“We might have at least been looted.”
’Twas strange now that he brought it to mind. I nodded. I had eyed the houses as we had passed by that morning. Nothing had seemed out of place.
“ ’Tis odd.”
We ate in silence for a while, but then he spoke again. “ ’Tis odd, too, that the savage was not armed.”
“He had an axe.” ’Tis what had been reported.
“Aye. An axe. Not a hatchet. So what then had he meant to do?”
Who could know the mind of a savage? “Chop down all our trees?”
Thomas smiled. “I wish he would have. With no access to the common, he might have done us all a favor.”
12
ONCE OUR NERVES HAD settled from the savages’ aborted attack, all thoughts turned to flax, from which we made our linen. After Father and Nathaniel had pulled up the plants, bound them together, and whipped off the seeds, ’twas Mary and me who loaded them onto the oxcart and took them to the brook for retting.
After binding several bundles together, we slipped off our shoes, raised our skirts, tucked them into our waistbands, and then waded into the stream. On the far side, we submerged the bundles in the calmer waters.
Some in town retted their flax in one of the nearby ponds, but though it took longer to ret flax in moving water, Mother insisted the result smelled fresher and stayed cleaner. Mary and I gave no protest. The air under the tree-shaded brook was refreshingly cool. And so, after submerging each bundle, we lingered in the stream, letting the water run through our toes and over our feet. But though the respite was pleasant, I could not let us long remain idle. Not when there was so much work to be done.
“We should go back.”
Mary only looked at me. And then she closed her eyes and tilted her head back, the sun-dappled shadows making freckles on her face. “You first.”
I gave her arm a gentle shove.
She shoved me back. Harder. But in doing so, she lost her balance, swaying on her feet for a moment. As she swayed, her hat fell from her head. “Look what you made me—”
I did not stay to listen. Her hat was already being carried away by the water. I lunged for it, but it had gained a swifter current and moved out just beyond my reach.
Behind me, I could hear Mary sloshing about in an attempt to join me. I held out a hand, which she soon joined with her own. Two were better than one when it came to both gaining and keeping a balance, and so together we started off to fetch the hat.
“Faster, Mary!”
“My skirt is drooping.”
“Then fasten it!”
She dropped my hand for a moment to hike her skirts up higher, to tuck them more tightly into her waistband. By the time she had finished, the hat was disappearing round a bend in the stream.
She surged forward, yanking on my hand.
“I do not know if we should—”
She tugged me along, despite my words. “That old ox wouldn’t move if you lit a fire beneath its tail.”
“ ’Tisn’t that. ’Tis the savages . . . we’ve ventured beyond where we ought.”
“And if we happen upon an Indian, I have no wish for him to see me unhatted. Hurry!”
She seemed to be putting much more emphasis on her looks of late. I was not sure I liked it. But I gave up my qualms and resolved to follow her.
As we splashed around the curve in the stream we saw the hat, stuck upon a stick, several paces farther down the stream. ’Twas Mary who recovered it. She shook it free from water droplets and placed it on her head. But then she paused. She took it off and plunged it into the brook, lifting it out, crown half filled with water. And then with a quick motion, she clapped it onto her head. She gasped as the water rushed down from the crown over her ears and forehead and down her back.
But she looked so refreshed and the stream running over my feet was so cooling that I did the same.
We stood there for some while, gasping and giggling, water making trails down our backs and fronts. And then, emboldened by our folly, we moved to the edge of the stream, grasped the slim trunks of saplings to pull ourselves up, and sat on its edge.
“We should go back.” I felt the call of duty.
“ ’Tis what you said that started us on this chase.”
“Nay. ’Tis you who shoved at me which started us off.”
“And only because you pushed me first.”
“I tapped at you.”
“You pushed at me.”
“But not with any mischief in mind.”
As we had been talking, I had kept one ear listening to the wood. And now I realized with a flush of dread that I heard nothing. Not one bitter with its calls for plum pudding, not one creak of a tree, and not one hush of the wind blowing through the woods’ leaves. It was strange. Unnatural. As if everything was holding its breath. As if one hundred pairs of eyes were watching us.
And then I heard the snap of a twig.
We both heard it. Could not help it as it had the sound of a gunshot.
Mary grabbed at my arm.
We shared a look.
Then we clutched hands, jumped straight back into the water, and started to run toward the other bank.
But midway in flight I paused. What was to say that whatever it was I felt watching us was not on this side of the river instead of the side where we had sat? Or, perhaps, on both?
I leaned away from the bank ahead of us.
Mary bent toward it.
Like a coil stretched too far, we came back together again. But without stability, without balance, and with much fear. We wobbled first one way, then another, and finally fell onto our bottoms in the stream.
And behind us rose the most unexpected sound of laughter.
I turned, expecting to find a savage partaking in unholy glee, but discovered the captain instead, bent over, hands at his knees, laughing at us.
Mary pushed up from the brook and stomped over to him.
“Some fine savage you turned out to be!”
