Without taking his eyes from the man, Thomas said quietly over his shoulders, “Missus, go and put whatever food is on the table into a sack and bring it fast to me.”
The beginning sounds of protest from Patience brought a swift black look from Thomas. She quickly pulled the children from under the table and ran for her bedroom, desperately slamming the door behind her. With shaking hands, Martha scooped the remains of bread and meat into a cloth and handed the parcel to Thomas, who walked without hesitation into the yard. Ignoring John’s insistent tugging at her skirt and hissing into her ear, “Stay in the house or yer get yerself killed…,” Martha moved forward to stand in the doorway. She watched Thomas hold out the parcel, waiting calmly and patiently for the food to be taken.
The man in the yard had not retreated at Thomas’s advance. Rather, he had planted one leg behind the other, tilting himself backwards to take in the Welshman’s height. The man himself was not tall—Martha guessed him to be in fact shorter than herself—but there was a straightening of his spine and his arm extended outward, fingers encircling the sack with a gentle, almost delicate touch. The sack disappeared inside the folds of the doeskin, and slowly turning without a word or glance, he disappeared into the woody bracken opposite the entrance to the road.
Martha looked back at John standing in the middle of the room, his weapons held aloft. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, “put down the ax. Did y’think to cleave him in two and then eat him?” He sat heavily in a chair, placing the fork back on the table.
Thomas closed and bolted the door and took up his post again at the window. After a time he carefully shut and locked the sash in its casing, and she came to stand next to him, waiting for him to speak.
“That Indian was Wampanoag on his way back north, if he weren’t to die of the pox first,” he said. His breath appeared and reappeared on the glass in veiled patches. “Had they been Abenaki it’s likely you and I wouldn’t be here talking. They were all with plague or they’d not be begging.”
“They…?” she asked, startled. To her eyes there had been only one man in the yard.
“There were half a dozen more in the woods not forty feet away,” he answered.
She pressed her nose closer to the glass and scanned the woods for movement. “Will they come back?”
He shrugged and passed his hands over his eyes. She studied his profile, the darkened flesh trenched beneath his eyes and the scar that split one brow in two. “Am I Gelert?” she asked. He turned to her, and she asked again, “The hound killed by his master? You said the tale was about me.”
“No,” he answered. “You’re not Gelert.” His breath was moist in her face, scented with wild river onions, green and pungent, but he soon turned back to watch the woods and he didn’t speak to her again for hours.
THE MAY WINDS brought rain from the direction of Boston, the air sharpened with the taint of salt water, and Daniel Taylor appeared on such a morning through undulating currents of dampened air, his canvas coat turned black and heavy from the wet. He arrived as Martha and Patience stood in the yard, quickly gathering in the washing that had been hung to dry earlier that morning when the sun had burned free of the clouds. The women had mistaken the crashing and rumbling of the carters wagon as approaching thunder until they saw the barrel-chested gelding appear steaming and straining over the crest of the road.
Patience covered her face with her apron and sobbed at the sight of him. At his first embrace he said to her, “Now, now, my own little wife, I am home. Come see what I’ve brought you.” He carried into the house bundle after bundle of cloth as well as hides, tools, and foodstuffs: two barrels of small beer, a firkin of ale, one large keg of wheat, two cones of sugar, and a caged cockerel.
He proudly pulled out crates of woolens and linens for new shifts, caps, and aprons, smiling at his wife’s delighted surprise. In a friendly hug, he yanked up a startled Joanna, frightened at the appearance of this strange, unshaven man, but she quickly smiled when Daniel showed her a corncob poppet made, he said, by a Carribee slave. Seeing Will standing alone and frowning at his own lack of presents, Daniel set Joanna down and soberly gestured for his son to approach. With a serious face he pulled from a bag a tiny ax and presented it to the boy, as though the gift were the rarest of finds. Will yelled a full-throated cry and ran from the house, bringing laughter from everyone but John, who said, shaking his head, “Best hide the new rooster.”
