by Jenny Bond
The Falconer
Book 2 The Dawnland Chronicles
Jenny Bond
Prologue
Tabby was led to her place next to the magistrates’ bench. Her seat, an exceedingly uncomfortable straight-backed chair made of pine, was as hard as a ploughman’s palm. Crafted by an ill-skilled carpenter, she guessed. She half hoped it would not be a lengthy trial for her back would not endure, although in truth she was willing to bear the discomfort for as long as was necessary. Her life was at stake, after all.
She had taken the counsel of friends and worn a simple, pale-green bodice and skirt. Both were borrowed, of course, as were the delicate pins that held her wild red hair in check. Scanning the faces in the courtroom, her gaze fell upon those most familiar, yet their sympathetic expressions did nothing to still the waves of unease ebbing and swelling in her belly.
Dummer and the other magistrates entered wearing their robes of office, their powdered wigs. ‘Pomp and circumstance,’ her father might have scoffed once. Recalling the sound of his voice as it had been all those years ago was a comfort to her now.
Tabby and the spectators rose at the magistrates’ arrival, then sat, following their lead.
She waited as the men shuffled their documents and conferred about various points of interest. It was a torture of sorts, as though being probed and examined by a thousand eyes, a thousand whispers, a thousand suspicions: Did she do it? A healer? Everyone knows ruddies have fiery tempers. Anything is possible.
Attempting to inhale a deep, bolstering breath of air, she found herself hampered by the stay she was wearing. She fidgeted in her seat for a moment, twisting her torso left to right as a bear would seeking relief for an itchy back against a tree trunk. No trees here. No bears, either, although she would wager Governor Dummer was just as fierce.
Dummer seemed to be eyeing her with a curious, disapproving stare. She watched as he turned to the onlookers, waiting for them to silence before proceeding.
‘Mistress Post, you have been charged with murder.’
A murmur went through the courtroom.
‘During this trial, the Crown will present the facts of your crime and your motives for committing such a heinous and unwarranted act. If we can find no circumstances under which your crime was justified then, as you are aware, the penalty is death. You have refused your right to representation, arguing that it is only yourself who can tell your story. Is this correct, Mistress Post?’
She looked at Dummer squarely. ‘I believe that is the only way my truth will out, for who knows but me and the dead man precisely what happened on that day?’
Dummer raised an eyebrow. ‘A simple “yes” would suffice, Mistress Post.’
A bible rested on the arm of her chair. She had anticipated this moment during the week she spent in prison in the lead up to the trial, and before that as she travelled to Boston from Moosehead Lake. What would she do when called to swear on God’s Holy Book? She decided she would not know until the moment was upon her. Now, as fast as a jack rabbit in front of a prairie fire, the moment had arrived. Tabby decided that if there were a God, she would rather have him for her than against. She placed her hand on the book and repeated the oath after Dummer.
Then came the question all present were waiting for.
‘How do you plead?’ Dummer asked.
A shadow passed across her blue eyes for an instant before she looked directly at the governor.
‘Guilty,’ she responded.
1
Two months earlier
May 1725
As Tabby placed one foot into the canoe, her other sank into the mire of the bank. Tabby eyed Edie, who had already found her usual perch on the bow, expecting the falcon to comment. In Tabby’s mind, the bird’s wide, inquisitive eyes, tilted head and fractionally open beak often implied the falcon was on the verge of speech, especially after an occurrence such as the one she just witnessed. Tabby imagined Edie quick-witted, with a wry, backhanded sense of humour that would be difficult to rival. Edie looked at things with her entire body, twitching her head this way and that, her yellow cere appearing golden as the sunlight skimmed across its waxy surface.
With a shake of her head and a grin at her own foolishness, Tabby removed her foot from the mud, unlaced the boot and dunked it into the lake water, swishing it from side to side. A thin film of fractured ice skinned the lake, glistening like cut crystal in the mid-morning sun. The thaw was late this year. Tabby watched the mud turn the sky-blue water murky for a moment then clear as the sediment dispersed, drifting to the bottom of the lake. In an instant, her fingertips grew numb. As she looked into the water, a vision became clear in her mind of Augusta, her eventual destination. Tabby had important business to see to there.