“You thought me a savage? Is that why you leapt from the bank? I simply wished to join you, but you jumped up like partridges. I have never seen two people move so quickly in my life!” He paused in his mirth to wipe tears from his eyes.
Rage fired the words that burst from my tongue. “ ’Tis fine and good for you to laugh while we’re the ones paying for your slyness. You might have hailed us!”
“Oh, come now. Let me help you out.” He straightened and offered me his hand.
“Nay.”
“Come. You’ll catch your death.”
Mary marched past me and grabbed the hand he offered, but instead of using it to climb out of the water, with a quick tug she pulled him right in with us.
I only wished I had been the one to think of it.
“You nearly scared the life from us!”
“And my getting my boots wet will atone for it?”
Mary stood there, hand upon a hip, glaring at him. “ ’Tis a start.”
They exchanged glares for several moments, and then Mary whipped her hat from her head, scooped a portion of the stream into it, and dashed it into the captain’s face.
He blinked while rivulets of water ran down his beard. And then he took the hat from his own head and bent to do the same.
Mary was forewarned and stepped back in the time it took him to arm his weapon.
Unfortunately, two of his steps were the same as four of hers, and in a moment’s time Mary shrieked and bent, outraged and sopping, to fill her hat once more.
They kept at each other for several minutes, and then, just as I had determined to leave them behind and return to the cart alone, the both of them turned on me and dragged me into their fight. Mary held my arms while the captain poured the contents of his considerably large hat upon me.
And spluttering, dripping, I tore my hat from my own head and bent to do the same.
But by the time I had done it they had both, laughing and gasping, turned from me and started upstream. And so I
was left by myself, drenched and muttering, following their backs all the way to where we had first set out the flax for retting.
I climbed out of the stream, skirts fast about my legs, refusing any offer of help from that man. I could not think where to place my hands, whether I should use them to block the view of my legs or my chest or some other part of my body now outlined with wet, clinging garments.
“Oh, do not be such a goose. You’ll dry.”
I did not bother to honor him with a glance.
“Mary, is your sister always so proper?”
She turned to him with a saucy glance. “Only with men so dark and handsome as yourself.”
I stiffened in outrage, forgetting to hide myself.
His teeth flashed white against his browned skin. “Dark and handsome? Is that what she says about me?” He turned from Mary to me, a question etched between his brows. But before I could think how to answer, he took his sopping hat from his head, swept it toward the ground, and bowed. “Do not be offended. I shall take myself off. Good day to you, Mistress Phillips.”
I would have liked to have kicked out at him and his fancy hat, but I would only have succeeded in tripping myself up in my skirts. And given my sister a story to tell to the townspeople. So I settled for turning my back on him and busying myself with the ox instead.
Mary joined me at the ox’s head and together we pulled him into a walk. “If that captain were one of us, I would marry him in a minute.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“And why wouldn’t I?”
“Because he is arrogant and glib and . . . and rude.”
“But he’s so strapping and brawny and merry.”
“Merry? What does being merry have to do with being godly or kind or good?”
“He is those things, all of them.” She smiled as she slid a glance at me beneath her lashes. “But he is also so much more! Would it not be something to be the wife of such a man?”
“But . . . but . . . merry? You would pledge yourself to a man for laughter? Laughter does not place food on a table. Laughter does not bring any money into a household. And laughter cannot mend a fence or build a barn.”
“Aye. But what kind of a home would that be without it? And what do you plan to do with John after you finish feeding him and cleaning his house and mending his shirts? I fear, Susannah, that you might actually have to talk to the man.”
“Of course I would talk to him. Don’t be foolish.”
“ ’Tis not me, I think, who is playing the fool.”
She dropped back behind the cart, plucking at the grasses as she walked. And so I continued on, trying to put her idle thoughts behind me.
Halfway to the fields, we began to think the better of displaying ourselves. Our skirts had not dried as quickly as we had hoped.
And our waistcoats, instead of hiding our womanly curves, seemed to emphasize them all the more.
“If we stop by home, just to change clothes . . .” I was trying to calculate whether the extra trip would be noticed by Father.
“But Mother would see us.”
“ ’Tis better than Father,” I reasoned.
“And Nathaniel.”
Agreed in purpose, we turned the ox toward home instead. But almost wished we had not once Mother saw us.
“And look at the two of you! Daughters of scandal, that’s what you are!”
“We were retting the flax and—”
She held up a hand. “I do not wish to hear it. Change your clothes and return to helping your father and brother. One would almost think you had decided to shirk your responsibilities and go bathing on a hot day.”
We dared not look at each other for fear all would be lost. And so we changed in silence, and it was only once we were away from the house that we finally looked toward each other and burst into laughter.
13
AS THE DAYS OF July grew hotter, so did Thomas’s work.
In anticipation of the end of the retting of flax, he began to prepare scores of pins and nails in the smallest of sizes for hackles, on which the fibers would be combed in preparation for the spinning wheel.
