In her alarm, she had dropped the scroll, and she hastily retrieved it from the floor. Wrapping her hand tightly in the hem of her skirt, she raked up the wooden piece and dropped it back into the parchment. The scroll was slipped into the arm of the coat, and then, carefully, she repacked all of the things she had removed from the chest. The lid was securely closed, the clasp fastened, and Martha stepped from the men’s room, rigid and blinking.
The children had moved to the far end of the garden, and she could hear their voices as wavering patterns of sound as though they ran chanting, weaving in and out of the planted rows. Patience still slept; there was no movement or stirring from her bedroom. Martha sat at the table, staring at nothing, her breathing evenly paced. But as she had done with her tongue, running the tip of it over the ragged splinter in her hand, her thoughts pulled against the memory of the small wooden piece, no larger, or seemingly more significant, than any sliver of wood carved by man, smoothed by handling and subject to the laws of time and use. She listened intently for any shifting sound coming from under the floorboards, but the space below her feet was voiceless.
CHAPTER 12
EDWARD THORNTON, HIS gathered lace nightshirt soaked through with acrid sweat, shifted his swollen legs more comfortably on the bed, and began the letter to his mother.
Dearest Madame,
I cannot say for truth that you will be glad of receiving this letter, sent to you from Boston Harbor; whether for news that I am yet alive, as of this, the 8th day of May, or gladder still for the knowledge that I have, by the time you read these words, passed out of this world altogether. It cannot give you much comfort either of ways, as I have been the source of most, if not all, of your misery and distress these four and twenty years.
His fingers, made awkward by the poison, lost their grip on the quill, and it dropped onto the parchment. Even if his mother agreed to the reading of the letter, he wasn’t sure the words he had so painstakingly written could be deciphered, so great was the pain in his hands. A cup of water had been placed on the mantel opposite the bed and he desperately wished for a drink but did not have the strength to cross the floor. The head pains that had plagued him for so many weeks had taken on the quality of heated nails pushed slowly through his skull. He closed his eyes and rested for a moment, listening to the cacophony from the streets.
When first arriving in Boston with Brudloe and Cornwall, he had often come to this garret to visit with Verity, a maid to his innkeeper, Mrs. Parker. Verity had caught his eye within the first few days in port. A lovely girl of sixteen, with pale skin and dark wavelets of auburn, she soon, with only a token struggle, became his frequent mistress. She would not take coin from him like some common whore, but she seemed to delight in little gifts bought from the streets: ribbons, a peacock feather, a pair of earrings made of cut glass.
He would come to her often those first few weeks in Boston, spending afternoons locked together with her in her narrow bed. Later, he came to be nursed by her, having symptoms of dizziness and gut cramping, which worsened by the day. Verity’s rented room was on the north end of town, close to the wharves, and had he screamed his loudest, even in the hours before dawn, the shipyard sounds would have drowned him out. Of all the places he had come to inhabit, of all the risk-laden ventures and squandered resources, he had never imagined making his death in a girl’s trundle bed, fouled with his own waste.
He grasped again at the quill and, spilling only a little of the India ink from the bottle, continued to write.
Having borne such a wastrel, and borne in good patience and earnestness the repeated disgrace of creditors hounding you on my account, until you have spent all but the barest remnants of your good husband’s fortune—I will not shame his name by calling him Father as I have no good reason to claim any but the Devil for my patronage—you must at least rest assured that I am most wholly and pitiably sorry for my actions and will beg you to remember some part of me that was good. Take comfort that you will never hear the worst of my deeds as the men whose company I have kept will soon, I have no doubt, pass on their way behind me.
It seemed to him, upon reflection, that the trip to the colonies from the very beginning was darkly favored. Their mission’s decline had begun before they had even left England with the torture and killing of Sam Crouch, Blood’s former associate and double-dealer. Crouch had died cursing them and their passage westward to Hell. He had gone to his end raving from Ecclesiastes: “Receive deceitful men into thine house and they will estrange thee from thine own.”
