The Traitor's Wife

by Kathleen Kent

  The skin on her scalp pulled tight, like a drawstring on a sack. “What do you mean, ‘men’?”

  John breathed out and carefully grasped her wrist. She looked down at the hand and realized he thought she would bolt away in fright. He said, “Murderers, bully boys, paid by the Crown to bring back the traitors. They’re not colonists, of that we’re sure. The news has come to us from sympathetic men.”

  Throughout the days and weeks that Thomas had recited to her his story, reeling out history in parceled bits, furtively and in hushed tones, Martha had never spoken aloud the word “traitor,” but it lay in the back of her mind like a canker. It had caused her to lie in bed at night, trembling, images of slaughter and mayhem forbidding sleep until she had daylight enough to commit his words into the diary, the quill across the paper helping to empty her head of terrifying thoughts. But then night would come again, and the scraping of branches on the roof became the beetling movement of the little wooden stake in Thomas’s great oaken chest, awakened through her touch.

  “The thing is, missus, these men, they’ve gone to ground.”

  “Gone to ground,” she echoed. She anxiously scanned the surrounding woods, realizing that both John and Thomas had known of these bounty men for weeks. “Perhaps they are lost, or have turned back.”

  “Or are biding their time,” said John. He had been holding on to her wrist and let go only when Martha looked with alarm at his fingers tightening painfully on her skin.

  “How will they come at us?” she asked, panic rising to a hard knot in her throat.

  “If they’re still alive? By stealth. By surprise.”

  They turned for a moment to watch Joanna, who had been joined by Will. The boy stood listlessly by, watching his sister piling apples into her apron. Behind him in the distance, Thomas had stepped out of the barn for a breath of air. The sun at his back, Thomas’s every feature was erased into blackened silhouette, his stance deceptively calm. His head swiveled in a practiced arc, easily scanning the surrounding forests and fields; but Martha knew that Thomas’s peculiar stillness was anything but passivity. It was a marshaling of strength towards some pending skirmish.

  Will had come to her, peevishly burrowing his head in her lap. “My head hurts,” he said, his hands cupped around his ears.

  “It’s all of your meanness, Will, blocked in your skull.” His hair spiked up in dampened clumps and she gave one a playful tug, running her hand absently over the taut curves of his face. She felt the scorching skin on his cheek and quickly she pulled him up to face her. He was flushed crimson, his bottom eyelids pooling with fever tears, and even as she held him, she felt through his shirt the onset of shuddering chills. Martha could hear behind her shoulder the intake of breath and the muttered oath as John saw for himself the sickness in Will’s face. Martha grabbed him up and ran for the house, forgetting for the moment the bounty men and any fear beyond death in the form of a spreading pox.

  IT TOOK THREE days for the rash to blossom, first appearing on Will’s tongue in white sloughing pustules, his fever continuing to rise until he lay alternately sweating and freezing within the blankets twisted between his thrashing legs. The men were sent to live in the barn, their meals carried out from the house along with the news of how the boy fared. Joanna was taken by John to the Toothakers, the child to be kept until the contagion had past.

  The women hourly bathed Will’s face with cool cloths, forcing him to swallow spoonfuls of water or broth even as he vomited into a bucket at his side. By the fourth day he lay still, his eyes sunken into their sockets, shallowly breathing, so that Martha was forced to stoop again and again to feel his feathered breath on a finger.

  Patience had been calm through the beginning crisis, and Martha was grateful that her cousin had rallied her full attention to her son, lovingly holding him as they changed his shirt or replaced fouled linen for clean. But as Will responded less to their commands to drink or eat or roll over, a hysterical note began to creep into Patience’s voice. On the evening of the fourth day, Patience burst into tears and, gathering Will into her arms, rocked him roughly while pleading, “Will, be a good boy now. Will, do you hear me? You must get up now. You must get up.”

  Martha, as gently as she could, pried her fingers from around the boy and laid him back down on the bed. It was the bed that Daniel had brought to Patience upon their marriage, and Martha knew it would never be shared by Patience and her husband again. If they survived, it would be burned along with the quilt soaked through with Will’s fever sweats.

