The Hearth and Eagle (11 page)

Phebe washed her face and hands and smoothed her hair. She took the letter from her bodice and flung it in her bride chest, slamming the lid. She threw open the batten door, and on the earthen threshold stopped dead.

“Oh dear God—” she whispered. “I cannot,” and she sank to her knees between the oak door frames. She kneeled there, facing the eastern horizon, while behind Salem the sun sank slowly into the untracked forests of the New World.

God did not seem to speak to her. She felt no exaltation or comfort. But there was certainty.

When Mark returned from his expedition to Marblehead he found Phebe changed, very silent and with a grim set to her mouth. She listened acquiescently but without comments to his enthusiasm for his new plan, and his satisfaction that through Mr. Allerton’s influence he had obtained a grant of five acres in Marblehead from the Salem authorities, who had little interest in that remote section of their plantation.

She remarked only that it did seem wise to move from Salem Town, and the sooner they could move the better, but otherwise she submitted to the remaining weeks in Salem and to Mark’s frequent preparatory absences in Marblehead with an unquestioning fortitude. Since the day when she had received Arbella’s letter, and finally put all thoughts of going home behind her, she had passed beyond personal fear. Yet the stench of fear hung over the whole colony. Daily disasters battered all the settlements, and no day passed without a death.

In Charlestown it was no better. Governor Winthrop sent word that they were starving, rotted with disease and lacking medicine. He proclaimed a Fast Day throughout the colony with a view to softening the Divine Chastisement. But Providence still scourged them.

Four weeks after Arbella’s death a home-bound ship touched at Salem and brought news from Boston, that Isaac Johnson too had died and had been buried in the lot by his unfinished house.

When Phebe heard this news she went to her bride’s chest, and drawing out Arbella’s letter gazed at it long and earnestly. What else besides this piece of paper was there left now of the Lady Arbella? Phebe raised the letter to her cheek, then wrapped it in her wedding handkerchief and put it back at the bottom of the bride chest. Nor did she ever mention the letter to Mark.

The Honeywoods were fortunate in escaping illness, but as September went by, they did not also escape malice and envy from their fellow townsmen. Their last days in Salem there were murmurs against them and slanting dark looks. They had not tried to join the congregation, they were virtually, by their own admission, no better than Papists. And why, in this case, should the Lord allow them immunity from the general sickness ? Unless indeed it was not the Lord, but some Satanic power in league with them.

Phebe, openly goaded one day at the town spring, by an old crone called Goody Ellis, answered that perhaps the milk from her cow and the abundance of fish caught by Mark filled their bellies and made them better able to withstand sickness. Goody Ellis brushed this aside as nonsense, and made vicious allusions to witchcraft. Phebe was glad enough to be leaving.

There were no women at Marblehead yet, Mark told her, except the squaws in the Indian Village over Derby Fort side. And he worried about this for the time when her pains should come upon her. “But I’ll get you a midwife from Salem, if I must give her all my silver,” he promised and she agreed indifferently.

On the eighth of October the Honeywoods left the wigwam and descending the path to the landing place, set out at last for their new home.

Mark had hired a shallop and boatman from the fishing settlement on Salem Neck, and this also conveyed all their goods, except Betsey. The cow must wait in Salem until Mark could lead her around by land. Six miles of rough Indian trail through the forests.

It was a fair sparkling day of a kind new to them, for autumn in England held no such vibrance. There was freshness of blue and gold on the water, freshness of red and gold on the trees. This buoyancy in the air seemed to bathe one in a tingling expectation, it smelled of salt and sunshine and hope, and Phebe knew a faint return of youthful zest for the first time since Arbella had died.

Scudding before the wind they swished by Derby Fort Point, and Phebe was pleased to see that from this offshore angle it no longer resembled the headland at home. At Marblehead all would be new, and there would be no memories.

They rounded another heavily wooded point where Mark said there lived a fisherman called John Peach. They veered southwest between two small islands and lost the wind. The boatman and Mark took to their oars, and presently, the tide being high, their prow grated far up on the shingle of a little harbor.

