The Traitor's Wife

by Kathleen Kent

  The captain brought out his compass, the thirty-two-point placard that rotated magically beneath the true needle, like the single rose the boy had once seen in the captain’s quarters floating in a bowl of rainwater. The captains eyes then raked over Cornwall, clinging miserably to the grating over the weathered deck, where he had fallen moments before. The forecastle of the ship plunged into a trough as the ship came about for the tack, spraying the struggling Londoner with frigid seawater.

  “Do y’know what signals a good seaman, boy?” the captain suddenly roared, looking pointedly at Cornwall. The Rat cocked his head to show he was listening. “Knowing best when to cut a bad line.”

  He then dismissed the Rat, but called after him in Dutch, “Het donderend geluid, jungen!” Thunder comin’, boy!

  LATER THAT NIGHT, the Rat learned from Cook that the captain would be inviting the four landsmen to eat in his quarters. In addition to rum, the Rat was told, the captain would be offering a bottle of Madeira steeped in wormwood.

  “Which will, Rat,” the cook barked, “give them fuckin’ landies a long sleep and a relief from the pukes, and afterwards, a fuckin’ head from Hell.” The cook laughed, but then quickly frowned, pointing belowdecks. “It’s a shame, that. What’s goin’ on below.” The Rat nodded his head in agreement, sadly staring at the boards below his feet.

  At four bells on the first dogwatch, the four landsmen drew straws for who among them would be declining the captain’s invitation, staying behind in the hold. It would have taken a cretin not to know that it signaled a long walk on a short deck for the bound boy that night. The Londoners had been too puffed up and careless in talking of their plans of ridding themselves of the boy and taking his share of some unspecified bounty for the entire crew not to have heard. A blind spot between the masts, a moment’s distraction, and the bound boy could be shoved over the railings in the blink of an eye. And who was to prove it was not an accident?

  The Rat had not heard the boy crying the whole of the day and he suspected even the captive knew his time was drawing to a close. He also suspected the landsmen were unaware of the battering storm beginning to bear down on the ship.

  Soon the three passengers Brudloe, Thornton, and Cornwall, led by the Rat, were groping their way aft across the open deck, leaving their companion, Baker, behind with the captive. The wind had taken on a new, shrieking quality, tearing steadily from port-side, as the three landsmen struggled into the rear galley for the captain’s meal.

  Brudloe, the first blown into the aft quarters, cast his eyes immediately on the open decanter of Madeira skating across the tilting table, and said, “Damn me, Captain, if it’s not a vicious blow.”

  The captain looked at the huddled three, damp and reeking as doused dogs, and answered carefully, “Yes. It may even come upon us rough tonight.” Then he turned his back on the men and, handing the Rat another bottle, told the boy, “Give this to the man below.” And then in Dutch, he added quietly, “Wel opletten dat hij het drinkt, hoor.” And make sure he drinks it.

  As the Rat departed, he uncorked the bottle and sniffed the contents. A dark, unctuous smell riding below the sweetness of the wine brought to mind the tar he used for plugging the hull; but deeper still was the odor of a Danish mast, freshly planed, still weeping sap.

  He took the bottle and, on his way to the landsman’s tuck, counted eight heads: all the able-bodied seamen along with the carpenter. The crew had been sent below, clearing the decks for the worst part of the storm. The only men on deck now would be the steersman and the first mate watching the pattern of the cresting waves.

  The Rat found Baker sitting on a weighted barrel with his back and arms pressed into the steeply curved hull, his legs dancing from one side to the other as he attempted to stay aright against the violent pitch of the ship. The Rat saw a bucket close by his feet that held the bile from the man’s last meal. Baker’s face had taken on an ashen shade of gray, his eyes pressed tightly shut. He was shivering, the air from the more northerly latitudes suddenly cold and saturated with a creeping damp.

  The captive looked up at him from his place on the floor. Carefully, but deliberately, the boy’s lips parted and he mouthed the words “Help me.”

  The Rat’s eyes quickly darted to Baker’s face but the man’s lids were still closed, one hand now clamped firmly over his mouth, damming up whatever bit of remaining stew threatened to spill from his gullet. A thought as brief as lightning crossed the Rat’s brain: to make a grab for the boy and hope for aid from the crew. But the first rule of the ship was to be deaf and blind to the doings of the passengers.