Once the boot was clean, Tabby removed the laces and draped them over the seat of the canoe, then cleaved open the neck as far she was able in the hope it would dry quickly. Edie looked at the boot quizzically. It appeared to be gaping at her, tongue exposed insolently.
‘Don’t fly off with it now,’ Tabby said, pointing her finger at Edie. ‘Once clean and dry, I’ll be able to trade them for something.’
Edie blinked her large black eyes. Tabby removed the other boot from her right foot, sat it next to its sodden mate then rummaged in her back basket for her moccasins. Well-tanned, oiled and supple, her moccasins were all she needed. What’s more, if they happened to receive a dunking, the water ran out of them after just one wringing. She placed the boots under the seat, out of sight, annoyed that she had ever accepted them in the first place.
They were a lumberman’s boots, received in Hallowell last October, before the lake and the Kennebec River had frozen. The man had been killed as he stood beneath a great white oak. A large branch had fallen to earth, striking the poor lumberman’s skull as it did so. Tabby was told by onlookers that he had watched its flight but stood frozen, unable to shift from its path. The distressed witnesses had rushed to him immediately and moved the branch away, but by the time Tabby arrived at his camp, it was too late for healing. Recalling that time, Tabby shunted her sorrow aside and instead praised herself for not having a superstitious bone in her body. There would be no other way she could have accepted the boots of a dead man.
She had sat by the dying lumberman and watched – watched and waited and listened as blood pooled like warm molasses in the leaves beneath his head. In his mother tongue, Alhwin described the Breg, a river he had lived by as a boy, his brother-in-law Per quietly translating the words for Tabby. To her mind, it seemed there was very little difference between the Breg and the Kennebec – water roads connecting people, linking life and death, flowing to the sea.
After Alhwin died, Tabby helped Per lay out the body and stitch the shroud. Tabby had stopped Per from placing the final stitch through Alhwin’s nose; there was no doubt that the poor creature was dead. Thinking back, it still saddened Tabby that Alhwin, although only seventeen, had left no widow behind. He had appeared a most respectful and eloquent young man. Yet a girl alone and penniless would come to no good end, she reasoned.
Tabby received the boots as payment for her service. It was the first time she had worn boots such as Alhwin’s. The leather had seemed unforgiving, so she had packed her moccasins in the canoe as well. Thinking back, she couldn’t recall why she accepted the boots as payment. But Per had nothing else to offer and he was so grateful for her services – for her to deny him payment would have only deepened his sorrow.
Before she pushed off from the bank, Tabby closed her eyes and took a deep breath, capturing the piney smell of the spruce trees. May was when the air was sharpest, Tabby believed, when every smell was distinct and pricked her nostrils like needles. In her heart, a sense of immense foreboding took hold. This was alway
s the way when she departed Moosehead Lake. With the surrounding greens of the forest and the jagged mountains looming, it was a refuge, a haven. She always thought twice about leaving, even in the direst emergencies.
The Indians were about by the time Tabby lifted an oar. She raised her hand in farewell to Mongwau, who was walking to the river, tools in hand, children by his side and at his feet.
‘Be safe, Mekwi,’ he called in his own language.
‘Always,’ Tabby replied. ‘Will you watch over my father?’
Mongwau nodded with a certain ease, as though the question need not have been asked.
Four years ago, not long after Tabby had first come to Moosehead, Mongwau had helped her build the canoe she sat in now. He was considered a master builder of the Penobscot people. He had shown her how to shape the bark around cedar frames that had been made soft and pliable by the waters of the lake. Tabby had not realised wood could be so supple, but Mongwau had worked it like toffee. The painting of the seams with warm pine resin was left to Mongwau’s children; they were expert at the task. They had slathered it on, thick as butter.