Their numbers had dwindled again when two more of their group had been washed away during the storm. He smiled, exhaling bitterly, over the apt name of the ship, The Swallow; it had certainly swallowed both the eel boy and Baker like a rapacious beast, leaving no trace. So witless had he been on the ship, by the action of the sea and the shrieking of the ocean wind, that he sometimes thought he heard the eel boy’s voice, coming from belowdecks days after he had been washed overboard, singing some fragment of lamenting song.
He thought he had known what true sickness was when they first landed at the docks, still miserable from the crossing, but within hours, it seemed, of coming to the colonies, he and his two remaining partners had had bouts of a great malaise and loose, spotty bowels, along with hours of retching into basins and buckets provided by their landlady.
These periodic incidents had not dampened his pursuit of pleasure, though. Boston had inns enough, the Salutation Inn and the Ship Tavern among them. Though there were a few discreet bawdy houses, sheltering women in drab dresses and with little, if any, paint on their faces, he soon abandoned these dens in favor of Verity’s company.
And Verity, though young, had been no stranger to the pleasures of a bed. She had the downy skin and unclouded eye of a virgin, and there was a sweetness to her that moved Thornton in a way he had not been moved in a long while. She had had her belly stuffed with child by a Royalist soldier who had abandoned her, the child subsequently dying. When she told Thornton, as they lay under a homespun quilt, of her lost infant, she cried bitterly and he had tenderly rocked her, soothing her with kisses. He had told her he knew what it was to suffer such a loss, although he did not tell her when and how these things had taken place.
He began to come to her every day, and she would feed him, and couple with him, bathing his forehead when he sickened, solicitous in the extreme. They would stroll together on the public square, along Bell Alley and Garden Court, and once, on a Sunday, sauntered into the North Meeting House. There they heard a preacher with the impertinent name of Increase Mather, who preached a sermon “Woe, to Drunkards; the Sin of Drunkenness.” He and Verity had snorted so loudly, giggling and gesturing irreverently, that they had been asked to leave by one of the meetinghouse Elders.
Thornton had begun to believe that, after they accomplished their mission, he might even stay in Boston, making his way in land speculation or merchant trading, keeping Verity in comfort in a town house. Maybe even marrying her in a quaint New World ceremony, joined in a pastoral setting, the girl’s hair bound up in a wreath of daisies or some such prosaic flower.
He looked down at the parchment and saw he had been crying, his tears streaking the ink on the page. He struggled with the quill for a moment, resolved to put his last thoughts on paper.
You may not be surprised to hear that once I left your home, I did follow my baser instincts into gambling and vice but made good my honor, for a time, by venturing into the earlier Dutch wars six years back, where I hoped to gain again some semblance of note in the company of Gen’l Vauban at the siege of Lille in France. Under his good tutelage I forswore drink and conducted myself in such a disciplined manner as would, I believe—I pray—have satisfied even your husband.
Whilst there, I married a good and honest girl from Lille who bore me a son, and for a time I made good my reputation by being husband and tender father. But to my eternal shame I abandoned them upon becoming reacquainted with the vagaries of the French co
urt that followed upon the siege, and have seen since neither my wife nor my little son.
Early on, he, Brudloe, and Cornwall had made a foray into Salem to meet their contact, a miller by trade who told them the most likely towns and villages to search for their fugitive.
Brudloe had waved off the miller’s cautioning words about the dangers of tracking these wanted men, some of whom had experienced disciplined fighting during the English Civil War.
“How hard can it be to track down one great beanpole of a man?” Brudloe had asked.
The miller had looked at Brudloe, his jaw moving beneath a creeping smile. “Oh, it’s harder than you might think. To find men of stature in this place, in this hard wilderness, one has only to stand on a Boston wharf and look westwards.”
The men had been confident in their plans, but as soon as they returned to Boston, they all became suddenly ill again.
