The Wolves of Andover

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 8^thday 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 court 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.