Daniel sat and called for food and in between bites of his dinner rattled off an account of his travels. “I’ve been as far north as Salisbury and hope to go even farther on the next leg, perhaps as far as Portsmouth if there be enough clearing of woodlands up past Strawberry Bank. You can’t believe the farmsteads opening up between Casco Bay and Kittery. Pelts, timber, fish—more than one man can trap or catch in a lifetime.” His round and sympathetic face clouded only once, when he spoke of the whispering up and down the coast of Abenaki Indians chafing at the land and furs taken by the Englishers, and of the raids on settlements lying vulnerably close to the edge of the forests.
“It’s the French north of the Eastward,” he said, scratching at his scalp still burning from the lye soap he had used to kill the lice he had picked up in some bedstead in Boston. “They’re stirring and stirring the pot, making friends with the heathens so they’ll knock us about the head and drive us all the way back to England.” Patience began to cry again, and with a few words Thomas related the visit by the Wampanoag man and of the plague that had visited both colonist and Indian alike. Daniel made placating sounds, distracting his wife by saying, “Here, look, Patience. Have you seen the bowls I have brought you? Look how bright the pewter is.”
Martha made panbread for the evening supper with the new flour, molding a tender blanket to hold the old rooster that, over the protestations of Will, who wanted to try his new ax on the bird, was butchered and dressed by John within the space of an hour. Patience waited impatiently for Daniel to finish his portion and retire with her to bed, but he didn’t leave until he had generously shared the new ale, not twice, but three times with John and Thomas. When he finally took his wife’s hand, she led him off to their room saying, “Oh, Daniel. It’s been such a struggle managing all by myself.”
John hid a creeping smile, draining the dregs of his ale, and Martha threw him a warning glance, snatching away his cup. The children had been sent to her bed, and when she crawled under the blanket, fitting her body carefully between their huddled shapes, she was surprised to see that Will was still awake. His eyes turned in the direction of the wall where the rhythmic sounds of the creaking bed ropes that supported his mother’s bed drifted through the thin walls, and he began to cry. She shushed him and, placing her hands over his ears, pulled him tight to her own body until she felt him go lax and heavy in her arms.
In the morning, it was clear to Martha that the bed ropes weren’t the only things squeaking during the night. Prompted by Patience, who dug a sharp elbow into his side, Daniel cleared his throat and announced that a Reverend Hastings, newly appointed minister of Billerica, would be coming to dinner within a few days. He droned on at length about the minister’s qualities of piety and of his recently acquired status as widower. Martha had been wiping the bowls clean and felt pulled into the sudden cessation of talk as a clod of dirt into a tunnel of wind. Seeing the expectant looks of her cousin turned in her direction, she realized Daniel had been speaking of the reverend for her benefit.
Casually, he rattled on about the trading he had recently done with the minister, the frugal nature of his habits, the austerity of his bearing, the dignity of his house. Martha brooded on whether the Reverend Hastings would be like the reverend from her childhood; the man who, despite her best efforts, entered her thoughts at times like a clot in sour milk. If so, Reverend Hastings would have no apparent vices of his own to make him humble or soft in his opinions of others who had sinned. He would be dry and sharp and, worst of all, full of purpose. He would carry within the folds
of his cloak the breath of winter and peer at everyone with pale robin’s-egg eyes, uncovering and revealing every speck of unlawfulness in moral conduct, and his hands would make a punishment of every caress.
Signaling to John to begin the morning’s work, Thomas stood up and walked out the door, shading his eyes briefly in her direction, as though he had come upon her naked. She turned away, suddenly angry, snapping the cleaning rag aggressively across the boards of the table, spraying the floor with remnants of corn-meal. She said to no one in particular, “I’ll not be trussed up and bundled off to the first man, reverend though he may be, who comes sniffing around. By God, I’ll not.”
