The Wolves of Andover (13 page)

“And the women of London. Were they lovely?” She regretted her question as soon as she asked it and waited for him to deride it as vanity, most certainly what the Reverend Hastings would have done.

There was a slow shifting of weight as though he was considering the best way to answer. “In London,” he began, “just before the Great War, fishwives and housewives stood cheek by jowl with great ladies. You could see the mayor’s wife pulling up her skirts against the muck like any oysteress. You smile, missus, but it’s the truth. During the days before the war, the women of that time were infected with the same fever as their men, and they matched them brick for brick in building the ramparts to shield the city against the king and his army. It was a fever we held on to because to cure it meant to wake again to tyranny. You ask what makes a woman comely?” He tapped one finger lightly against her temple and said, “Thoughts, missus. It’s thoughts that make a woman so.”

She had opened her mouth to speak when John shuffled noisily into the barn, calling out, “Missus, there’s a journeyman come for you. With a letter.” John had turned away slightly, and she colored to think he had come upon them having a conversation which had moved beyond the health of the livestock. She quickly buried her chin in her shoulder, hiding her expression, until John had left again. Slipping her hand free, she moved away reluctantly, saying, “You know a lot, for a farmer.”

As she passed him, Thomas’s head tilted back, eyes narrowing as though to focus better on something wavering and indistinct,
and he countered, “Enough to know you’ll never be settled with some parson.”

As she stepped from the barn, she shook the folds of her skirt into order, all too aware that anyone seeing her then would think her a wanton emerging from a toss in the hay: bothered, flustered, her backside covered in straw. But she found the entire household gathered around the journeyman already being fed at her cousin’s table, a man so thin his shanks would have whistled in a high wind. He wiped his hand on his trousers and, handing her a folded piece of parchment, went back to stuffing his mouth with the remnants of cold porridge left over from breakfast.

Martha quickly opened the letter, written on the back of a fragment of a pamphlet from Boston trumpeting the arrival of ships from England, anticipating some homely bit of news about the Toothaker settlement ten miles to the north. She sensed Patience move up close to her and felt a flash of irritation that her cousin would seek to rob her of solitary discovery of news from her sister. The letter, in Mary’s hand, was brief; she had lost the pregnancy in her seventh month and was much taken down through the disappointment of her husband, Roger. She had written simply, “Please come.”

“Disappointment of her husband,” Martha muttered resentfully, remembering bitterly how ill her sister had been at the previous miscarriage. From the first she had laid eyes on her brother-in-law, she had always believed him to be a husband by convenience, and a father by accident. Her hand holding the letter had no sooner dropped to her side in a shared sense of grief than Patience asked, with alarm, “What’s amiss? Has anyone died?”

“Mary has lost her babe,” she answered and saw Patience grab
instinctively at her belly. “And her son, Allen, is ill. I must go straightaway.”

The journeyman, finished with his meal, shook his head vigorously, saying, “Large bands of Wabanakis have been seen moving through the forests ’cross town. There’s no doubt they be on the path to malice. Stay armed and stay sheltered. I myself am staying in the next settlement until they have moved on.”

Patience grabbed at her husband’s arm, pleading, “Daniel, let John take Martha. We need Thomas here. To help protect us and the children.” Joanna, catching the near-hysterical tone in her mother’s voice, began to cry, and Martha picked her up, smoothing her hair out of her face.

With all eyes turned expectantly to him, Daniel looked unseated, thrust so quickly into making a decision beyond what to bring from the cellar. Blinking rapidly, he said, “Very well, but you must wait a few days, Martha, maybe a week, until we know the road to your sister’s home is not the road to disaster.” When Martha opened her mouth to protest, Daniel gathered himself up, saying, “Now, that’s enough. I… that is, we have decided.” He turned hopefully to his wife, and when she nodded encouragingly to him, he added, signaling an end to the conversation, “Am I not master of this house?”

