Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  Ash worked in secret in a barn behind the Williams house. Joshua was worried by Ash’s participation in the work. “If the men find out these orders come from him,” he told Fanny, “they won’t carry them out. They think Ash is mad and brings bad luck.”

  “Then don’t tell them,” Fanny said.

  “I think he’s mad myself. This idea is mad. We’ll have a hold full of dead lobsters.”

  “Maybe. But if it works, Oliver will be very happy. What we need is another cargo, for insurance. What about smoked oysters?”

  Joshua gave her a sharp look. “Mussels too. You’re Henry’s daughter in more ways than one,” he said.

  He put Condon and two or three young sailors on the beach, gathering oysters and mussels and smoking them over pitch-pine fires. They had a tarry taste that Oliver thought would create a sensation at Rose Tavern.

  Lebbaeus Williams, intrigued by the idea of making money out of something like the lobster that simply occurred in nature, helped enthusiastically. “It is a gift from God, like the New World itself,” he said. He found coopers to make watertight tanks that would fit into the hold of the Pamela. Fanny went with Williams to the cooperage and watched the tanks taking shape. It was intensely satisfying to see the staves shaved and shaped, then fitted together and bound with iron, then put to soak to swell the joints and plug the natural leaks.

  By the first of September, the lobster vats and the pumps were ready to be fitted. Joshua sailed the Pamela to the beach and for a week the whole crew caught lobsters in long-handled nets that Ash had designed for the purpose. Fanny counted them as they came aboard, throwing all but the largest back into the sea, and calling a halt to the fishing when there were two thousand lobsters in the vats.

  “If half of them live, and you can sell them for a shilling each,” Fanny said, “we’ll be five hundred pounds richer.”

  Joshua made a Genoese shrug. “The tanks cost us two hundred.”

  “If they all die, sell the tanks,” Oliver said.

  “I’m sure there’ll be a tremendous market for them,” Joshua said.

  The Pamela would sail on the tide, leaving Fanny and the others behind. Fanny had no real hope of ever seeing England again. She took Joshua by the arm and walked him far down the beach. When they were far enough away, she talked to him.

  “You don’t have much faith in this cargo, do you?”

  Joshua shrugged again. “The men don’t like pumping water into the ship, it isn’t natural,” he said. “But for me, it’s not the cargo, it’s this Ash. They think he’s bad luck.”

  He and Fanny were standing on a smashed pavement of mother-of-pearl left by the hunting birds. Joshua reached into his pocket and brought out a rosary with a silver cross. It had belonged to Fanchon, and Fanny had carried it in the secret pocket of her petticoat since taking her First Communion. She hadn’t seen it since she left France.

  “Ash found it on the floor of the cabin while you were sick,” Joshua said. “Naturally he thought it was mine.”

  Far down the beach, Ash was watching them. He saw Fanny looking back at him and turned away. She lifted her skirt, unbuttoned the pocket in her petticoat, and put the rosary inside. The ruby necklace was already there, wrapped in a piece of linen.

  A strand of Fanny’s hair had blown across her face. Joshua lifted it and put it back in place.

  “You’re a lovely girl, Fanny,” he said. “Don’t stay here. This place is empty.”

  “Empty? With all these birds and lobsters?”

  “You can’t talk to birds and fish, or marry them,” Joshua said. “Come back to England. You should find a husband and have a son who’ll grow up to be like your father. Henry didn’t bring you up to be alone all your life in a place like this.”

  “I wouldn’t be alone in England?”

  “At least you’d be a long way away from this man Ash.”

  Joshua was looking over her shoulder as he spoke. Fanny turned around and looked too. Still far away, but coming steadily on, was Ash. He waved and shouted; they heard him perfectly despite the racket made by a sky full of birds and the pounding of the surf.

  “Look at him,” Joshua said.

  Ash broke into a run, his gray hair feathering as he moved; he was remarkably athletic and this muscularity was always a surprise because it was the last thing one expected to see in him.

  “See how he runs to you,” Joshua said.

  Ash? Fanny laughed and called Joshua by his real name. “Oh, Pietro …”

  “Don’t laugh, Fanny. He’s after you. Come back to England on the Pamela. I ask you as your father’s friend.”

