Martha stood at the door watching Asa Rogers ride away, his coat and collar stark and correct, black and white as a deacon’s. But his assessing, avaricious glances at the Taylor barn and fields put her more in mind of a crow studying the latch of a corn crib. Her mother while midwiving, at the sight of a noisy flock, used to say, “One crow for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, and four for a boy.” But the crow, as well as a prophesying bird, was also a ravaging thief, spiteful and destructive when thwarted.
When Thomas returned that evening, they sat together in the yard away from the prying eyes of the house. She told him of Asa Rogers’s visit and his extravagant offer to buy the land. Thomas ducked his chin and chewed thoughtfully on a blade of grass but said nothing for a time. A woolly bear caterpillar, reddish brown, tipped with black, bristled past her feet and she watched its slow progress. It was the first one she had seen that summer and was surprised at its early emergence.
“We had such in England,” Thomas said, as he prodded it with the toe of his boot, making it curl into a defensive ball. “But there we called it fox moth. He tells of an early winter.”
Martha nodded, tenting her apron over her knees. “The winters in England cannot have been colder than this place.” She turned her head, studying his profile and the downturned corners of his mouth.
“Aye, the winters here are cruel, to be sure. But the north of England…” He paused, looking up at the stars emerging from the east. “There is no greater cold than wind that blows south from the Scottish moors.” He lay back on his elbows, tracking a streaking light crossing Polaris into the northern horizon. “One winter, durin’ the war, the greatest river in Scotland froze hard enough for twenty thousand clansmen to cross over and fight with Parliament. They were the hardest men I’ve ever seen and yet near a quarter of them froze to death. I lived only by crawlin’ inside the bodies of the horses I killed for food.”
“Will we be taking up house in the milk cow, then?” she asked, meaning to make him smile, but he looked at her starkly, his eyes receding into shadow below the prominent ridge of his brow.
He reached across and, picking up her hand, worked it carefully between his two palms like clay. “Martha, I’m a hard one to put down. And you must know that if it comes to it, I will do what needs be done to protect those dear to me.”
Martha had seen enough of his strength to know the truth of it. She had envisioned, at times in a kind of fever-dream, his abilities on a battlefield, and yet how long would brute force last against a warrant of arrest served by a party of constable’s men? What hadn’t been said between them was that, in marrying him, she put him at risk of being captured. She would dull his wits with her domesticity, with her belly full of child, and he for loving her would never desert her; of that she was sure.
If only all armed conflict could be decided instead by scything a field of timothy grass. Then, she thought, every townsman could return to a whole roof and a waist full of game pie, their champions lying over the windrows of wild weeds and thistles on summer-mown earth, not in tormented death but in comfortable exhaustion. But men, being what they are, could never take the excise of battle without tearing apart the land, pulling the sky and its curtain of stars in afterwards.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me everything and then we’ll bury Thomas Morgan so that Thomas Carrier can live.”
CHAPTER 18
From Martha’s Diary: Begun Thursday, August 28th, 1673
These, then, are the words of Thomas Morgan Carrier, known as the Welshman, who places in my hands through faith and through trust the whole of his story; inscribed by my hand alone through his remembrances. Committed in secret from the eyes of men and the tongues of women and hidden from the knowledge of the teller himself, I will commence to make a true record of these happenings.
I were born in Carmarthenshire during the cruel winter of sixteen and twenty-six. My father while crossing a crook of the River Towy heard the Hag of Warning, Goorach uh Hribun, shriek out from down under the ice and snow, “My wife. Oh, my wife,” and by this he kenned that my mother, who labored even then to birth me, would die. Runted and puny, I had no name until I were past four months old and the ground could be dug up to bury my mother’s body. The earth where I first placed my feet to walk was savage hard and rocky with scarce enough topsoil to fill the hand. But Father was canny and carried inland from the shores of Llandach sea sand mixed with lime and dung. From this he grew barley and oats for his sons and daughters, and fodder for his cows. We bartered our sheep and milk cattle in the lowland fairs for corn and wool culled from the beasts of Tremain. And the Welsh cotton my sisters made of it could have floated a man in the Cardigan Bay, so tight was it woven. The old house, or hendre as it is even now called, was small but cunning-built. And a harp sat in the window, though none of us could play it but our mother, for it was said that a Welshman without a harp had no soul.
The winters through we huddled nightly over the smoking peat and daily whipped the cattle against a frozen sleep. But when spring came, my brother and I would run to the southern pastures and rest in the hafod, the summerhouse of loose rock and thatch. There we would stay until the frosts came again, chasing the wolves from the calves and chasing each other through the hills above Llangadok. I grew to a man swallowing the dust from my brother’s feet, for though I stood hands above him, I could never best him in a race. And so we lived our days until my brother died, his heart giving out at the end of a great race between Carmarthen and Kidwelly, a distance of ten miles and more. I was but fourteen, and into that graveyard furrow my keenness for life was also buried, dropping away like sunlight into a well.
I lived that winter through doing as my father willed until the March thaw, when he gave me a bundle of woolens to take to Swansea for tin. I walked two days and a night through fog and a tearing wind but didn’t so much as raise my collar against the rain, so low was I. There is a legend in Cymry, which is what the Welsh call their land, of a monster called the Afang which likes the taste of flesh better than cake. It lives in the bogs and lowlands, swallowing up man and cattle alike, and with the flesh, it devours the essence of its prey. So, too, it seemed to me, following down the River Truch to the sea, that to stay in my father’s house would be my soul’s end.
When the bale of woolens was boarded onto a merchant ship, I boarded with it, and paid for my passage with the woolens and with strokes of tar and sandstone upon the deck. The three-master was filled with coal and iron bound for Caernarvon and hugged the coast around St. David’s Head to New Port and Cardigan, banking the Irish Sea. I slept every night upon the deck because the beams below could not contain my height. But the biting cold up top was nothing compared to the stench of rotting wool over the pale and wormy seamen resting in the holds below. For a day and a night we spied an Irish galley with thirty oars and a square-rigged sail. It was a shallow-draughted pirating ship out of Dublin only seventy sea miles westward and would have overtaken us had a gale not sprung up.
We rounded Badesey Isle in a storm that howled like the dogs of Hell with waves that breached the topmost timbers. Men were blown from the decks and floated like corks in a monstrous vat of ale. On the third day the skies parted and I saw like a crouching giant the gray walls of the Castle Caernarvon.