The Traitor's Wife

by Kathleen Kent

  The journeyman, finished with his meal, shook his head vigorously, saying, “Large bands of Wabanakis have been seen moving through the forests ’cross town. There’s no doubt they be on the path to malice. Stay armed and stay sheltered. I myself am staying in the next settlement until they have moved on.”

  Patience grabbed at her husband’s arm, pleading, “Daniel, let John take Martha. We need Thomas here. To help protect us and the children.” Joanna, catching the near-hysterical tone in her mother’s voice, began to cry, and Martha picked her up, smoothing her hair out of her face.

  With all eyes turned expectantly to him, Daniel looked unseated, thrust so quickly into making a decision beyond what to bring from the cellar. Blinking rapidly, he said, “Very well, but you must wait a few days, Martha, maybe a week, until we know the road to your sister’s home is not the road to disaster.” When Martha opened her mouth to protest, Daniel gathered himself up, saying, “Now, that’s enough. I…that is, we have decided.” He turned hopefully to his wife, and when she nodded encouragingly to him, he added, signaling an end to the conversation, “Am I not master of this house?”

  The journeyman hurriedly left and the settlement became a fortress. Shutters were closed and nailed into casements. Doors were heavily cross-barred with oak, and vigilant watches were kept by the men by day and by night. The women placed buckets of sand and water under the eaves to put out fires set on the roof and the children were kept indoors at all times. The ample supplies brought by Daniel replenished the fearful watches and, as the week diminished, so, too, did the keg of strong ale, sipped sparingly but steadily to counter nerves brought to a fiery temper through waiting.

  On the fourth day after the journeyman had left, a “hallo” from the yard showed a mounted constable come to spread the word that the Indians had moved on. But with them they had taken cattle, horse’s, and a young girl named Elizabeth Farley. A child eleven years old, she had gone out to empty the morning slops, and when she did not soon return, her mother found many footprints leading westward towards the Concord River. Townsmen followed the trail but lost it in fording the river and so had to give up the search. A day after the doors and windows had been thrown open again to the spring winds, Martha and Patience went to Goodwife Farley with food, to sit with the recently widowed woman, childless, alone and grieving, a mantle of ashes in her hair scraped from the cold remains of her kitchen hearth.

  THE DREAM HAD left Martha terrified and shaken, with a sensation of suffocating, of drowning in mountainous, overwhelming drifts of feathers. Upon waking, she jerked herself upright to sitting, knees bent with hands clenched tightly over her stomach, and stifled a cry. Joanna moved restlessly next to her and she felt her way in the dark to the end of the bed, crouching on the floor, her hands over her open mouth.

  It was the Reverend Hastings’s visit the night before, she believed, that had sharpened the memories of that other black-frocked man she had not seen in over ten years. The Taylors’ supper had not gone well and it was close to a certainty that the reverend would never again come to call at her cousin’s with a mind to wooing. From the beginning, Reverend Hastings had shown himself to be exactly as she had imagined him to be, judging the quick and the dead with harsh alacrity. He had quoted Ephesians to her when she had proven herself to be insufficiently humble on the subject of marriage: “So man is to God, so must woman be to man.” To which she had retorted sharply, “And does not Colossians say, ‘See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy’?” The table had sat in uncomfortable silence until the reverend said, in barely repressed anger, “The contract of marriage is God-ordained and is like any other necessary, required, and enforceable contract…”

  As he spoke, his words droning on and on through tightly pressed lips like coarse line through a too-small fishing hook, Martha had begun to feel the familiar stifling dread building behind her temples and she clutched at the table for balance. She could feel Thomas’s eyes on her, and he abruptly said, “By mutual consent.” Baffled by the interruption, the reverend stopped mid-sentence. “What’s that you say?” he asked. Thomas, methodically mopping up the end of his soup, swallowed the last of the bread before answering, “It’s the covenant of marriage, Reverend. Not a contract. You’re not tradin’ for livestock.” John quickly bowed his head, snickering, and Martha herself felt a hysterical urge to laugh out loud, fully and rudely, into the parsimonious face that looked to his hosts in wounded indignation. Thomas held her gaze boldly for a moment and then, excusing himself, left for the barn, John trailing closely behind.

