“At least any of their dicks’d be stiff enough t’ hit the mark,” she snapped.
Thornton scowled but buried his face in his cup.
Brudloe tapped her arm and said, “Go on.”
“What if I can find someone t’ fill the gap? No need to pay the impress men. I’ll find th’ mark and we’ll split the fifth man’s pay.” She turned to Thornton and said, pointedly, “Equal shares.”
“Blood won’t like it,” Brudloe said.
“Blood won’t know,” Anne answered, looking around the table, each man giving his nod of complicity.
“He always knows,” Cornwall mumbled sadly, eating the last of the damp morsels off the table with his fingers.
As Brudloe signaled for the men to go, she saw that the sleeping man had left his place at the fire, the door just closing on his retreating form. As Baker stood from his stool, he pointed to the rabbit and asked politely, “May I take the rabbit for my wife?” She nodded and he saluted her, his fine hands gently folding the rabbit’s corpse into his cloak.
She locked the door behind them and smiled at her own cleverness. As long as the work at hand was attended to, Blood would never begrudge her initiative. He had sparked to her abilities, and though he could have his pick of any woman, he had chosen her for his special attentions. It wasn’t merely the sweaty business in bed that she was partial to; his parts worked like any man’s. It was the talking he did when they were about it. He would whisper wetly into her ear, “My oyster, my briny-dewed oyster… my careless pearl… my wine-dark abyss,” and other such nonsense. The words stretched out into the long groan of rutting, words which uttered at any other time would have brought laughter from her mouth, but which, at the frantic moment of release, brought violent and thrilling images of falling from a vast height, with nothing but rocks below to catch her.
One brief moment of doubt crossed her thoughts, that he would settle on her harshly for dealing him false; but it was only flickering, soon gone with the rapid pulse of her breath. Blood would be in her room close by, still warm from the long wait by the fire, perhaps yet good-humored that his hired assassins had been so close and yet unaware that he had been seated in the tavern all along. She would trust, due to their greed and their fear in equal parts, that none of the men would reveal their little plan for the fifth man, and though she had grown fond of Georgie, it would be a very small thing to replace one eel boy with another.
CHAPTER 9
THE STRENGTHENING SUN had passed the noonday hour, and already Martha had hung clean shirts and breeches along low-lying bushes, dividing her time between watching the level of the boiling water in the great iron wash pot and spying on Will as he marched up and down the yard, a stick balanced over his shoulder the way he had seen Thomas balancing the long barrel of his flintlock.
The quiet, solitary preparations of the wash had come as a soothing ritual after a frantic morning preparing the house against the plague. They had learned of the outbreak from the Taylors’ nearest neighbor, who shouted out the news from the road, not wanting to come even so close as the yard to prevent contagion. Martha had painted the lintels with vinegar, smoked the rooms with sage, and regardless of the warmer breezes bringing the scent of early iris throughout the house, she had closed all the windows tight to keep any errant winds from bringing ill humors into the house.
She had not spoken more than a dozen words to Thomas since the evening he told of the hound, Gelert, and the meaning of the tale, or lack of it, had rankled her as though she had swallowed a smelt whole, one whose bones had stuck in her belly long after the flesh had melted away. The hot and piercing rage she had felt after the wolf attack had passed away, taking with it the savage dreams; but now, in place of anger she had a restless, almost hostile, curiosity about the Welshman.
She pulled a tiny fragment of cone sugar out of her apron and called to the boy. She smiled at his eagerness to grab at the sweetie and she toyed with him a bit, holding it just out of his grasp before placing it with her own fingers on his tongue.
She pulled him down to sit with her on a patch of drying grasses, the sun hot at their backs, and asked, “What, then, do you know of Thomas?”
He answered, smacking his lips, “Thomas has been all t’ way to London.”
“You mean New London, don’t you, Will?” she asked, giving him a doubtful look.
He boldly reached into her apron, looking for more sugar until she pushed his hands away, shaking her head.
“More,” he demanded, his mouth opening like a baby bird’s.
“Tell me, then,” she said with mock seriousness.
“He was t’ London, old London, and he fought the king, with Cromwell. John told me an’ he hasn’t told you.” He began to squirm, and she knew he would tolerate only a few more questions before he dashed away.
“Want more?” she asked, taking his hands in hers, tethering his restless form a moment longer. “Tell me and you’ll get another pinch of sugar.”
“He’s got a great… a great…” He faltered, his attention captured by a squirrel gnawing at a seed in the garden.
She shook his hands to draw him back. “A great what, Will?”
“A great wooden trunk,” he said, following the squirrel with his eyes. “Next t’ the bed.”
“And what’s inside?”
“A coat. A’ old red coat,” he answered, jerking his hands free, and he ran, brandishing his stick, for the squirrel.
A coat, she thought, disappointed. There was nothing remarkable in that, unless there were other, more telling things inside the trunk. The cone of sugar was almost gone, and she wondered how much more she could extract from the boy before there was none left for so much as a pasty. She pestered him off and on for the remainder of the day, but Will could reveal only the little he had heard and seen with his own eyes: that Thomas had fought against the Old Charles during the English war and that Thomas kept the wooden trunk at all times near the place where he put his head at night. She finally gave up her questioning when he began to look at her as a goose regards a butcher who is standing with a sprig of parsley in one hand and a small ax in the other.
She lay in her bed that night, turning over in her mind the few things that Will had told her, and decided that when morning came, she would question Thomas more directly about his past. Her fingers crept up to the space beneath the pillow and she felt the smooth edges of the red book there. She had not yet been able to tear out the pages as she had intended to do, the pages where she had deposited her troubling thoughts. The book seemed to her to be an integrated, almost animate, thing. It had a spine and a hide and within the coverings were stiff, rustling pages that moved the air about like the wings of a bird. Ripping out the glistening paper would be like plucking the white feathers from a goose while it yet lived. It came to her that she would soon have to hide the book from the prying eyes of others if she could not bring herself to blot out the clandestine words.
At first light, upon the last of the breakfast dishes put away, Martha announced to Patience that she would go to the river for leeks and that Thomas should accompany her.
When Patience raised a brow at her, Martha said, “There may be Indians.”
“God help the Indians,” John mumbled, handing the older man the flintlock.
Martha gathered her shawl around her shoulders, and without looking behind her to see if Thomas followed, she walked purposefully towards the river. When they reached the embankment, Thomas walked ahead of her and she fit her shoes to his footprints, sunk deeply into the soft, loamy soil, up the steeply angled hillock towards the river, which lay in a depression on the other side. Halfway to the crest, he motioned for her to sit on a fallen log and wait. He disappeared quietly over the ridge, moving with caution through the undergrowth, using the barrel of his flintlock to prod his way forward through the tangle of maidenhead ferns.