Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  “Montagu died?”

  Oliver told her the details of Montagu’s disease—the horrible brown moles growing all over his emaciated body. “Praise God heard that he’d locked himself up in his house in Pall Mall. Strangers hear him screaming as they go by in the street. Let the bastard scream.”

  The ship creaked.

  “Forget Montagu,” Oliver said. “We’re partners in the Pamela now, and we’ve got debts to settle and matters to discuss.”

  The silk, the coffee, the chocolate, the leather, and all the fine wine—enough value of goods to cover Praise God’s share of the cargo and pay all the partners’ debts to Montagu—had been transferred from the Pamela to the other vessel. Oliver proposed to sell the rest of the wine and spirits in Boston for ready cash, and for a new cargo of American goods that were in demand in England —shingles, spars, smoked and salted fish, and sassafras, a New World medicinal plant that was used in England to treat syphilis and other diseases, including plague. Pennock had said that sassafras grew abundantly on his estates. Ash said it was useless as a specific against anything more serious than stomachache; Oliver believed that it was just one of many things growing on his land that would make them a great deal of money. The Pamela would make a voyage to America every two years, to bring Oliver and Fanny their share of the profits, but otherwise she would call at her usual ports.

  “The partnership’s divided just as it always was,” Oliver told Fanny. “Peters at sea getting twenty percent, Praise God in London taking ten percent, and me in America getting ten. All the rest belongs to you. You’re a rich woman, Fanny.”

  Oliver reached inside his coat and brought out the ruby necklace. It was a necklace for a princess. Each of the rubies, set among pearls and sapphires along a woven gold chain, was as large as the stone in Rose’s ring. There were six of them. Oliver hung the necklace around Fanny’s neck and held up a small mirror so that she could see the gems against her skin.

  “This is not mine,” Fanny said. “It’s the necklace you bought for Rose.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How could I not know? Everyone in London knows. I don’t want it. Give it to Rose.”

  These words wounded Oliver. His dull puzzled eyes grew moist. Fanny was trying to take the necklace off, but she couldn’t unfasten it. She tugged at it with all her strength, hoping to break the chain, but she only hurt the skin on her neck.

  Oliver recovered his voice. “What difference does it make?” he asked. “It’s just rubies and gold and it’s worth a thousand guineas. You don’t have to wear the bloody thing, Fanny—just keep it. You may need it someday.”

  “I’ll never need it. Get it off me.”

  “Do you think I don’t know I killed your father with my stupidity, Fanny?” Oliver said. “Don’t you be stupid too—Henry wouldn’t like it. You can throw the necklace into the sea if you want. But it’s the only thing of value I have to give you. I don’t know what we’ll find in America, but like it or not, I’m all you have, and we both know that if I die as quick as Henry did …”

  He unhooked the necklace and handed it to Fanny, pouring it out of his big hand into her small one. The weight of the stones pulled the gold chain after them into a little heap of glitter in her palm. Oliver’s eyes glistened. Closing Fanny’s fingers over the jewels, he pursed his lips and made a slight movement of his head. Large as he was, sad as he had become, different from Henry as he had always been in every way, he fleetingly reminded Fanny of her father. He had often done so, just as Henry sometimes made her think of Oliver. She had seen them together all her life. They had been together so much, and for such a long time, that they had acquired each other’s gestures and mannerisms, and like brothers who took after different parents, they resembled each other even though they did not look alike.

  Fanny kissed her godfather and closed her hand on the ruby necklace.

  4

  Rose Barebones could not bear the heat of America. She began to feel it, like the weight of a man’s body, while the Pamela was still miles offshore. By the time the ship sailed into Boston Bay on the first Sunday in August, the heat had actually become visible; worms of superheated air danced around the blurry masts and hulls of anchored ships, the docks, the low houses of the mean little town. With nearly seven thousand inhabitants, Boston was by far the largest English settlement in North America, but it was smaller than Chesham and ruder than any place Rose had ever imagined—little skewed houses built of raw unpainted lumber, a low bald shore without a single tree or lawn, the smell of a slaughterhouse on the offshore wind. On first seeing the settlement, Rose thought that it must be the place where the Indians lived, and that they would sail on to the English town. But then the sound of church bells came rolling out over the water and she knew that this dreadful slum was Boston.

