Though rain, and wind, and the rattling of the window sash were all the sounds that broke the deep stillness, she dreamed of church bells.
Thirty
In darkness she woke—with the instincts of one who has milked cows for most of her thirty years—and in darkness dressed. Downstairs she heard the small sounds of the inn servants making fires, tidying the ordinary, taking bread from the oven.
The wind was less; the rain had ceased. Abigail’s bones ached with the damp.
You will not be sick, she told herself firmly. Descending to the ordinary, she congratulated herself that she’d written a note to John and his reinforcements last night, while she still had candles and the room was still warm enough that she could hold a pen.
Male voices drifted up the stairway, and for one moment her heart gave a leap. But of course it was only Muldoon and the other male guests, consuming bread and cheese and joking one another about who snored and whose names got amorously murmured in sleep.
“—Oh, and Fleurette—who the bloody ’ell is Fleurette . . .”
“My dearest wife—”
“Aargh, ’er and Nan . . . and Margot . . .”
“I have many wives, mes amis; behold, I am a Mohammedan . . .”
All stood as Abigail came down the stairs, and Mrs. Purley brought her corn pudding—as befit her more elevated station—and coffee. The horses are ready like you asked, Mrs. Adams—and a nice bit of bread and cheese for you both, and oats for the beasts—Why, thank you, m’am—Will there be anything else, Mrs. Adams?—Yes, we’ll hand it to him as soon as he arrives . . .
Under a racing cover of cloud, the world was just light enough, at eight, to make out the details of the Danvers road as it turned inland, toward what had once been Salem Village.
“D’you know the place, then, m’am?” asked Muldoon, as Abigail drew rein. From her last visit to Gilead she remembered the old house that lay a little distance down the overgrown track to their right: remembered it because, in the near-darkness in which she and Thaxter had been riding, she hadn’t been able to see the end of the woods some hundred yards ahead, and had hoped to find shelter.
Now in midafternoon, with the woods filled with a sickly rinsed-out light, she could glimpse the ruined walls, the holed and sagging ceiling, in clearer detail. As she had on that first visit, she dismounted, and led Balthazar to the broken door. What had been simply a pitch-black cavern on that night showed up now as a primitive keeping room, the puncheon floor—under its carpet of dead leaves—an assurance that they wouldn’t fall through broken boards into an unsuspected cellar.
She led the horses inside, slipped the bits from their mouths, loosened the saddle cinches, and from the saddlebag poured two little heaps of oats on the floor. Muldoon, who’d lingered in the doorway looking down the road at the fields glimpsed beyond the thinning of the trees, came in to help her: “Is that there Gilead, then, Mrs. A?”
“Beyond the fields, yes. My impression was that the place was larger ten or fifteen years ago. Several houses looked completely deserted, and many of the inhabited ones had their upper stories shuttered up, even in the daytime when we rode out. But it was the end of daylight when we reached here, my husband’s clerk and I, and we were taken immediately to their House of Repentance for evening services. It was well and truly dark by the time the Hand of the Lord had had his say.”
“Then we’d best have a careful look round.” The sergeant took his musket in its wrappings of oilcloth from the back of his saddle, and after it, the pistol that John kept in his office desk under lock and key. “How close are the woods to the buildings?”
With half-closed eyes Abigail summoned back the wet twilight, the impression of trees crowding in on those decaying gray buildings. “A hundred feet?” It was hard to put aside her horrified anger at herself, that she and Thaxter had undoubtedly spent the night only a few dozen feet from where Rebecca—almost certainly—was being kept. “They’ll have gardens, between the houses and the woods, but those will be cleared off now.”
“Aye, but their fences’ll still be up.” The young man led the way from the house, looked down the road toward open ground, blue eyes narrowed. In Boston, Patrick Muldoon’s air of countrified good nature had made him seem naïve, primitive, and rather harmless despite his imposing size and crimson uniform. Faced with the prospect of an escape through woods in overcast darkness—she knew precisely how far her lantern would cast light and she knew it would be next to useless—Abigail felt suddenly grateful that she was with an Irish farmhand used to the ways of bogs and fields, rather than the cleverest of Boston law clerks. “Moon’s on the wane, too, and them clouds don’t look like breakin’. We’ll barely be able to see, goin’ in. Comin’ out, we’ve got to strike a fence and know which way to follow it, if we’re to make it back here with both feet. Thank Christ the road’s good and rutted.”
“And that it’s December and cold as a well digger’s elbow,” murmured Abigail. “They’ll all be indoors.”
As if to mock her words, the crack of a gunshot sounded somewhere in the brown and silver woods, a hunter seeking to make the most of what game there was before the last of the squirrels retired for their winter naps. “Almost all,” she temporized primly, and Muldoon grinned.
“Better watch out for them behind us, then, if they take it into their heads we’re the divil’s henchmen. All over the barrack, they say colonials grow up with guns in their hands, an’ don’t have to be taught to shoot ’em, like we do that the landlords have up for poachin’ if we so much as throw a rock. Lead on, m’am.”
For nearly a mile they skirted the edge of the open fields that lay to the eastern side of the village. The rain had been much less here, inland from the sea, but the going was slow, wet leaves and broken branches treacherous underfoot. The thicker undergrowth along the edge of the woods screened them from sight of the village itself, but within the woods the ground was clearer, the world bathed in a cold shadowless light. Now and then Abigail and her escort would work their way through the knots of hazel and bindweed, to the ditch that demarcated the fields. Beyond the ditch, low stone walls kept wild pigs, deer, and—probably more effectively—saplings and creepers at bay.
“Looks a right mess to get a plow through,” whispered Muldoon, gazing across the brown field with its pocked, uneven ground. “What do they grow hereabouts?”
“Maize—Indian corn—mostly, and beans and pumpkins between the rows. The Indians used to not plow at all, just make hills for each plant, and bury a dead fish in each hill, to put heart into the plant. We grow corn on our farm—south of Boston, in Braintree—as well as wheat and rye, but ’tis a hard crop on the soil. If you’re to grow corn you need three times the land you’re going to plant, plus meadows for hay.”
“And it all belongs to somebody else anyway, you say?”
“A great deal of it. It isn’t that unusual, for boundaries to get mixed up, especially if the land goes through the hands of a speculator. When Bargest originally sought out land for his congregation he bought what was cheapest without looking into title too closely.” Abednego Sellars himself had been absent when Abigail had called at the chandlery on her way out of Boston—evidently a good many of the Sons of Liberty were out investigating the rumor that the Beaver was going to be surreptitiously unloaded at sea. But Penelope Sellars had provided a wealth of detail about her detested in-laws’ legal troubles, with considerable spiteful satisfaction, including the information that indeed, the case was scheduled to be settled at the next General Court. Legal details aside, Abigail couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that the decision would go against a good friend of the Crown who dined regularly with the Governor.