For the first time in days, persistent thoughts of hen feathers filled her mind. Ripping the apron off her waist, she threw it to the floor and fled from the house, keenly aware of the astonished looks traded between her cousin and Daniel.
She walked in circles around the yard until the pumping in her chest slowed. Daniel soon emerged from the house and, awkwardly gesturing an apologetic hand to her, began to hoe weeds in the garden. He threw himself into the work as though he would, in a single day, make up for all the time gone, and Martha thought she had never seen a man flail himself so at a task. Every limb was at odds with every other, elbows flying, knees bobbing, face as red as autumn cranberries, until, she thought, he would wear himself into the very soil. She looked at him critically for a while and then turned towards the barn, her arms crossed, regarding the shadow of Thomas passing back and forth through layered columns of sunlight from the open hayloft above.
In the barn she found Thomas running his hand over the flanks of one of the milk cows. The cow had been bawling fitfully for days, moving back and forth in a disquieting motion as it shifted its weight from one front hoof to the other. Thomas didn’t turn at her approach, but she knew he was aware of her presence. To make conversation she thought to ask him if the beast had stones in the belly, even though she knew it was a blocked hind stomach. Thomas had once remarked in passing to John that if a Welshman knew nothing else at all, he would know about sheep and cows and, for all their great size, the delicacy of their inner workings. She moved to cradle the cow’s neck in her arms, scratching at its cross-grained hide with her nails. It lifted its head, thick upper lip twitching, and Martha breathed in the smell of sour grasses fermenting in the maw behind the animal’s grinding teeth and knew from this that it was not fatally sick. Thomas knelt down, pressing his hands gently into the cow’s underside, shielding his face from Martha with the brim of his hat.
She sat down next to him and played with the straw between her fingers before asking, “What’s a Swedish feather?”
He turned to her, startled, with raised brows, as though she had asked him to jump off a cliff.
“John says I have a tongue like a Swedish feather.” She had asked the question in all earnestness, but when he moved to hide a smile, she bridled.
He straightened his mouth and answered, “It’s a weapon. A short pike with a steel-pointed blade. I say so as I have had necessity to use one.”
“And where,” she asked stiffly, “would you have had use for such a one as those?”
“Most times, missus,” he said, standing, “between the eyes and the belly.” He walked to another stall but soon returned with a flannel cloth and a bottle of oil. He uptilted the bottle onto the rag and commenced gently rubbing the cow’s hide, darkening it into circled, glistening patches. “I’ve been a soldier.” He looked at her significantly. “And I believe you know on which side I fought.” He set the bottle down, balancing it into the straw, and began carefully pressing his fingers into the cow’s soft underbelly, expertly probing the length of the entrails through the tightened, distended skin. “I were a pikeman, so I had use for such as a Swedish feather.”
“And did you live in London, as Will says?” she asked, and she was all too aware that her mouth had fallen slightly open, like a girl who is starving, fed with a very small spoon. She had once heard her sister’s husband, Roger, say that there was no greater place than London, or more wicked, as men walked with less reverence into a church than a tinker and a dog into an alehouse.
“Aye, I lived in that place. I left Wales, suddenlike, and by sixteen I were a man-at-arms.” He nodded for her to hand him the bottle again and he oiled both hands, rubbing them briskly together, warming them. She watched his splayed fingers moving knowledgeably over the cow’s hide, and when it bawled again in pain, he called to it chidingly, “Bod dawelu,” as though to a child protesting overmuch to a dose of physic. “You may reckon London a palace with streets of pearl and ivory, but they had cows and sheep there as well, the kind that stand on their two back legs. I lived in that cesspool until the war, called by my own conscience to fight.” He moved to help her from the straw and draped one long arm over the cow’s back. He looked at her evenly before saying, “And now I’ve told you enough to bring me trouble.”
She ducked her head, feeling his gaze raking the top of her skull. “Why do you tell me this?” she asked defensively.