  “Oh, Fanny, it’s cruel, cruel,” Rose said. “What have I ever done to be punished so?”

  These were very nearly the first words Rose had spoken in Fanny’s presence since sailing from England. She did not look at Fanny as she spoke. Her eyes were on Edward Ash, as if she expected he would answer. But Ash was absorbed in the view of the harbor and paid no attention to her. Betsy stood beside him.

  “Look, wife, America,” he said in a voice that reverberated through the ship. “Look how it sleeps, waiting for the coming of the Word.”

  “How true,” Rose said loudly, as though Ash had addressed his remark to her. “The country is asleep. You can feel it.”

  Ash took no notice of her. As the Pamela drifted toward her anchorage in the brutal heat, Rose was wearing a white dress and a white hat decorated with red cloth roses. She was pale, with blue shadows under her eyes, and she was a little thinner than she had been in England, so that her body appeared to inhabit her clothes without actually touching the fabric. Her lips were somewhat swollen. She looked like a bride who had been making love all the way across the ocean.

  Apart from the church bells, there was no sound at all outside the tiny capsule of noise that was their English ship. The bells were very feeble, not tuneful like English bells. Then even the bells stopped.

  In the quiet that followed, Fanny understood that she had crossed the ocean, that she was about to set foot on a different world, that she would never go back. America was as silent as the grave. Fanny had never been in such a silent place, and she realized that she was only at the edge of it. How far could the bells be heard when they were rung on Sunday—a mile, two miles if the wind was right? Beyond that point, Fanny thought, it must be just as silent as it had been before the English came. We are at the edge of an enormous place, the largest, emptiest place left on earth, and there is nothing in it but silence. It is to the ear what darkness is to the eye.

  Fanny breathed in and out very deeply. She was dressed in black from head to foot, black hair framing her golden face that had not smiled since Henry died. She turned her back to the shore and found Ash staring at her. Rose was still waiting for Ash to respond to her own remark.

  “Did you hear what Mr. Ash said?” Rose asked in a hostess’s voice. “Don’t you think he’s right, Fanny, to say that the country is asleep?”

  “Not asleep,” Fanny said. “Waiting.”

  5

  Joshua Peters disposed of the Pamela’s cargo without difficulty and for good prices; the demand for alcohol was as great in New England as anywhere else. There were far fewer drunken women and children to be seen in public here than in London, and no gangs of youths robbing in the streets. No one was permitted to drink more than a quart of ale outside of mealtimes, and the drinking of healths was punishable by a fine of twelve shillings, but these prohibitions were largely disregarded. A quart of ale cost a penny. Puritans liked strong drink and believed that it was a friend to man.

  The local taste surprised Joshua and taught him a lesson about future cargoes. Canary wine sold for more money than claret because it was better known to the Bostonians. Nantes brandy was prized for medicine and for drinking healt
hs. The apple brandy from Calvados set the Puritan merchants thinking—cider was the drink of the poor in America.

  “Bring us no more of this,” one man said, eyes watering from drinking the fiery stuff. “If the laboring class develops a taste for it, the colony will cease to exist.”

  On the first day, Joshua and Oliver saw a red-faced man standing in the stocks with a scarlet D hung around his neck to mark him as a drunkard.

  Oliver’s plan to load up the Pamela with shingles and spars came to nothing. The Indians had cut down the forests near Boston; from the beginning, the English had had to cut firewood on islands in the harbor. Oliver was tremendously disappointed. He had imagined majestic trees, an inexhaustible supply of them, growing down to the water’s edge, and shiploads of masts and spars and shingles making him rich.

  The Bareboneses and Fanny and the Ashes were invited to dinner by the Boston lawyer who was in charge of John Pennock’s affairs in America. His name was Lebbaeus Williams.

