‘And I will give unto thee the land wherein thou art a stranger, for an everlasting possession,’ the little woman had told her; That’s what their Hand of the Lord wrote on his court deposition, when they asked him for proof of where he’d got title to have his folks farming those acres. And, ‘This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed . . .’ just as if HE were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all rolled into one. AND he had his congregation run off the bailiffs, that Pentyre had sent out—just as if the man wasn’t in a position to have this Hand of the Lord taken up for debt and bigamy, too . . .
What had Thaxter said of Richard Pentyre? God help you if you cross him . . .
And God help you, thought Abigail uneasily, if you cross the Hand of the Lord.
And Perdita Pentyre, who would have inherited the lands were her husband to die, had been merely a detail to be cleared from the path of the righteous.
The woods grew thinner around them, sumac and sapling pine replacing the immemorial heaviness of hickory and oak. The ground became more even underfoot, and the broken remains of a wall slanted away before them. Following the woods’ edge, Abigail saw the houses of the village much closer, and the remains of what had been a palisade in the days when Indian attack was a real possibility. Above the gray overcast, the sun had passed noon.
“Well, that place looks a fair mansion, anyway—”
“The Reverend Bargest’s, at a guess,” Abigail murmured. It was the handsomest and best-kept in the village. Troublingly, men and women stood about in front of it with an air of people waiting for news. Now and then someone would emerge from one of the other houses, cross to the waiting knots. Even at this distance, Abigail could see the tension of question and reply.
“Would he be ill, then?”
“What, he?” Despite her uneasiness, Abigail couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Surely he can cure himself of anything with a touch? Perhaps his most recent Bride has gone into labor.” But the sight filled her with dismay. She had counted on three solid hours of the Chosen One’s evening sermon, to allow her to get in, release Rebecca, and make good an escape before total darkness set in. The possibility that the Reverend would be ill and unable to preach had never crossed her mind.
“Well, let’s get in a smitch closer, and sit and watch a spell. ‘Mostly you don’t need to ask questions,’ me mother always says, ‘if you’ll just hold your peace and keep your eyes open.’ ”
“She sounds like a wise woman, your mother.”
“Ach.” He shook his head. “When I’d tell her so, she’d roll up her eyes at the rafters an’ say, ‘I’m scarcely that, boy-o; I married your Da’, didn’t I?’ Yet she always did give me the best advice.” He fell silent, as they moved closer yet to the buildings. There were perhaps forty houses, not counting cowsheds and outbuildings, straggling along a single rutted lane which perished in the yard of the last dwelling in the town. Another lane crossed it, joining the Reverend’s house (as Abigail surmised it) with the House of Repentance. Nearly half of these dwellings clustered within the ruined quadrangle of the old palisade, and three appeared to have been part of its curtain wall.
As she watched the inhabitants of the village moved about their circumscribed winter chores—cutting kindling or hauling in sledges of wood from the surrounding wilderness; feeding chickens in their coops or tending boiling pots where by the stink of it soap was being rendered. Most, Abigail knew, would be laboring at indoor winter tasks: spinning, weaving, carding, sharpening tools, and mending harness. Orion grew up here.
She could almost see him, toddling adoringly at his mother’s heels down that muddy street. Beautiful, like her, with her raven hair and green eyes. And she’d thought nothing of dragging him along with her to live under the domination of her monomaniacal lover. And he, who had only his love to use, to draw her back to him, had been trapped in the sticky webs of neediness and domination.
I’ve tried to act for the best, but I can’t be two people!
Would things have been different, if he had been brought up in anything approaching normal circumstances?
Or with madness, did it make a difference?
Yet while her mind ran on all this, Abigail’s gaze moved over the squalid little settlement, picked out details. Who went into which doors, who came out, how long they remained. Which houses had the look of habitation—cows, chickens, dogs, gardens harvested recently, smoke in the chimneys, outhouses that smelled of use—and which did not. She and Muldoon shifted their position several times in the course of the afternoon, watching patiently as hunters, not even knowing quite what they looked for.
“You say he kept her stupefied with laudanum before he took her across the bay—”
“He had plenty in his house. I don’t see how else he would have kept her quiet.”
“Oh, aye. Our landlord’s mother had the habit of it, and God knows she didn’t know Easter from Christmas for months on end. But you had to watch her. Lord Semphill, he’d keep her locked in her room, but you couldn’t leave a candle with her, and they had to bar the windows, for she’d sometimes try to break ’em. Would they still have her under it now, d’ye think, ten days later?”
“I have reason to think she was struck over the head,” Abigail murmured back. She shifted her cloak, where it had become entangled with the small horn lantern at her belt, and its little satchel of candles. “I don’t know how badly. Nor can I guess what the Reverend Bargest told whatever family is in charge of caring for her. They must be well and truly under his sway, for if she’s capable of speech, what she tells them will be disquieting to say the least. And they’ll see—they must see—how harmless she is . . . In the end, he knows he’s going to have to kill her.”
“Oh, aye,” said the young man again, as if it needed no saying. “Just as soon as he knows Mr. Pentyre’s been took care of, belike. They won’t have done for the poor lady already, d’ye think?”
Abigail shook her head, not shifting her gaze from the village down the hill. She’d already thought of that. “If he did bring her here, it would be because she saw him. She knew him. Whatever Bargest told him about why Perdita Pentyre must die, Orion had clearly made up his mind not to harm Rebecca. The Hand of the Lord must have had a nasty shock,” she added grimly, “when his chosen weapon came back to him with a witness, saying, You keep her safe, or I won’t kill Pentyre.”
“It’s mad. Your boy must have known the old man couldn’t let her live.”
“He knew for two years that she was another man’s wife,” said Abigail. “Yet he hoped that things would somehow turn out right in the end. But—” She broke off, and said, “Damnation!”
“What?” Muldoon grinned. “An’ don’t think it ain’t a treat, to find a good Puritan lady will swear now and then—”