The journeyman hurriedly left and the settlement became a fortress. Shutters were closed and nailed into casements. Doors were heavily cross-barred with oak, and vigilant watches were kept by the men by day and by night. The women placed buckets of sand and water under the eaves to put out fires set on the roof and the children were kept indoors at all times. The ample supplies brought by Daniel replenished the fearful watches and, as
the week diminished, so, too, did the keg of strong ale, sipped sparingly but steadily to counter nerves brought to a fiery temper through waiting.

On the fourth day after the journeyman had left, a “hallo” from the yard showed a mounted constable come to spread the word that the Indians had moved on. But with them they had taken cattle, horses, and a young girl named Elizabeth Farley. A child eleven years old, she had gone out to empty the morning slops, and when she did not soon return, her mother found many footprints leading westward towards the Concord River. Townsmen followed the trail but lost it in fording the river and so had to give up the search. A day after the doors and windows had been thrown open again to the spring winds, Martha and Patience went to Goodwife Farley with food, to sit with the recently widowed woman, childless, alone and grieving, a mantle of ashes in her hair scraped from the cold remains of her kitchen hearth.

T
HE DREAM HAD
left Martha terrified and shaken, with a sensation of suffocating, of drowning in mountainous, overwhelming drifts of feathers. Upon waking, she jerked herself upright to sitting, knees bent with hands clenched tightly over her stomach, and stifled a cry. Joanna moved restlessly next to her and she felt her way in the dark to the end of the bed, crouching on the floor, her hands over her open mouth.

It was the Reverend Hastings’s visit the night before, she believed, that had sharpened the memories of that other black-frocked man she had not seen in over ten years. The Taylors’ supper had not gone well and it was close to a certainty that the
reverend would never again come to call at her cousin’s with a mind to wooing. From the beginning, Reverend Hastings had shown himself to be exactly as she had imagined him to be, judging the quick and the dead with harsh alacrity. He had quoted Ephesians to her when she had proven herself to be insufficiently humble on the subject of marriage: “So man is to God, so must woman be to man.” To which she had retorted sharply, “And does not Colossians say, ‘See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy’?” The table had sat in uncomfortable silence until the reverend said, in barely repressed anger, “The contract of marriage is God-ordained and is like any other necessary, required, and enforceable contract…”

As he spoke, his words droning on and on through tightly pressed lips like coarse line through a too-small fishing hook, Martha had begun to feel the familiar stifling dread building behind her temples and she clutched at the table for balance. She could feel Thomas’s eyes on her, and he abruptly said, “By mutual consent.” Baffled by the interruption, the reverend stopped midsentence. “What’s that you say?” he asked. Thomas, methodically mopping up the end of his soup, swallowed the last of the bread before answering, “It’s the
covenant
of marriage, Reverend. Not a contract. You’re not tradin’ for livestock.” John quickly bowed his head, snickering, and Martha herself felt a hysterical urge to laugh out loud, fully and rudely, into the parsimonious face that looked to his hosts in wounded indignation. Thomas held her gaze boldly for a moment and then, excusing himself, left for the barn, John trailing closely behind.

She had gone to bed in a jubilant mood, only slightly sorry that her cousins were put out by the abrupt departure of their
guest. Reverend Hastings’s diminishment by Thomas had, it seemed for a time, excised some of the feelings of debasement and shame, long held from the eyes of the world, brought about by a fellow man of God.

A deep-limbed sleep had come as soon as she had pulled up the quilt. She had dreamt of herself as a girl again in the home of the Ipswich parson and his family where she had been placed at nine years of age. In the dream, she stood in the chicken coop, her face to the wall where she had been turned and told not to move, or speak, or resist; the back of her skirt up around her shoulders as brutal encircling hands held her immobile. Thumbs, like two vises, pressing cruelly into her flesh, beginning at the ankles and proceeding higher and higher up her calves, to her knees and then onward to the inside of her thighs. Higher and higher like a Jacob’s ladder into the inner tender parts that were covered to the eyes of scrutiny in the brightness of day, places that were hidden even from herself as she dressed for the night in a sweet-smelling night shift scrubbed clean by the parson’s wife. And all around her, in the dream, the hens are fluttering, shedding feathers that drift like snow over her face, covering her eyes and nose; feathers that can’t be brushed away because to move would be to invite a beating.