  Ash was much closer now. He looked as if he had happy news. It was impossible to talk. Moved by Joshua’s affection for her, knowing that she would probably never again see this wrinkled brown Italian who had always been so good to her, Fanny kissed him—threw her arms around him and kissed him on the lips and then gazed into his eyes for a long moment and patted his cheek.

  Ash was very close when this happened. When Fanny took her eyes off Joshua and looked at Ash, she saw that his face was drained of expression. He stared at Joshua, then at Fanny, then at the sea.

  “What is it?” Fanny asked.

  Ash, who spoke as easily as he breathed, had to clear his throat before he could reply.

  “Williams has sent a message,” he said. “Hawkes, the guide, has arrived in Boston and we must leave for the west tomorrow.”

  Joshua held on to Fanny’s hand. “Will you go, too?” he asked.

  “I must,” Fanny said.

  “Then I’ll bring your ship back to Boston,” Joshua said, “in case you need her.”

  8

  John Pennock had been possessed of the religious temperament. While praying at the age of sixteen, he was seized by the belief that he must devote his life, the only thing that was truly his—as opposed to the estate on the Scottish border that he would inherit when his father died—to the defense of Jesus Christ against His chief earthly enemy, the pope of Rome. Just then there was no religious war in England (though Pennock thought there ought to be because of young King Charles’s marriage to the Catholic sister of Louis XIII of France), but the possibility of killing papists existed on the Continent.

  Pennock went to Germany to fight in the protracted conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor and a shifting coalition of Protestant and Catholic enemies that was afterward called the Thirty Years War. He seldom came home to England after that. Catholics and Protestants were never at peace with one another everywhere in Europe for a single day during his lifetime. During his first years as a soldier, Pennock served under Gustavus Adolphus, Protestant king of Sweden. Though Gustavus’ troops were, for their time, highly disciplined and well-behaved, Pennock nevertheless saw entire towns massacred and whole provinces laid waste by what both sides believed was the providence of God. Gustavus, the greatest military genius of the age, invented the practice of infantry firing their muskets in unison, or “in salvo” as he called it, as they advanced, and insisted that cavalry must charge right into the enemy and fight with the saber. Pennock believed in Gustavus’ principles of warfare nearly as strongly as he believed in the truth of the Scriptures, and was as willing to die for them.

  After Charles I of England was beheaded in 1649, Pennock fought with Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, taking part in the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, in which the Catholic defenders were put to the sword to the last man after they surrendered to Cromwell’s army. At Wexford, Pennock saved the lives of three Irish wolf dogs, enormous beasts with dejected whiskery faces, that were about to be shot by archers because they were ferociously defending their wounded master against the English who wanted to kill him.

  “There’s no hope for you, but there’s no need for the dogs to die; I’ll look after them,” Pennock had said to the dying man.

  “Very well,” the papist replied, and called off the dogs.

  “Magnificent animals, biggest dogs I’ve ever seen,” Pennock said to his
enemy as he took away his sword. “What are they for?”

  “Wolf dogs,” the other said as he sank to his knees, making the sign of the cross. “That big chap ran a wolf for fourteen hours only last year—ran it right back to me and the other dogs and then killed it.”

  “Fourteen hours!”

  The doomed man called his dogs over and pounded them affectionately on the ribs. Then he told them to lie down; they did so obediently, watching him and whimpering low in their throats as he prayed. When he was finished, he opened his eyes and nodded. Pennock gave the order and the archers killed him; the dogs howled in anguish when they smelled his blood. True to his word and impressed by the wolf dogs’ obedience, Pennock took them back to England with him. As there were no wolves on the Scottish border, he used the dogs to run stags, and found that their dead master had not exaggerated their endurance or courage. He gave instructions that they should only be bred to each other, never crossed with another breed.

  After Cromwell died and Charles II was restored to the throne, Pennock returned to the Continent and joined the great Dutch Protestant William, Prince of Orange, in his battles against Louis XIV. When, in 1688, William of Orange invaded England at the invitation of a group of English noblemen, Pennock rode with him.

