by Anya Seton
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.
So she stuffed the turkey with oysters and corn meal, and roasted it on a green sapling spit hung on the andiron hooks. The boiled pudding was also of corn meal, sweetened with all her remaining store of currants and enriched by Betsey’s milk. And in one of her iron pots they concocted a makeshift wassail bowl of beer and brandy and a pinch of her jealously guarded spices.
The guests arrived at noon. Thomas Gray already something unsteady on his feet, lurched over the rocks through a fine sprinkling of snow and singing at the top of his voice. “Here we come a wassailing, among the leaves so green!” He had stuck a gull feather in his monmouth cap, tied a bunch of cedar to his filthy leather doublet, and he held in his hand a fishing pole from which dangled a huge slab of dried cod.
“Merry Christmas to ’ee—mistress,” he roared at Phebe. “I’ve brought un a gooding, my best dun-fish. Twill be fine for thy belly and what’s within it.”
Phebe colored and thanked him. John Peach came in quietly, but even his melancholy eyes lightened at the sight and smell of the great turkey, golden brown on the spit.
“We maun sing—sing—sing,” shouted Thomas, helping himself from the wassail bowl and banging his mug on the table. “Raise thy voices, split uns’ gullets ’till they hear us in Salem. The sniveling pewking whoresons.”
Mark laughed and, clinking his mug against Gray’s, complied in his melodious baritone.
Wassail, wassail all over the town,
Our bread it is white and our ale it is brown—
Phebe joined in, and even Peach after a while in a whispering monotone. They sang all the verses in the old, old way, lifting their mugs and bowing to each object mentioned. For “A good crop of corn” they bowed to the drying ears by the hearth. “Here’s health to the ox,” and they bowed toward the shed where Betsey munched her Christmas ration of salt hay.
For “Here’s to the maid in lily-white smock,” they gave Phebe courtly bows. “In truth—” shouted Thomas slapping his thigh, “she’s no maid by the look of her, but we’ll greet ’ee nonetheless.”
They ate and they drank and they sang. The snow stopped and the wind roared louder. It blew from the northeast and piled the mounting breakers into the Great Harbor. The men grew still a moment, all listening. “Are the boats pulled up high enough, d’you think?” asked Mark uneasily.
“For sure they be—” answered Thomas. “This’ll be no storm. Coom sing again—we havena had ‘The Bellman,’ nor the ‘Boar’s Head,’ yet.”
But the other two men looked at each other and stood up. Peach nodded and buttoned his doublet. Mark, full of wassail and none too steady, followed the fisherman out into the cold dusk to see to the boats.
Thomas Gray promptly fell off his stool and lay on the floor snoring. Phebe began to straighten up the room.
The feast had gone well. For an hour or so they had almost captured the richness and gaiety of a real Christmas. She had thought of them at home almost in triumph, saying to them, “See, we are not so barbarous here, nor to be pitied.”
But now she saw how flimsy a shell had held their gaiety. The wind rose, and the shell was shattered. At home the rising wind meant another log on the fire, another round of punch and a heightening of snug comfort.
Here it meant danger. She pulled her cloak around her and went out into the raw bitter cold to the shed to milk Betsey. She leaned her forehead against the warm flank while her aching fingers fumbled on the teats. Thank God, the cow had proved sturdy. She did well enough on the salt hay and bran they had brought from Salem.
Above the hissing of the milk into the wooden bucket, and the increasing pound of the waves, both woman and cow heard another sound. Betsey shivered and tossed her head.
“Hush—” whispered Phebe, though the flesh on her spine crept as it always did. “The wolves can’t get at you here.”
The shed was strong, and the wolves had never yet come down on the Point; they remained near Forest River.
To soothe Betsey she began to sing the old children’s carol of “The Friendly Beasts.” Often she had heard her mother sing it to the baby.
And next Christmas, thought Phebe, will I be singing it to mine? But the baby did not seem real.
“Aye, dear God, I wish it was over,” she whispered. Her hands fell from the udder. She picked up the heavy bucket, and staggered with it back to the house. She must leave for Salem soon, if the baby were to be born there.
But on each succeeding day the journey was impossible. It could only be made by boat. Thomas Gray’s shallop had been battered, though fortunately not lost in the Christmas storm. John Peach had only a skiff too small to fight the winter gales which blew steadily through January.
On the first day of February the wind dropped at last and a glittering sunshine dazzled on the snow patches. The waters of the two harbors calmed to glancing ripples filmed along the shore by brittle ice, and Phebe knew that they might set forth for Salem.
