The Wolves of Andover

CHAPTER 15

A BAG OF GOOSE down lay opened on the bed, the curling, delicate quills startlingly white against the dark gray sacking. There were other things as well, carefully positioned and repositioned next to the bag: four buttons carved from the tiny bones of a squirrel, a cloak pin for the English woolen bought at market, shaved from the pointed splinter of a stag’s antler, a doeskin throw, supple and warm from being cured in the sun. Martha sat, picking up and setting down again each thing, one by one, regarding the treasures that Thomas had left for her almost daily since the mowing of the fields, leaving them in places he knew she would go; shyly, stealthily, without any show or stated expectation for return of favor.

Patience had said nothing of the gifts. She would merely, with a disapproving glance, turn away with a cautionary exhalation of breath as though the frequency of the offerings was suspect, even though Thomas was as ever steadfast in his work on the settlement.

Martha picked up the red book and painstakingly recorded each offering, noting with satisfaction the growing list. It was only recently that she had begun writing again in the journal. Each morning or evening, whenever she could be alone, she would carefully tear open the seam in the pillow casing, make her few entries, and then carefully sew the book back into its hiding place. It was the only thing that she could hold completely, without the prying eyes of others, to herself. Patience had not yet asked her about the book. Her cousin was too preoccupied with her own fears about the coming labor pains to think on that which held for her no great worth.

Martha turned back a page and read the entry from the day before.

Thomas had wordlessly upended the green and glistening clusters on the table to dry, their red stalks pointing up towards the ceiling. Like tiny advancing pikemen, she thought. She knew he had picked the purslane for her because she had said in passing that she hungered for it. She stuffed a few of the leaves raw into her mouth, savoring the stringent, almost bitter taste, and held the rest back for a stew for Patience.

Her cousin was becoming more and more knotted over with worry about the birthing, which Martha was certain was soon to come. The pregnant woman’s ankles were swollen, as were her hands and the skin under her eyes. At least her appetite was good, the retching now all but gone. But there was still a disturbing lack of movement within Patience’s belly, and she would often grab at Martha’s hand and place it over the mounded flesh, pleading, “Martha, tell me you yet feel the flutterings.”

This morning, before the sun grew too hot, Martha would go with Thomas to scrape enough slippery elm to make a poultice to ease the passage of the infant through the birth channel. She had wanted to go days earlier, but Thomas had put her off, saying it was not safe. He had for the past week been frequently gone, searching out the scarce game that hid from the heat, and had told her that between the pox and the Indian raids, life was of late never more the width of a blade’s edge.

She closed the book and quickly stitched it back into her pillow. She then took up a short curved knife for peeling the elm branches and tucked it into her apron. Joanna had been sitting at the hearth, practicing writing her name in the ashes with a stick, the letters floating canted and disconnected like sprigs of rosemary in soup.

Martha bent down and kissed her head, the girl’s hair smelling of acrid smoke and lavender, and admonished her, for her mother’s sake, to be at least quiet if not good.

As she walked from the house, John grinned at her and loudly sang, “Now is the month of Maying, when merry lads go playing…” She scowled, her face reddening, but secretly she was pleased, and John laughed and sang even louder, the words of the song following her across the yard.

Will waited outside with the stubborn pout she had come to know as the desperate disappointment of the man-child, forever being left behind when an adventure away from the settlement was under way. She waved to him as she and Thomas walked south, but Will stood, his arms crossed, his narrow hips thrust angrily forward, glowering at them until the view to the path was veiled by the branches of low-hanging trees.

They walked for a while, not talking, Thomas’s pace deliberately slow for her benefit, but there were no glances, and when he didn’t soon reach for her hand, she moved nearer. He stopped once and hunkered down, gesturing for her to do the same, and pointed into the shadows of the bracken. It took her a long time to see the deer, twin mottled shapes, their heads bowed in sleep over each other’s backs, motionless except for the delicate, almost imperceptible motion of their ribs. He gripped the barrel of the flint, upright like a staff, but never moved to fire it.