Phebe jumped out, careless that she wet her feet or the hem of her blue serge skirt. While the men unloaded the boat she stood on the beach, staring. The sunlight fell warm on her back, matching a warmth in her heart. For in that first moment she felt a liking for the place. It was snug here in this little harbor with its two guardian points and tiny sheltering islands, and just beyond them there was grandeur; the whole blue sweep of the Atlantic stretching to the white horizon. Her senses seemed sharpened to a new delight. The sucking of the wavelets on the shingle, the water-borne cry of a seagull gave her pleasure, and in her nostrils there was the smell of pine trees and salt, mingled with faint pungency of drying fish. She looked for its source and saw on the northern curve of the little cove two spindly wooden frames, and a shabby hulking figure crouching over them.

“The fish flakes,” said Mark, seeing her puzzled gaze. He laughed. “That’ll be Thomas Gray turning the splits. He’s a bit of a knave and generally in liquor, but I’ve cause to be grateful to him.”

Phebe nodded. Mark had told her of the help given by Thomas Gray and John Peach in the building of a shelter. Phebe had resigned herself to making do with another wigwam, but seeing Mark’s air of mystery and excitement now her hopes rose.

He led her a hundred yards back from the beach through a tangle of ruby sumach and wild asters to a modest clearing. Then he paused and waited, and Phebe did not fail him.

“Why Mark—it’s a real mansion you’ve builded!” she cried, clapping her hands together. Indeed it was hardly that. A two-room cabin, topped with thatching, but the walls were solid, framed in sturdy New England pine, faced by pine weather-boarding, and all hewn by Thomas Gray who had knowledge of carpentry.

Together the three men had built the central chimney of the field stone so abundant here, and cemented the chinks with clay. The six small windows were still unfinished, the thatching of rushes pulled from a near-by pond was ragged and thin, but the thatch poles were of good barked hickory, and the rafters all ready for a permanent roofing later. Inside, Phebe was delighted to find a real floor of wide pine planking, and the walls snugly sheathed with soft pine boards.

“It’s marvelous!” she cried, running between the two rooms. “I never thought to find you so skilled,” and she kissed Mark, indifferent to the grinning boatman who was busy hauling their goods from the shallop.

Mark accepted her delight, and gloried in it. He well knew that her family had thought him feckless, and unlikely to provide good care for their daughter. The quick building of this solid house was something of a triumph. To be sure he had had help; from Allerton’s men on the
White Angel,
and then from the two fishermen here.

Exultantly he showed her around their kingdom. Their land adjoined that of Allerton’s where he proposed soon to establish his fishing stage, and also that of the Bay Company’s English Governor, Mathew Craddock, who had never left or proposed to leave the Old Country but bought many likely parcels of land in the new.

Mark pointed out to her their well, so convenient to the house door. How fortunate they had been to find sweet water so soon, and so near the salt. Here at a distance would be the privy—here the shed for Betsey. See how many trees they had, three great chestnuts, four elms, and a pine, rare luck for this rocky promontory.

Here behind the house on the slope to the Little Harbor was rich soil for a vegetable plot. And to the south a stone’s throw from the house was the sea again, the restless deep waters of the Great Harbor. Phebe longed to return to the house and start the placing of their furniture, but Mark held her beside him on the rock-strewn beach.

“This harbor is big enough for a fleet, and deep too. Better than six fathom at ebb tide—and mind you—look how sheltered it is! See the spit of land across?” She nodded obediently. “ ’Tis a great neck with pasture and marble cliffs on t’other side to quell the sea—and down there to the south, a most fair haven, and Master Allerton says the day’ll not linger when we see it teem with shipping.”

“For sure it will,” said Phebe, and tried to speak with interest. While they stood there the sun had set behind them, and the air grown chill. The harbor filled with shadows, and the ceaseless muted sighing of the waves seemed to increase the solitude. Mark, deep in musing, did not move. Then from the far-off forest side toward Salem she heard the long-drawn howl of a wolf. She shivered and put her hand on Mark’s arm. “We have much to do inside.”

He turned and helped her up the little bank. She was growing somewhat clumsy and uncertain in her steps.

That winter was one of plodding hardships and now and again a sharp peak of danger. But Phebe found comfort in her home. She kept her two rooms swept and garnished with housewifely pride. When all their goods were at last unpacked, and supplemented by Mark’s carpentry of plank table, bedstead, and stools, it was not ill-furnished. She had a shelf for her shining pewter, the mugs, platter, and salt cellar. The wooden trenchers were ranged beneath with her pewter spoons and candlesticks. To be sure, she had no candles as yet, nor means of making them. The fire gave light enough, or in emergencies pine-knot flares as the Indians used them.

