The Wolves of Andover

CHAPTER 16

From the Private Journal of John Dixwell

Catalogue XXIII

New Haven, Connecticut, Anno 1673, 28th day of July

In primis: the following code, dated 19 July, was received this morning by courier from my agent in Boston and is hereby re-created from the original:

3012272622271022253016272218

312135211522181030161433211113101121272334

3121192710181228131024192310112110131614342313

27222319271116111410242113232111

121832161322101211181027223035103119111813

The cipher translates as follows:

Parker expired. Followed pigeons north 4 days but no sightings. Returning Boston. Advise and replenish funds.

Faciendum: a courier should be sent to the constable in Boston with funds for the Boston agent in the amount of fifty shillings, to include remuneration for Mrs. Parker’s burial, along with directives to friends in Woburn and Haverhill to observe and report, taking no tumultuous action against Brudloe and Cornwall, pro tempore. It may be our English pigeons have misled us about their going north up the coastal roads.

However, the courier from Boston has informed me that, as there is plague in Springfield, the post road towards Boston is now barred, as well as ships coming into Boston Harbor, to keep contagion and death from entering the city. My agent must make his way home from Boston as best he can, with no word soon from me. I fear the foul wind of sickness may have already settled in New Haven, as my wife has been downed with a troubling fever. I have bled her three times, but the fever rises with the hours.

Further to this difficulty there are Indian raids to the west. Seven people have been murdered, their bodies hacked into suet, at a settlement in Danbury thirty miles from here and we are left for only God to defend us, as our stores of powder have been neglected, our garrison only basely built.

It may be weeks before we can alert our Massachusetts friends who have for so many years lived in our care and under our watchful eye. It is for me only a little thing, sitting and watching and cawing like an alarming parrot, repeating and passing on those communications uttered by careless and odious Royalists—some of whom have meant to do harm, others who’ve merely loved the sounds of their own voices—when those I seek to warn have sacrificed so much for the sake of common good: they who have given up land, family, and the most modest of pleasures to keep on living; they who are now only a few and who have, from the first instant of the Struggle, done what others were not willing to do. And though I may count myself a part of that struggle, it is doubtless not so great a sacrifice having affixed my name, one name out of many, to a king’s death writ, when others have taken up the mask, the rope, and the ax.

If any in our care are captured and brought back to England as traitors alive, here is what awaits them upon judgment from the king, this purveyor of ancient justices and charitable acts: they will be taken from their place of imprisonment, bound and dragged on hurdles, to the place of execution at Tyburn or Charing Cross. There they will be hanged by a short rope for only a little while, just shy of death. Then will they be cut down and dragged again to a long table where the executioners will saw off their privy parts and throw them to dogs to be eaten. A long cut will be made in the bellies of the newly hanged; the entrails spooled out slowly upon a rolling pin. This in full sight of the sufferer who screams in agony to a crowd of leering subjects fed by oranges and sweetmeats provided by the king’s men. Each organ in turn will be pulled out and burned and, if the executioner is practiced and skilled, the dying man will not go to his end until he has smelled the charring of his own tender flesh.

I have lost close to a dozen confederates in just such a manner, myself escaping the noose of betrayal and capture solely by God’s Grace and the advantage, at times, of only an hour’s head start.

Those in our care have damned themselves to their native country, and have given up their own unfettered liberties for the right to go on breathing; a few even now hide in cellars and attics as though they were thieves. But a new country, and a new people, baking in the slow fire of brutish energy and stirred with the infant zealotry of practical idealism and independence, have claimed them.

In these late days, I am often reminded of the lament of Dante in his sublime Paradiso, who knew full well the torment of the exiled: Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta più caramente; e questo è quello strale che l’arco de lo essilio pria saetta.

You shall leave everything you love most; this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first.