Martha slipped into the common room, where the cauldron had begun to boil at the hearth. She picked up the chair, overturned by John’s hasty departure, to set it right and carefully laid into the churning water the meat and herbs to make the broth for her sister. She could hear John in the yard, first laughing, then swearing, then retching. She hoped Roger’s physic would work so that John would be well enough for work in the morning. As it was, she would most likely be listening to John’s groaning the whole day over his thick head and watery bowels.
She flung open the front door and loudly shushed the men, and then pointed them to the barn, scolding, “If you wake my sister, I’ll purge the both of you till you’re as dry as Lot’s wife.”
She closed the door and returned to stab at the sluggish fire in the hearth, thinking that a man’s storytelling was like a madwoman’s embroidery, plied repeatedly in careful rows that, by themselves, knot by knot, could be neat and pleasing, but that taken together made a larger grotesque image of mayhem, becoming more monstrous with every reworking.
But she knew that women, as well as men, had their own history of blood-letting, their own lust for conflict. In some moments of dire threat, she had desired to run screaming towards the danger, brandishing a knife, with her hair on fire. She had listened, rapt, to John’s every rendering of the battle and felt no aversion to the descriptions of carnage, or of the tall soldier of Edgehill, rather, only a taut, vibrant anticipation.
She felt a presence at her back and looked around to see Allen standing at the bedroom door, frowning, his brows knitted together like two geese in a fog. She smiled at him but he turned back into the room and soon she heard Mary calling for her.
THE DAY WAS too hot for Patience to stand over the huge washing pot. The rain had vanished, leaving clouds at the top of the sky, crimped and mottled like the underbelly of a sea turtle. There was no breeze, and dampness hung in the air like in late summer even though it was still May. Martha wiped at the sweat around her collar and lifted, with both hands, a weighted pile of boiled linen with the paddle. Not satisfied, she dropped the clothes back into the water and stood back from the heat.
She heard Joanna singing to herself as she sat, bare-bottomed, on a bucket, her apron and skirt tied up around her middle. The child had resisted all efforts to stop wetting herself, demanding to still wear clouts, and Martha was intent on breaking her of the practice before the new babe came. Martha had warned Joanna not to stand from the bucket until she had passed her water into it. She called encouragingly to the girl, but Joanna crossed her arms and looked away. Martha turned to hide a smile; the child had taken to imitating her habit of crossing her arms, and it brought no end of laughter from Daniel.
She held the stirring paddle out in front of her chest. It was about five feet in length, almost as tall as she. John’s battling giant of Edgehill had wielded a pike of twenty feet, or so he had said, making the pike four times as long, and four times as heavy, as the paddle. She tucked it under one arm and held it aloft like a spear. With a sharpened point at the end it could pierce the breast of any oncoming beast, but not clear through to the rider.
She looked around for a longer stick and left the pot boiling to search for branches in the stand of elm at the edge of the yard. A slender sapling had fallen with a storm and with some effort she snapped the lower part from the roots and stripped it clean. After grasping the heavier end, and cradling it beneath her arm, she raised the far end, quivering, holding it chest-high to a horse. Any charging animal would have propelled her backwards and trampled her underfoot, and she wondered what advantage the weapon would be to the men behind the advance guard, crushed beneath the recoiling pikemen.
“That’s no way to hold a pike, missus.”
She dropped the sapling and whirled around to find Thomas standing in the yard. He walked to where the discarded tree branch lay and picked it up, bending slowly at the waist, his long arms grasping the wood with a practiced grip. “You’d lose an arm with the first charge.”
He walked closer to her, standing within an arm’s breadth, and said, “First position. You must plant it between your legs and hold it thus.” He motioned for Martha to take hold of the pike at breast level, enclosing her hands in his own, pressing her fingers warmly into the wood. He reached forward with his boot to tap lightly at the instep of her right foot, saying, “Second position.” He tapped at her instep again. “Wider. You must stand wider or your knees will buckle.”
He let go of her hands and moved to stand behind her.
“Third position,” he said. “Lower the tip. Lower still, till your arms are straight. Now, brace the end against your right instep and step forward with your left. More forward still. And now you’re in fourth position. And now you wait.”
She tensed, her knees locked and cracking in the awkward stance, imagining his breath at her neck and his hands coming to rest at her shoulder or arm, but he did not touch her. Rather, he continued to stand behind until the rhythmic sounds of his exhalations became matched with her own.
Moments passed and she stretched her neck against the weight of the sapling. She finally asked, “For what do we wait?”
“Might be anything, missus. It could be a press of men on foot with muskets and pike. Or a charge of men on horse. Or”—he paused, and without seeing his face, she thought he smiled—“a swamp of woodland harpies.”
She laughed and shifted the weight of wood in her aching hands and felt the sharp stick of a splinter in her palm. She dropped the sapling, bringing the hand up into her mouth, the nib of the splinter scraping against her tongue, and turned to face him. He reached out, clasping her around the wrist, and lifted her palm higher to see the wound. With his other hand, he lifted the skinning knife that he always carried at his side, the knife he had sharpened evening upon evening, and solemnly passed the small edge of the blade across an inch of her palm. It separated the flesh easily, with little pain, and with the tip of the knife, he flicked out the splinter of wood. Blood sprang up through the wound, and he watched it pooling in her palm before pressing her palm to his chest, letting her blood spread on the linen of his shirt like a bloom.
“You told me before… that I’m not Gelert, the hound,” she said, breathing in once and looking up at his face. “Then I must be the infant prince, knocked from his cradle and set upon by wolves.”
He inclined his head to her and said, “No.” He smiled and inclined further until he felt the slightest stiffening clench of her hand and he carefully dropped his arm back to his side. Her hand, of its own accord, stayed poised on his chest for the briefest of moments before the wail of a child floated across the yard.
“Oh, Joanna!” she cried, and even louder, “Oh, the wash!” Remembering the clothes, in all likelihood boiling to cinders in the pot, she turned quickly and raced away. She did not dare look for Thomas again until she was certain he had left the yard to tend to his traps. Only then did she bring her hand to her mouth, sucking at the wound where the splinter had been, tasting salt and the faint rust of metal.
IT WAS THE last of the month before Martha found the courage to see for herself the great oak chest that sat by Thomas’s bed. She had waited until the men had gone out hunting, Daniel tagging along with them, eager as a boy, overstepping the tall grasses with the bobbing knees of a startled deer. Patience had lain down to sleep after the morning meal, her belly growing ever heavier, and the children Martha had sent out of doors, each holding a bit of a sugar teat.
The men’s room was deeply shadowed and dank, but she left the lantern unlit, fearful the children would see the light through a crack in the wall and come to question it. She stood at the door, poised to turn back, but the house was silent and there might not be another opportunity for a long while. John’s pallet lay closest to the door and she stumbled over it as she guided her hands along the timbers. She balanced herself and waited, adjusting her eyes to the dark, until she could make out the other objects scattered about the room: a once fine, heavy rug thrown carelessly across the boards, a shirt, some bit of toweling. Against the far wall was Thomas’s bed, two rope frames with a straw mattress laid end to end, and at its foot rested the chest, the wood mottled dark either from the stain of rainwater through the roof, or perhaps salt water from the passage to the colonies.