  In that moment, Baker opened his eyes and startled to see the Rat standing there. He spied the bottle of Madeira and, with an unsteady hand, reached out to take the proffered gift. His fingers, uncallused and cold, made the Rat think of the fish on the flour barrel.

  “This from your captain?” Baker croaked.

  The Rat nodded, gesturing that the man should drink. Baker uncorked the bottle and poured some of the wine into his mouth. He swallowed, shuddering violently, and said, “Boy, give me that blanket.”

  Crumpled next to Baker’s feet was a thin quilt that had slipped off the man’s restless shoulders. But the Rat, instead, picked up another blanket, one he had expertly rolled into a tight bolster. As the blanket unfurled, it spilled from its innards the rotting fish that was meant for Brudloe to find. The carcass lay on the floor in gelatinous pieces, a heaving mass of maggots that had gained momentum from the blanket’s warmth. The stench rose up and filled the small space like an uncovered burial trench.

  A sudden lurch of the ship loosed the bottle from Baker’s hand. The bottle went rolling wildly astern, spilling the rest of the dark liquid onto the boards. Baker, cursing, began to retch again into the bucket.

  He groaned wildly, coughing and gnashing his teeth. The ship, hit with a wave broadside, juddered massively, knocking Baker off the barrel. He lay on the tilting boards, panting and tearing at his hair. When next he looked at the Rat, all of his former composure was gone. The Rat had seen the look before; seasickness, day after day, hour upon hour, unhinged some landsmen to the point of madness.

  At the ship’s heaving to port, Baker staggered to his feet, tearing his way through the hastily rigged partition. He looked desperately about, the startled crew, only partially illuminated by the wildly swinging lanterns, remaining silent and watchful.

  “Air…I must have air …” He was thrown hard against the foot of the main mast, where he steadied himself, tightly grasping at the wooden pillar with both arms. “I must go on deck,” he pleaded, his knees buckling.

  The carpenter, showing teeth the color of cloves, called out, “There’s a storm out there, man. You’ll be crossin’ an open deck.”

  Baker, seeing the Rat nearby, balancing expertly against the movement of the ship, jabbed a finger at him and shouted, “Him. He’s going to take me up.” He tore at the neck of his shirt, raking at his face with his nails. “Take…me…up,” he screamed, retching once more onto his shoes.

  It was seventeen paces from the waist of the ship to the ladder topside. Plenty of time for the Rat to palm a piece of rope, hiding it under his shirt, so that he could tie himself to the lifelines already strung across the railing. Most men, especially a landsman, not tied fast to the ship would be swept overboard by the storm waves. He nodded to Baker and motioned for him to follow.

  The floor around the ladder was soaked from the hatch above, even though the grate was layered over with oiled canvas, and at the next pitch to the fore, they both slid hard into the rungs. Baker shoved the Rat from behind to climb the ladder quickly, and it didn’t take long for him to beat the framing loose at the hatchway. The Rat crawled onto the deck and waited an instant for the leeward listing of the ship. Using the momentum, he rapidly slid to the port-side railing and tied himself to the lifeline with a slipknot.

  Baker came soon after, pulling himself onto the heaving deck. The wind hammered water into his face,
blinding him briefly. The ship in that moment had begun its roll to starboard, and the Rat could already see the man’s building terror as he looked through the standing rigging and saw for the first time the towering black water that roiled into collapsing valleys and then upwards to crushing peaks. Baker grabbed at the starboard lifelines in panic.

  The spars dipped heavily towards the advancing waves, which crashed over the deck in cascades of stinging foam, and Baker’s eyes widened as if with an immediate, savage awareness that there was no end in sight to the ocean surrounding the boat. The horizon, blended into a gunmetal sky, had become a vast, limitless circle wherein nothing of man’s designs, nothing of the stationary planes and inviolable right angles of land-bound dwellings held sway or could tame the farthest-reaching vanishing point. He once grasped at the rigging to stand, but he could only crawl on his hands and knees as seawater pummeled over the decks in funneling shocks. The Rat instinctively knew that he would not have much longer to wait.