  By then Pennock’s work in England was done. He had always been rich and his faithful service under William now made him richer. During the winter, while at morning prayer among the strangers who were his servants, Pennock underwent a second religious experience. It was just as forceful, and just as irresistible, as the one half a century before. While listening to the reading of the Forty-sixth Psalm, he was seized with such a strenuous desire to leave England and go to the colonies that he could only believe that the idea was an instruction from God. “There is a river,” read the psalm, “the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God …”

  Pennock decided to build a city in the wilderness where he and all who followed him would live in harmony with God and nature, out of reach of Catholics. “A quiet place on the banks of a river,” he told his servants, explaining that he intended to take them with him. “A godly place without argument or discord.”

  He located a river, the Connecticut, on a map of New England and applied to King William for a royal grant of land. This was soon approved by the king, as foretold in the psalm. In the ensuing three months, Pennock sold everything he owned in England. He had never married. Requiring a wife to go into the wilderness with him, Pennock married Oliver’s spinster aunt, Hope Barebones, who was kindly and clever like her Adkins mother and tall, broad-shouldered, and plain-minded like the Bareboneses. On the fourteenth of June, the anniversary of the Battle of Naseby, Pennock sailed for the New World in two ships—a little one for the farmers and craftsmen who were going with him and a larger one for livestock, tools, and supplies. Besides his bride, Pennock took along an entire community of people—farmers with all the necessary breeding animals and seeds, carpenters, masons, tanners, and weavers and their tools, a miller, a brewer, a tavernkeeper, a sergeant named Amos Hawkes who had fought with Pennock in Ireland and in the Low Countries, and others.

  By the time Pennock came back to England and told Oliver and Henry his stories, he had built his city in the wilderness—a church and other necessary buildings, a big house for himself, and thirty small ones for his colonists, on a hillside above the Connecticut River. The settlement was protected from savages by a log stockade fifteen feet high with watchtowers at each corner. Pennock called it Alamoth because the Forty-sixth Psalm was described in the Bible as “A Song upon Alamoth” and he assumed that that was the name of the city of God. Ash explained, when he heard the name of the place years afterward, that alamoth was a Hebrew word meaning “soprano”—from almah, “a virgin.”

  Alamoth’s natural setting was a place of remarkable beauty. The Connecticut at this point was as wide as the Thames at London, but more meandering. Natural meadows lying in bends shaped like oxbows were fertilized by annual floods that covered them with rich silt. Pennock’s border farmers planted these oxbows with wheat, rye, Indian corn, beans, hay, and other crops, and set out apple trees and other English fruits on the hillside. Deer came down from the encircling forest and grazed peacefully in the pastures among the Devon cattle and Shropshire sheep and Berkshire hogs that had crossed the Atlantic in Pennock’s cattle boat.

  There were fiercer beasts, too, and in a letter to her family Hope described hearing what she thought was a baby crying in the forest. But it was a lion. “The Indians sometimes imitate this beast, as well as the calls of other animals, in order to approach closer to their enemies,” Hope wrote. “They regard the English as enemies, but my husband has brought along a goodly supply of muskets and pikes and already he and Sergeant Hawkes are drilling the other men to be soldiers. I am with child.” Hope bore Pennock two children, a girl named Thoughtful, and a boy, born a year later, who was also called Oliver after Pennock’s hero, Cromwell. Pennock was seventy-five years old when his son was conceived.

  During the fourth summer of Alamoth’s existence, a band of Abenaki Indians, a tribe from the north, attacked the village. The war party, gaunt painted men with stringy limbs who yipped like terriers as they fought, came down from the forest before dawn, killed the English sentinels in their watchtowers, and set the church and some of the houses afire. Pennock tried to rally the men he and Sergeant Hawkes had trained and armed with muskets and pikes, but the tactics that had driven King Charles from the field at Naseby and overcome the Catholics at Lützen and Wexford were useless against the savages. The Abenakis simply ran ahead of the amateur troops as they marched stolidly across a meadow. There was no cavalry to cover them except Pennock and his old sergeant. When the English fired their muskets in a salvo, so that they all had to reload at once, the Indians dashed closer, killed half of them with bows and arrows and hatchets, and captured the rest. Pennock killed one Indian and wounded another with his saber before the Abenakis hamstrung his horse and dragged him, slashing and cursing, off its back.