  On the morning of the fifth day, Will seemed to rally, his fever and chills subsiding. He opened his eyes, asking for bread, and cried plaintively when he was told he could have only broth. He watched the women moving about the room with glittering eyes, too weak to move, except to swallow the spoonfuls of liquid poured into his mouth. By noon his fever had spiked again, his breathing increasingly labored, and when his mother, sitting at the edge of the bed, bent down to comfort him, he whispered, “I want Martha.”

  Martha had been standing at the foot of the bed, but before moving towards him, she instinctively looked to her cousin. A stiffening had begun the length of Patience’s spine, a lowering of the head, a tightening of the shoulders. Patience, without turning around, said to Martha, “Please get more water.” The words were spoken quietly, but rage filled the space like a sickroom smell, and Martha quickly left to fill another basin with water.

  She paused briefly at the front door and saw that Thomas had begun an agitated pacing in the yard. Seeing her, he paused, searching her face for some sense of resolution. She shook her head once and turned away, returning to the bedroom door, where Patience was waiting for her.

  Martha came up short, the basin slopping water onto the floor, taking in the furied, twitching muscles on her cousin’s jaw, the corded muscles at her throat. Patience had placed one hand on the door frame, the other on the door itself, barring Martha’s entry back into the bedroom. Patience tried once to speak, her lips trembling with emotion, and, after a shuddering breath, demanded, “Why are my children dying?” She stared defiantly at Martha, then closed and latched the door.

  Will succumbed during the night. Martha knew the exact moment of death, even as she sat at the common room table, locked out of the sickroom. Patience had begun a low, muffled moaning, as though she had buried her face in the bedclothes, repeating “no, no, no,” over and over. Her voice soon rose in pitch to a shrill keening that went on until Daniel, driven from the barn by her screaming, threatened to take the door off its frame. When Patience unlatched the door, she collapsed at his feet, and Martha staggered to her own bed. She thought sleep would come, exhausted as she was, but she found the porcupine on the pillow that Joanna had left behind, the toy that Will had so gleefully tried to dismantle, and she wept, tearing at her pillow.

  At dawn, wrapped in a quilt, Will was taken for burial. Daniel drove the wagon, Patience walking behind him like a penitent. She would not look at Martha and angrily pulled away when Martha reached out to touch her shoulder. After the wagon had pulled out of sight, Martha stood gazing at the pale crimped clouds and the arrow-shaped flock of birds surging south, like the wake from the prow of a great ship, and felt a desire to settle into the ground, resting there for the whole of winter, blanketed by the weight of snow. For the first time in days, fearful thoughts of the bounty men surged in her head, mixing with her grief like a noxious poison.

  As she stood in the yard, she felt Thomas’s presence, and before his arms could enfold her, she had begun an open-mouthed, anguished sobbing, threads of saliva mixing with tears on her chin. She had shed tears the night before, the bereft and insistent weeping of loss. Now was the futile cry of the wet nurse, breasts still swollen and leaking milk, who had tended and night-watched the dead child of her heart; the wail of the stepmother, the caretaker, whose own cries must not be heard above the din of the helpless parents.

  He took her arm and led her stumbling and blind onto the path to the
river. They climbed slowly up and over the embankment, their clothes soaked with the heavy dew on leaves of ferns clotting the rise, until Thomas finally settled her on the fronds at the water’s edge. They sat close together and for a while Martha wiped at her face with her apron, soon wet through with her tears, and followed aimlessly the course of eddies and shallow pools not yet filled with autumn rains.

  “I told you I had a wife in England,” Thomas began. He had turned to face her, bringing his arm tentatively around her shoulder. “But I had a son as well. He died along with his mother.”

  She looked at him, surprised, astonished, and yet she wondered why she had never considered it before. He had been married for years, why would he not have had a child? But the news in that moment had also made her feel defeated and added to her sense of loss. She turned her head, biting her lip, afraid of sobbing uncontrollably again. He lowered his arm and she saw that she had wounded him with her moving away. She drew herself closer, sliding her arms tightly around his ribs, burying her head against his chest. She breathed in the smells of musk and old wood fires and folded her legs next to the long bones of his thighs.

