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Yet the disasters continued. There was an epidemic of smallpox, there were earthquakes and hurricanes. There was drought. There was an eclipse of the sun. All these were recorded in Winthrop’s Journal, which was designed for public consumption and seldom indicated any viewpoint but the Governor’s. At the May Elections of 1639 he was very nearly defeated, and was sufficiently stung to write more personally.

Mr. Winthrop was chosen governor again, though some labouring had been, by some of the elders and others to have changed, but not out of dislike of him, (for they all loved and esteemed him) but out of their fear lest it might make way for having a governor for life, which
some
had propounded as most agreeable to God’s institution and the practice of well ordered states.

Despite the “love and esteem” of all, Winthrop’s worries continued, but he never chronicled the family ones, and in the summer of 1639 these had to do with his ever-unregenerate niece, Elizabeth. She came to him in Boston, one July day, dishevelled, having dressed hurriedly, and more distraught than he had ever seen her.

“My uncle, I must speak with you,” she said, pushing past the servant with scant ceremony, upon seeing Winthrop alone in his study writing letters.

“Well, well, niece,” he said, rising politely. “What is it? You seem very agitated. There’s no ill stroke on your family I trust?”

“In a way - ” she said. “Nay, ‘tis not the children - Robert though.” She paused, unwilling to explain how much Robert was upset “ ‘Tis Captain Daniel Patrick and his wife - they’re leaving Watertown! You’ve driven them away!”

“My dear daughter,” said Winthrop, exasperated. “That is not a sensible speech. Captain Patrick is neither a godly man, nor suitable for you or your husband. I did not in fact know that you were; intimate. He has been formally accused of lewd attempts on the virtue of a young wench called Sturgis; she has written an affidavit to that effect.”

“But he
didn’t!”
Elizabeth interrupted. “He barely knew her - it’s a conspiracy. He has enemies in Watertown - it’s that tithing man put the Sturgis girl up to it. Daniel wrote you it wasn’t true.”

Winthrop folded his hands behind his back, walked to the cold fireplace, and turning regarded his niece. “Patrick has written me several rash letters,” he said in measured tones, “and I have been very patient. My patience is at an end. I have permitted Captain Patrick to leave the colony, which I believe he ‘wall do tomorrow.”

“This is the way you requite him for his services!” she cried. “Treating him just like Underhill, like everyone who doesn’t go about whining psalms and doting on the ministers. And he’s not had the lands or bounty he was promised; if it wasn’t that Anneke has a nest egg he’d be destitute unless he can sell his land at Watertown!”

The dark flush ran up under Winthrop’s skin. His nostrils flared and he drew a harsh breath. “You speak remarkably warm about this - this Patrick, Elizabeth,” he said, watching her narrowly.

“He’s my friend!” she said, not in the least understanding him and the anger in her eyes matching his. “And he’s Robert’s. Robert is very fond of him.”

“I cannot believe that your husband shows such ill judgment,” said Winthrop. “And I do not
wish
to believe an inference I might draw from your behaviour. Patrick and his family are sailing tomorrow; they may go wherever they please so long as they leave this colony.”

“Then we’ll go too!” she cried wildly.

“No, Elizabeth,” said Winthrop. He walked over and stood beside her. He was not a tall man and yet to her he seemed to tower as high as the beams.
“You will go nowhere”
Each word dropped like stone on stone. She drew back slowly until she leaned against the table.

Her uncle saw the defiance drain out of her and smiled coldly. He went to the door and called, “Wife, come here!”

Margaret came running in from the kitchen, and Winthrop cut across her greetings to Elizabeth, “Here is our niece, my dear, who has been indulging in one of her peculiar fits of passion. I suggest that you pray with her, and ask God to calm her wayward heart.”

The Patrick family left Watertown the next day. All their goods were piled on a flatboat to be poled down the Charles and then transferred to a ship bound for New Amsterdam. Robert and Elizabeth stood on the little river landing to say farewell, and only Anneke wept. Robert was mute, though his eyes were very bright and his skin unnaturally reddened. He looked at Daniel, clasped his hand and then stood staring into the water. Elizabeth had cried during the night but now she was as silent as Robert.

“I’ll write ye, Bess,” said Daniel as he kissed her forehead. “If it wasn’t fur you two, I’d be
glad
to go, I’ve told ye before. I’ll find a place far from here as I can, New Netherland or Virginia, and write ye of it. Then you and Rob can come too.”

“He’d never let us,” she said in a wooden voice. “I can never get away.” And Daniel had no doubt whom she meant.