  As Alamoth was twenty miles from the nearest English settlement, there was no possibility of rescue. The Indians stripped off Pennock’s boots—he was the only man along this part of the river with sufficient wealth to be entitled by law to wear full-length boots that came up to his thighs—and locked him in the pillory. The Abenakis then built a fire under him and left him to burn to death while they finished with the killing. Twenty of the sixty villagers were killed, including Hope’s small son, Oliver, who had his brains dashed out by a savage who swung him by the heels, cracked his head against a tree, and then threw his small body into the burning church. Hope was hatcheted to death by the same Indian when she tried to save her child. There was so much murder, clumsily accomplished with the only tools the Indians had, badly sharpened knives and hatchets and the saber they had captured from Pennock, that the small brook that ran through the village turned pink with English blood.

  While the massacre progressed, Pennock was doing a mad dance as he tried to escape the fire. His head and wrists were trapped in the stocks, but his feet were free, so he kicked away the burning brands with his bare feet. Four of his toes were burned off, together with his clothes and his beard and all the hair on his body. When the old man told this story to Henry and Oliver, he said that what he feared most was that his dangling parts would be burned off. The Indians seemed to realize this. About half of them momentarily forgot about the slaughter and gathered around the pillory to watch, clutching their own privy parts and pointing merrily at Pennock’s, which swung between his legs as he performed his frantic dance. Pennock felt no resentment toward the Indians. However primitive, this was war; he had seen worse things happen in Germany. Nor was he surprised that the pain of being burnt at the stake was so excruciating. Marching through Bavaria with Gustavus Adolphus, he had seen as many as a hundred witches burned in a single captured town. The Forty-sixth Psalm, which Pennock, who knew it by heart, had been repeating in his mind in order to prevent h
imself from screaming, said, “Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made in the earth.”

  As soon as the Abenakis departed, the Nipmuck girl, Magpie, released Pennock from the pillory, then held his head above the water when he lay down in the brook to cool his burns. Little ribbons of charred flesh fluttered in the current. The Indians carried all the children away with them, including Pennock’s small daughter, Thoughtful, and Sergeant Hawkes’s ten-year-old son, named Gustavus after the great Swede. The boy escaped almost immediately and ran all the way to Deerfield, twenty miles away, to summon help. A column of soldiers marched after the Indians, but the Abenakis split up into small groups and escaped into Canada.

  Most of the Indians of New England and eastern Canada spoke some form of the Algonquian language, and they all conversed fluently in a universal sign language, so that they generally understood each other in a rudimentary way. Pennock realized that Magpie, whom he had taught to speak and write English, gave him the means of asking the Indians about the fate of his child.

  “God has now revealed his purpose in causing me to teach you the English tongue,” he told Magpie.

  For a whole year, Pennock traveled among the Indian villages with his small slave, inquiring about Thoughtful. Magpie was reluctant to accompany him, because he had also caused her to learn to sew and she feared that she would be captured herself if this secret became known to the Abenakis. She confided her fears to Pennock.

  “Nonsense,” Pennock said. “Why should Indians want a seamstress when they wear leather clothes?”

  Magpie did not tell him that her own father had kept an English-woman he had captured during King Philip’s War hidden in his village for fifteen years. The Englishwoman sewed the whole time, cutting up the same few pieces of cloth over and over again and sewing them into fanciful garments for her captor and his wife. Magpie’s father would not let the woman eat or drink while she was sewing, for fear that she would stop before she had finished. Her reward for a shirt or a pair of trousers was a handful of no-cake and a gourd filled with water. When the English came, usually to pray and sing hymns and explain to the Nipmucks about Jesus Christ, Magpie’s family would force the seamstress to climb high up in a pine tree, where she would be gagged and bound to the trunk until the visitors went away. In the end the woman went mad and one of Magpie’s brothers had to kill her with a club.