The Wolves of Andover

CHAPTER 20

MARTHA RESTED IN the yard, its sparse grasses bleached in the sun to jackstraws, with Joanna in her lap. They played with a porcupine that John had fashioned from a pinecone, its eyes and nose made of dried currants. Will had taken it from his sister earlier, taunting her and stripping some of the quills from its back, until Martha had rescued it, giving him a bruising pinch on the arm for his cruelty. Joanna had cried for a while until John came and made faces at her, bringing a smile. He had been digging out a Dutch cellar for the apples and roots they would soon be harvesting, and he came to sit next to Martha in the shade, brushing away the autumn flies with his hat, mopping at the sweat on his neck with the tail of his shirt.

Although the days were still warm, the nights were suddenly turning cooler and Martha had felt of late an earthly gathering in, a compacting together of living things; animals burrowing deeper within their nests at night, fish lying weighted and sluggish in the streambeds and shallow ponds. Even the clouds ran low and stuttering in their early-morning progress, as though seeking warmth from the ground.

Martha watched John’s expressive mouth, downturned and moody, gently refusing Joanna’s entreaties to recite some silly fragment of song. A pall of worry had settled into his reddish highland face, making him look drawn and sickly. He had, in fact, over the most recent days come to look as miserable as she’d ever seen him, and she wondered if his unhappiness sprang not only from worry over Asa Rogers’s suit for the land but also from her own deepening closeness to Thomas.

It came to her in that moment that she didn’t know how John happened to be with Thomas. She knew he was not related by blood, and, besides his youth, his actions, quick-witted and foolish at times, were at odds with Thomas’s sober and deliberate nature. With ever greater frequency, she had heard John’s worried questioning of Thomas about the miller, seeking reassurance that Daniel, if not Patience, would keep to his bargain about the land promised to them. John could not have failed to hear the arguments between husband and wife after they had retired to bed. The entire household could hear Patience’s low beseeching tone turn first sour and then loudly demanding as Daniel reasoned with her to put aside her expectations of profiting from another’s loss.

In the mornings, Patience would sulk and be cross until Daniel made much of her, telling her what next he would bring from Boston. Patience had always been desirous of comfort, Martha knew, but grief had turned her venal. Her behavior had put all of them on edge, and Martha had begun to feel the pricking of thorny resentment at her cousin’s avarice. If Thomas had resentments or worries, he kept them close-handed and hidden; but even he had become more reticent and silent, as though he had been hollowed out from the long, clandestine telling of his former life as a soldier in England. His eyes at all times, though, followed Patience like a man walking in deep brush, tracking the progress of an adder.

Martha shifted Joanna more comfortably on her lap and regarded the distracted frown on John’s face. “Your father, does he yet live?” she asked.

“No. My own father’s long gone. He died durin’ the war.”

“How, then, do you come to be with Thomas?”

John smiled sadly. “I was made orphan when my father was killed at Naseby, so I have no memories of him. They were great friends, though, Thomas and he, after Thomas saved his life at Edgehill.” He took an apple out of a pouch at his waist and began to peel the skin away in one long curl. “ ’Twas Thomas who sent a share of his soldier’s wage to my kin so we wouldn’t starve. I found my way to him in London when I came of age an’ crossed on the boat with him to the colonies.” He dangled the curling skin in front of Joanna, making it dance. “He has been both father and friend to me.”

Placing a hand over his arm, she said quietly, “I know about Thomas. He has told me all.” She had spoken softly, almost to a whisper, but John looked at her sharply, suddenly wary. He quickly handed the skinless apple to Joanna, gently dislodging her from Martha’s lap. He pointed to the trench he had been digging and said, “There are more in the straw, Joanna. How many do ye think ye can hold in yer apron?”

She skipped away and he watched her sorting through the straw at the lip of the shallow depression, gathering up hardened knobs of fruit.

He turned to Martha and said, “There are men coming.”

She looked at him without understanding. The skin under the constellation of brownish flecks across his face had gone pale, his mouth constricted and dry. He cast a searching glance towards the house and whispered, “Two men, Englishers, came through Salem lookin’ for Thomas. That was weeks ago.”

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 other? To be a soldier’s 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.