They stood quietly and moved on, the building heat creating crescents of sweat under their arms. The birds stopped their morning rustling, settling into sporadic calls and answers, and Martha’s hand brushed the carapace of a grass locust clinging, with serrated arms, to her skirt. She swept it away and looked once more at Thomas, his brooding face framed from behind by the powdery dust kicked up by his boots.

She became more discomfited by the silence, by his withdrawn, distracted air, and she burned to ask, Are you Thomas Morgan? Instead, she pulled at his sleeve and said, “I thank you for the gifts.” He stopped, his chin pointing towards the road in front of them. “Thomas…,” she began. It was the first time she had uttered his name in his presence and she was suddenly desperately shy, as brittle and insubstantial as the locust she had flicked away into the grass.

He took her wrist and walked her to the side of the path where a small boulder was planted firmly into the earth and lifted her in one motion, setting her feet on the flattened edge of the rock so that her face was closer to his own. He swept off his hat, gripping her arms tightly as if to keep her from falling off a great height.

“Martha,” he said. She waited for him to speak further, but he dropped his chin and looked away. She knotted the linen of his shirt in both her hands and tugged at the cloth until he looked at her again.

“There are things,” he began, “which must be said.”

“Nothing needs to be said now, except for those promises you are willing to give.”

“No,” he said, his hands tracking the distance of her arms, coming to rest over her fingers still gripping the front of his shirt.

Through her palms she could feel the rhythmic pulsing beneath his ribs, and imagined his heart as large as a waterwheel, churning his warming blood through the length of him. His breath expanded and contracted in moist waves around her face, and a half smile rimmed his lips. “The wolf skin would’ve been better suited to you than the doeskin.”

“Is that how you see me?” she asked. “Like a wolf? Is that who I am in your tale of Gelert? Am I the wolf?” Her face was defensive and half-fearful, like a child expecting punishment.

He leaned closer, bringing his lips to her ear, and asked solemnly, “D’you still not know?” She shook her head, and cupping the side of her face with his hand, he said, “You are the deer shot through with arrows whose heart grows cold for want of being taken.”

He looked at her, his mouth solemn, and her eyes filled with tears. He held her, speaking to her in his own tongue, the guttural sounds fractured and sweet against her cheek. “Branwen,” he called her, pulling off her cap to crimp the black hair in his hands. He whispered into her neck, first in Welsh and then in English, the tale of the myth-woman Branwen, with cheeks the color of raven’s blood and the body of snow. He kissed her mouth, encircling the backs of her thighs with his arms, pressing her against him. Tracing upwards with his fingers the bony prominences of her spine, he rested his palms beneath the hollows of her arms and he slowly pulled her away. He lifted up her apron to show her she should wipe her face, streaked and glistening. He helped her by brushing the creases of her eyelids with his thumbs and smoothing back the knots of hair from her forehead.

“Sweetheart,” he said, kissing the hollow of her throat.

By measures her tears dried, and after lifting her from the rock, he took her hand and led her to the grove where she set to work with her curve-bladed knife, gathering the sap from the slippery elm. The insides of the trunks were still soft, the hidden bark light-colored and strong-smelling, and she scraped at it vigorously, the sweat from her face burning her eyes like lye. After a time, she gathered the shavings into a small bag and watched Thomas scanning the path and the woods for movement, his form grown restless and agitated.

After a while he said, “When you take up a man’s name, you take on his history. I’m nigh on fifty years. D’ye know that?” She nodded for him to go on. “I’ve had a wife before. In England.”

Her grip on the knife handle tightened, but she kept her eyes on the bark and the rhythmic scraping of the blade.

“She died when I was a soldier fightin’ for Cromwell in Ireland. I were his man in all things, Martha, and you should know it before you tie yourself to me.”

His eyes searched the length of the path from the opposite direction they had come, as though he expected someone to appear. She anxiously peered into the woods, looking for something hidden in the shadows, but saw nothing alarming. He glanced up at the sky, the sun at midpoint, and then, nodding, turned to her. “I’d tell you all, here and now, but for the others.”