  She had gone to bed in a jubilant mood, only slightly sorry that her cousins were put out by the abrupt departure of their guest. Reverend Hastings’s diminishment by Thomas had, it seemed for a time, excised some of the feelings of debasement and shame, long held from the eyes of the world, brought about by a fellow man of God.

  A deep-limbed sleep had come as soon as she had pulled up the quilt. She had dreamt of herself as a girl again in the home of the Ipswich parson and his family where she had been placed at nine years of age. In the dream, she stood in the chicken coop, her face to the wall where she had been turned and told not to move, or speak, or resist; the back of her skirt up around her shoulders as brutal encircling hands held her immobile. Thumbs, like two vises, pressing cruelly into her flesh, beginning at the ankles and proceeding higher and higher up her calves, to her knees and then onward to the inside of her thighs. Higher and higher like a Jacob’s ladder into the inner tender parts that were covered to the eyes of scrutiny in the brightness of day, places that were hidden even from herself as she dressed for the night in a sweet-smelling night shift scrubbed clean by the parson’s wife. And all around her, in the dream, the hens are fluttering, shedding feathers that drift like snow over her face, covering her eyes and nose; feathers that can’t be brushed away because to move would be to invite a beating.

  And when she woke she remembered fully the reverend of her childhood. The man who had called her “daughter,” patiently teaching her to read and write excellently and to commit to memory the whole of the testaments, for to be left ignorant of these things would have reflected badly upon his tutelage. A man who was loved and admired and looked upon for counsel and who only ever once was confined to his bed, shortly after the time that she awoke from her turpitude and, taking his manhood into her hands, twisted it nearly off. She was quickly returned to her own family as being recalcitrant after three years spent in Ipswich and soon took to her own bed with an illness the town surgeon had called “unwholesome.” She wept then, remembering, too, that it was Thomas, and only ever Thomas, who had seen, who had recognized, the stamp of a pitiless secret held like a poisoned abscess in the deepest part of herself.

  In the morning, she took a needle and thread and sewed the red book into the casing of her pillow. She would keep the pages intact and alive within their covering but hidden away. And if her cousin asked her the whereabouts of the book, she resolved she would tell her it had become corrupt with mold and had been discarded.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE RAT, TO his own knowledge, had never been on dry land. The ship had been the sum total of his world, and had he gone blind, he could have found his way by touch and smell alone from the bottom of the hull, stinking of pig iron and refuse, up to the forecastle, where the teeming seamen hoisted or lowered the square-rigged sails, and aft again to the raised deck where the captain stood, and never wavered, never stumbled, as though his feet had been nailed to the planking.

  The captain rarely asked questions of the Rat, and even if he had, the boy could not have answered in words, being mute as he was. But the Rat was quick in his other senses, and the captain had seen fit to have the first mate give him lessons a few hours every Monday in seamanship—navigation and sextant use—and in languages, the written form at any event: English, Dutch, and a smattering of French. Understanding the other languages in their nautical sense was of practical use in case of a quick deci
sion to board another, less agile merchant ship packed with raw goods from the Americas. The captains ship was a pinnace. Dutch-built, fast, and shallow in draught, whereas an English ship of a comparable size would need thirty men, the Zwaluw, The Swallow in Dutch, needed only ten able-bodied seamen to rig and maneuver the sails. Every man on the Zwaluw held a cutlass close at hand and could have been called a pirate but for the British royal license to “reconnoiter” other ships perceived to be hostile.

  The captain was known to be of Dutch origin, owning the Dutch-sounding name Koogin, and though he could speak the language like a native, he had no accent and spoke English like every other member of the crew. His success in trading with his clients, English and colonial alike, gave testament equally to his indifferent loyalties, his willingness to traverse the Atlantic during the most unfavorable seasons, and his ability to hold his patronage in the strictest of confidence. He never interfered with another man’s livelihood where it didn’t intersect his own interests, so there were no questions asked when five men from London boarded the ship at Plymouth port with passage for Boston.

