Dark Tides Page 8

  “There is no life for me, without you, and without my child!”

  She nodded, her eyes never leaving his face. “That was your own choice,” she said. “Freely made, and knowingly made. You did not want a child and now you have none. It’s like a spell. It was your wish. You can’t take it back, and it can’t be unsaid.”

  “Is this your last word?”

  Wearily she turned her head away from him and caught Livia’s dark intent gaze on her. The younger woman’s eyes were filled with tears; Livia was following every word, moved to deep emotion. “She said so,” Livia spoke gently from the doorway. “She has given you her last word. You can ask for nothing more from her.”

  He looked at Alinor, as Livia opened the door in silence, and there was nothing he could do but leave. Livia followed him out and closed the door quietly behind them.

  On the narrow landing, he caught her sleeve and she turned her beautiful face up to his.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “I love her, and together we have a child. I promised her marriage and now I need a wife, and I need my child to inherit.”

  Gently she put her warm hand over his. “But I do understand,” she said surprisingly. “And I will help you. Come tomorrow and walk with me.”

  “On a Sunday?” he asked.

  She had been raised as a Roman Catholic, and had never observed the Sabbath like a puritan. She shrugged. “Meet me tomorrow after dinner, and we can decide what is best to do.”

  JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  Ned, planning to send a barrel of goods and herbs to England at the end of summer, traded a whole freshly caught salmon for a pair of barrels from the cooper. The minister’s housekeeper was there, ordering a barrel for the manse.

  “Good morning, Mr. Ferryman, I’ll take some fresh fish for the minister, if you’ve got anything nice,” she said.

  “Of course,” Ned said. “I’ve set my traps again and I’ve got some beautiful fat trout. Shall I carry it to your door?”

  “I’d be grateful,” she said.

  “May I carry your basket for you? Are you finished here, Mrs. Rose?”

  She put her initials in the cooper’s book for the minister’s order, and then gave Ned her basket as they walked around the cooper’s house, out of his gate, and back into the broad street, past the meetinghouse, to where the minister’s house was set at the junction. The wide green common grazing land ran north to south past his front door and at the side of his house was the west-to-east lane called the Middle Highway running out of town to the woods. The town fence protected his land and house from the grazing animals; his own gate led to a path to his front door, fastened with ironwork—a handsome latch.

  “Fair weather,” Ned said shyly, casting about for something to say to her, knowing that the whole town had watched them walk up the lane together. Everyone expected them to marry. Single men were not welcomed in these frontier plantations where a man could only survive with the work of his wife and children, and a woman had to have the protection of a man. There were only two other bachelors in the town and each had been given a plot in return for plying his trade, his specialist skills; both of them would be expected to marry. The minister John Russell had invited Ned to join the community and given him the riverside lot outside the town fence and the ferry beside it, for his loyal service in Oliver Cromwell’s army. Mr. Russell wanted a man he could trust to watch the north road and guard his secret guests. If Ned wanted to settle in Hadley and be granted more land, and a bigger house, he must marry. Mrs. Rose was a widowed indentured servant at the manse. When her contracted time was served, she would have to find another post and work for another household or marry one of the settlers to get a house and land.

  “It’s fine now but it’ll soon be too hot to speak,” she predicted. “The summers here are as cruel as the winters. I miss an English summer day!”

  “We all do, I think. But I like this warm weather.”

  The minister lived in a well-built house; handsome wooden steps led up to a double front door. The housekeeper led Ned around to the back, where the grassy lot stretched away east to the start of the forest. Near the house a black slave chopped a tree into firewood, another stacked it. Mrs. Rose led Ned up the two steps to the kitchen door. They went in together, and Ned put down the baskets on the scrubbed table.

  “You can go down,” Mrs. Rose said quietly. “They thought they’d keep out of sight today in the cool, while there are messengers coming and going.”

  She nodded him towards the main part of the house. Ned opened the door and stepped into the wooden-floored hall. A long-case clock ticked loudly, as if to proclaim the wealth of the master of the house. Ned glanced into the empty study where the minister wrote his impassioned sermons. No one was there, so he rolled back the rug that covered the trapdoor to the cellar. He tapped on the hatch door, the old familiar rat-tat-tat-tatta-tatta-tat, and opened the hatch. A ladder extended below him into darkness. Ned climbed down into the pitch-black and only when the hatch above him thudded back into place and he heard the shuffle of Mrs. Rose rolling back the rug, was there the sharp click of a flint, a spark, and the flare of a flame.

  Ned felt his way to the bottom of the ladder and there, faces illuminated by the bright flame of candlewood, were his former commanders, both men in their sixties, exiles from the English Civil War which had finally turned against them: Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, regicides, men who had signed the death sentence for their own king and were now hiding from a warrant of arrest from his son, the restored king. The three shook hands in silence and went from the foot of the ladder to the end of the storeroom where a window set high in the stone walls admitted a greenish light and fresh air to the cellar.

  “No strangers in town? No one asking for us?” Edward asked of Ned, who had served them and guarded them for the five and a half years they had been living in Hadley.

