It would prove to be a simple thing, he thought, bringing back to England one man; but there was much to do before the ship upon which he would book passage for the bounty men set sail. Five men should be able to overcome one colonial lout. His pace quickened, and he figured, based on the call of the street watchman, that if he could strike a deal with the gun merchant within the hour, he would have time to pay a visit to Fanny Mortland’s whorehouse before she closed her doors at dawn.
CHAPTER 5
THE WOLVES RETURNED to Billerica, killing three more of the neighbors’ lambs and savaging a milk cow so that she had to be taken for the butcher. Hard by the barn, Thomas made his wolf pen from woven willow and birch rods staked to the ground, and he scattered cow offal about as a trail to lead the wolves to the hen tied within the cage. If the beasts entered to devour the hen, the men, hiding up in the hayloft, would then pull the trip rope, trapping the beasts inside.
At dawn, Martha dressed quickly and slipped from the house to inspect the cage. There were no large, hulking forms within, only the hen, which sat ruffled and shivering in the morning cold. She could hear the sound of lax-lipped snoring coming from the open hayloft above, and she shook her head at the thought that the men would catch anything other than a wet lung from sleeping in the open air. The trip rope, snaking its way up the side of the barn, was still taut, and she thought to give it a good pull and startle the men into waking.
A movement at the far edge of the yard caught her eye. Thomas stood alone, raking the ground over with the heel of his boot. A knot of flies rose and fell with the movement, finally settling back onto a clot of what looked to be blackened entrails. She could smell the rotting bait mixing thickly in the morning breeze and knew that if Patience caught a whiff of it, she would have her face in the bucket all morning.
Thomas scratched his chin thoughtfully as she approached, and she fought the impulse to cross her arms in front of her chest. She regarded the swarming mess with a disapproving sweep of her hand. “Well, I see we have caught something, and plenty of those. It’s a pity, though, there’s no bounty on flies.” She ejected the last word as though she had said, “Satan, the father of lies.”
He ducked his head, the brim of his hat hiding his face, and said nothing. But she sensed it was not an attitude of submission, rather more a desire to hide his expression.
“The wolves did not come,” she said with certainty. “So you must wake John and clean this mess from the yard before Patience can wake to find it…”
“You’re wrong,” he said suddenly. “They did come in the night.” He motioned for her to look past the bait and she saw the depressions in the mud. At that moment the breeze lifted, carrying with it the odor of stinging musk; a wild, uneasy odor like the pungent smell of a dog in heat.
There were two sets of tracks, side by side, one smaller than the other. The larger of the tracks was bigger than any dog or fox could have made. The paired wolves had been standing, perhaps for a long while, regarding what lay in the clearing beyond the forest. The sharp imprint of their nails pointed, like an arrow’s mark, back towards the house. Then the tracks wheeled sharply about, disappearing into the bracken. She saw a soft bit of gray undercoat still clinging to a thorn briar, insubstantial and filmy like the downy top of a puff-away weed. She plucked it from the branch and brought it to her nose. The heavy, musky smell was stronger there, reminding her of her own body at the bleeding time.
Once, when she was fourteen and living in Andover, her father had trapped and killed a young wolf. The wolf was small enough for her father to carry the carcass home over one shoulder. “Hardly worth the skinnin’,” he had said. But he had skinned it nonetheless, making a fur frill for her cape. The fur, more white than gray, had a warm lair scent about it, as though the pup still carried within his very skin his mother’s milk. It had been a rare kindness from her father, and he was wounded deeply when she gave the fur over to her sister, Mary. It was the smell of it she couldn’t abide—the overwhelming smell of brutalized innocence.
“These are smart ones,” Thomas said. He had come to stand next to her and she startled at his voice. “I’ve never seen the cunning like. They never even touched the bait.”
She took a few steps back from him, hiding the bit of fur under her apron. “Well, what are you going to do about it?” she asked impatiently, coloring darkly at her own thoughts.
“We’ll need a sweeter come-hither,” he answered.
The tone of his voice was hard to place. Not mocking, but flat and dry in a way that made her think he was masking something not quite proper. Narrowing her eyes, she said, “I suppose you’ll be wanting to risk freezing two chickens now instead of one?” She snapped the hem of her apron, clearing away some unseen clod of dirt, and fought the impulse to move back another step.
“No,” he said, drawing out the o as if singing the final amen to a solemn hymn. “I’ll be thinking something larger, and more tempting.” He said the words slowly and carefully, as if speaking to someone cleft in the head.
A bead of sweat vibrated at the curve of his jaw, like oil on heated metal, and the heavy scent of musk and burned wood pulsed from his clothes and skin. She paused and waited for him to speak. She was not certain he had been sparking her with his talk of tempting, sweet come-hithers, for men rarely spoke true their intentions, but she would be wary for a reach and a grab nonetheless. Yet Thomas only stood, his arms tightly crossed, the vertical lines of his face impressed deeper into the hollows of his cheeks.
When it was clear he wasn’t going to offer anything more, she returned to the house and began cleaning in earnest. The boards on the floor were swept, scrubbed, and sanded. The table was polished with butter and ashes, the great pot scoured and greased. The pewter was rubbed, and the blankets were shaken, the ticking boiled, the mattresses taken out to be emptied and refilled with new husks. The great cloud of winter’s detritus was lifted and settled back down over her head, and with it came a growing irritation.
She set a narrow-backed chair under the eaves to stand on and began sweeping out the gutters with violent thrusts of the broom, practicing in her mind what she could have, what she should have, said to Thomas. The leaves, erupting with spiders and mice, first exploded in rustling showers, falling to the ground brittle and sharp, like shards of thin glass. Will soon began to scatter the leaves over the newly swept yard, throwing and kicking them into the wind. Martha had only just resolved to chase him away when Will asked, “Who’re ya talkin’ to?” He had come to stand next to the chair and craned his neck to see what lay on the roof. From the look on his face she knew she had been revealing her thoughts aloud.
“I’m talkin’ to the mice,” she said, her irritation firing to red, and with the next jab of the broom she felt the handle break in two. “Now see what you’ve made me do,” she muttered, stepping off the chair. Will retreated quickly backwards, his arms shoved behind him, wide-eyed and frightened, as though he had broken the shaft himself.