  The ship began its methodical tilt to starboard once more but passed beyond its veering arc at forty degrees, dipping farther and farther away from its vertical axis, seeming to settle its mast into the waves that rushed to drown the deck, spilling over the railings in torrents. The Rat closed his eyes, feeling the immense drag of the waves against his tethering rope, until he felt the vessel righting itself, and when he opened his eyes again, he saw the steersman still straining at the whipstaff. When the Rat cut his eyes to the side of the deck where Baker had last been crawling, the man was not to be seen.

  The Rat lengthened out the slipknot and slid across the deck to the opposite side, carefully peering over the railing to scan the waves. He was astonished to see that Baker had managed to cling to the ship, both hands entwined in the standing rigging where it was pinned to the outer hull. The man’s fear had given him the strength of desperate action, and he began to climb back up, his feet scrabbling frantically against the gun-port lids and the outboard channel. The man found footing, slipped, then found footing again when the next swelling wave lifted him towards the deck.

  Pressed up against the railing, the Rat felt cold metal against his belly, and he remembered a jerry iron tucked into his waistband. The Rat had employed it many times, using its sharp, angled blade to pull old oakum from the seams of planking.

  The Rat saw one of Baker’s fine, long-boned, even delicate, limbs reaching, clasping the railing. The Rat pulled from his trousers the jerry iron and brought it down fiercely onto the man’s hand, separating the large joints of his two middle fingers. Baker howled in pain and surprise as his body pitched backwards into the water that swelled up to engulf him.

  His chest heaving raggedly, the Rat lowered himself protectively against the inside railing, almost dizzy with the exultant thought that the captive would perhaps now be safe. Now that Baker was dead, he believed, he hoped the crew would help him to ferret the boy away in some hidey-hole belowdecks, bringing him food and water. He would work all the harder for the crew’s approval, making sure the boy did his share of a seaman’s work as well. The Londoners, recovering from their drugged sleep, would think Baker had tumbled over the side in the storm along with the captive.

  As the Rat pondered all these things, he watched the raging water but Baker never again broke the waves. For a long time after, the Rat would wonder that a man so determined, so self-possessed and dangerous, should not have recoiled to the surface, if only for the briefest of moments.

  CHAPTER 11

  IT WAS A two-hour journey to the Toothaker house, and Martha and John said hardly a word to each other, both preoccupied and alert for any movement in the woods that signaled more than a deer or fox foraging at the clearings edge. The morning drizzle had continued for a time and John sat with his shoulders tense, furtively looking to the right and the left at every snapping branch and shifting of wind through the trees. Martha was almost sorry Thomas had given John the flintlock, as she thought he would more likely discharge the weapon at her than at an Indian if they were attacked.

  After the first hour, the clouds cleared and the sun shone hot enough to dry the oiled rain canvas, sending steam off their bodies in curling wisps as though their clothes had been set on fire. At the moment they rounded the last turn in the road, they heard the howling of a man in agony, and John pulled back sharply on the reins, almost tumbling off the driving seat in his haste. They saw in the yard in front of the Toothaker house a man sitting in a ladder-backed chair holding on to the seat bottom as though his hands were manacled there. He was grimacing and hissing through his teeth, the muscles of his jaw working knotted ripples along the side of his face, courses of blood streaming down his shirtless chest. Over him leaned another man, slight with dark hair banded neatly behind his head, with a pair of metal tongs, digging at a bloody patch on the man’s breast as though he would pull one of his ribs through the flesh. The man with the tongs hailed the wagon with a cheerful lift of his chin and then continued on with his methodical prodding.

  When John looked at Martha in alarm, she shrugged and said simply, “My sister’s husband.”

  She walked briskly into the house, leaving John to tend to the cart. She called softly to her sister and wandered through the house, finally finding Mary in bed under a pile of quilts, weeping. Next to her, in a trundle bed, lay her son, Allen, playing with a miniature wagon, his eyes suspicious and watchful, the fever-cut hair bristling from his scalp. He had none of the pleasing roundness of most boys his age, and even as a babe he had been defensive and puckish, as though holding the world away with sharp angles, all bent elbows, knees, and bony wrists.