  First on deck from the transport wherry was a man named Brudloe, certainly the group’s leader, and as densely muscled as a pit cur. He grinned tightly at everything, an unpleasant lifting of the lips, expressing mirth that stopped well below eyes that were pinched and distrustful. His gaze shifted restlessly at all times, as though assessing every portal and expecting trouble.

  Next on board climbed a tall man with a pallid face and a set of slightly stooped shoulders. There was something menacing hiding behind his soft chin and pale skin that made the Rat suck in his breath. Once Baker caught his eye and slowly winked at him, and it was like watching a great northern shark closing its inner lid before feeding.

  After Baker came a man as large as a Lebanon cedar. He clumped noisily onto the deck, already unsteady on his feet though they hadn’t left port, carrying a boy who was only slightly older than the Rat. This older boy looked dead drunk, or drugged, and was quickly conveyed belowdecks.

  The last man to climb over the railing was a fop, wearing a shirt with more flounces than a woman’s and a velvet coat. He was called Thornton, and he answered every hail and every instruction with a silent sneer. Whether at rest or in motion, Thornton had a grace and a barely suppressed energy that might have, with enough experience, made him a superior seaman on the bucking deck of a sailing vessel.

  Once the ship was under way, the four older men would often come up to the deck to desperately gulp at the air. But the boy, never; he was always left belowdecks.

  The Rat frequently grinned to himself, thinking how quickly the London men’s swagger left them once the ship headed past the Isles of Scilly and the headwaters of the Channel. He often stood in the webbing of the bowsprit and watched impassively the four landies hanging over the sides, their eyes bulging, expecting to see their shoes coming up through their mouths. He himself clung effortlessly to the ropes like a monkey, impervious to their curses and threatening gestures, laughing silently at their distress, and waving extravagantly to the forlorn outcroppings of the Isles to show the Londoners that there would be no more sightings of land for many weeks.

  The Rat had heard the captive boy crying from the Londoners’ section of the hold. There were no barriers or separate cabins in the hold, but the four men had hung a blanket for privacy, and when the boy went on sobbing for too long, the Rat could hear first the thud of a swinging boot to the ribs, and then the groan before the captive was kicked into silence again.

  The Rat knew, of course, about impressment. The seas would dry up before the practice of kidnapping a man off the docks onto a ship would come to an end. But those who were captured were usually grown men, most of them seasoned on at least one trip on a ship; otherwise they would prove useless, especially on such a small craft, where every sailor had more than one duty to perform. This captive, he was sure, had never before been on a ship and couldn’t have been taken for ransom, as he was ragged beyond simple poor. He had the ground-in dirt of a river urchin, a lifetime spent in the sucking muck of the Thames up to his knees, grubbing for barnacles or bait or a ha’penny accidently dropped into the reeking tidal wash.

  One day he heard an odd, repetitive moaning, like chanting, coming from the captive, and he realized the boy had been mindlessly singing to himself. The boy’s voice had a high-pitched quavering sound, like a wounded bird, or like a man stuttering out his prayers as he’s swaying, storm-ridden, on the yardarms, his fear giving desperate music to the pleading.

  The Rat crept beyond the blanket when all the Londoners had gone topside, and crawled to where the boy lay bound with his hands behind his back, his knees drawn defensively up to his belly. He sat awhile looking at the older boy sleeping fitfully, noting the bruised, tender-looking swelling over one eye. As though feeling the Rat’s presence, the boy opened his eyes, which were not brown as the Rat had surmised but the blue of an island shoal. The boy’s brows knitted together, pleadingly, and he opened his mouth to speak. But the Rat heard the ponderous, slapping footfalls of the men returning, and he darted away into the shadows. From behind stacked barrels of powder he watched the men’s shadows thrown up by lantern light against the curved ribs of the hold.

  The Londoners talked amongst themselves of plans and schemes, their voices getting louder the more rum they drank. They bragged of their fights and the prodigious pay for their robberies and murders, conversing at length of the man in the new England they were sent to capture or kill, or die trying.

