Dark Tides Page 13

  “No, he just looked awkward,” Sarah said astutely. “I bet she looks like she’s courting with every man she meets, she’d look like that with a bargee. She’s just one of those women who always look as if everyone’s in love with her. I don’t think he’s running after her; I think boot’s on t’other foot: she’s got her eye on him.”

  “You can’t know that! What d’you think she wants?”

  “I can’t tell. She’s so pretty mannered all the time, I can’t tell where the real woman starts and stops.”

  “She’s very…” Johnnie had no words for Livia’s relentless allure. “She makes me feel… There’s something about her.”

  “Something expensive.”

  “She makes my toes curl,” he confessed. “She looks at me and I can’t think what to say.”

  “She makes my claws curl,” Sarah replied acidly. “I know exactly what I’d say.”

  He laughed at her. “I’d like to hear it!”

  “What d’you think she came here for, if not to marry someone rich?” Sarah demanded.

  “Well, she’s got a catch if she can net Sir James. Do the milliners know anything against him?”

  She shook her head. “No mistress. They’d know that in the sewing room the moment he ordered a lace collar. You know, he might be what he says he is: an old friend of Uncle Rob’s and a country gentleman.”

  “Then what does he want with us?” Johnnie asked. “For we are neither.”

  “Can’t we ask Ma?”

  Johnnie looked awkward. “I s’pose so—but I always feel when we ask her things it’s as if we’re missing a father,” he said. “As if we’re saying she isn’t enough. Like we’re blaming her for what happened. Like we want a father instead of her.”

  “We’re twenty-one!” his sister exclaimed. “Aren’t we old enough to ask yet?”

  They were silent for a moment as they realized they were still not old enough to challenge their mother.

  “I couldn’t hurt her, just for curiosity,” Johnnie said, and Sarah nodded in agreement.

  “See you next Saturday?” he asked, and she rose to her feet to go in the kitchen door.

  “I get my afternoon off tomorrow,” she said. “You?”

  “Not this week,” he said. “But if you come by the warehouse at six I’ll take you out for a lamb chop when we finish.”

  “Dinner on you? I’ll be there.”

  He gripped her shoulders, they rubbed cheeks rather than kissed, with the easy familiarity of loving siblings, then he watched her bound up the steps to the door and heard the gale of laughter that greeted her from the millinery girls demanding why she had not brought her handsome brother to breakfast.

  JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  As soon as it was light, Ned pulled his ferry, hand over hand on the rope, to the west side of the river and made an interrogative owl’s hoot into the darkness of the forest. He sat down at the foot of a tree and waited, his eyes towards the shadows of the forest, so that they would remain sharp and not be dazzled by the gray sheen of the quietly moving river. A little while later a female owl answered “whoo whoo.”

  “Come,” Ned whispered, and without a sound a woman stepped from the shelter of the trees.

  “Nippe Sannup?” she said. “You are early? This is our time: it’s us who are named the People of the Dawn.”

  “Quiet Squirrel, I thank you for coming,” Ned said formally in English. She squatted beside him and he took in her lined face, the cracked and worn skin of her hands. He smelled the scent of her: red cedar wood, sassafras, and the soft clean smell of her buckskin cape.

  “What do you want, Netop?”

  “Mind ferry?” he asked, attempting her language. “Me walk with friends to sea.”

  She smiled at his attempt at her speech. “They are weary of being men of the twilight?”

  He frowned, trying to understand. “Want to go. Want walk.”

  “They walk in the forest and by the river when at dusk, thinking they are hidden by the shadows.” She smiled. “Of course we see them.”

  “They are good men. Safe? Safe with Dawnland People?”

  “They’re safe with us. It is your rulers who say where people can and cannot go. We know that a man can walk anywhere. But your friends had better not go back to where they hid before. Won’t your king send his men to look there?”

  He frowned at the ripple of words. “Somewhere else?”

  She nodded. “Somewhere better. I will ask someone to take you. He knows the lands here and at the coast. He will know a good place.”

  “He come now? Quick quick?”

  She thought that the white men were like children, not just in speech but in thought, in the impatience of their demands.

  “You can start the journey, he will find you on the way,” she said. “He has his own business before he travels.”

  Ned shifted awkwardly, feeling his knees stiffening up. “What doing…? What he doing?”

  No child of the People would be so rude as to ask a direct question. Especially when asking for a favor.

  “He does his own business, Ferryman. We do not answer to you.”

  “No trouble?” Ned asked, awkwardly conscious of his lack of fluency. “He friendly?”

  “I don’t know his business. I don’t ask him. Do I keep the fees for the ferry?”

  “Take fees, I give nails too.” Ned knew she would get little profit from the ferry, she would not charge a crossing fee to any of her people, nor any of the neighboring people. They lived in a world of gifting and favors to show power and to strengthen family bonds. They would never charge money for a favor as the settlers did; they thought it beneath them to make little profits off each other. And there was no point paying her in food—she was a better gardener, fisher, and gatherer than he would ever be. But all the native people loved anything made of metal, to hammer into their own use. He knew she would be glad of nails.

  “And little iron rods,” she specified.