There was a moment of confusion when Martha simply stared, wondering that there should be a twin to her own singular journal. But Daniel’s face was stricken with something beyond grief. A crimped mask of fear had compressed his lips into two white slashes, and he asked, “Is this your doing?”

“Patience gave it me,” she answered quickly. “The book is for the house accounts.” She heard from her cousin an ugly exhalation of air, and when Martha met her eyes, a prickling band of sweat sprang up around her neck.

“I will ask you again, Martha, is this your doing?” He anxiously palmed the stubble at his chin, and Martha frantically searched his face, trying to gauge the depth of his knowledge. How far beyond the beginning entries, the notations of supplies and homely expenditures, had he read of a regicide’s life?

“It was given to me by your wife, Daniel. It is mine.” Martha dropped her chin, clenching her hands together. “I thought my property to be inviolable.”

“Your property. Your property.” Patience rapped fiercely on the back of the chair, making Daniel wince. “Everything in this house by rights is ours. The food you eat, the bed you shared with our children. The cloth that came from the sale of our pigs…” She stopped for a moment, collecting herself. “I went to lie down on my son’s bed and found that… accounting book sewn into your pillow, next to where my own child laid his head. In truth it is an accounting book, but not such a one that is to our prosperity. Indeed, I think it is to our ruin.”

More than the pity Martha felt for her cousin in that moment—the thought of Patience trying desperately to breathe in the remaining scent of a dead child impressed onto a pillow—she awakened to an overarching terror that she had, through her own playing at secrets, betrayed Thomas.

She met Daniel’s gaze and held out her hand to receive back the book. He looked away from her, gripping the book’s binding tighter, turning it end over end in his hands. He said, “You will leave today for your father’s house until such time as I have reflected on this. I will keep the book and you will not return until—”

“She will not return to this house, and as for the Welshman—” Patience began.

“Silence!” Daniel roared. “Enough.” Wounded and shaken, Patience gathered up the folds of her skirt and left the room, weeping.

“Martha,” Daniel said, “John will take you in the wagon today.” He laid the diary on the table, his palms splayed over the binding as if seeking to hide it. Martha could see the lines entrenched in his face, and she knew his sadness would never find release pinioned against his wife’s towering, extravagant grief.

“Daniel,” she began. “Cousin, I have never asked you for anything, and have done all I could for your family. But I ask you, I beg you, to burn this book rather than read it more. I would you call me thief and have me arrested rather than harm come to another through my indiscretion.” She took a few steps closer to the table. “Cousin, the teller of these words has no knowledge of this book. Think what may come from revealing these pages to others. I, myself, have not told another soul. Please.”

“No,” he said, taking the book from the table. “You must promise me you will never again speak of this. I will reason with Patience. She is—” He paused for a moment before continuing. “She has faults enough, but she is my wife and will be silent on this if I demand it. You must understand… she had no knowledge…” He stood abruptly, dragging a hand through the tufts of his hair. He stepped closer, saying, “You have put us all in grave danger with this book, cousin.”

Martha looked at his red-rimmed eyes and knew in the instant that he had read the whole of the book. “It was recklessness that led me to write it. I see that now.”

He clasped her firmly by the elbow and walked with her out of the house, leading her into the garden, dotted with swelling gourds. He stood scanning the surrounding fields, cropped bare through autumn harvesting, and said, “Martha, if Thomas ever knew of this book, it could be the end of the trust he has placed in you.” When she tried to speak, to tell him of the bounty men, he held up a hand and said harshly, “Not another word. You must leave now. Speak to no one else about this. I will think on what is best to be done.”

Martha searched his face, which seemed to reflect only the flushed and open visage of a simple carter. A kind and generous man who had coddled and spoiled his wife and children alike; a man who could not, though it save his very life, hit the broadside of a barn with a primed and ready flintlock. But she also sensed a forcefulness that he had, until that moment, hidden from her. Or perhaps it was that she had not looked closely enough to find the greater substance in him.

He glanced at the house, the door still open and beckoning, and Martha could see the rings of black under his eyes and the stubble of beard that proved the cost of hiding her secret.

Martha quickly bundled her few things together and, wearing the new cloak, climbed into the waiting wagon. Thomas had gone hunting hours before, or so he had said, but she wondered if his going had been a kind of self-protection. She craned her neck again and again for some glimpse of him, but the wagon was quickly engulfed by spiraling wisps of fog dissipating with the rising heat. John sat next to her on the driving board, his face anxious, his eyes, wide and blinking, fixed on the road ahead.