Her kitchen hearth was her special pride, wide and deep enough to have roasted an ox, furnished with the much-traveled andirons, and a stout green lug pole from which hung her two iron pots. There was color too in this common room from the ears of red and orange Indian corn hung up to dry, and a sparkle of cleanliness from the white beach sand on the floor.

The other room held, besides the bed, chests and provisions until a lean-to could be built for the latter, but it too had its cheerful fire, and plenty of iridescent flamed driftwood to burn in it.

The two fishermen, Thomas Gray and John Peach, found cheer in the Honeywood home and were grateful for such hospitality as Phebe could provide. They were unlike each other in every way, and before the visit of Isaac Allerton with his great plans, and the subsequent arrival of the Honeywoods, had had little to do with each other. Each had built himself a cabin on the shore a half a mile from the other, each had in England learned something of rude carpentry and fishing. There was no other resemblance. John Peach was a meager wisp of a young man from the West Counties, who spoke rarely and wore a look of settled melancholy. Some early tragedy had soured him and made him emigrate. He never spoke of the past, and the Honeywoods learned nothing of his early life.

Thomas Gray was as garrulous and rowdy as his fellow settler was restrained. No inner love of solitude had driven him to this secluded point, but the intense disapproval of the Salemites, who wanted none of him. He had come over with Roger Conant in 1623, and sober or half drunk he was an excellent fisherman. Wholly drunk, he embodied all the failings most abhorred by the ministers.

He brawled, he wenched, he blasphemed, he was given to fits of lewd and unseemly mirth directed at godly members of the congregation.

During the seven years since his landing he had roistered his way through most of the new settlements, from Cape Ann to Beverly to Nantasket and Salem. In none had he found welcome. Marblehead had been the answer. Though under Salem jurisdiction, the authorities were, so far, too busy with their home problems Jo concern themselves with the outlying districts. Gray found good fishing, and convenience to Salem where he might sell or barter his fish, and obtain enough supplies of “strong water” to make his solitary nights more cheerful.

He was a large shambling man and except when liquor released a violent temper, a good-natured one. Phebe deplored his coarse speech and coarser jests, but both she and Mark liked him.

The Honeywoods kept Christmas Day, a celebration which would have outraged the rest of the colony, had anyone known it.

On the twentieth of December, Mark had most providentially shot a wild turkey which had wandered down to the shore in search of shrimps. Phebe invited the two fishermen to dine and plunged into preparations.

At first the contrast between these preparations and those last year had saddened her so that she almost lost heart and she weakened into thoughts of home for the first time since August. Christmas had always meant weeks of excited anticipation, in the kitchen—where she and her mother supervised the making of the mincemeat, the cakes, and pastries, the boar’s head, the snap dragons, and the wassail bowl, and outside—the ceremony of cutting the Yule log, the gathering of holly and mistletoe, the midnight procession to the sweet-smelling candlelit church, the visits of the mummers in ludicrous costumes, the waits gathered outside the windows and singing the old carols, while inside and out there were dances and kisses and laughter.

Here, a two-room cabin in the wilderness, and no sound but the wares and a bitter winter wind.

“It’s folly to try—” she said to herself while she stood in the raw cold and pulled pine boughs from one of their trees. Tears sprang to her eyes and chilled on her cheeks. She wrapped her cloak tight around her swollen figure and walked back to the house. It was Mark who cheered her. Seeing her despondency he made her sit and drink a cup of sack. He applauded the pine branches, and stuck them on the pegs that held his musket, telling her they were as pretty as holly.

He seemed always lighthearted these days, and was full of plans. With Tom Gray’s sporadic help he was building himself a rude shallop; it should be finished by spring, if the winter were not too severe. He looked forward to Allerton’s coming. He had been fortunate in finding food. Oysters now, and he pointed to a piggin full of gnarled bluish shells. He had found a bed, which was exposed at ebb tide. “They’ll do well to stuff the turkey with, sweetheart,” he said, and she smiled again, heartened by his eagerness.