A rending spasm in his gut made him cry out. His hands clenched, crushing the parchment, and his knees drew up reflexively to his chest. He had within the past hour begun to bleed from his rectum, and he could feel a renewed warm trickle of blood seep onto the sheets. When the spasm had passed, he lay panting, his teeth clenching and unclenching. He had spilled most of the ink onto the mattress, but there was some yet in the bottle and it would serve for his purposes. He had only a little left to write.
In battle I have been the slayer of men who begged me, on their knees, for mercy, and the spoiler of women who have done the same, and have done things besides, regarding which I cannot put pen to paper. You must, then, endure the role as my confessor, as I have no priest to make clean my soul.
He could hear Verity’s footsteps coming up the stairs to the garret and he paused, looking towards the door. Her step was usually quick and light, but today her tread was more deliberate. It was she who had told him that morning, after she had fed him his cup of chocolate, that she had been poisoning him all along, along with his partners. She had straightened the sheets and smoothed back his hair as he looked at her in horror. She had explained to him patiently that he was yet one more in a line of Royalist bastards who had killed and whored and burned their way through the colonies: corrupting good women, impressing good men, seeking to murder capable farmers because they had fought against some long-dead king. When he had pleaded with her to send for a doctor, she had shaken her head, saying, “It’s too late for that now, Edward.”
He had then begged the girl to allow him to make his will, and it was she who had given him the implements to write it. He garnered a last bit of strength, smoothing the rumpled parchment below his palms, and managed to bring quill to paper.
I leave to you my sword, for whatever you may take from its gain, the hilt alone is worth fifty guineas, and some small coins besides. Take this as my amends and know that I will die trusting that you will send something to Elisabetta Daumier of Lille, my own true wife.
Your son, the 17th, and penultimate, Earl of S.
Edward Thornton
It would take another two hours for him to die, alone; Verity not returning again until late that evening. So he couldn’t have seen her first read the letter and then burn it in the small hearth, along with the bloody sheets, still warm from his body.
CHAPTER 13
THE FIRST WEEK of June, Daniel returned to his carting, the gelding plodding slowly past the burgeoning fields, shaking his tufted head against the heavy leads to the wagon. Martha stood with Patience at the door as Daniel waved cheerfully, exuberantly, to his wife and children. She passed her arm supportively around her cousins broadening waist, whispering to her all of the choice things Daniel would bring back to them—a bit of lace, a brace of pewter bowls—but five days would pass before Patience stopped sulking and soaking her pillow at night with tears. Martha could often hear her cousins indulgent weeping as she lay in bed trying to find sleep, and most nights Will would creep into Martha’s room, poking her with a finger until she relented by making room for him within the hollow of her arms. Daniel had promised to be home by the middle of July to see Patience through her birthing. Martha never spoke to him of her nagging fears about an early and difficult lying-in, thinking that to speak of such things would give substance to unhappy possibilities.
On the sixth day, Martha looked at her cousin sitting mournfully at the table, eyes glazed with tears and frowning into the palm of her hand, and said abruptly, “Right, then. I’ve never seen a woman more in need of a potted cheese.”
Patience furrowed her brows. “What?” she asked, dropping the hand from her chin.
“To market, cousin,” Martha said, smiling, wrapping a cloak around her shoulders. “And I’ll give you a quarter hour to comb your hair and wash your face or you’ll disgrace us all.”
Within the half hour, the cart rattled from the yard, Patience sitting next to John, her face for the first time bright and hopeful, while Martha sat in the back with Will and Joanna. Thomas had come out from the barn to watch them go, his eyes settling on her at the last. She at first averted her eyes, jerking her chin away, but then, pressing her lips together, she met his gaze full-on. She knew he would think her turning away a kind of modesty, a maidenly recoiling from the memory of the night before. She had come upon him in the barn, scraping the hide from the crippled calf he had slaughtered that afternoon; the animal’s malformed legs jutted out at odd angles, wobbling in a kind of ghastly dance with every jerk of the skinning knife against the dangling carcass.