  “No one that I saw, no one came in on my ferry,” Ned told him. “But you’re wise to stay down here, there’s another town meeting this afternoon and messengers expected from Boston. They’re warning about the Pokanoket—if they’re planning something? People out of town are fortifying their houses. I had one of the selectmen at my house telling me to come and translate for the town council, and that next I’d be mustered.”

  “Of course you’ll serve,” William told him. “There’s not one of them has ever seen warfare. Half of them can’t light a matchlock. The town needs you.”

  “There’s not one of ’em I’d trust with a weapon,” Ned said scathingly.

  “Aye, but they’re our people,” Edward agreed with his son-in-law. “And they can be trained. Don’t you remember the early days of the New Model Army? You can make a great army from ordinary men if their cause is just and you have time to train them.”

  “I was proud to serve then,” Ned said quietly. “But that was my first and last cause. I served a great general to free my people from a tyrant. It was an honor to serve the Lord Protector against the tyrant King Charles. And when we won, and you two sat in judgment on him, I was there! I was in court for every day of his trial and I knew it was justice. I watched him step out of the Banqueting House that morning and put his head on the block. I swore then that I’d finished soldiering. I’d never take arms again. I swore I’d live in peace to the end of my days. I’d never make war on innocent people.”

  “Aye, but savages are not innocent people, Ned! These are not comrades like us in the New Model Army. They’re not Christian, half of them are pagans. They don’t think like we do. And mark my words, you’ll have to choose a side sooner or later. Josiah Winslow himself said to me that there will come a time when it’s us against them.”

  “His father would never have said that,” Ned pointed out. “Everyone says his father and the Massasoit were true friends.”

  “That was then,” Edward said. “When we first arrived there was real friendship, I know. This is now: it’s changed. They’ve changed.”
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  “The savages won’t spare you if it comes to a fight of English against Indians,” William said. “They’re cruel enemies, Ned.”

  Ned nodded, reluctant to argue with men who had been his officers, and served in the highest council in England. “I really think it was us who were cruel,” he volunteered quietly. “At Mystic Fort we fired the village with old people and women and children inside, and shot those that ran out. Even the Indians who served with us, the Narragansett, cried that it was too much! Too much—those were their very words. They couldn’t believe that we would burn children and women alive.”

  “That was thirty years ago,” William said. “Ancient history. And worse things happened in Ireland.”

  “And anyway, they make war like that now,” Edward said grimly. “They’ve been quick to learn, they burn now, and they scalp too.”

  Ned threw up his hands. “Sirs, I’ll not argue with you,” he said. “I came to see that you’re well and pay my respects.”

  William patted him on the back. “And we’d be fools to fall out with you,” he said. “I don’t forget that it was you that brought us here, two days’ trail through the woods and up the river never setting a foot wrong. We were glad then that you were friendly with savages and knew their trails. We’d never have got here without them to guide us and you to command them. You’re a good friend, Ned, we don’t forget it.”

  “I thank you, sir.”

  “But their leader is a king, isn’t he?” Edward could never let an argument go. “The Pokanoket call him King Philip? Never tell me that you’d serve a king rather than your brothers, Ned!”

  Ned smiled. “He’s not a king like Charles Stuart: a tyrant. He’s their leader, but they consent to him leading them. They don’t call him a king, that’s the name we gave him. They call him Massasoit. His real name is Po Metacom. They don’t call him Philip. It was us gave him the name Philip, and the title King, out of respect to his father, who truly was our savior the first winter we got here.”

  “That old story?” Edward queried.

  “They’ll never forget it. The English would all have died that first winter, but the Pokanoket built them shelters and gave them food. When the English robbed native corn stores, the Pokanoket gave them more, freely. That’s part of their religion, to give to someone who has nothing. But you know, we even dug up their graves for the treasures that they had buried with their dead?”

  Edward grimaced. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “It doesn’t reflect very well on us, so it’s not often told,” Ned said wryly. “But we were like greedy beasts that first winter, and they were forgiving. We promised them then that we’d only come to trade: us on the coast, wanting no more than trading posts on the coast, and all the land should always be theirs. That’s how people thought it would be. D’you remember, before our war, when King Charles was still on the throne, nobody ever thought we’d live here? Everyone thought the New World would be just for fishing and a few trading posts?”

  “It’s true,” William Goffe ruled. “It never looked like a country for settling, it was like Africa or the East. Somewhere that you’d visit to make a fortune and be glad to get home alive. All the early settlements died or gave up.”

  “Aye, just so. But now this pickthank comes to my door and tells me that the land is empty—empty! So the English have the right to everything, that he wants to be a master. Doesn’t even know how much land there is. Doesn’t know beyond Hatfield, won’t ever go upriver for fear of not getting back before dark. Doesn’t even know how many natives there are. Thinks he’s a hero to get as far north as Hadley. Thinks he’s deep in an empty wilderness when he comes through the town gate to my lot. Doesn’t know nowt!”

  William Goffe laughed at Ned’s indignation and poured a glass of small ale for him from a jug on the table. “He’s got you rattled,” he remarked, and waited for the rueful warmth of Ned’s reluctant smile.