  After a while he spoke, and listening to his words within the concavity of his chest was, to Martha, like hearing a mine shaft closing in on itself.

  “I had fought for seven years as a soldier for Cromwell, killing my own countrymen; killing a man who had been king. I thought I’d seen every base thing a man could do to another. But in this I was wrong. I was sent by Cromwell to Ireland to help crush the Catholic rebels. Those that threw down their weapons were murdered along with the ones who refused to surrender. The resisting were burned alive in their churches; priests spitted like spring lambs in the marketplace, women raped while lying over the bodies of their children, babes dashed to the stones.”

  She stirred against his ribs as though in protest but he quieted her, shushing her like an infant, and went on.

  “I was sent out to a settlement hard by a town called Drogheda to clear out the miserable hovels there. Not even proper houses but caves dug into hillsides covered over with daub and thatch. From the last hovel a man, wearing no more than a linen shift and felt-tied boots, reared himself from his nest, slashing at my arm with an old clannish dirk. I’d never seen a man so wild in his attack. I killed the man but kept to this day his dirk to remember that a man is most savage when fighting for his home.

  “It was then I heard a child’s wail coming from inside the cavern. There was no door, but a sheep’s hide covering it. I crawled into a chamber, smoked and reeking of death, and spied a small boy, no more than four years old, clinging to the body of his mother. She had cut her own throat rather than be taken by us.

  “I have seen harried deer with less fright than was there in that boy’s eyes. I sheathed my sword and held out my hand to him. He bared his teeth at me, for he had been told by the Irish priests that the English would eat him. The boy believed I’d tear the flesh from his bones for my supper, and he took the knife with his mother’s blood still warm on it, and brandished it at me.

  “For an hour or more I spoke to him, of cattle and fields and harvesting grain. And even though I did not speak his Irish tongue, my own good Welsh is drawn from the same well. I told him of my brother, gone from the earth. I told him of my own son just his age, and after a time he crept towards me and fell onto the bread I had offered. When I left the hovel, he followed after.

  “From that day forward I thought I was done with killing, and when my wound grew rank and would not close, I was mustered out and sailed for England with others whose limbs could not fester, for they had been hacked off, by Irish rebels or English surgeons. I did not learn of my family’s death till I returned to London. They had been dead near three months.”

  He paused, inhaling deeply as though the air had thinned, settling his chin more heavily on the crown of her head. His fingers dug into her, and she held her own breath, willing herself not to flinch under his hands so that he would go on.

  “My wife, Palestine…” His voice thickened for a moment. “My wife died for a man named Lilburne, leader of the Leveller cause, put in the Tower for preaching the rights of men. Petitioning for his release, she challenged Cromwell himself in front of the Hall of Commons. She caught his cloak, calling him to task for killing the king and jailing people of goodwill. Can you imagine it? A man who was like a king himself, called to task by a girl. There was not a man living who dared put hands on the Protector, but my wife dared. By Christ she did.” A brief exhalation of air, coarser than a laugh and more prideful, passed through his lips. She felt a lightning stab of something close to jealousy but willed it gone before he could feel it through the crown of her head like a fever.

  “It was Cromwell’s men who jailed them, taking my wife and son to the Tower. The bastards had waited till I was shipped for Ireland. They meant only to frighten her, to stop her from calling Cromwell to task for becoming a tyrant himself, but the Black Dog had come breathing contagion, and she and the boy died in the filth of their cell.”

  She tried to push herself away out of the hollow of his arms so that she could see his face, but he held her tightly to his chest. Her forehead rested against his neck and she could feel the working tendons and muscles of his throat constricting, his jaw hinging wordlessly up and down, up and down, as though testing the air for further grief. She reached up and felt the slick of tears in the hollow of his cheek. Placing the flat of her palm over one eye, she gently stroked with her fingers the place where the scar on his brow lay, and waited for him to speak.

