Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  “Cecil,” Rose said.

  Sir Cecil lifted his head. Rose had never dared to call him by his name before.

  “May we borrow horses for the journey to London? The coach is unbearable.”

  “Borrow twenty-two horses? Are you mad?”

  “Not twenty-two, Cecil. Just two. The men can walk.”

  Sir Cecil ate another fried kidney. “All right,” he said. “It’ll make the men walk faster and at least you won’t fall off. You can rescue this idle curate if his horse runs away with him.”

  Before he rose from the table Ash said a prayer. He had a melodious voice, but even in ordinary conversation it was so loud and had such an edge to it that it hurt Rose’s ears.

  Rose watched him as he prayed. His face was turned toward her and he seemed to be staring at her even with his eyes closed.

  18

  Rose Barebones and Edward Ash rode side by side down the road to London, Rose on a handsome hunter that had belonged to Robert, Ash on a shaggy beast that was a walking insult. He sat with one long thin leg crossed over the scrub’s withers, reading a small thick book bound in black cloth. He winced from time to time as the broad-joking Buckinghamshire voices of the yokels, who were skylarking along behind them, carried to their ears.

  Rose watched him intently as he read his book. Then she said, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Ash.”

  Ash marked his place with his index finger and looked at her without interest. She had never seen that expression on a man’s face before.

  Rose smiled. “I was going to ask if you would mind reading aloud.”

  “I doubt that you would enjoy it. I am reading a work of philosophy, or so-called philosophy, by Mr. Thomas Hobbes.”

  “You have no Bible? I love to hear the Bible.”

  “I have one in my bag, but I do not wish to read it now.”

  “Is Mr. Hobbes’s philosophy like the Bible in any way?”

  “No. In fact it may be the work of Satan.”

  Rose’s interest was immediately aroused. “Is it about witches?” she asked.

  “No. It is about the king, Mr. Hobbes was tutor to Charles II when he was crown prince. His view, therefore, has been more than usually influential at court. It is Mr. Hobbes’s thesis that the powers of the sovereign are unlimited because God gave those powers to him and that the obedience of his subjects must therefore be unconditional. There is only one limitation on his power. An Englishman may defend himself even against the king. The right of self-defense is absolute. Even a poor clergyman who has been deprived of his living by the Act of Uniformity, and stripped of his right of movement by the Five Mile Act, and denied his right of conscience by the Test Act, at least retains the right of self-defense. Or so Mr. Hobbes says. The king does not think so. ‘My power is absolute,’ says the king. ‘Whip the man who says otherwise. That will prove it.”

  As soon as he finished speaking, Ash opened his book again and raised it to his face. Evidently he was short-sighted. Rose wanted to hear him speak again.

  She said, “Is it because of Mr. Hobbes and his Acts that you were whipped, may one ask?”

  Ash marked his place again and looked into her face with that peculiar intensity of his. “The Acts were not Mr. Hobbes’s but the king’s. I was whipped for writing a book that attacked Mr. Hobbes’s doctrine of passive obedience. I wrote that a Christian must, in certain circumstances, resist the king.”

  Though Ash spoke no less loudly when he uttered these words, he spoke very calmly. Rose did not know how he could. She had never heard such madness spoken aloud.

  “Resist the king?” Rose said, barely able to get the words out. “That’s treason. They’ll put you in the Tower.”

  Always before, men had said things to Rose that they imagined she wanted to hear. Ash seemed to care nothing about that.

  “You needn’t worry,” he said. “You’re in no danger of having your head cut off as a result of hearing my treasonous words. It was King James, not the present king, who had me whipped.”

  King James had fled to France at least ten years ago. Ash must be older than he looked.

  “What a terrible punishment,” Rose said.

  Ash did not respond to her sympathy. “I will give you the details,” he said. “My book was burned by the public hangman. I was ordered to pay a fine equal to my entire inheritance so that I should be impoverished forever. I was sentenced to stand in the pillory at Westminster, Charing Cross, and the Royal Exchange. And I was whipped from Newgate to Tyburn.”

  Ash would have gone back to his reading again, but Rose was now enthralled. “How far is that?” she asked.