  “He’s the sort of man who decides what side he’s on, when he sees who’s winning,” Ned warned them. “The sort that welcomed you as heroes, like they did in Boston when you got here, but then as soon as they heard the death sentence from the English courts, decided that they’d rather send you back to England for trial. No heart for one side or another. No heart at all.”

  “I suppose so,” William agreed. There was a pause as he poured more small ale. “Who’s like us?” he asked in the old drinking oath they had picked up from the Battle of Dunbar when they had defeated the royalist Scots and won a victory for the common men of England and the Commonwealth.

  “Damn few, and they’re all dead,” Ned replied.

  They clinked glasses and then fell silent for a moment.

  “No free-born Englishmen would ever send us back,” Edward said. “I know they didn’t dare to defy the king’s proclamation openly; but they passed us hand to hand in secret till we were safe here.”

  “I don’t know how they can bear a king in England,” William said. “After living in freedom! After godly rule!”

  “Would you go back to fight against Charles the Second?” Ned asked curiously.

  “I’d sail tomorrow. Wouldn’t you? I wait for the call, I expect it, any day now.”

  William laughed shortly. “Well, it’s a feud now! What with naming me as unforgivable, putting a price on my head, and hunting me down through the old world and the new, spying on my wife and daughter! Executing my brothers-in-arms! I’ll never forget hiding in the cave from his spies. I won’t forgive living here, hidden by friends, ducking into the cellar at the first hint of strangers, putting all of you in danger as well as myself.”

  The men were silent, thinking of the old battles they had won and the final battle they had lost, that had driven them into exile.

  “I suppose I’d fight against him if I had to,” Ned said slowly. “If I was called. But I’d hoped to leave the old country and the wars of the old country, and live in peace. It’s not that England was ever a kindly mother to me or to mine.”

  “No wife?” Edward asked, missing his own wife, Mary, in distant England.

  “No wife,” Ned confirmed.

  “No family at all?”

  “I have a sister and her children. Poorly treated and poorly lodged. A sinner, like us all, but God knows more sinned against.”

  The men fell silent.

  “Anyway,” Ned said more cheerfully. “You’re safe now. The minister keeps his faith, Mr. Russell will never betray you.”

  “He’s a good man,” William confirmed. “But I think we’ll take to the woods for the summer season; it’s weary work staying out of sight, living in a town but not being part of it. Hearing them practice the drills against attack and knowing they don’t know the first thing to do. They’ve not even built palisades! An enemy troop could march right in.”

  “You can hide in the woods near me and I’ll keep you supplied,” Ned offered.

  “Near you, or deeper into the forest,” William said. “Maybe even back to the coast. Anywhere that King Charles can’t send men to find us.”

  “It’s been more than twenty years since we beheaded his father,” Ned said. “Surely there must come a time when the king offers pardons.”

  “Not him!” Edward exclaimed. “This is a man who dug up his dead enemies and hanged their corpses. Cromwell himself! Our commander and the greatest men that ever served their country? Dug out of his grave and executed for spite. What good does he think that does? Raising the dead to slight them? It’s superstition like a fool, it’s little more than witchcraft.”

  “Stupid,” Ned replied, whose sister had once been swum as a witch. “I can’t abide that sort of thinking.”

  JUNE 1670, LONDON

  As soon as James had gone, Sarah ran upstairs and brought her grandmother down to the parlor. Tabs laid the table and brought in the dinner—a venison pie from the nearby bakehouse, and a plate of oysters.

  The family bowed their heads as Alinor gave thanks for the food. “And may my brother have
as good a dinner and be as light of heart as we are tonight, in the new land that is his home.”

  “Amen,” everyone said. Alys glanced at her mother. They had always named Rob when they said grace, but now Rob was gone and his widow took up her fork and waited to be served.

  “Are they starving you at Mr. Watson’s?” Alys asked her son as he sliced the pie and gave himself a good portion, oozing with dark rich gravy.

  “No, they set a good-enough table, and us counting house lads eat with the family, but there is nothing in the world like your small ale and shell bread, Ma.”

  “Madame Piercy takes nothing but tea and bread and butter at dinnertime,” Sarah volunteered. “She says true ladies have no appetite. We girls go out to the pie shop every day.”

  “Then how will you ever save your wages?” her mother demanded.

  “Ma, I can’t. Between ribbons and dinners, I can’t make it stretch.”

  “When I was your age, I only bought ribbons from the Chichester fair and that never more than once a quarter.”

  Sarah rolled her eyes. “But I’m surrounded by shops, Ma! It’s like poaching was for you. Everywhere I turn, there is something to pick up.”

  Alinor smiled. “Don’t you believe her! Your mother would have sold her soul for cherry ribbons,” she said. “And surely you’ll earn more when you’re a senior milliner, Sarah?”

  “Yes,” the girl confirmed. “And I’ll bring it home, I promise.”

  Alinor turned to Johnnie. “And is Mr. Watson pleased with you?”

  “He’s pleased with nothing,” Johnnie answered. “With the court so much in debt and the king such a spendthrift, all he can see, all anyone can see, is more taxes ahead. Taxes for all the City merchants to pay for luxuries at the court.” He turned to his mother. “D’you want me to look at the books with you tomorrow?”