All Hallows’ Eve was the last time she had paddled down the Kennebec to Augusta. During the months between, when the snow fell in stinging panels and the river water hardened into dusted marble, Tabby had used snowshoes to visit those nearby, or borrowed Mongwau’s donkey if she needed to travel further. While there had been some consideration of purchasing a sleigh last summer, the sale had fallen over when Tabby had spied a crack in the stanchions. When the river was neither water nor ice, Tabby chose not to travel at all, unless a person was exceedingly ill or a woman was in travail.
At the end of leaf fall, when Tabby noticed woodpeckers moving to shared nests for warmth and muskrats digging their burrows deep in the riverbed, she knew it was going to be a harsh, long winter. Why, as late as April 22nd the ice could still support a sleigh bearing the weight of old Thomas Higgins to his burying place in Portland. But it had thawed and now, as she paddled past Sugar Island just before turning into the neck of the river, she let out a low resonant whistle made of three parts with varying tones. A whistled response of a similar length came from the woods.
My father is just an echo, thought Tabby as she passed, kept barely audible by my fading memories. It was becoming more difficult to believe that Ephraim Post the man still existed. But he did. He had just whistled proof of it.
The return journey to Augusta would take a month or longer. Her first stop was Winslow. A message had arrived the day before from Henry Farnham. His wife Sarah had the fever and couldn’t nurse Henry Junior. Scant on detail, the note that was delivered by the girl who helped Sarah spin flax offered no more information. Tabby suspected broken breast, as she had only delivered Henry Junior on March 12th.
Tabby had instructed the girl to swathe Sarah’s breast with a cold tow compress. She was certain that should offer the woman some relief until Tabby could reach her, enough to feed young Henry which was, after all, the best remedy. If the fever became worse, the girl was to rub Sarah’s feet vigorously with liquor to draw the heat down from her head. Before leaving the lake, Tabby had topped up the dried rosemary, sorrel and dandelion in her black apothecary case in order to be ready to make a poultice if broken breast was, in fact, the source of the fever.
Other people would call on her services once they heard she was moving down river. Word travelled fast along the Kennebec, faster, Tabby reckoned, than the water at Cold Stream Falls. With no physicians or surgeons in the region – just quacks and charlatans – Tabby’s services were always in demand. No doubt she would be required to tarry for a night or two in some places, tending to those who were too ill to leave, and to ensure her own rest and good health. But patience was a virtue Tabby possessed in abundance.
It was six months since Matthew Hawkins, the town clerk at Hallowell, had told her of an Algonquin Indian named Achak. He’d gleaned that this man knew something of her father’s plight. ‘Achak’ meant ‘spirit’ and, according to the clerk, he lived up to his name. However, he usually appeared in Augusta at the onset of summer, trading pelts, furs and the like.
During that half year, Tabby’s skin had itched with impatience as though she had walked unknowing into a swarm of yellowjackets. But she waited until May, teeth gritted, before commencing her journey. It had been most unbearable at night when there were no distractions. Lying awake, watching the embers of the fire, Tabby would list the questions she hoped to ask Achak when they finally met. It was the only means she had to ease her restlessness. Doing so convinced her that her inactivity was not wasted.
Hawkins had also mentioned a new arrival in Augusta, a landowner and merchant. This man, whose name Hawkins could not recall, had established himself as a banker of sorts in the booming trading town. Hawkins had heard that the Englishman, dealing in lumber, coin, grain, musket balls, furs, pelts and wampum, had already built a reputation as a trustworthy sort.
Tabby eyed the back basket sitting beneath Edie at the bow of the canoe. It housed a bag of coin and wampum that bulged in the same way Mister Hamlin’s belly did after consuming a particularly well-cooked batter pudding. She looked to the future.
Tabby was nine and twenty. Although she was a healthy, handsome woman, or so she observed on the rare occasion she examined herself in a looking glass, opportunities for marrying had long passed her by. Yet there was still time to build a proper home with her father, and with it to rebuild the life they had once shared. She had in mind to establish a practice where patients could come to her. She couldn’t live in a wigwam forever, after all. Neither would she be able to navigate the Kennebec as she aged and her strength abandoned her.