  Ash was startled by the question. “How far is what?” he said.

  “How far were you whipped when you were whipped from Newgate to Tyburn? I do not know London well.” “It is about fifteen furlongs.”

  “You walked?”

  “No. They tie you up on a frame in a cart drawn by oxen and as it rolls slowly through the streets, you are whipped. The crowd cheers.”

  Rose was very moved. Hunting with Robert and Sir Cecil, she had often seen a stag brought down by the hounds, its hide bitten to ribbons. It must have looked and sounded like that when Edward Ash was whipped across London. What must his scars be like?

  “How could you bear it?” she asked.

  Ash was reading his book again. He answered without putting it down. “With fortitude,” he said. “God made it possible for me to pray harder than the brute could whip, and louder than the mob could howl.”

  19

  Montagu was back in London. Praise God had seen him in Lloyd’s Coffeehouse and had himself carried to Catherine Street to warn Oliver.

  “Thank you,” Oliver said. “I’m ready for him.”

  He sat at the table in the hall with four loaded pistols before him and a stout cudgel on the floor beside him. His eyes were rimmed with red and his face was colorless. He had not slept for days, except to nod off at his post and then wake up with a guilty start.

  Waiting for Montagu to come, Oliver thought about America. He had thought about very little else since Henry’s death. Even Rose did not tempt him. Oliver had not had a sexual thought since the moment on the field of play when he had heard the snicker of Henry’s neck breaking like a joint being twisted apart in a cold roast of mutton. Of course he had heard no such sound; it was the look of Henry’s neck as he lay dead and the expression on Fanny’s face as she knelt by the corpse, the color and the life draining out of her own features in an imitation of death, that made Oliver imagine that he had heard it. He had not been able to touch his friend’s body or look at it. The Gypsies carried it to the river while Oliver helped Rose along the path and Fanny rode on ahead with the corpse, one hand touching it and her own face as blank as Henry’s. When Fanny took Oliver’s hand and held it against her body at the grave, Oliver had wondered if Henry was using his daughter’s hands to touch him for the last time. When Praise God Adkins told him that Fanny had gone to France to find the Pamela, a farther distance than Oliver himself had ever traveled, he merely nodded, as though his goddaughter had gone to Greenwich on a day’s outing.

  Oliver had begun to think about America as a means of not thinking about Henry. He imagined himself in the wilderness with Rose beside him. In his mind he saw the tall pines, twenty feet around at the base, that his Uncle John Pennock had described, and wooden houses with shingle roofs standing in a valley beside a wide sparkling river. Deer drank from the river. Flights of ducks and partridges obscured the sun like clouds.

  Oliver, like most people who had grown up among Puritans, believed in predestination. “God would, by things that are not, bring to naught things that are … and God did,” said Oliver Cromwell after he destroyed King Charles’s infantry and scattered his horse at the Battle of Naseby on the fourteenth of June 1645. John Pennock had ridden at Cromwell’s side at Naseby, had actually heard him speak these words; they became the motto of Pennock’s life and gave him hope that events he could not foresee
would drive the Stuarts off the English throne again and replace them with a man who derived his idea of God directly from the Scriptures. That man was William of Orange, who granted Pennock his lands in America. What clearer proof of God’s intentions could there be?

  Gradually, as he thought about America, Oliver, too, began to believe that fate was calling him there. Everything that had happened since Shrove Tuesday—his sudden irresistible passion for Rose, her coldness to him, the bets with Montagu, the trouble with money, the ruby ring and necklace, Henry’s death, Fanny’s flight to France—had been ordained by destiny.

  He said so to Praise God Adkins.

  Praise God was taken aback. “You mean you think that Henry’s death, financial ruin, this lust you can’t satisfy—that all these misfortunes are messages from the Almighty?” he asked.

  “Why shouldn’t I think so?” Oliver asked. “God has the power to make His plan come true in every man’s life. Otherwise, it all means nothing.”

  “I wish Henry were here to hear this. What do you think you’re being told by heaven?”

  “To go to America.”

  “What?”

  “America. It’s quite clear. I’m being told to go to America.”