Others? she thought, wiping away a limp strand of hair with the back of her sleeve. She saw him look sharp to the road and she stood up, following the direction of his gaze. A man walked towards them, his arms swinging easily in counterpoint to his rapid stride. He was dressed in a leather jerkin and full breeches like any farmer, but with the confidence of a man used to certainty of action. Lacing her fingers around her eyes against the noon glare, she looked up at Thomas and with a jolt realized that he knew the man, that he had been waiting for him. As he walked nearer, she saw that the man was tall, only a head shorter than Thomas, with a few days’ growth of heavy beard, as though he had been living hard on the ground. His footfalls made explosions of dust as his heels struck the path, and the long barrel of a flintlock, strapped with leather to his back, gleamed dully over one shoulder.

He came to stand in front of them, placing a familiar hand on Thomas’s shoulder. There was nothing said between them, merely the nodding of heads in casual greeting.

“Here is my friend Robert Russell.” There was weight in the word “friend,” but Thomas offered nothing further.

Martha looked at the man, unsure how to place his name or face. He was a stranger to her; she had never heard Thomas speak of him before today. Robert regarded her closely, scrutinizing her face, and she wondered if her eyes were still red and swollen from weeping. She self-consciously wiped her slick palms on her apron and waited.

Suddenly he grinned, displaying an alarming array of strong white teeth, and said, “You look confounded, missus. But that is to be expected, as you know little of me, and I know so much of yourself.”

His speech was not like Thomas’s, but neither was it accented as it would have been with a whole life spent in the colonies. She crossed her arms and said, “I know nothing of you.” Uncertainty had made the sound of her voice strident but, rather than taking offense, he smiled wider at her and cut a look to Thomas.

“That is why I am here, missus.” Robert reached into a bag at his waist and pulled from it an apple, a perfect globe of pale red and green, and extended it out to her like an offering. “It is from General Gookin’s orchard.”

“I don’t know General Gookin either,” she said. She paused a moment before reaching out and taking the apple.

“Walk with me, then,” he said, “and I will tell you.” He gestured off the path, towards the stand of trees. Thomas took her arm and they walked the short distance to the shaded places. Standing, she propped her back against a slender trunk and held the apple briefly up to her nose, breathing in its rolling perfume, roselike and tart. She looked to Thomas for some guiding word, but he stood apart from her, staring down at his feet, lost in his own thoughts. She clasped her hands under her apron, tense and expectant, knowing that good news never would need such a courtship of words.

“General Gookin is known to both of us, Thomas and me, from the Great War. He fought like us for Parliament. He is now here, in the colonies, and has great tracts of land: orchards, fields, and men, of which I am but one. Thomas and I made the passage on a ship with the general.” He paused and looked expectantly at her, as though he had run a great distance ahead and waited for her to follow.

Unaccountably, she remembered the instant of fear when the tinsmith blew out the candle, the blackness, the scrambling to find the lock. And the name he had given her when she crossed the threshold to leave. “Prudent Mary,” she said. “The ship on which you crossed over was the Prudent Mary.”

Robert dipped his head in assent.

“And there were others,” she said, using Thomas’s word. “Others who came with you, because to stay in England would bring… danger.”

Robert laughed, throwing his head back. “That’s putting it prettily, missus.”

Thomas held up a cautioning hand and said, “Martha.” When she looked into his face, she saw that he was afraid for her. “It was General Gookin who found us shelter, and he watches over those who made the crossing with him, as best he can. All our fates are tied together. So one goes, the others may follow. I would not burden you with a name that’d mean prison, or death, if you didn’t know the truth.”

He moved in closer, grasping a branch above her head. “Robert an’ me, we sleep with our backs to the wall. One loose word about any one of us, and some village newcomer, and all his grandchildren, would have coin enough to live like princes.”

Her hands, hidden beneath the apron, squeezed tighter together, her nails piercing the skin of the apple. She turned her back to Robert so that Thomas alone would see her face, and asked, “Why could you not tell me this, Thomas? Do you not trust me?”