“There, lovey - “ he said, much distressed. “You mustn’t lose heart. Maybe ye’ll settle down better in Watertown wi’ us gone, can’t tell. I only hope
he -
“ He gestured towards Robert and did not finish. “By God,” he burst out, “I hate to leave ye like this, I’ll pray fur ye. Haven’t tried it in a dog’s age, but a Pater Noster or Ave might work. I’ll even make me a rosary outa corn or huckleberries!” he said, chuckling anxiously, but Elizabeth did not smile.

She and Anneke kissed each other, the Patrick children waved, the flatboat started downriver, and the Feakes turned back to their home.

Robert spoke not at all the rest of that day, until as they entered their bedchamber he suddenly said, “Bess, I feel very ill. It is a judgment for my great wickedness, as losing my friend is a judgment on me.”

She thought it was “the strangeness” coming on, but it was not. By midnight, Robert had a raging fever, and was vomiting, also he was seized with cramps and bloody flux. There was now a physician at Watertown, Mr. Simon Eire, and Elizabeth, hastily summoning him, found that the physician confirmed her own fear - Robert had contracted a cholera.

For the next weeks, while she nursed him, there was scarcely time to regret the Patricks or realize how lonely she was.

Robert recovered very slowly; by the end of October he was still weak and could leave his bed but an hour a day. Elizabeth at Doctor Eire’s direction fed her husband laudanum and elixir of vitriol, and her own decoctions, supplemented by a sassafras broth Telaka made and said was used in her tribe to bind the bowels. Yet still, though the violent symptoms had long stopped, Robert gained little ground, and Elizabeth suspected that he had not the heart to do so. He was docile and quiet, he often spoke to her with tender gratitude, there was no hint of the real “strangeness”, but he would lie for hours staring at the rafters and when she tried to rouse him by bringing in the children, he would respond with a feeble smile, then slip back at once into the hinterland where he preferred to dwell.

During the worst of Robert’s illness the neighbours had been kind. A new one, Mistress Stone, whose husband Simon had bought land adjacent to the Feakes’, helped tend Elizabeth’s children. Goody Bridges helped with the constant laundering of fouled sheets; even the goodwives Knapp and Warren had come to the house bearing possets.

Elizabeth suspected more of avid curiosity than genuine warmth in these attentions and declined them courteously as soon as she could. Besides, Telaka continued to show an extraordinary efficiency. By this time Elizabeth had noted the fear with which the neighbours regarded her Indian, and had even been warned of Telaka by Goodwife Bridges. “I know ye won’t hold wi’ what I say, Mistress,” said Sarah Bridges one day when they met on Bank Lane, “but ‘twouldn’t be my Christian duty not to point out that yon scar-face squaw o’ yours is monstrous weird.”

“Just her looks,” said Elizabeth quickly, hurrying on. “She’s very good to us.”

“How d’ye
know?”
persisted Sarah, panting along, her fat earnest face turned up to Elizabeth. “How d’ye know what she does i’ the dark o’ night? I mean it kindly, Mistress, you being a young gentlewoman as hasn’t seen the Devil’s works as clear as I have.”

Elizabeth gave an impatient smile. She liked Sarah Bridges better than the other goodwives, but she was tired of discussing Telaka, and anxious to get back to Robert. “Telaka’s a fine woman,” she said. “We understand each other.”

This speech was later reported to Goody Bridges’s gossips, and served in due time to light the powder keg which finally exploded under the Feakes.

Elizabeth arrived home at dusk, and for several dismayed moments wondered if she would have to eat her confident words to the goodwife. As she entered the garden Elizabeth saw her squaw standing under the great maple tree; from an Indian pipe in her hand the blue smoke curled upward. Telaka had made the pipe herself from a hollow stick and a pierced stone, and she sometimes smoked a few puffs, an indulgence permitted by Elizabeth; indeed several of the old women in town had their corncob pipes. But Elizabeth had never seen Telaka standing in such a peculiar stiff position, with face upraised towards the sky, nor heard her give forth such strange low noises. Elizabeth ran to the squaw, crying sharply, “What
are
you doing? Why aren’t you in the house?”

Telaka raised one arm to hush her mistress, then, putting the pipe to her mouth, inhaled a deep breath and, bowing to the west, chanted, “Chekefuana, Chekefuana, Chekefuana!” while the smoke drifted from her nostrils. Telaka held her hand to her ear and appeared to listen until a look of what seemed to be triumph illumined the mobile side of her face. She sighed deeply and clasped’ the pipe to her breast. “It is good - ” she said to Elizabeth in a voice of joy. “Chekefuana and Manitoo they have answered. Long have I asked them at this time of Telaka, when they must hear me, but till now they would not speak.”