  Praise God was dumbfounded. “America,” he said. “But people like you, people like Rose, don’t go to America.”

  “Everyone told my uncle the same thing. He went anyway.”

  “And had his wife and child killed by savages.” “Savages, you say? What do you call Montagu and his kind? Henry was killed right here in England.”

  “Oliver, my dear fellow. Friends die. Life goes on.” “Yes, P.G., that’s what I’m saying to you. For me, life will go on in America. It’s meant to be.”

  Oliver’s inheritance in the wilderness had always been a joke to his friends. Henry had called him the Earl of Massachusetts after the place where his ten thousand acres were located. “You may laugh,” Henry would tell the crowd in the Rose Tavern or the misses at the Widow’s, “but Oliver owns a river bigger than the Thames and more trees and deer than his majesty the king—and also an Indian maiden who owns a slave.”

  This was perfectly true. John Pennock had bequeathed Oliver, besides the ten thousand acres of meadow and forest, including a stand of six hundred pines large enough to be cut as masts for men-o’-war, the Nipmuck slave girl, Magpie. She was by this time grown up and married to the Negro Coffee. In his will Pennock left Coffee to Magpie, an eccentric bequest, and one of dubious legality, because a slave, who had no right to own anything, had never owned another slave, as far as anyone in New England knew.

  In his will Pennock spoke of Oliver’s “quick wit and merry heart.” But it was Henry, with his love of stories, who had got the old soldier to tell him and Oliver about America. Praise God believed that Pennock must have mixed up the two boys as his memory failed, and believed that Henry was Oliver.

  20

  As Montagu and his toughs marched into Catherine Street, twilight was beginning to fall; the men were shouting and beating their picks and sledgehammers together to make a din. They sounded like a hundred, but in fact there were no more than twenty of them, poor men with dirty skin showing through their rags. Leaving his pistols on the table, Oliver ran up the stairs and flung open the window of Rose’s bedchamber to get a better look at them.

  Montagu, seated in his sedan chair, saw Oliver immediately his face appeared in the window. Just as immediately, as if Oliver was the last object in the world that could be of interest to him, Montagu turned away to exchange a word with a woman he had brought along to watch the sport. Oliver recognized her; she came from the Widow’s. The sound of yoke bells made the men shout louder. A span of six oxen, driven by the same man in the red cap who had pulled down Henry’s house, plodded into view. Montagu’s men, each carrying a sack over his shoulder, stood in a double rank in the mud. Montagu made an indolent gesture and spoke a word. The men dropped their sacks at their feet and spread open the tops. There were bricks inside. Like soldiers responding to a command, each man picked up a brick, set his feet, and threw it at Oliver.

  Oliver followed the dreamy flight of the bricks through the air and then heard them thud against the side of his house. It seemed to him that they all arrived at once. Windows shattered. Three bricks struck Oliver one after the other like a flurry of punches, the first hitting his left elbow and causing excruciating pain, the second bouncing off his chest, and the third opening a cut on his scalp and knocking him unconscious for a moment. When he woke up he was sitting on the floor while bricks cannonaded through the open window, smashing Rose’s new mirror and the scent bottles on the dresser. The air smelled overpoweringly of Rose. Her pale wafting dresses hung all around him on hooks. Oliver looked into the broken mirror and saw that his face was covered with blood from the gushing scalp wound.

  Outside, men were shouting, a shrill beastlike roar. Captain John Pennock had said that the Abenaki Indians had yipped like dogs that had just been kicked away from a fight. Montagu’s bullies sounded the same. Oliver no longer thought about the destruction of his house or the loss of his ship. Nothing in England mattered. In his mind, he was already living in Massachusetts, and even now, with a mob howling at the door, his thoughts were of his estate in America—its broad river, its majestic trees, its fertile meadows, its woods in which bears grazed on sweet wild berries. Eden!