And when she woke she remembered fully the reverend of her childhood. The man who had called her “daughter,” patiently teaching her to read and write excellently and to commit to memory the whole of the testaments, for to be left ignorant of these things would have reflected badly upon his tutelage. A man who was loved and admired and looked upon for counsel and who only ever once was confined to his bed, shortly after the time that
she awoke from her turpitude and, taking his manhood into her hands, twisted it nearly off. She was quickly returned to her own family as being recalcitrant after three years spent in Ipswich and soon took to her own bed with an illness the town surgeon had called “unwholesome.” She wept then, remembering, too, that it was Thomas, and only ever Thomas, who had seen, who had recognized, the stamp of a pitiless secret held like a poisoned abscess in the deepest part of herself.

In the morning, she took a needle and thread and sewed the red book into the casing of her pillow. She would keep the pages intact and alive within their covering but hidden away. And if her cousin asked her the whereabouts of the book, she resolved she would tell her it had become corrupt with mold and had been discarded.

T
HE
R
AT, TO
his own knowledge, had never been on dry land. The ship had been the sum total of his world, and had he gone blind, he could have found his way by touch and smell alone from the bottom of the hull, stinking of pig iron and refuse, up to the forecastle, where the teeming seamen hoisted or lowered the square-rigged sails, and aft again to the raised deck where the captain stood, and never wavered, never stumbled, as though his feet had been nailed to the planking.

The captain rarely asked questions of the Rat, and even if he had, the boy could not have answered in words, being mute as he was. But the Rat was quick in his other senses, and the captain had seen fit to have the first mate give him lessons a few hours every Monday in seamanship—navigation and sextant use—and in languages, the written form at any event: English, Dutch, and a smattering of French. Understanding the other languages in their nautical sense was of practical use in case of a quick decision to board another, less agile merchant ship packed with raw goods from the Americas. The captain’s ship was a pinnace.
Dutch-built, fast, and shallow in draught, whereas an English ship of a comparable size would need thirty men, the
Zwaluw, The Swallow
in Dutch, needed only ten able-bodied seamen to rig and maneuver the sails. Every man on the
Zwaluw
held a cutlass close at hand and could have been called a pirate but for the British royal license to “reconnoiter” other ships perceived to be hostile.

The captain was known to be of Dutch origin, owning the Dutch-sounding name Koogin, and though he could speak the language like a native, he had no accent and spoke English like every other member of the crew. His success in trading with his clients, English and colonial alike, gave testament equally to his indifferent loyalties, his willingness to traverse the Atlantic during the most unfavorable seasons, and his ability to hold his patronage in the strictest of confidence. He never interfered with another man’s livelihood where it didn’t intersect his own interests, so there were no questions asked when five men from London boarded the ship at Plymouth port with passage for Boston.

First on deck from the transport wherry was a man named Brudloe, certainly the group’s leader, and as densely muscled as a pit cur. He grinned tightly at everything, an unpleasant lifting of the lips, expressing mirth that stopped well below eyes that were pinched and distrustful. His gaze shifted restlessly at all times, as though assessing every portal and expecting trouble.

Next on board climbed a tall man with a pallid face and a set of slightly stooped shoulders. There was something menacing hiding behind his soft chin and pale skin that made the Rat suck in his breath. Once Baker caught his eye and slowly winked at him, and it was like watching a great northern shark closing its inner lid before feeding.

After Baker came a man as large as a Lebanon cedar. He clumped noisily onto the deck, already unsteady on his feet though they hadn’t left port, carrying a boy who was only slightly older than the Rat. This older boy looked dead drunk, or drugged, and was quickly conveyed belowdecks.