Midway through the journey John said to her, “Do not worry about the Taylors. I will see to them, no matter what…” He paused, his voice trailing away.

She sat shivering with the cloak drawn tightly around her shoulders, even after the sun broke free, shining hotly on their necks, and a pounding like the threshing of grain began in her ears. She suddenly pressed her hands over her face, her breath exhaling raggedly against her palms, and she felt John’s hand go to her shoulder briefly before she turned her head away.

“Thomas will never break faith with you,” he said. “Never.”

She shook her head, voiceless, searching the familiar pathways of burled oak and elm already washed with russet brown and yellow. She smelled the honeysuckle, made heavy and overripe by the rains, remembering that its scent could foretell weddings. On the day of the summer harvest, Thomas had proudly pointed out to her his plot of land at the bend of the Concord. A place of sandy shale and gray rock pressed firm and flat by rushing seasonal tides, facing the rolling furze of Broad Meadow on its westerly side. Wood and stone, he’d once said, about his house that was to be. It was to stand on the banks above the glistening boulders, settled in sheltering birch and ash, the great common fields at its back, the gold and amber of the setting sun at its front.

Now, in all probability, through the determination or spite of her cousin, the house that stood at the bend would be shackled to a miller’s wheel, and the man dispossessed of it perhaps manacled to a prison ship bound for England. There would be no marriage now, in any event, if Thomas believed that she had betrayed him.

John stopped the cart some distance away from the Allen house at Martha’s insistence. She climbed weakly from the wagon and stood mute in the shifting dust of the path, unable to say the simplest of good-byes.

She turned and walked across the yard to the house. Standing silently at the open door, without greeting or explanation, she took in the surprised looks on the faces of her father and his two hired men. They had been eating supper and they sat with their spoons poised over their laps as though she had appeared like a nymph, come from the woods to haunt them. Andrew Allen slowly lowered his spoon to the table, his surprise quickly turning to dismay, and then to suspicion, and motioned abruptly for the men to leave.

When he and Martha were alone together, he wiped his mouth carefully with the back of his hand and asked, “Are ye in the family way?”

Setting the empty bowl from her bundle on the table, the bowl she had taken to the Taylors’ to fill by her own labors, she shook her head, and without a word, she crept to the attic, to her old bed, and lay down to sleep.

When Martha woke, it was daylight but on which day, she wasn’t sure. She had fallen asleep on her belly, her arms curled under her chest, and her eyelids felt swollen shut with crying. She had woken and slept in so many fragmented, half-aware snatches, she was uncertain which recollections were dreams and which were taken from actual events. She pushed herself upright, seeing that someone had covered her with one of her mother’s quilts, and she rasped her fingers across her papery mouth, needing desperately to drink.

Holding her shoes in one hand, she walked carefully down the stairs, only to see her father sitting alone at the table, observing closely her unlaced bodice and wild, unbound hair knitted over her shoulders. He tapped at the table with his forefinger, his bird’s-nest brows rising with alarm, as if to say, “Here. Here is a thing which needs be attended.” But when she didn’t speak, staring at him with red-veined, purposeless eyes, he shifted his gaze away to the window and sighed noisily. She walked to the rain barrel and drank deeply, letting the dipper spill water over her skirt, and taking a piece of corn bread from the hearth, she went to sit at the table.

“Yer mother’s gone with a shroud to Goodman Abbot’s.” He cut his eyes to her briefly and she realized it had been her father who had covered her in the night.

She toyed with the dry corn bread on the table for a time and, resting her forehead in her hands, bit the tender inside of her lip to keep the tears from coming. She heard the sound of a chair being scraped back and her father saying, “Come with me now.” It was the commanding way she had always heard her father speak and, reflexively, she pushed up from the table, following his gesture to cover herself with one of her mother’s shawls.

She followed him through the yard, the eyes of the workmen on her, questioning, curious, and quickly she realized her father was leading her to Sunset Rock to the north of the house. They climbed the rock slowly, pausing at times for her father to favor his weak leg, and stood looking over Boston Way Road, empty of all carts or wagons, the air silent except for the distant sound of a pick on a rock somewhere beyond Ballard’s Pond.

