The Wolves of Andover

CHAPTER 17

MARTHA SAT ON the threshold, fanning her face with a dampened apron. The heat had become burdensome even at that early hour, but there was an eastward breeze which would last until midmorning, and she watched the men moving through the fields, testing the grain heads with their fingers and teeth, preparing for the summer harvest. She had come outside to escape the Reverend Hastings, who had been with Patience, still confined to her bed weeks after the burial of her infant, praying for hours. His visit had started gently enough with a passage from Romans: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” But then he moved on to the book of James and the sick, who should “call upon the elders of the church night and day until evil is cast out.” And finally, he raked her over the coals of Deuteronomy, wherein “sinful, unrepentant men, women, and children perish and are cast into the sulfurous pit.”

Before the reverend had barely climbed off his cart for the visit, he had taken Daniel solemnly aside and mouthed a few words into his ear, no doubt, Martha thought, encouraging Daniel to begin the plowing of his wife as soon as was seemly, giving her another babe to forget the one only recently lost. As John passed Martha on his way to the fields, he had murmured, “By God, I know lowland Presbyterians more cheerful than that one there.”

Daniel had returned to them a week after the delivery and truly mourned for his dead son. But his concern now was for his wife, who lay in bed, refusing most times to eat or drink, ignoring the demands of her two living children. At night Will and Joanna kept close to Martha in bed, despite the suffocating heat, Will twirling strands of her hair around and around his fingers into ever-tightening coils.

Martha’s concern was for the anger she saw in her cousin’s eyes whenever she looked at her. It was not an open hostility, but the creeping kind of resentment that could, over time, build into a rage: blameful stares, sour words, implacable silences. Patience became especially agitated whenever Martha and Thomas stood close together, as though their happiness, guarded as it was, mocked the loss of the infant. Mary and Roger had waited to leave until after the burial, and it seemed to Martha that her cousin saved the greatest portion of blame for her.

Ten days following Daniel’s return, Asa Rogers appeared at the door. Thomas and John had gone away hunting, and when the miller smiled tightly at her, his gray teeth showing through thin lips, Martha knew he had been waiting for an opportune time to resume his press for the land. He gave his condolences to Patience, sitting forlornly at the table, and briefly restated his case to Daniel.

“Goodman Taylor,” Rogers began, smoothing the lines of his jacket into order, “you are an honorable man to keep your promises. But I have it on good authority that the man who works for you is in fact a criminal.”

Daniel looked unhappily at Rogers, raking his hand through his hair so that it stood spiked like a cock’s comb. “Thomas has ever been honest, hardworking. I have never heard word from any man that he is other than what he shows himself to be.”

“No doubt he is a workhorse, but from Salem there is rumor…”

“Rumors, aye, and spiteful gossip from the tinsmith.” Martha rose to stand behind her chair, her hands twisting forcefully at the joints.

Daniel held up a quieting hand. “It is a harsh accusation to call a man criminal, sir. What mean you by it?”

“That he is a regicide, sir.” Rogers turned to Martha with raised brows.

Daniel took a steadying breath, saying, “There is not a farmer here in Billerica who does not have, by marriage or birth, family that fought against the king. But the king in his grace has pardoned all, sir.”

“All but those whose actions have directly brought about the death of the first King Charles. I have heard such stories from Ezra Black, who is of a prominent family here in Billerica.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” Martha said, her voice high and querulous.

Rogers, looking to Daniel, asked, “Is it your custom to let a servant question your judgment thus, or the opinions of others?”

Seeing Martha’s reddening face, Daniel quickly added, “She is my wife’s cousin.”

“How much are you offering to pay?” Patience suddenly asked. She had been sitting with a bent head as though drowsing, and Martha looked at her with astonishment.

Rogers oriented himself closer to Patience and said, “I’ll pay two pounds now and another two in one year’s time.”

Martha sucked in her breath at such a sum; two pounds was an outrageous amount that could only be offered by a man expecting to receive a bounty from somewhere other than his professed trade as a miller. Daniel then stood and escorted Rogers to the door, saying, “I will think on it and give you my answer.” Rogers left with a lingering, meaningful look at Patience, as though he would enlist her help, and when Martha glanced again at her cousin, she saw the same calculating look that had driven Patience to haggle with Thomas over the shared bounty of the wolves.

Martha stood at the door watching Asa Rogers ride away, his coat and collar stark and correct, black and white as a deacon’s. But his assessing, avaricious glances at the Taylor barn and fields put her more in mind of a crow studying the latch of a corn crib. Her mother while midwiving, at the sight of a noisy flock, used to say, “One crow for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, and four for a boy.” But the crow, as well as a prophesying bird, was also a ravaging thief, spiteful and destructive when thwarted.

When Thomas returned that evening, they sat together in the yard away from the prying eyes of the house. She told him of Asa Rogers’s visit and his extravagant offer to buy the land. Thomas ducked his chin and chewed thoughtfully on a blade of grass but said nothing for a time. A woolly bear caterpillar, reddish brown, tipped with black, bristled past her feet and she watched its slow progress. It was the first one she had seen that summer and was surprised at its early emergence.

“We had such in England,” Thomas said, as he prodded it with the toe of his boot, making it curl into a defensive ball. “But there we called it fox moth. He tells of an early winter.”

Martha nodded, tenting her apron over her knees. “The winters in England cannot have been colder than this place.” She turned her head, studying his profile and the downturned corners of his mouth.

“Aye, the winters here are cruel, to be sure. But the north of England…” He paused, looking up at the stars emerging from the east. “There is no greater cold than wind that blows south from the Scottish moors.” He lay back on his elbows, tracking a streaking light crossing Polaris into the northern horizon. “One winter, durin’ the war, the greatest river in Scotland froze hard enough for twenty thousand clansmen to cross over and fight with Parliament. They were the hardest men I’ve ever seen and yet near a quarter of them froze to death. I lived only by crawlin’ inside the bodies of the horses I killed for food.”

“Will we be taking up house in the milk cow, then?” she asked, meaning to make him smile, but he looked at her starkly, his eyes receding into shadow below the prominent ridge of his brow.

He reached across and, picking up her hand, worked it carefully between his two palms like clay. “Martha, I’m a hard one to put down. And you must know that if it comes to it, I will do what needs be done to protect those dear to me.”

Martha had seen enough of his strength to know the truth of it. She had envisioned, at times in a kind of fever-dream, his abilities on a battlefield, and yet how long would brute force last against a warrant of arrest served by a party of constable’s men? What hadn’t been said between them was that, in marrying him, she put him at risk of being captured. She would dull his wits with her domesticity, with her belly full of child, and he for loving her would never desert her; of that she was sure.

If only all armed conflict could be decided instead by scything a field of timothy grass. Then, she thought, every townsman could return to a whole roof and a waist full of game pie, their champions lying over the windrows of wild weeds and thistles on summer-mown earth, not in tormented death but in comfortable exhaustion. But men, being what they are, could never take the excise of battle without tearing apart the land, pulling the sky and its curtain of stars in afterwards.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me everything and then we’ll bury Thomas Morgan so that Thomas Carrier can live.”