  Baker, the soft-spoken man with the eyes of the dead, talked of the plague ten years back and of the numberless bodies stacked in the pit at Houndsditch. Frequenting the Pye Tavern hard by the burying grounds, Baker would place winning bets on the exact number of dead piled onto the passing carts, like guessing the number of beans in a bottle.

  But as the days went on, the ship heaving and creaking through stiff westerly winds, the men grew silent. The group lay on the floor to sleep, to be battered and rolled about, instead of hoisting a proper hammock. Eventually the men left off even dicing and playing cards, spending more and more time topside, leaving their captive alone, seeking through drink to numb their misery only to wake to a rebellious stomach and a throbbing head. In a way, the Rat thought the most pitiable was the oversize Cornwall, who drank the most but could not eat, spending his entire day amidships, his meaty hands grasping at the ropes for balance until he was chased away by the seamen seeking to trim the sails.

  As the Rat worked on deck cleaning the chains, or with tar and oakum patching cracks in the deck, he would watch the captain watching the men, the captains expression carefully neutral. At one point, Thornton, his fine shirt soiled, the neck lace limp with seawater, approached the captain for a discourse. Without offering the Londoner so much as a “by your leave,” Koogin abruptly turned away, retreating to his quarters.

  AT THE STEERSMAN’S strike of eight bells, the end of the middle watch, the Rat woke and lay in his hammock, which swung in a deep pendulum, following the yaw of the ship. He could hear the seaman next to him wake and deftly roll from his own hammock. There was a rustling of a shirt quickly tugged on and then retreating footfalls as the seaman crossed to the ladder to the open deck. Soon, the man he replaced at watch swung himself into the empty hammock and within the space often breaths was snoring gently.

  It would be another half hour before the Rat had to begin his duties with Cook, and he took his time thinking of the boy, and how it would be to have a true companion. One who could serve as the Rat’s voice, whispering or howling his way through the oft-mapped lines of latitudes and stellar declinations like a singing fish through an invisible net. In all the years spent in the company of seamen, he had never had a shipmate even close to his own age.

  The Rat would gladly, if only given the opportunity, share with the boy all his own hard-won knowledge of the ship, not just the trimming of sails or the climbing of the yards, but the listening for the gunshot sou
nds of a breaching right whale, or the sighting at night, midsummer, of the green glowing ribbons dancing in currents of water so deep they could never be plumbed.

  He remembered with a growing anxiety the previous night, when he had overheard the four landsmen arguing over where and when to throw their captive overboard. He had been standing just behind Thornton, coiling a rope, when Brudloe caught sight of him and landed a quick kick to his side, sending him sprawling against the deck. The Londoner glared down at him, the white channel of scars in stark contrast to his weather-burned face, and all motion ceased for the briefest of moments, the seamen poised and wooden in their rigging.

  The ship’s boatswain, directing the halyards, roughly brushed passed Brudloe, hauling the scrambling Rat back up to his feet. He bent down and whispered hoarsely, “Maggoty pie.” The Rat grinned widely behind his hand and nodded. He was to change out that very morning a fresh fish for an old one on top of the flour barrel. A dead fish, with its rotting flesh, was used to bring the maggots up out of the flour. He would later take the worm-ridden, stinking carcass and roll it into Brudloe’s blanket.

  The Rat wasn’t certain if the captain knew of the plans for the bound boy, but he had felt a growing tension in the captain’s demeanor, like a rogue wind pulling a sail tight against its rigging.

  After his morning duties with Cook, he stood on the open deck and happened to see the captain leaning down towards him from the halfdeck, a deep furrow between his brows. His eyes flicked ahead to the cresting waves, peaking at fifteen feet or more, and then back again. “Boy,” the captain called to him. He motioned for the astonished Rat to come up the ladder and stand beside him. The wind whipped stingingly at them on the raised deck, and the two swayed in unison for a moment in silence, each hunching into his own shoulders for greater warmth.