  He knew that the Indian craftsmen could repair muskets if they had metal. But he had no choice but to pay her the fee she wanted.

  “Nails and rods.”

  “Very well.” She got to her feet in one sinuous motion as Ned pushed himself upwards, giving a little grunt at the effort.

  “That’s your shoes,” she told him. “Those shoes make your bones ache.”

  “It’s age,” Ned told her. “I am more than fifty.”

  She laughed and her dark eyes gleamed at him. “I am far older than you,” she told him. “Many winters older, and I can still outrun you. It’s those shoes you wear.” She patted his shoulder. “And your ridiculous hat,” she said affectionately, knowing he could not understand her words.

  Ned was still smiling at her condemnation of his shoes, as he pulled the two of them over the river on the ferry. The pale light of the dawn summer sky reflected on the sleek water. “I’ll wait here,” she said, her hand on the ferry rope. “Will you bring the Coatmen now?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We come quick.”

  She smiled at him, knowing that Englishmen would take a long time to start a journey, they always fussed about a thousand things, they always carried far too much.

  In the house, William and Edward were up and dressed, eating cornmeal biscuits. “Where have you been?” Edward asked.

  “I’ve got us a guide,” Ned said. “He’s going to find us on the way.”

  He filled his birch-bark bottle with water from the earthenware jar and wiped his face and neck with sassafras oil. “Want some of this?” He offered them the oil.

  “What is it?” Edward asked.

  “Sassafras oil, keeps the flies off.”

  “Nothing keeps the flies off,” Edward said pessimistically, and William laughed.

  Ned did not pull on the jacket that he wore to go to town but swung a cape of knotted reeds over his shirt.

  “You look like a savage,” Edward remarked. “Will you wear a feather in your hair?”

&
nbsp; “Keeps the flies off,” Ned claimed.

  “Nothing keeps the flies off,” Edward repeated.

  The three men came silently out of the house, climbed the riverbank, and looked back to the grazed wide way to the sleeping town, then they turned towards the river.

  “Who’s that on the ferry?” William demanded.

  “A woman of the Norwottuck,” Ned said. “My neighbor. She minds the ferry when I go into the woods.”

  “An old lady?” Edward asked.

  “She’s the elder of the village. She knows everything that happens that side of the river, and everything that happens in Hadley too.”

  “Is she trustworthy?” William asked. “Does she know of us?”

  “Aye,” Ned replied. “I said. She knows everything that goes on within fifty miles. She minds the ferry for me, she sells me sassafras and all sorts of things from the forest. Things I didn’t even know when I first got here.”

  Ned snapped his fingers and his dog Red bounded down the bank and jumped neatly onto the ferry. Ned and the men followed and climbed on board as Quiet Squirrel wordlessly pulled on the rope to haul them across to the opposite bank. The ferry grounded on the pebble beach, William and Edward took up their little sacks, and went at once into the shelter of the woods. Ned turned to say good-bye to Quiet Squirrel.

  “Tomorrow night I come back,” he said, and raised a hand.

  “Tomorrow night, Ned.”

  “Guide meets us?”

  She smiled at him. “Quick! Quick!” she mocked him. “He will find you. You start—if you can walk at all in those shoes.”

  Ned chuckled at the insult, threw her a salute, and turned, his dog at his heels, his musket slung over his back, to lead the way south.

  JUNE 1670, LONDON

  “It is quite ridiculous that we meet like this,” Livia said sharply to Sir James the next afternoon. “Like a maidservant creeping out to meet a footman! You must write down for me the address of your London house and then I can write to you and suggest a time and place to meet when we need to talk.”

  He felt himself flinch at her bluntness. “Of course, I am honored,” he said quietly.

  “Because we have much to do together.”

  “We do?”

  They were taking their usual path, along Savoury Dock, as St. Saviour’s Dock was ironically known to its neighbors who were sickened by the stink of the industries pouring their waste into the river. They turned right into Five Foot Lane, ignoring the catcalls of street urchins and the occasional appeal of vendors of small goods, and they wound their way through the line of little cottages to the fields where the sheep grazed in the distance and she could sit on the tree that he now thought of as “theirs.”

  “We do,” she confirmed smartly. “And this is not a place of business.”

  “I am not a businessman,” he said gently. “I have no place of business.”

  She peeped up at him in her charming way. “I know,” she agreed. “You are above all this. But I have to toil and sow and reap for my boy, you know. For his inheritance. And his family, this family that I find myself among, these are working people and I cannot be idle. They need my help and I am going to help them.”

  “But I…” he started.

  “You can just leave, of course,” she offered him. “You need never see any of them again. You have been forgiven for your sins and no doubt you forgive them theirs. You tried to reenter their lives and you have been shut out. There is nothing more for you here. You could go now and never come back, arrange another marriage and hope for a son of your own.”

  He blinked. “I could,” he said cautiously.

  “Or you could help me save them,” she said, her voice a little lower, beguiling. “You could help this poor family to make a living, better than it is now. You abandoned them in poverty, and they cannot rise without our help. You can have no contact with Mrs. Reekie, you know, but her grandson should grow up as a prosperous English boy. You will tell me where he should go to school? I am sure that he should go to your school? At what age does he have to start? Should you introduce him?”