  Williams was a nearsighted rotund man with a deep bass voice and a cordial nature. He had a mannerism that would have delighted Henry Harding: when he answered a question, he gripped the edge of the table with both hands, half-rose from his chair, leaned forward, and shouted, rather than spoke, the key phrases. Oliver asked him for his opinion about the timber business.

  “Opinion, Mr. Barebones?” Williams replied. “The country is too young for opinions to have formed, and I am already too old to express them. All I have to give you, in exchange for the fee you will pay me, is facts.”

  “Then give me facts,” Oliver said. “Where are the American trees we hear so much about in England?”

  “There are trees aplenty,” Williams said, sipping the excellent claret Oliver had brought as a gift. “Trees to the west of us, trees to the south and north of us. Enormous trees, Mr. Barebones, infinite numbers of them, giants of the forest standing a hundred feet high, oaks and firs and elms and maples as well as other kinds, both hard and soft, that are unknown in Europe. But you see, Mr. Barebones, there are no roads between Boston and these trees, and no rivers flowing eastward to float them in, and the Indians will not let themselves be hired or enslaved to carry masts for his majesty’s navy over a hundred miles or more of swift rivers and steep hills and treacherous bogs, so the idea of shipping wood from here to England has never come to reality.”

  “What if a road were built?” Oliver asked.

  “A road? That would require the labor of a thousand Englishmen, sir, and there are not that many idle in the whole colony. That is a difficulty. If you overcame that, the Indians would doubtless attack you as you started carrying trees out of the forest, because this involves the most peculiar fact of all. Yes, very peculiar, Mr. Barebones. Would you like to know what it is?”

  “Very much, Mr. Williams.”

  “Then I will tell you,” Williams said. “The Indians believe that the English have come to America to steal the trees. They all believe it. King Philip believed it when he waged his bloody war against us. They have guessed that we have cut down all our own forests and there are not enough trees in Europe.”

  “What an amazing idea,” Rose said.

  “Indians are amazing altogether,” Williams said. “Take the case of Magpie, the Nipmuck woman bequeathed to you by Captain Pennock. Pennock had her educated, you know—she reads and writes and even plays the spinet a little. When he died, he left her the Negro slave Coffee in her own right. And she immediately sold him.”

  “Sold him?” This was the first Oliver had heard about this transaction.

  “Sold him down the islands, as they say. Poor Coffee was transported to the island of Nevis in chains. Magpie realized two hundred pounds for him.”

  “But he was her husband.”

  “Nevertheless, she sold him.”

  “But why?”

  “Magpie did not explain. Indians never do.”

  Williams chuckled, drank more claret, hacked a piece of meat off the neck of mutton that lay in the pewter trencher in the center of the table, and chewed it off the bone without using a knife. Williams kept a fine house for Boston, but there were no plates, no glasses. Everyone ate out of the trencher. The Bostonians’ grandfathers, simple unknown people to begin with, had brought their manners over from England three generations before, and these were the manners that were still in use. Their houses and furniture and clothes were the same. The rooms were too small, the ceilings were too low, the roofs were too steep, the chairs and tables were the wrong size, the wood had not been properly finished. Nothing was beautiful.

  Rose, smiling faintly, ate nothing and wondered how soon she would go mad. She had nearly died of boredom in Buckinghamshire. What would happen to her here? She wore one of her floating dresses, pale yellow, but modest. Rose had already noticed, in her one walk through the town, that breasts were not displayed in America, so she had covered hers with a shawl. This made the heat even more oppressive, and the sweat dripped down the furrow of her back. The room smelled strongly of food, sweat, dust, tallow, and Americans. The people here had a very plain odor—no wig powder, no hyacinth or heliotrope perfume, no lingering aroma of the milk bath on the women’s skin; and like the Gypsies in Norwood, Americans smelled strongly of woodsmoke.