  “I broke the back of the jailer who had locked my family away, and spent a month in Newgate Prison. From my cell, I heard the outcry of men and women, confined and tortured, attesting to the thing Cromwell had become: a man of treachery who schemed to claim kingship in all but name.

  “The Protector himself paid for my release, but I took off the red coat of my rank then and put it in a wooden chest. The Irish dirk, the wooden stake that committed me to being an executioner, and even a parchment note written in Cromwell’s own hand were all put away from the prying eyes of men. I took up shop on Fetter Lane as an ironsmith and never again saw the living Cromwell.”

  He pulled away, encircling her face with his two hands, tracing with his thumbs the swollen lids beneath her eyes. She met his gaze reluctantly, thinking of the time she had plundered the great oaken chest. But she now had a history for everything inside it: the faded red coat, the curious dirk, and the rolled parchment, within which the little wooden stake had been wrapped. She shivered, suddenly cold.

  He said, “I yet think on my son as he could have been, were he to have lived. He was tall for a boy and had his mother’s love for music. But he is gone from me forever, and though I grieve for him, I cannot wish myself to be in that place where he is. Not yet, not yet.” He clasped the back of her neck and brought his forehead to rest against hers. “Children may die, Martha, as will we all. No one knows when that end-time may be. But for this day, we live. So bide with me. Bide with me and take from me what you can, as I will from you. And however long it is that we walk this earth, we can stand for one another and leave off grieving until one of us is gone. I’ll not ask you to be mine, for you were mine at the moment my eyes opened to you, fuming and roaring into the mouth of a wolf. I will never seek to blunt the fury in you, never, and will honor your will as my own. What say you? Can you be a soldier’s wife?”

  She looked at him wonderingly and at length, remembering other women’s acquiescence to an awkward suitor’s prologue to marriage: girlish smiles and laughter following some artless boy’s long-limbed shuffling and shy proposals. In all her imaginings of a sober and practical union, the breeding of children, and the laboring drudgery of a woman’s sphere, she had never dared hope for the promise of this; that a man would take her knowingly for all her mannish, off-putting certitudes and canny will, her prickly refusals to adhere to womanly scrapings, her ferocious and ill-tempered nature. But how could it be oth
er? To be a soldiers wife would suit her well.

  She kissed him in answer, pressing her body for a while into his, and, after a time, he gathered her up and led her home.

  IT WAS THREE days afterwards that Patience found the red diary.

  Martha had been finishing the hem of her cloak made from the English woolen for which she had traded the piglets at market, the blue-green cloth that Thomas had said was the color of the Irish Sea before a storm. She gathered it into folds around her neck, placing Thomas’s antler clasp first at one shoulder, and then the other, before moving to the small bedroom window to better see her work. It had stormed earlier in the day, but the rain had slackened and turned to a rolling fog, settling into dells like ponds of lambs’ wool. She caught herself humming a snatch of song before remembering the words: The song of winter becomes like sleep and drowns the air with a gentle roar; and limbs like fingers grasp the fruit, into which time doth pour.

  The tune was mournful—it made her think of the inevitability, the nearness, of death—but she stopped her humming, guilty that Patience might have overheard her. Patience had barely spoken to her since Will, placed in a small coffin hastily provided by a neighboring carpenter, was laid into the ground. Martha had spent most of her time while indoors confined to her room, sewing or furtively writing in the diary, at times overcome with tears for the boy. Blessedly, no one else in the family had become ill, and John would soon be sent to bring back Joanna.

  Earlier, she had heard the unmistakable sounds of an argument between Patience and Daniel coming from the common room. There were suppressed, passionate exchanges punctuated by the sounds of her cousin’s angry weeping, and Martha had waited until silence had returned, making her think that Daniel had led her cousin into their bedroom. Placing the cloak aside on the bed, she walked into the common room to build up the fire for the noon meal. She was startled to see Patience standing behind a chair, her fingers tightly gripping the ladder back, and in the chair in front of her sat Daniel, holding in his hands a red leather-bound book.