“It’s not for lack of trust, Martha. It’s our way. It’s for our safekeeping, and for yours. If I should be taken, Robert would do his best to protect you.”

“You needed to see my face, and I yours,” Robert said, pushing himself away from the tree where he had been leaning. “Though it is better truth to say I am more the advantaged by having seen yours.”

Thomas led her back to the path and she followed him haltingly, her head filled with the knowledge, and half-knowledge, of his life before coming to Billerica; that he had had a wife and had fought across two countries with the Great Protector, Cromwell, now proclaimed a criminal throughout England and its colonies. Yet the one question she burned to ask had not been uttered.

Thomas waited for her in the sandy loam of the path, Robert at his side, the afternoon light filtering in columns through the dust of a midsummer’s drought. They looked at her solemnly, waiting for her to step from the lip of the meadow’s edge onto the road. If she turned away now, she could walk through Fitch’s settlement, following Bent Stream all the way to the Taylors’. There she could take up the hoe and hack away at the vines overtaking the corn until she had worked herself through the choking runners, clearing neat channels of earth, row upon row upon row, in endless successions of soil and rock and sand, until she in turn was planted in the dirt.

Instead Martha asked, “Are you Thomas Morgan?”

There was the slightest pause, his hesitation not one of deception, but rather of a man careful in handing over a thing of staggering weight. She felt the falling away of fear and in its place flared the dreadful excitement of the battlefield harridan, the woman who follows after soldiers, hopeful of gain at the end of a desperate fight. In her mind there was a quick succession of images: the embattled waves of tramping men, the sounds of iron on leather, the trumpeting of dying horses and men. The poetry of blood.

And then he answered, “Aye.”

Robert turned and walked the way he had come with no good-byes until he had swept up the path twenty paces or so. Turning briefly, he called out, “I’ll be about, missus. Rest easy on that.”

Later, Martha would halve the apple, twisting it in her hands, and hand the largest part to Thomas, who ate it in two bites, skin and core, swallowing whole the bitter pips, the seeds that would always endure beyond the fruit’s demise, the hard and reluctant carriers of secrets.

FOR DAYS AFTERWARDS Martha rarely spoke to Thomas yet often found ways of standing close to him, the air between them discouraging even the simplest intrusive demands of others. John laid off his teasing banter, quietly leaving the common room or barn whenever they were near. Patience, worried over the impending birth, stayed close to her bed, saying nothing to Martha about her solitary time spent with Thomas, giving out only a succession of peevish requests for food or to move her pillow this way or that.

On the eighteenth of July, the true pains of labor started for Patience. Her water broke in a thin stream while she was at the wash, and John was quickly sent in the wagon for Mary, who would help with the birthing. In a scrap of note, Martha wrote for her sister to bring black cohosh, as the cramping had begun sluggish and weak. She knew that Patience would never willingly take the cohosh—“squaw’s root,” the pregnant woman had dismissively called it—but Martha would sneak it into her broth if her cousin didn’t have the strength to bear down through the final stages.

Patience, greatly relieved that the pains were so light, was full of high resolve and friendly chatter as Martha walked her about the yard, through the common room, around the bed. Patience speculated aloud when Daniel would return and what he might bring back for her. She questioned Martha endlessly about what name she should give the child if it should be another boy, dismissing every name Martha suggested, finally deciding on the name Daniel; if it should be a girl, she would name it Rebecca. Will, agitated by the sudden tension and nervous vulnerability of his mother, marched back and forth through the yard, a stick over his shoulder like a rifle, challenging hordes of invisible attackers. Wave after wave of invading bands were subdued, until he knocked Joanna down, making her scream, and Martha used the stick on the back of his legs.

At four in the afternoon, Martha laid Patience down on the bed and examined the crown of the birth channel. The pains had begun to come more frequently, less than every half hour, but the crown was not opening sufficiently for the infant’s head. The plug had not been completely dispelled and Martha was loath to puncture it as she had known other midwives to do. Often, it nicked the tender part of the babe’s skull, or allowed a pustulance to start in the womb, causing fever and death. She decided to wait and heaved Patience up again to walk her around the garden once more.

