry, and Martha picked her up, smoothing her hair out of her face.

With all eyes turned expectantly to him, Daniel looked unseated, thrust so quickly into making a decision beyond what to bring from the cellar. Blinking rapidly, he said, “Very well, but you must wait a few days, Martha, maybe a week, until we know the road to your sister’s home is not the road to disaster.” When Martha opened her mouth to protest, Daniel gathered himself up, saying, “Now, that’s enough. I… that is, we have decided.” He turned hopefully to his wife, and when she nodded encouragingly to him, he added, signaling an end to the conversation, “Am I not master of this house?”

The journeyman hurriedly left and the settlement became a fortress. Shutters were closed and nailed into casements. Doors were heavily cross-barred with oak, and vigilant watches were kept by the men by day and by night. The women placed buckets of sand and water under the eaves to put out fires set on the roof and the children were kept indoors at all times. The ample supplies brought by Daniel replenished the fearful watches and, as the week diminished, so, too, did the keg of strong ale, sipped sparingly but steadily to counter nerves brought to a fiery temper through waiting.

On the fourth day after the journeyman had left, a “hallo” from the yard showed a mounted constable come to spread the word that the Indians had moved on. But with them they had taken cattle, horses, and a young girl named Elizabeth Farley. A child eleven years old, she had gone out to empty the morning slops, and when she did not soon return, her mother found many footprints leading westward towards the Concord River. Townsmen followed the trail but lost it in fording the river and so had to give up the search. A day after the doors and windows had been thrown open again to the spring winds, Martha and Patience went to Goodwife Farley with food, to sit with the recently widowed woman, childless, alone and grieving, a mantle of ashes in her hair scraped from the cold remains of her kitchen hearth.

THE DREAM HAD left Martha terrified and shaken, with a sensation of suffocating, of drowning in mountainous, overwhelming drifts of feathers. Upon waking, she jerked herself upright to sitting, knees bent with hands clenched tightly over her stomach, and stifled a cry. Joanna moved restlessly next to her and she felt her way in the dark to the end of the bed, crouching on the floor, her hands over her open mouth.

It was the Reverend Hastings’s visit the night before, she believed, that had sharpened the memories of that other black-frocked man she had not seen in over ten years. The Taylors’ supper had not gone well and it was close to a certainty that the reverend would never again come to call at her cousin’s with a mind to wooing. From the beginning, Reverend Hastings had shown himself to be exactly as she had imagined him to be, judging the quick and the dead with harsh alacrity. He had quoted Ephesians to her when she had proven herself to be insufficiently humble on the subject of marriage: “So man is to God, so must woman be to man.” To which she had retorted sharply, “And does not Colossians say, ‘See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy’?” The table had sat in uncomfortable silence until the reverend said, in barely repressed anger, “The contract of marriage is God-ordained and is like any other necessary, required, and enforceable contract…”

As he spoke, his words droning on and on through tightly pressed lips like coarse line through a too-small fishing hook, Martha had begun to feel the familiar stifling dread building behind her temples and she clutched at the table for balance. She could feel Thomas’s eyes on her, and he abruptly said, “By mutual consent.” Baffled by the interruption, the reverend stopped midsentence. “What’s that you say?” he asked. Thomas, methodically mopping up the end of his soup, swallowed the last of the bread before answering, “It’s the covenant of marriage, Reverend. Not a contract. You’re not tradin’ for livestock.” John quickly bowed his head, snickering, and Martha herself felt a hysterical urge to laugh out loud, fully and rudely, into the parsimonious face that looked to his hosts in wounded indignation. Thomas held her gaze boldly for a moment and then, excusing himself, left for the barn, John trailing closely behind.

She had gone to bed in a jubilant mood, only slightly sorry that her cousins were put out by the abrupt departure of their guest. Reverend Hastings’s diminishment by Thomas had, it seemed for a time, excised some of the feelings of debasement and shame, long held from the eyes of the world, brought about by a fellow man of God.

A deep-limbed sleep had come as soon as she had pulled up the quilt. She had dreamt of herself as a girl again in the home of the Ipswich parson and his family where she had been placed at nine years of age. In the dream, she stood in the chicken coop, her face to the wall where she had been turned and told not to move, or speak, or resist; the back of her skirt up around her shoulders as brutal encircling hands held her immobile. Thumbs, like two vises, pressing cruelly into her flesh, beginning at the ankles and proceeding higher and higher up her calves, to her knees and then onward to the inside of her thighs. Higher and higher like a Jacob’s ladder into the inner tender parts that were covered to the eyes of scrutiny in the brightness of day, places that were hidden even from herself as she dressed for the night in a sweet-smelling night shift scrubbed clean by the parson’s wife. And all around her, in the dream, the hens are fluttering, shedding feathers that drift like snow over her face, covering her eyes and nose; feathers that can’t be brushed away because to move would be to invite a beating.

And when she woke she remembered fully the reverend of her childhood. The man who had called her “daughter,” patiently teaching her to read and write excellently and to commit to memory the whole of the testaments, for to be left ignorant of these things would have reflected badly upon his tutelage. A man who was loved and admired and looked upon for counsel and who only ever once was confined to his bed, shortly after the time that she awoke from her turpitude and, taking his manhood into her hands, twisted it nearly off. She was quickly returned to her own family as being recalcitrant after three years spent in Ipswich and soon took to her own bed with an illness the town surgeon had called “unwholesome.” She wept then, remembering, too, that it was Thomas, and only ever Thomas, who had seen, who had recognized, the stamp of a pitiless secret held like a poisoned abscess in the deepest part of herself.

In the morning, she took a needle and thread and sewed the red book into the casing of her pillow. She would keep the pages intact and alive within their covering but hidden away. And if her cousin asked her the whereabouts of the book, she resolved she would tell her it had become corrupt with mold and had been discarded.