Her father crossed his arms and asked, “Are ye still…? I mean to say, d’ye still have yer…?” He paused and sucked at his teeth for a moment.

Martha looked at him, her mouth downturned. “If you mean, am I still intact, the answer is yes.” She exhaled sharply, muttering, “Much good may it do me.”

The wooden sign above Chandler’s Inn, a rough-hewn board with the mark of a horseshoe, squealed once in an errant breeze and then hung motionless.

He shook his head and gestured. “Ye look like a madwoman.” He shifted his weight from his ulcered hip, taking in the view of harvested fields. “Thirty years I’ve made this my home.” He looked at her as though she’d dispute the fact. “The spring of ’forty-three I came. There were scarce twenty of us between the Cochichawick and the Shawshin. And here, right here on this rock is where I stood to spy my holdings.” He coughed loosely and spat off the ledge. “I had a brother lost in the Great War. My brother James.”

She looked at him in surprise. He’d never before mentioned a brother in England.

“He took for soldiering with the Solemn League and Covenant for Cromwell,” he said. “He died on Marston Moor and I didna’ know of it for five years. But I know why he fought. So that a Scotsman wouldna’ have to bend his knee to tricked-up vessels and rich cloths thrown up over the altar of Christ like a whore’s skirt.”

In all her years she had never heard him speak at length about anything other than the determined acquisition of that which increased the holdings of Goodman Allen.

He pressed his arms tightly around his chest and said, “There’s been talk. About you and the Welshman.”

Martha crossed her own arms and waited. The anxiety she had felt in the wagon on the way to Andover had begun to build again, making the jellied parts of her eyes feel pierced with gunmetal shards. She pulled the shawl tighter around her chest with unsteady hands and stared at her feet, two steps from open air.

She felt the restraining grasp of her father’s hand over her arm. “Oh, fer Christ’s bloody sake, Martha, I didna’ raise ye to be well regarded. To be liked. Any puny, weak-waisted slut can be liked. I raised ye to be reckoned with. To be fierce in the face of others’ pridefulness. T’say to those who would be puffed up in their own cleverness, ‘Kiss ma backside and the Devil take the rest.’ D’ye hear me? I don’t know this… slack-kneed girl in front of me.” He softened his grip on her.

“I’d rather ye be wed to a wanted man with principle than to a magistrate with the balls of a seahorse.”

He took from his pocket a small gold coin and bounced it in his palm. “A coin has two faces, but it’s forged from the same metal. That’s you and I.” He tapped twice at his brow. “We’re the same.” He reached out for her hand and closed her fingers over the coin. Martha looked at him amazed; she didn’t know whether to be more surprised at his holding her hand or the giving up of a gold coin. He turned abruptly and began his descent down the rock.

He threw over his shoulder, “Ye have to ask yerself, daughter. Is he worth a fight?” He stumbled, cursing, then righted himself and shouted, “It’s a fair way to Billerica on foot. Best start now.”

She gave him time to return to the house and, slipping the coin into her apron, descended the rock on steadied legs. She walked Boston Way Road for a short distance before cutting west at Preston Bridge over the Shawshin and followed Blanchard’s Plain southward. The paths were still boggy from rain, veined through with muddy rivulets and carpeted with mottled leaves that clung fast and clammy to her legs. At Strongwater Brook she peeled off her shoes and stockings and picked her way across the sucking black clay, mired up to her knees. On the other side she sat on a stone wall, rubbing hard at her blackened legs with leaves, scraping away the sodden dirt, only just remembering that all her few belongings were still in Andover. She laughed aloud, the sound harsh and challenging, thinking she didn’t even have the cloak for a blanket.

The path descended into rows of pines, banked and half-buried by a recent mud slide, and when she came upon Long Pond, she realized she had walked too far west. She floundered through a backwash of branches and fallen trees, losing the path for a time until she came upon Alewife Creek, getting her bearings again. In another hour she passed Nuttings Pond and saw her cousin’s house, a thin column of smoke coming from the chimney.

Behind it stood the barn, and she watched it for a while until she was certain Thomas was there. She crept along the shadowed side of the barn, slipping in through the door. She stood quietly for a moment, listening to the sounds of Thomas and John mucking out a stall.