The ring of his hammer on iron and the hiss of hot metal kissing water were constant as he drew the nails out to a taper and then upset them to form a head. At the end of a day’s work, I stood with him in the smithery sorting the nails into piles according to their sizes and then counting them. Nails were gold. The most tedious of a blacksmith’s labors, they yielded the greatest return. Only two houses in the town had been built with iron nails. Thomas’s and Simeon Wright’s. The rest were held together with wooden pegs.
It was during such a sorting and counting that a woman hailed the smithery and then stepped inside. Susannah Phillips had come to Thomas bearing several hackles.
“Good day, Susannah Phillips.”
“Good day, Thomas Smyth. I’ve come to you about our hackles.”
Thomas reached and took them from her, and then turned the boards first this way and then that, holding them up to the forge’s fire for light.
He looked first at the board having both the smallest and the most pins driven into it. “I cannot straighten these. They will break in the doing. But I can replace them.”
She frowned. “ ’Tis what Mother said, but I know that she had hoped . . .”
Thomas put the first board aside and took up the second. If the first had eighty pins the inch driven into it, the second had eight. “These others here, I can pull out and then straighten.”
She let out her breath in a huff. “Then what else can be done? Please do with them as you must. When shall I retrieve them?”
“On the morrow if you wish.”
She moved as if to turn, but then she stopped. “Please give my best to your wife.”
Thomas looked at me then, confusion drawing his eyebrows together.
I did not speak, did not move.
“She is right here. And has been all this time.”
“Where . . . ?”
Thomas put out his hand and plucked the arm of my waistcoat. “Just here.”
She looked toward me then, and still it took her a moment to register my presence. “Oh. Well. Greetings, Goody Smyth.”
I nodded.
As she left, Thomas stared after her in wonder. “She must be going blind.”
I shrugged. I was used to it. Depended upon it. Poor Thomas, it was only he who saw aright.
By the time our flax had been retted, beaten, and scutched, the scorching days of July had drawn to a close. The morning of the last day of the month, Mother sent me to the miller with a portion of newly harvested grain. Upon arriving, I joined the tail of a long line of women. We waited, all of us, for the first fruits of the harvest to be milled. But we did not wait silently.
“They say there’s a new milliner come to Newham.”
“From England?”
“From Boston. But she gets her goods direct from London.”
From Boston! I still considered Boston my home. I had been born there, had lived my life there, had in fact left half of my heart there when we had moved. But I knew, even after all of this time, that it was safe in my grandfather’s keeping.
Three years it had been since I had last seen my mother’s father. And in all that time, no one had ever called me Susannah in quite the same way, or listened to me with such gravity, or bothered to read the Bible to me in Latin just so I could hear how it sounded. He was a minister and often about God’s work, but he seemed to have all the time in the world for me.
Not unlike the captain.
In fact, strange as it might seem, I suspected that should providence ever give them an opportunity to meet, they would find much to admire in each other. I heard myself sigh. I missed my grandfather. I let my thoughts drift toward Boston as conversations swirled about me.
“My girl says there’s apples ripening in the wood.”
“And what would she be doing in the wood with savages lurking about?”
“ ’T
was that captain who told her.”
“I hear Goody Metcalf is with child.”
“So soon after her wedding?”
“No sooner than is proper.”
“And when will you be wed, Susannah Phillips?”
All eyes turned toward me, and caught mooning, I could do naught but blush and sputter.
“ ’Tis not a fair question.” God bless Goody Blake! “Is it not for the man to do the asking and the deciding?”
“But come now, Susannah, there are ways to hurry a man along. . . .”
Somewhere, one of the women hooted. Were it possible, my cheeks grew even more red.
“ ‘And now, my daughter, fear not. . . .’ ” The quavering voice that spoke the words paused for a moment, then began again. “ ‘I will do to thee all that thou requires: for all the city of my people doth know that thou art a virtuous woman.’ ”
In front of me, the women stood on the tips of their toes, straining to see who it was that spoke. And then, as one, they fell back from the line, revealing Mistress Wright. She was standing there, frail and hunched, and she was looking straight at me.
“ ‘A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones.’ ” She stood still as a stone for one long moment, watching me, and then she collected her sack, left the line, and walked slowly toward her home.
It was some time before anyone dared to break the silence. But even then, no one said anything else to me about John Prescotte.
Those heat-soaked days of August soon gave way to the more moderate temperatures of September. The captain still left every morning on his watch. The men still stood double watches with double men, but there had been no other signs of savages since the attack. And so we were able to put to the side that threat, for a far greater danger had been loosed upon us. The pigeons had come to nest.
They came by the thousands, winging overhead hour after hour. And after they had come, they settled in the wood. It seemed a benign invasion, but then they began to litter the ground with their droppings. So great was their output that it seemed an early frost had come. So many were their numbers that several trees broke from their weight. And then finally, nests built and wood occupied, they turned their attentions to our crops. And that we could not abide. At church the following Sabbath a day was chosen on which the town would launch an assault upon their number.
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