She crossed the few steps to the chest and knelt in front of it, spanning her arms across the metal bracing. Surprisingly, there was no lock on the clasp, and she pulled her hands back quickly into her lap. She had thought merely to explore the outside of the chest, never imagining it wouldn’t be locked. What of worth, or even intrigue, she thought, could be in an unlocked chest in a home with restless women and prying children. She frowned and leaned forward to stand, resting her two palms on the split seams of the lid.
In that moment, something of weight shifted below the floorboards. It was not the rattle of footfalls on the cellar stairs or the snick of a latch on a door. The disturbance was not even a thing she had perceived with her ears alone. It was more a vibration, passed through the shoe leather into the balls of her feet. She sank slowly back onto her heels, her hands still resting on the top of the chest, waiting for the movement to come again. But the house was quiet. From a distance, Martha could hear Will’s voice taunting Joanna to chase him through the garden, but there had been no creaking bedposts from Patience waking, nor any peevish summoning from her cousin for water and salted bread. A moment passed and there was nothing further to give alarm. Whatever had made the noise had departed; only the growing agitation of being discovered remained, along with an unbearable curiosity.
Without a conscious thought, she unhinged the clasp and heaved up the heavy lid. She had not meant to open the chest when she first entered the room and would have abandoned the action if the covering had resisted, but the hinges were well oiled and the lid was raised to its full open position against the chains without a sound.
The deep well of the chest at first appeared empty. With a breath, she reached down into it and pulled out, bunched in her hand, a pair of breeches and a shirt, both worn and familiar; she had scrubbed them often enough with the rest of the household wash. These she laid aside and reached her hand more deeply into the recess. Her hand touched something of cold metal and she pulled into the light a long, pitted dirk. The head was plaited into a design of serpents coiled together, the edges stained and ragged from years of disuse. It balanced in her open palm like a slender scale and she gripped the hilt, notched cunningly for grasping fingers. She set this aside, laying it carefully on top of the shirt, and reached once more to the bottom of the chest.
Her hand nestled into something heavy and woolen and she pulled free a long coat of faded red with facings of blue at the collar and cuffs. She stood and held it widely in both hands to see the whole of it. Its seams were ragged, the sleeves patched and mended many times, but the wool was as fine and tightly woven as she had ever seen, the color at the folds still resolutely scarlet. She brought one sleeve up to her face and smelled the heavy scent of aged oak.
A pale bit of falling paper caught the light, and she saw at her feet a tightly rolled bit of parchment, wrapped in stiff oiled yarn. Realizing it must have fallen from the other, dangling sleeve of the coat, she bent over to pick it up, and as she lifted the scroll from the floor, a flattened piece of wood, about as long and half as wide as her forefinger, fell out of it.
Draping the coat over the lip of the chest, she regarded the slender piece, trying to place what it might be. Too small and fragile to be a dowel of any useful sort, it was too large to be a needle. Perhaps it was a gaming piece, she thought, and reached her hand forward to examine it more closely. As her fingers grazed the wood, she froze. Her fingers curled reflexively away and she quickly stood again, her clenched hands crossed defensively over her chest. An aversion as strong as anything she had ever felt unfurled its way down her spine and she stepped back, knocking into the chest. She imagined fully and vividly, had she touched the wooden piece with her bare flesh, it would have brought fresh blood from the wound in her hand, the wound Thomas had opened with his knife to remove the splinter; first seeping, then pulsing, then gushing like a town pump. She saw, in her mind’s eye, the red bloom on Thomas’s shirt, the stain from the cut in her hand, spreading over his breast until it fell in torrential droplets to the ground, the linen too saturated to absorb the blood more fully into its fibers.
In her alarm, she had dropped the scroll, and she hastily retrieved it from the floor. Wrapping her hand tightly in the hem of her skirt, she raked up the wooden piece and dropped it back into the parchment. The scroll was slipped into the arm of the coat, and then, carefully, she repacked all of the things she had removed from the chest. The lid was securely closed, the clasp fastened, and Martha stepped from the men’s room, rigid and blinking.
The children had moved to the far end of the garden, and she could hear their voices as wavering patterns of sound as though they ran chanting, weaving in and out of the planted rows. Patience still slept; there was no movement or stirring from her bedroom. Martha sat at the table, staring at nothing, her breathing evenly paced. But as she had done with her tongue, running the tip of it over the ragged splinter in her hand, her thoughts pulled against the memory of the small wooden piece, no larger, or seemingly more significant, than any sliver of wood carved by man, smoothed by handling and subject to the laws of time and use. She listened intently for any shifting sound coming from under the floorboards, but the space below her feet was voiceless.
CHAPTER 12
EDWARD THORNTON, HIS gathered lace nightshirt soaked through with acrid sweat, shifted his swollen legs more comfortably on the bed, and began the letter to his mother.
Dearest Madame,
I cannot say for truth that you will be glad of receiving this letter, sent to you from Boston Harbor; whether for news that I am yet alive, as of this, the 8thday of May, or gladder still for the knowledge that I have, by the time you read these words, passed out of this world altogether. It cannot give you much comfort either of ways, as I have been the source of most, if not all, of your misery and distress these four and twenty years.
His fingers, made awkward by the poison, lost their grip on the quill, and it dropped onto the parchment. Even if his mother agreed to the reading of the letter, he wasn’t sure the words he had so painstakingly written could be deciphered, so great was the pain in his hands. A cup of water had been placed on the mantel opposite the bed and he desperately wished for a drink but did not have the strength to cross the floor. The head pains that had plagued him for so many weeks had taken on the quality of heated nails pushed slowly through his skull. He closed his eyes and rested for a moment, listening to the cacophony from the streets.
When first arriving in Boston with Brudloe and Cornwall, he had often come to this garret to visit with Verity, a maid to his innkeeper, Mrs. Parker. Verity had caught his eye within the first few days in port. A lovely girl of sixteen, with pale skin and dark wavelets of auburn, she soon, with only a token struggle, became his frequent mistress. She would not take coin from him like some common whore, but she seemed to delight in little gifts bought from the streets: ribbons, a peacock feather, a pair of earrings made of cut glass.