“What nonsense!” said Elizabeth crossly. “What do you mean by this gibberish - those Indian words?” she amended, seeing that the squaw did not understand.

“Chekefuana is the - god of the west wind,” said Telaka with

reverence. “And Manitoo is over all like your English God. They hear me best at Telaka for it is my - my totem.”

“At twilight?” asked Elizabeth. “That’s what your name means, isn’t it? What have they told you, these gods?” she added curiously, despite herself.

“They tell me a happy thing,” said Telaka. “For me, for you. Look!” she cried, kneeling suddenly on the path. She picked up a stick and began to draw on the dirt. She drew a rough indented line, and then a projecting shape like a large thick axehead, “This,” she said, “is my country, land of Siwanoys. Here,” she pointed to the underside of the axehead shape, “are many bright sands. My people camp there. White men have come. The red-haired captain is there now!”

“What!” cried Elizabeth. “You can’t mean Captain
Patrick?”

“It is so,” said Telaka rising. “I saw it in sky, I hear it from Chekefuana. Patrick is there and
we
will be. I shall go back to my people.”

Elizabeth was touched by the thrill in the usually expressionless voice, and she shook her head, saying gently, “Ah, Telaka, I understand your longing, it’s natural. But your wishes’ve deceived you. Captain Patrick is at Fort Amsterdam or mayhap Virginia by now. He would never stop in your land, wherever it is, nor - ” she added, “have we heard from him as he promised. I pray that they are well.”

The Indian did not listen. She said something in her own language, and walked into the kitchen, clutching her pipe against her breast.

Elizabeth soon forgot Telaka’s odd behaviour in a succession of domestic incidents. The three little girls took the measles, and Lisbet was very ill for some time. When she recovered, Toby announced that he did not like Watertown, felt that his uncle was sufficiently well to be left alone, and wished some London property he owned on Lombard Street to be sold, so that with the money realized he could buy a large decked-over shallop he had seen building in the Boston yards.

Robert made not the slightest objection; he showed no more interest in his nephew than he did in anything else, and though up and about most of each day now, wandered through the necessary acts of living like an automaton. Accordingly, as Toby’s guardian, he signed the necessary papers, and Toby, who was enterprising enough in all nautical matters, bought his boat and hired as crew a Norfolk lad, Ben Palmer, who was kin to Toby’s brother-in-law. Toby then set off to be a modest coastwise trader. The Feakes heard nothing from him for months.

The winter passed in snow and bitter cold - so much dirty weather that folk were forced to stay at home, huddling by their fires and praying that there was sufficient wood stacked in the shed to last them. By February the wolves were howling nightly in the forests near Beaver Brook, and everyone’s fare was reduced to mouldy powdered beet and the last scrapings of the corn bins. The Feakes fed better than most, since, until April, when his bond terminated and he left for Wethersfield, they still had their manservant who could be sent with a sledge along the frozen Charles to Boston for provisions. But by March all the family suffered from colds, and even Elizabeth’s excellent health was affected. She had frequent headaches and her spirits had grown nearly as despondent as Robert’s. In March the snow at last began to melt, the wild geese flew honking towards the north, the sap rose in the awakening trees, and Telaka, knowing what their bodies so urgently needed, made expeditions into the forests, where she gathered the inner bark of spruce and slippery elm to infuse with the first birch sprouts.

These expeditions and their results were known. The goodwives of Watertown kept watch on Telaka, and it was seen that though there was scurvy in almost every house, the Feakes escaped.

“And ye needn’t tell me that munching
bark’s
what keeps ‘em hale,” whispered Goody Warren one afternoon when she and Goody Knapp were settled in the Bridges’s kitchen, where young Dolly Bridges, now a lass of thirteen, was shucking corn by the fading daylight at the west window. The three older women were haggard; Sarah Bridges had lost four front teeth during the winter. Peg Warren’s mouse face had sharpened, and her skin erupted into tiny sores, while Goody Knapp had a constant pain in her belly and her gums. The two visitors had brought their knitting, and Sarah Bridges sat at her spinning wheel, but the work went on languidly. It was the first time they had gathered since the thaws set in, and their apprehensions, released from daily struggle for survival, turned with renewed interest to the fearsome topic which their minister had quelled last year. Besides there were alarming developments.