She met his eyes and asked, “What could I possibly have to hide? I’ve never been anywhere, I’ve never seen anything.” A note of bitterness had crept into her voice and she tamped it down lest he think her shrewish. His hand, still coated in a fine membrane of oil, crept over her own, the calluses rasping and unyielding across her skin; but there was no proprietary feel to the touch, and he didn’t move his body closer to hers as a preamble to some coarser action, and there were no whispered words as a ploy to reach and grab.
“And the women of London. Were they lovely?” She regretted her question as soon as she asked it and waited for him to deride it as vanity, most certainly what the Reverend Hastings would have done.
There was a slow shifting of weight as though he was considering the best way to answer. “In London,” he began, “just before the Great War, fishwives and housewives stood cheek by jowl with great ladies. You could see the mayor’s wife pulling up her skirts against the muck like any oysteress. You smile, missus, but it’s the truth. During the days before the war, the women of that time were infected with the same fever as their men, and they matched them brick for brick in building the ramparts to shield the city against the king and his army. It was a fever we held on to because to cure it meant to wake again to tyranny. You ask what makes a woman comely?” He tapped one finger lightly against her temple and said, “Thoughts, missus. It’s thoughts that make a woman so.”
She had opened her mouth to speak when John shuffled noisily into the barn, calling out, “Missus, there’s a journeyman come for you. With a letter.” John had turned away slightly, and she colored to think he had come upon them having a conversation which had moved beyond the health of the livestock. She quickly buried her chin in her shoulder, hiding her expression, until John had left again. Slipping her hand free, she moved away reluctantly, saying, “You know a lot, for a farmer.”
As she passed him, Thomas’s head tilted back, eyes narrowing as though to focus better on something wavering and indistinct, and he countered, “Enough to know you’ll never be settled with some parson.”
As she stepped from the barn, she shook the folds of her skirt into order, all too aware that anyone seeing her then would think her a wanton emerging from a toss in the hay: bothered, flustered, her backside covered in straw. But she found the entire household gathered around the journeyman already being fed at her cousin’s table, a man so thin his shanks would have whistled in a high wind. He wiped his hand on his trousers and, handing her a folded piece of parchment, went back to stuffing his mouth with the remnants of cold porridge left over from breakfast.
Martha quickly opened the letter, written on the back of a fragment of a pamphlet from Boston trumpeting the arrival of ships from England, anticipating some homely bit of news about the Toothaker settlement ten miles to the north. She sensed Patience move up close to her and felt a flash of irritation that her cousin would seek to rob her of solitary discovery of news from her sister. The letter, in Mary’s hand, was brief; she had lost the pregnancy in her seventh month and was much taken down through the disappointment of her husband, Roger. She had written simply, “Please come.”
“Disappointment of her husband,” Martha muttered resentfully, remembering bitterly how ill her sister had been at the previous miscarriage. From the first she had laid eyes on her brother-in-law, she had always believed him to be a husband by convenience, and a father by accident. Her hand holding the letter had no sooner dropped to her side in a shared sense of grief than Patience asked, with alarm, “What’s amiss? Has anyone died?”
“Mary has lost her babe,” she answered and saw Patience grab instinctively at her belly. “And her son, Allen, is ill. I must go straightaway.”
The journeyman, finished with his meal, shook his head vigorously, saying, “Large bands of Wabanakis have been seen moving through the forests ’cross town. There’s no doubt they be on the path to malice. Stay armed and stay sheltered. I myself am staying in the next settlement until they have moved on.”
Patience grabbed at her husband’s arm, pleading, “Daniel, let John take Martha. We need Thomas here. To help protect us and the children.” Joanna, catching the near-hysterical tone in her mother’s voice, began to cry, and Martha picked her up, smoothing her hair out of her face.
With all eyes turned expectantly to him, Daniel looked unseated, thrust so quickly into making a decision beyond what to bring from the cellar. Blinking rapidly, he said, “Very well, but you must wait a few days, Martha, maybe a week, until we know the road to your sister’s home is not the road to disaster.” When Martha opened her mouth to protest, Daniel gathered himself up, saying, “Now, that’s enough. I… that is, we have decided.” He turned hopefully to his wife, and when she nodded encouragingly to him, he added, signaling an end to the conversation, “Am I not master of this house?”
The journeyman hurriedly left and the settlement became a fortress. Shutters were closed and nailed into casements. Doors were heavily cross-barred with oak, and vigilant watches were kept by the men by day and by night. The women placed buckets of sand and water under the eaves to put out fires set on the roof and the children were kept indoors at all times. The ample supplies brought by Daniel replenished the fearful watches and, as the week diminished, so, too, did the keg of strong ale, sipped sparingly but steadily to counter nerves brought to a fiery temper through waiting.
On the fourth day after the journeyman had left, a “hallo” from the yard showed a mounted constable come to spread the word that the Indians had moved on. But with them they had taken cattle, horses, and a young girl named Elizabeth Farley. A child eleven years old, she had gone out to empty the morning slops, and when she did not soon return, her mother found many footprints leading westward towards the Concord River. Townsmen followed the trail but lost it in fording the river and so had to give up the search. A day after the doors and windows had been thrown open again to the spring winds, Martha and Patience went to Goodwife Farley with food, to sit with the recently widowed woman, childless, alone and grieving, a mantle of ashes in her hair scraped from the cold remains of her kitchen hearth.
THE DREAM HAD left Martha terrified and shaken, with a sensation of suffocating, of drowning in mountainous, overwhelming drifts of feathers. Upon waking, she jerked herself upright to sitting, knees bent with hands clenched tightly over her stomach, and stifled a cry. Joanna moved restlessly next to her and she felt her way in the dark to the end of the bed, crouching on the floor, her hands over her open mouth.
It was the Reverend Hastings’s visit the night before, she believed, that had sharpened the memories of that other black-frocked man she had not seen in over ten years. The Taylors’ supper had not gone well and it was close to a certainty that the reverend would never again come to call at her cousin’s with a mind to wooing. From the beginning, Reverend Hastings had shown himself to be exactly as she had imagined him to be, judging the quick and the dead with harsh alacrity. He had quoted Ephesians to her when she had proven herself to be insufficiently humble on the subject of marriage: “So man is to God, so must woman be to man.” To which she had retorted sharply, “And does not Colossians say, ‘See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy’?” The table had sat in uncomfortable silence until the reverend said, in barely repressed anger, “The contract of marriage is God-ordained and is like any other necessary, required, and enforceable contract…”