  He flushed with embarrassment. “I didn’t go to an English school,” he said. “I was tutored at home and then I went to a seminary. I was intended for the priesthood.”

  “Dio!” she exclaimed. “You? An English Milord?”

  “There are many English Roman Catholics,” he said awkwardly. “But I lost my vocation, I had… I had a crisis of faith… and, like many, I converted to the Protestant Church and took up my title and my lands.”

  She had no interest in his religion. “Oh! So! Where should Matteo go to school?”

  “Perhaps Westminster?” he recovered. “I could assist you with that.”

  She clasped her hands. “I ask for nothing from you but a little help. I was impulsive before, you understand that I am Italian? I see a happy outcome and I long for it all at once. You will find me passionate! You will forgive me that. But I will never trouble you with my dreams again. I thought that I could be a wife to you and give you a son—I thought it like a miracle that we should meet when I am the very thing that you want. But I see I was too quick for you! From now on we shall be nothing more than friends and partners.”

  He was flushed with embarrassment at her frankness, but stirred by her words. “I could not engage myself to do more than make introductions for you, to gentlemen who are buying antiquities, and their agents,” he said stiffly.

  “Nothing more than that,” she agreed. “Alys will arrange the shipping, I shall order the antiquities, you shall do nothing more than invite people to your house and make the introductions, and I shall sell the things.”

  “At my house?” His refusal was immediate; but she laughed gaily and put her hands on his. “Not your beautiful house in the country,” she assured him. “I don’t ask for that. No, no, all I want is to be allowed to place some of my best and most beautiful pieces in your London house so that your friends and acquaintances may come and admire them, in your salon. That is how they should be seen.” She paused as a thought struck her. “Oh, but you do have a salon? This is not two rooms over a coffeehouse? In some shabby corner? You do have a proper house?”

  He was stung. “It is Avery House, madam, on the Strand.”

  She jumped to her feet in delight and kissed him on both cheeks. “That will do splendidly!” she exclaimed, as if he had agreed. “I will come tomorrow.”

  JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  The three men walked for hours on the track that wound through the forest of tall strong trees, the fallen leaves from last year rustling beneath their feet. Ned kept up a brisk pace but both William and Edward were men in their sixties, they had been indoors for months, only walking at dawn and dusk, hoping to be unseen. The hot sun beat down, the flies rose like a thick mist from the brackish water on either side of the narrow path, and swarmed around their faces, constantly biting. Ned called a halt, and they all drank from his bottle.

  “How d’you ever find your way?” Edward gasped, taking a sip of water. “This whole forest goes on forever and it all looks the same.”

  “I’ve been out this way a few times,” Ned said. “And I was raised on a mire, I learned as a boy how to find little tracks and remember them.”

  “You hunt here?”

  “No. We’ve got no land rights here and the People like to keep it for themselves, they don’t want boot prints on their paths and guns banging off in their forests and frightening the animals. This is their lands, not ours. Though some of the townsfolk are trying to buy here.”

  “You don’t come here for beaver pelts?”

  Ned shook his head. “It’s been trapped out,” he said. “Long before I got here. They say that when we first came here there was a dam in every stream: thousands of beavers. Now they’re all gone. The dams are breaking, the lakes behind them are draining away. If you take all the beavers you lose the dam, you lose the lake and that changes the rivers, and so you get no beaver. That’s
why they call us stupid.”

  “It’s got to be farmed,” William insisted. “Anything else is wasteland.”

  “Maybe some land ought to be wasteland?” Ned suggested. “Maybe God made it like that for a reason?”

  “ ‘Increase ye, and be ye multiplied, and fill ye the earth, and make ye it subject; and be ye lords to the fishes of the sea, and to volatiles of heaven, and to all living beasts that be moved on earth and be ye lords, or rule ye,’ ” William quoted Genesis.

  “Amen,” said Edward.

  Ned nodded. “Amen. Are we ready to go on?”

  “When will we meet with the savages?” Edward asked.

  “When they want,” Ned said with a smile. “They’ll have been watching us ever since we started on this trail.”

  Edward hunched his shoulders. “How could they?” he said. “We’ve gone in silence.”

  Ned laughed shortly. “Not to them,” he said. “To them we’ve sounded like a fife-and-drum band marching through the woods.”

  “We’ve barely spoken,” William protested.

  “The deer know, don’t they?” Ned said. “The deer heard us from the first step? The People know the woods as well as the deer.”

  “Can’t you order them to show themselves?” Edward said irritably.

  “Nay, they’re free men on their own lands.”

  They said nothing more as Ned led the way on a path which was no wider than his shoulders, putting one foot before the other, his English boots making clear marks in the mud where moccasins had left no trace.

  They went past a deep hole, like a posthole, and Ned paused for a moment, cleared a vine which was trailing across it, and turned to go on.

  “Just give me a moment to catch my breath,” William said.

  As they waited, Edward idly poked a stick in the side of the hole; the sandy gray soil spilled inwards.

  “Don’t do that,” Ned warned him. “It’s important to them. They keep it clear and open. You saw me weed the vine.”