His back and shoulders were bared and she had stood in the shadows watching the cording of the muscles under his skin, damp from sweat and pale as death, as white as lime dust next to the reddish brown of his forearms working to strip away the hide from the twisted flesh of the calf. Sensing her, he turned around, but before he could speak, she had spun away, rushing back to the house, hiding the flush of her neck with her hands. More disquieting than this, though, and the true reason for her turning away, was the knowledge that she had willfully, and shamelessly, plundered Thomas’s great oaken chest.
He followed slowly behind the cart for a short distance, his long legs keeping pace, until they turned onto the north road. He stood there, in the cascading dust from the cart, until it had risen up and over the crest, following the snaking of the Shawshin River.
As they rolled above the water’s course, trumpeting breezes blew the topmost of trees, whipping branches fully green in unpredictable patterns against the untainted blue of the sky. At the quarter mile Martha told riddles to the children: “At night they come without being fetched, by day they are lost without being stolen.…No, not candles, nor yet are they fireflies. Ah, yes, stars! ”
And John sang a London street song:
“I was commanded by the Water Bailey,
To see the rivers cleansed both night and daily.
Dead hogs, dogs, cats and well-flayed horse’s,
Their noisome corpses soiling the water’s courses.”
Both the children and the women squealed in delighted protest.
Patience had been good as her word, giving Martha two of her piglets for trade, and Martha regarded them, their snouts straining wetly through the wicker cage, thinking they would bring enough for a new winter cape and a mirrored candle holder. She had spent most evening’s stealing a few moments to write in the red book before bed. It had begun with entries of so much wheat kept in the cellar, so much corn, so many seeds, all matters of the Taylor house. But more and more of her musings had turned to Thomas, recording not only the things he said to her, which were more often like the riddles she had told the children, but how he looked at her, much like a starving man looking at a pasty, as though he would devour it whole. Or, she mused, like a man on campaign, long used to depriving himself, warily wakening to the knowledge of his own hunger.
Within the half hour, they had entered the town green, the meetinghouse of Billerica situated on the northern end, its gray boards neatly patchworked with darker, newer planes of wood. The cemetery, already spilling from the fro
nt of the yard, spread like a stone curtain, first to its western edge and then to the back of the meetinghouse. To the eastern side sat the Reverend Hastings’s home, the minister she had turned away from Daniel’s table with her combative words. The house was small but with a wooden fence fortifying a generous house garden. A girl, perhaps seventeen, gracefully tended the garden, and Martha’s mouth twisted with the half-resentful thought that, though she was no doubt aptly servile as the minister’s likely wife, she was also quite young and lovely.
There were a dozen women on the green sitting close together, some with their willow-shoot baskets of early sprouts from their gardens, others with brooms or herbals. Apart from them sat or stood the men, coopers and potters, mostly idle as the harvest of summer grain had not yet begun but talking as noisily as the women. As John pulled the wagon up close, all talking ceased. The clump of villagers seemed to Martha like a hive of stinging insects, each contending for the highest position in the honeycomb, each with a stinger for a tongue. But unlike bees, which could sting only once and then died, these goodmen and good-wives could inflict the poison from their tongues again and again, like wasps. The buzzing ceased only so long as it took to scrutinize the new arrivals, and then the hissing was taken up again, no doubt, Martha thought, to the detriment of every visitor’s moral constitution.
Helping Patience from the wagon, Martha situated her cousin among the townswomen and went directly to the weaver, a stout man with bowl-cut hair. She was soon disappointed, though, to see only a few coarse blankets from the weaver’s own loom laid out on the ground. When she told him she was looking for the goods to make a new cloak, he smiled and beckoned her to his wagon, where he removed from a sack a bolt of English wool. She brushed at the covering of dust lying like a second skin over the surface and saw that the cloth had an almost glistening sheen, the color of slate after a heavy rain, and when she tested the weave with her fingers, she knew she must have it. But he would not take only one piglet for the woolen, and she would not readily give up both, as she had in mind to acquire a new lantern as well. Martha held up two fingers covered with grime to show the man she knew the cloth had long been in the wagon, too dear for any local villager to acquire it; and so it had rested there, perhaps for many months beyond the sea passage from England.
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