“Because…I believe you know what it’s like to carry the weight of something hidden that can’t be spoken of. Not to friend, nor ken, nor to the closest partner of your bosom.”
As he spoke, she had placed her own mirroring hand across the beast, making an unlinked arc of both their arms. She couldn’t look at his face, unnerved that he would know she had secrets to keep; instead, she intently studied the knotted joints of his hands and the calluses that shielded the pads of his fingers. She willed herself to think of the wooden trunk set next to his bed, and the red coat Will had told her was nestled within. There came to her then the stories that her father had told her of the long and bloody civil war in the old England thirty years ago; of the red coats of Cromwell’s New Model Army, an army that was, in its day, one of the best and most disciplined to fight in the known world.
She met his eyes and asked, “What could I possibly have to hide? I’ve never been anywhere, I’ve never seen anything.” A note of bitterness had crept into her voice and she tamped it down lest he think her shrewish. His hand, still coated in a fine membrane of oil, crept over her own, the calluses rasping and unyielding across her skin; but there was no proprietary feel to the touch, and he didn’t move his body closer to hers as a preamble to some coarser action, and there were no whispered words as a ploy to reach and grab.
“And the women of London. Were they lovely?” She regretted her question as soon as she asked it and waited for him to deride it as vanity, most certainly what the Reverend Hastings would have done.
There was a slow shifting of weight as though he was considering the best way to answer. “In London,” he began, “just before the Great War, fishwives and housewives stood cheek by jowl with great ladies. You could see the mayor’s wife pulling up her skirts against the muck like any oysteress. You smile, missus, but it’s the truth. During the days before the war, the women of that time were infected with the same fever as their men, and they matched them brick for brick in building the ramparts to shield the city against the king and his army. It was a fever we held on to because to cure it meant to wake again to tyranny. You ask what makes a woman comely?” He tapped one finger lightly against her temple and said, “Thoughts, missus. It’s thoughts that make a woman so.”
She had opened her mouth to speak when John shuffled noisily into the barn, calling out, “Missus, there’s a journeyman come for you. With a letter.” John had turned away slightly, and she colored to think he had come upon them having a conversation which had moved beyond the health of the livestock. She quickly buried her chin in her shoulder, hiding her expression, until John had left again. Slipping her hand free, she moved away reluctantly, saying, “You know a lot, for a farmer.”
As she passed him, Thomas’s head tilted back, eyes narrowing as though to focus better on something wavering and indistinct, and he countered, “Enough to know you’ll never be settled with some parson.”
As she stepped fro
m the barn, she shook the folds of her skirt into order, all too aware that anyone seeing her then would think her a wanton emerging from a toss in the hay: bothered, flustered, her backside covered in straw. But she found the entire household gathered around the journeyman already being fed at her cousin’s table, a man so thin his shanks would have whistled in a high wind. He wiped his hand on his trousers and, handing her a folded piece of parchment, went back to stuffing his mouth with the remnants of cold porridge left over from breakfast.
Martha quickly opened the letter, written on the back of a fragment of a pamphlet from Boston trumpeting the arrival of ships from England, anticipating some homely bit of news about the Toothaker settlement ten miles to the north. She sensed Patience move up close to her and felt a flash of irritation that her cousin would seek to rob her of solitary discovery of news from her sister. The letter, in Mary’s hand, was brief; she had lost the pregnancy in her seventh month and was much taken down through the disappointment of her husband, Roger. She had written simply, “Please come.”
“Disappointment of her husband,” Martha muttered resentfully, remembering bitterly how ill her sister had been at the previous miscarriage. From the first she had laid eyes on her brother-in-law, she had always believed him to be a husband by convenience, and a father by accident. Her hand holding the letter had no sooner dropped to her side in a shared sense of grief than Patience asked, with alarm, “What’s amiss? Has anyone died?”
“Mary has lost her babe,” she answered and saw Patience grab instinctively at her belly. “And her son, Allen, is ill. I must go straightaway.”
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