She stepped forward into the light of a hooded lantern and said, “Thomas.”

They both startled at her voice, and she could imagine what they were seeing; her dress was torn and muddied, her shoes two stumps of clay embedded with leaves and the bristling eruptions of twigs.

She said again, “Thomas.”

Thomas set down the pitchfork and, turning to John, said, “Leave now. Stay gone a good while.”

John propped his pitchfork against the stall and walked quickly past her, closing and latching the door.

She stepped out of her shoes, leaving them behind like a chrysalis shedding its casing, searching Thomas’s face for any sense of betrayal. But there were no bitter looks, only an alarmed concern as one might give a sleepwalker. She stepped closer, staggering through the straw, and he was there, holding her up briefly, then setting her on a stool. He turned away, filling a bucket of water from the trough, and knelt in front of her. Peeling off her stockings, he dipped his hands into the bucket and began to wash her legs with long, kneading strokes. The water was surprisingly tepid on her skin, as though the huffed, steaming breath of the cows had warmed it first.

He set aside her shawl and carefully washed her face and neck, cupping one palm around the back of her head, running his other hand across the birdlike bones at the base of her throat and the darker skin above her bodice. The water ran in droplets between her breasts, collecting on her ribs like animate things, and she recalled she must breathe. Her hands, lying useless at her sides, were collected and rinsed with water until the pads of her fingers were pale again.

While he washed her he spoke to her calmly, beseechingly, in Welsh and then in English, telling her, “Daniel spoke only that you and the missus had quarreled, and that he sent you for a time to your father’s.”

“Thomas,” she whispered, “through my own carelessness I have revealed to Daniel…”

He held her chin so that she faced him. “Martha, Daniel knows who and what I am. He always has. He is but one of many who has chosen to give safe harbor to men such as myself.” Startled, she reflexively pulled back, but he held her fast. “Pots are not the only things he carries in his wagon. His work goes to the heart of his commitments to keep those in hiding from harm. He carts letters and dispatches from here to Boston and back again for a man named James Davids who, to the best of his abilities, watches over those of us wanted by the king for treason.” He craned his face closer to hers, his voice low and urgent. “Daniel carries the greatest treasure in the colonies: intelligences, warnings, instructions. Without such knowledge we would be like blind men pursued by dogs.”

That Daniel had put himself, and his family, at risk of imprisonment or death made her ashamed she had ever thought him weak. “Has he said more?” she asked. “Why he sent me away?”

He shook his head. “Beyond crossing words with his good wife? Only that he would give you time to reflect on the life you may be choosing.” He traced a lingering finger across the prominence of her collarbone.

Relief that Daniel had not spoken of the red book overwhelmed her, and she lowered her chin. She held up her empty palms, like a supplicant, to show him she had brought nothing with her on her arriving, for she had nothing. He pulled her head roughly to his chest, and then he lifted her up, carrying her into the recesses of a far stall.

The hay was newly set, both green-smelling and fusty from the mold of summer. He set his back against the wall and pulled her to him. Her gestures were reticent, shy, and he kissed her gently until she had caught fire and pressed her mouth between his lips. She straddled his lap, understanding that his great weight would burden her, and helped him pull up the bulk of her skirt and shift which then lay like a gray curtain around them. She placed his hand over her breast and willed herself to slow her own motions. She brought her forehead to rest on his, her eyes opened and watchful. There were no whispered pleadings or sentiments offered to justify their actions, but a voiceless question had formed on Thomas’s face and she said, “Yes.” “Yes,” she said to him and settled her hips more insistently on his.

He encircled her tightly, her soft lower ribs shifting under the force, and then he moved to open the cloth of his breeches. He kissed her, biting her hard on the lip, as though to distract her from the pain, the tearing of the small veil of tissue between her legs, the skin straining for an instant, like the belly of a silvered trout, torn on a barbed lure.

After that there was very little pain, only the sensation of dying by slow measures, the blood swimming to the surface of her skin like resurrected bounty brought up from some polar sea. She could feel the beginnings of pressure marks on her arms and thighs, the scalding of her flesh by the uncut bristles of his face. She wound her arms more tightly around his neck, impressing herself onto him, promising to wear the unintended bruises like the flags of a new country.