  The howling toughs in the street were as strange to Oliver as wild Indians. Except when playing football, he had never taken joy in his strength. After he discovered, when he was still a boy, that he could break the bones of playmates without meaning to do so, Oliver had always been reluctant to injure other people. He would use his strength to defend others, as he had always protected Henry. But when he himself was threatened, Oliver often yielded to weaker men—after all, how could they hurt him?—rather than inflict pain and humiliation on them. He was tempted to yield now. He was not afraid; he had never been frightened. It did not trouble him that he was alone. Oliver had never expected rescue or help of any kind. Sending to Sir Cecil Lockwood for football players had been Praise God’s idea. Oliver had seized on it as a means of getting Rose safely away from danger yet not losing her, but he pinned no hopes on Rose’s mission. Chesham was far away. Nobody in London would lift a hand to help. Montagu had made Henry ridiculous even in death, and now he had made Oliver ridiculous too; Oliver knew that no one in London would befriend or defend the laughable. Even Montagu’s whore, whom Oliver had made squeal and sweat for her guinea no more than a month before at the Widow’s, could laugh at him.

  In Rose’s bedchamber, Oliver was blinded by his own blood; it was beginning to congeal, sticking his eyelashes together. This had happened to him before, and he knew his scalp wound wasn’t serious. He snatched one of Rose’s dresses off a hook and scrubbed his eyes with it, then tore the filmy cloth into strips and bandaged his head with it. In Rose’s mirror it looked like the sultan’s turban he had worn at Sir Cecil’s masked ball. Going down the stairs to get his pistols, Oliver remembered every detail of the carnival ball, the Buckinghamshire gentry in their countrified costumes, the awful half-cooked supper, Sir Cecil’s sly look when he talked about Rose’s breasts and what her dead husband had taught her in the marriage bed, and then the inconceivable reality of Rose herself.

  Why did his mind keep wandering? Oliver shook his head violently to clear it. He was surprised to see that he held a dueling pistol in each hand and had two more thrust into the waist of his breeches. Outside, Montagu’s savages went on screeching. In another dreamlike moment, Oliver saw Rose walking in flaxen nudity through the crowd; she was smiling, they fell silent. Oliver pulled himself back to the present. His ears rang; objects seemed far away and insubstantial; all movement was very slow; every face seemed ready to break into a derisive smile; everyone except Oliver appeared to know some secret joke. Sometimes when he was muddled by too much drink, Oliver had asked whatever woman he was with to slap him hard across the face to unstop his mind. Now
he felt that he could come back from wherever he was—unconsciousness? sleep? death?—if only someone could hit him hard enough on the face. Oliver knew that a blow on the head had done this to him, but just the same he thought it very odd that his mind should be elsewhere, in America, when so much was happening to him in the here and now.

  He threw open the door. The sight of him—massive, hairy, naked to the waist, head bound in blood-soaked gauze, two maddened eyes glittering in a mask of blood, pistols at the ready—hushed Montagu’s men. The oxen were already hitched to a roof beam and the man who had climbed up to attach the chain was still at the top of the tall ladder. Seeing the oxen and the man standing thirty feet up as if suspended in air, Oliver realized that he had had a plan all along. Grinning through his mask of blood, he thrust his pistols under his armpits and tipped the ladder over. The climber swept across the sky, clinging to the top rung as he fell. He howled at the last moment, just before his body struck the mud, and uttered the same loud “Oof!” as Henry had done when his neck broke. But this man was still alive, rolling and groaning in pain.

  Gripping his pistols, Oliver took three more long paces to where the span of oxen waited. The driver stepped between Oliver and the animals and menaced him with his whip. Oliver picked up the ox driver by the crotch and heaved him into the rubble of Henry Harding’s house. Then he raised the pistol in his right hand, cocked it, placed the muzzle against the forehead of the near lead ox, a big red animal with a curly Devon fringe between its sweeping horns, and shot it dead. It fell as if decapitated, and the weight of its limp carcass pulled the animal yoked to it down too. The unwounded ox, its neck twisted in the yoke, bellowed and thrashed. With the pistol in his left hand, Oliver shot the off ox in the second yoke. It, too, slumped to the ground, pulling its mate down with it. The four living oxen, eyes frantic, bells ringing, tried to stampede, but their yokes held them fast to the two dead ones. In death, the oxen Oliver had slaughtered looked quite human with their dazed expressions and their pink curls on their foreheads.