For six hours the women walked and rested and walked again. Martha brought a pan of warm water and helped her cousin squat over it, her shift pulled up around her breasts, allowing the steam to open up the womb. Finally, close to midnight, the pains stopped altogether and Patience fell into an exhausted sleep. Martha lay down next to her, prodding Patience’s belly gently with her fingers, but felt no answering kick; an hour later Martha closed her eyes and slept.

Martha dreamt of the wolves trapped in the pen and jerked into consciousness at hearing the high-pitched scream of a struggling animal. She woke to a blackened room, Patience writhing in agonized spasms next to her. Martha quickly rose, feeling her way to the hearth to light a few candles. When she returned to the bedroom with the guttering light, she saw a dark stain of liquid on the mattress, her cousin’s face open-mouthed in the extremes of fear and pain.

“Patience, your water has fully come. This is good news, cousin. Hush now or you’ll wake your children.” Martha heard padding footfalls behind her and saw Will and Joanna standing, staring wide-eyed and frightened, at the bedroom door. Behind them loomed Thomas, his body in the helpless stance of useless men, and she waved him out of the house, into the barn. She led the children back to bed, giving them each a piece of bread to suck on, and quickly built up the fire, adjusting the iron pot to boil water. She shredded into the pot lavender and chamomile, and carried back into the bedroom the slippery elm paste covered in a wet cloth. She sat on the bed with a candle, positioning herself to examine Patience, satisfying herself that the womb was beginning to open, expelling the child.

Within a few hours, though, Martha was dismayed to see her cousin beginning to tire, unwilling to bear down with the cramping pains that left her scrambling up the wall behind the bed, her arms and legs flailing, as though she could leave her distended belly behind to do its own work.

With much coaxing, Martha roused her and set Patience on her lap in a chair. She encircled Patience’s belly with her arms, pushing down whenever the pains came, whispering encouraging words over her cousin’s frantic protests that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, bear down anymore.

Dawn had fully come before Martha heard John returning with the wagon. She rushed into the yard, anxious to greet her sister, but was dismayed to see Roger climbing from the wagon as well. His eyes were veined with red and he scowled, on the back end of being in his cups, and she knew he was the reason for the delay in her sister’s arrival. Saying he had long been with a patient and needed sleep, he quickly found his way into the barn, and Martha hoped he would sleep through until Patience had been delivered.

Mary followed quickly into the bedroom and, with only the briefest of examinations, whispered for Martha to begin feeding Patience the cohosh. They dosed Patience every hour for three hours and Mary was soon satisfied that the roof of the womb was finally opening sufficiently for the head. With the birth pains coming every few minutes, Patience shrieked and cried, and Martha knew that she herself would be coming undone without the soothing presence of her sister. She watched Mary’s assured movements, admiring her calm, but Patience’s face had taken on the color of old ivory, with black bands underlying her swollen lower lids, and when Martha caught Mary’s eye, she saw the press of wary concern on her sister’s face.

Mary took up the slippery elm and applied it with gentle fingers into the birth channel, all the while encouraging Patience with how fine her son would be, how proud would be his father. Martha crawled onto the bed behind Patience, raising her up into a sitting position while Patience thrashed her head from side to side with increasing violence screaming, “No more, no more, no more…”

Mary said quietly, “Martha, we need to dose her again.”

Patience went suddenly limp and still, a look of renewed panic growing on her face. Through cracked lips, she croaked, “What’s that you say? What’s that?” She looked first at Mary and then up at Martha bending over her shoulder, and whispered with rising hysteria, “You’re poisoning me. You’re killing me! Murder! Murder!” Her eyes rolled towards the door and she pleaded, “Help me, they’re poisoning me!”

Martha followed Patience’s gaze and she saw Roger standing at the door. He said, “Christ on the cross, but you can hear her out to the barn.” He paused, regarding the women unsteadily, and offered, “She needs to be bled and heartily.”

Patience reached out to him with grasping fingers and shrilled, “Yes, let him take it. Open my veins and take this pain from my head.”