  Martha crawled carefully onto her sister’s bed and, as she had done with Will, gently spooned herself into the collapsed folds of the grieving woman’s body. They lay in silence until Martha heard Roger come noisily into the house, perhaps looking for his dinner, and with a gentle warning that Mary should stay in bed, she promptly got up and began setting the house to order again. Roger had placed a clay jug of hard cider on the table, no doubt his physician’s pay, and from the front door Martha watched the patient as he staggered off to his horse, holding his bound chest protectively with both arms.

  As she worked kindling into the fire, she heard Roger recounting to John, whose face twitched with barely concealed horror, the methods of his surgery. “That man is a blacksmith by trade. A piece of iron fired out from the coals and lodged a sliver as long as my middle finger into his breastbone. I worked on him with a probe and a fine saw for three quarters of an hour before finding the last shard. You know, there is a particular muscularity and a sort of…intransigence, I could say, to the material between the ribs, almost like a chicken’s gristle, yet a man will bleed an entire basin of blood, or viscous yellow matter, before passing into a swoon.”

  Martha rapped sharply on the boards of the table, startling John almost out of his shoes, and pointed for the men to sit down to be served.

  “I believe now he’ll survive the injury,” Roger said, smiling, pleased and unconcerned.

  Martha, seeing the blood from her brother-in-law’s patient still crusting his fingers, set a plate of meat and bread none too gently on the table and said, “Yes. But will he survive the surgeon? I wonder.”

  Roger smiled tightly up at her. Toying with a piece of bread, he turned to John, asking, “My sister-in-law, being a woman, is not appreciative of my skills as a surgeon; but there is a kind of poetry in blood, don’t you think?”

  John shook his head distractedly. “To my mind,” he said, “the one doin’ the bleedin’ is not likely the one doin’ the singin’.”

  “Ah, but surely,” Roger said, turning his eyes to the clay jug set at arm’s length, “you are not too young to remember, say, Cromwell’s war and General Skippon’s famed cry to his soldiers: ‘Come on, my boys, my brave boys. Let us pray heartily and fight heartily and God will bless us.’ A song has been made of it.”

  John shrugged and answered doubtfully, “I know not about that, but had I been
older, I would’ve fought fer Cromwell as my father had done.”

  “There you see, sister,” Roger said, nodding. “Blood stirs a man to poetical leanings, just as naturally as love stirs a woman to tend the pot.” He grinned at Martha good-naturedly and she snorted, but she returned to the hearth to begin boiling water for broth. Though her back was turned, she could hear the rasping sound of clay over wood and knew that Roger was pulling the jug closer towards himself. It was so much to Roger’s character, she thought angrily, that he would seek to liken a blood-letting to a bard’s song while his wife lay unattended in a back room. She moved to stand at the table, her arms crossed, muttering indignantly, “There is no more meat. And this is the last of the bread. It’s good that I’ve brought all for the table or we’d have to send John out with the flint.”

  Roger rose abruptly from his chair, his color high, and brushed past her, pulling from the sideboard three cups. He set them noisily on the table, and as he scratched the wax from the neck of the jug, Martha deliberately pushed her cup away. Roger poured a measure into his and John’s cups and quickly took a sip, closing his eyes to the spreading warmth. Turning to John, he drawled, “John, have you accompanied the cart today because you’ve a mind to finally marry this one here? Or have you only come to drive the nag?” He placed a heavy emphasis on the last few words while looking at Martha. She slitted her eyes but moved away from the table and into the bedroom where her sister lay.

  Mary had fallen to sleep, but the boy turned his head to stare up at her, his eyes pouched and glittering. She sat at the edge of the bed, listening to the men talking, first with Roger’s clipped speech dominating, as was common when her brother-in-law conversed. But soon John’s more resonant voice gained confidence; the r’s rolling extravagantly, his breath eager, the swearing and oath-taking growing through the heat of the liquor. There were short bursts of muffled laughter, as though they hid their mirth in their sleeves, and the rise and fall of queries and answers. The men’s voices turned to sniggering whispers and Martha strained to hear more. She stood and moved softly to the open bedroom door, pressing herself against the frame to listen and not be seen. There was a sudden quiet and she froze, thinking she had been discovered, but they had stopped speaking only long enough to fill their cups again.