She knew also that it was too late. An agonizing backache had awakened her at dawn. By noon she was in full labor. Mark, helpless and frightened, paced back and forth, from the bed where he clumsily smoothed her forehead and murmured endearments which she did not hear, to the kitchen where he tended a roaring fire and kept a pot of water boiling.
Boiling water he had heard was needed in childbed, but he did not know why and he knew nothing else of the procedure. He dared not leave Phebe to summon the other men, but John Peach presently came of himself to tell them he had the skiff ready.
“No good now—” Mark groaned. “Her pains are already monstrous hard. I don’t know what to do.”
A smothered cry came to them from the bedroom, and the sweat sprang out on his forehead. He ran to Phebe. She was panting, her eyes stared without recognizing him, the pupils dilated to black holes.
An hour went by and he knelt beside the bed. Sometimes she seized his hand as though it were a block of wood without life, and clutched at it so violently that his great bones cracked.
Sometimes she tore at the stout coverlet and her nails ripped gashes in the material.
At five the pains seemed to lessen a little and Phebe drowsed. There was a knock on the door. Mark opened it to see Thomas Gray and an Indian squaw.
Gray, sober for once, stepped forward. “Look ’ee, Honeywood, John Peach come to me cot saying thy good wife’s pains’re on her, and ’ee fair distraught. This squaw’s got brat of ’er own, and must know summat of birthing. So I brung ’er.”
Mark’s intense relief at the sight of a woman, any woman, was nearly eclipsed by astonishment. Only a few Marblehead Indians had remained to brave the winter, and they kept severely to themselves over by Tagmutton Cove. Nor did they allow their women to roam. This young squaw in her doeskin dress, with a mantle of beaver fur on her shoulders, was not uncomely, though her bronze skin was faintly pitted by the smallpox. She gave Mark a deprecatory smile, which showed even white teeth.
“Name’s Winny-push-me, or summat like that,” said Thomas. “I call her Winny.” As Mark still looked astonished, he added, “She’s my doxy.” He gave the squaw a pinch on her backside and she giggled.
“But Tom—it’s rash!” Mark cried. “We darn’t offend the Indians, we’re so few here—”
Thomas went to the fire and rubbed his hands. “Ah, ye needna fret. She’s widder woman, they care naught wot she do. I’ve bedded with her off and on, for better’n a year.”
A moan from Phebe recalled Mark. He took the squaw by the arm. “Go see what you can do.” The woman understood his gestures, and Mark followed her to the bed.
Phebe cried out and shrank as she saw the dark face and felt the alien hands on her, but through the re
d surges of renewed pain she heard Mark’s voice. “She’ll help you, sweetheart. Let her do what she will.”
Winnepashemic was a skilled midwife, a role which often fell to the tribe’s widows. She watched Phebe’s pains carefully, nodded, and produced from her bosom a leather pouch. From it she drew a sharp bone knife and a small leather thong. These she laid on the floor to be used later. She got hot water from the kitchen pot and mingled with it a powdered herb which she forced Phebe to drink. In a few minutes Phebe’s pains increased in violence and frequency. Winnepashemic nodded again, satisfied, and pulled down the blankets.
Half an hour later the baby was born. The squaw cut the cord with her bone knife and bound the stump with the thong; then she wrapped the baby in her own beaver mantle and carried it to the kitchen.
She thrust the bundle toward Mark. “Man,” she said, beaming. Mark, whose body dripped with sweat and whose hands shook, stared at her blankly, but Thomas jumped up and pulled apart the beaver wrapping.
“So it be!” he shouted. “A fine boy, red as a strawberry an’ plump as an oyster.” He clapped Mark on the shoulders. “Ye can smile now, m’ hearty young stud.”
Mark looked at the baby, at the smiling faces of the fisherman and the squaw. He mopped his forehead with the back of his sleeve and went in to Phebe, walking on tiptoe. In his great chest was a hard fear. The sound of her screams was still in his ears.
She lay so quiet and flat on the bed that his mouth went dry and he could not speak. Then he saw her drowsy lids lift, and she too smiled at him.
“No need to fear, Mark—” she said dreamily. Her smile seemed to come from secret distance. But she saw his need and made greater effort. “It’s all over. Aren’t you content we’ve a fine boy?”
“But Phebe—it w-was fearful. I thought—thought—”
He fumbled for her hand, clumsy in his pity, and amazed that she could smile that little secret smile.