Then there was Kirkcaldie. Tabby did not include him in her plans – he had no suitable place there – but she liked the salty taste of him and his rough hands on her skin. She would stop in on him on the return journey. She had not seen Kirkcaldie since February, when an unseasonal case of canker rash had afflicted Dolly Weston and Tabby found herself nearby.
She missed him.
Tabby looked at Edie, who was offering the disapproving glare of a school dame. It was as though she was privy to Tabby’s thoughts. The falcon did not seem to approve of Tabby’s occasional bedmate.
‘Oh, Edie …you’ve just got to get to know Kirkcaldie. Then you’ll like him as much as I do.’
Alerted by the song of a thrush, the falcon’s head darted left towards the rocky monolith of Mount Kineo.
It appeared that Edie remained unconvinced.
2
It took Tabby the best part of the day to reach the Farnhams’s. When she finally did, the log cabin was in an uproar. Henry Junior mewed in hunger and Sarah groaned and wailed in discomfort. Tabby gleaned that respite only arrived when exhaustion sent the baby into a fitful sleep or Sarah was sent drifting into a delirium by fever.
A blazing fire at the hearth had turned the two-room cabin into a furnace, and the girl who had delivered the note to Tabby had taken it upon herself to cut Sarah’s hair back to the scalp. Unlike the soaring temperature in the cabin, the cropping of the hair would do no damage to Sarah’s eventual outcome, but it made Tabby seethe when people resorted to unfounded remedies based on superstition.
Within a minute of entering the cabin and taking in the full extent of the chaos, Tabby had scolded Henry Senior for uncountable offences.
‘You should have sent for me sooner.’
‘Your note did not convey the seriousness of your wife’s unease.’
‘Why has a nurse not been found to see to the baby? There are any number of newborn babes in Winslow.’
‘The fire is too hot!’
When Tabby inquired whether Sarah’s feet had been rubbed, the girl, whose name was Hepsy, replied that the only liquor on hand was Mister Farnham’s rum and he had forbidden her to use it.
‘Do you not want your wife to be well, man?’ Tabby had rebuked before violently throwing wide the shutters and the door. Following a final g
rimace and a glance at the scene before her, Tabby took leave of the mayhem temporarily for, at this point, a minute or two would not make any difference to Sarah or her baby, and she feared she would utter words she could not rescind. Ephraim Post had once been fond of telling people that his daughter’s fuse was as ‘short as washday grace’.
Edie, who waited on the gatepost, flew to her mistress, descending on Tabby’s outstretched forearm. Nuzzling her face into the soft neck feathers of the bird, Tabby took in her nutty scent and immediately regained her composure. Tabby loved everything about Edie – the way her nape feathers bristled in affection, the way she reacted when she heard something, lifting herself taller for a moment and the slight movement of her tail, as sleek and pointed as an arrowhead. But she especially loved the way her eyes searched for and found Tabby’s, even when the bird was high in the sky.
‘Good girl,’ she said to Edie. ‘This might take some time. Sarah is exceedingly unwell.’ Tabby stroked the ridged feathers of the bird’s back. ‘It’s dusk, do you not see? Time you found some supper.’
As Edie shifted along the muscles of Tabby’s arm, Tabby felt the pinch of the falcon’s talons through the leather sleeves of her tunic. She smiled at her friend.
‘Ah, but I can tell from the ache in my arm that you are getting fat, my good lady. You may want to watch what you dine on this evening.’
As though sensing Tabby’s tone, Edie released a high pitched chitter then flew off into the distance. Tabby watched her flight until Edie disappeared over the river and into the glowing pink of the sunset.
By three o’clock in the morning, Sarah’s fever had quieted. Her head was cool and she slept peacefully. Henry Junior was nestled in the crook of her arm. Tabby had sent Henry Senior to find a nurse for the baby.