“Husband,” Mary said quietly, “you are tired. Rest more and let us do our work.”

He paused for a moment, assessing the pregnant woman on the bed, observing her pallor, her swollen limbs. He asked Martha, “How long has she labored?”

“Since yesterday morning late.” Martha wiped at her cousin’s face with a cool cloth, clenching her teeth. Roger’s answer to everything—every bruise, every pustule, every boil—was to aggressively bleed the patient until the sufferer was as white as lambs’ wool.

“She is phlegmatic…,” he began.

Martha clapped her hands over her cousin’s ears and snapped, “She is not phlegmatic, she is exhausted.”

He shrugged, but before walking away, he said to Mary, “I have brought castor oil, if it comes to that.”

Patience covered her face, sobbing into her hands, saying she would surely die, and Martha held her in a rocking embrace. Castor oil was tricky and vile; it was certain to bring on powerful labor, but too much of a surgeon’s distillation, the castor beans having been soaked in the oil for months, and the laboring woman would indeed be poisoned. Mary put her ear to Patience’s belly, listening for the sounds of life within, and when she raised her head, she said urgently to Martha, “Help me get her up.”

It took the two of them to lift Patience out of bed and they eased her down squatting onto the floor, both of them holding her arms, pleading, exhorting, bullying Patience to push and push and push again. After another few hours, Patience began a shuddering fever, her body lathered in sweat. When Patience began to rave incoherently, she was eased back onto the bed with pillows propped under her head. Beckoning for Martha to follow, Mary walked into the common room. They found the men eating a cold midday dinner of day-old porridge and meat, their faces strained from the sounds of a woman’s agony. The children sat on a bench, their hands interlocked in terrified silence.

Mary beckoned to Roger and, when he stood in front her, whispered, “She has no more strength left to labor. If the babe is not pushed out of her womb very soon, they both will die.”

He walked to his saddlebag and sorted through some bottles until he pulled out a small brown vial. Lifting the stopper out, he carefully poured a tiny measure of the syrupy oil into a cup of ale. Pausing a moment, he added a drop more. Swirling the mixture in the cup, he said, “She must drink it all at once.”

“She’ll not do it willingly,” Martha warned, wondering how they would pry open her cousin’s jaws to swallow the oily drink.

Carrying the cup, Roger followed them back to the bedroom where Patience lay panting, her hands gripping at the torn sheets, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Advising the two women to hold Patience down, he leaned over the bed, saying, “You must swallow this down, Goodwife Taylor. It will help you in your labors.” He said it pleasantly, matter-of-factly, but when she began to shake her head wildly in refusal, clamping her lips more tightly together, Roger reached out, pinching his fingers over her nose, and waited. She soon gasped for air and he poured the liquid over her tongue, quickly palming his hand over her mouth, forcing her to swallow or be drowned.

Before he left to resume his dinner, he gently stroked Patience’s hair, cooing to her that all would be well, that the babe would now soon come. Patience smiled up at him and Martha marveled that for all of Roger’s weaknesses, his passion for drink, his carelessness with his wife, he could at times show kindness. She admonished herself to have more charity where her brother-in-law’s shortcomings were concerned.

The action of the oil worked quickly and within a few hours, Patience, howling and bucking, had been delivered of a boy, his forceful passage soaked in a spill of blood and water running in rivulets over the mattress onto the floor. While Mary worked to clean up the afterbirth, washing Patience with practiced hands while she slept, Martha swaddled the infant and held him close to her breast. He was the most perfect infant Martha had ever seen, each finger, every toe creased and rounded in rosy flesh, the nails crescented and silvery. His head was gently domed, neither flattened nor marred, despite the many long hours of the labor. She examined the infant skin, looking like cream and marigolds, stroking the cheeks, full and dimpled, the lashes still dark and segmented with the fluid from his mother’s womb, the lashes that would never crimp or dampen with crying, the curved and protruding lips that would never part with laughing, for he had been born without a breath to waken him, and with never a breath he would be lowered into the ground.