  Dinner began at noon, a little later than it would have done outside of Boston, where the principal meal was consumed as early as ten-thirty in the morning. They had begun with a pudding—begun with a pudding!—made of Indian corn, molasses, and butter. Rose had tried this, dipping her spoon into the yellow quivering heap of it along with everyone else, but it was too sticky to eat.

  Williams’ stout wife and lank daughters all wore Puritan bibs and caps and chewed with their eyes down, saying nothing. They drank water fearlessly from large white cups and helped themselves to more from a pitcher, something that Rose, coming from England, where only animals drank water, had never seen before. Speechless though they were, the Williams females Were fascinated by their visitors. Rose supposed that they had never seen such clothes, such elegance. She spread her hand on her bosom so that they could admire her ruby ring.

  Williams, at least, was transfixed by Rose’s dazzling appearance. He could not take his eyes off her. He had never seen a woman dressed in such bright colors. Though his remarks were always addressed to Oliver, his eyes only darted to him at the beginning and end of every sentence. Otherwise, he watched Rose.

  “Will you not have a potato, mistress?” he said, enunciating all the letters of a word that had been pronounced “missis” in England for at least a lifetime. “It is not, I assure you, in the least … gallant.”

  Even in London, this would have been a daring remark to make to the beautiful wife of another man; the potato, called the gallant root, was regarded as being exciting to the senses; even Oliver had only eaten it in brothels.

  Oliver did not take offense; knowing how much this guileless, talkative American would have amused Henry Harding, he himself liked Williams tremendously. Besides, Oliver had begun to see the comic side of Rose’s vanity.

  “Maybe you should have some potato, my dear,” he said.

  Rose’s smile did not change, nor did she answer. The maidservant, a gawky staring girl whose boots clumped like a soldier’s on the squeaking floor, brought in a platter of baked birds, dozens of them lying on their backs with their skin glistening with bacon fat.

  “Pigeons,” Williams explained. “The season is nearly over. In June and July, when they are flying over us in their migrations, strangers may think on looking up that the sky is black with pigeons. But they are growing very scarce. I can’t think why. As a boy I once netted five thousand in a single morning.”

  “Netted?” Ash said.

  “You catch them like fish, sir. Hang nets between the trees and the blind foolish things fly into them.”

  “How did you eat five thousand pigeons, sir?”

  “Eating them was not the object. Even the Indians, who are very frugal, sir, far more frugal than Englis
hmen, caught them to watch them flutter. They are so brainless that it is impossible to have pity for them.”

  When dinner was over, Oliver and Williams retired to Williams’ office, a low narrow room under the rafters that was as bare and as stifling as all the other rooms in the house. All the windows were shut. Oliver wore the plum-colored suit and the long curly wig that he had had made for his wedding. These garments—the wig was like a thick wool hat, good for keeping off the English rain—were not suitable for the humid weather, and Oliver’s body steamed inside them.

  The walls were lined with shelves filled with wooden boxes. Williams got one of the boxes down, and wearing a delighted smile, sat himself and Oliver down, knee to knee, in a pair of straight chairs. He rapped sharply on the box and held up a key.

  “Captain John Pennock’s box,” he said. “All the particulars of your situation are locked safely inside.”

  “I must say,” Oliver said, “that the particular about Magpie and Coffee is very shocking.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” Williams said. “You will find, sir, that Indians do shocking things. But what they do is not always what it seems. I will leave it at that.”

  “But poor Coffee.”

  “Indeed. But it may not be as bad as it seems. Nevis is a place for the breeding of slaves. There are worse lives, sir, than the life of a prize bull.”

  Williams opened the lid of Pennock’s box and extracted a paper. He held it out so that Oliver could see the seal and read the superscription, written in Pennock’s own hand: “A Description of my Nephew Oliver Cromwell Barebones, Gent.” The seal was Pennock’s, a lion with an owl’s head; Oliver had seen the ring on the old man’s finger and the seal in wax many times before. Williams broke the seal, unfolded the paper, and read rapidly, moving his lips and pausing after every sentence or two to look sharply at Oliver.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “You appear to be Oliver Cromwell Barebones. Captain Pennock’s description is precise.”