She sat for an hour or more, sorting through the seeds that would go into the house garden. From time to time she looked up through the window or open door, following John’s progress around the house. He sang snatches of a song, “ ‘For other manly practices she gain’d the love of all, for leaping and for running or wrestling for a fall,’ ” sometimes stopping to swear softly or moan to himself, “Christ, the woman is a tartar.”
When she had finished counting the seeds, she glanced through the window and saw Thomas coming from the barn. He stood looking fixedly at the ground as though the firing pan had fallen off his flintlock. Something about the way he stared prickled the back of her neck.
Leaving her shawl in the house, Martha quickly crossed the yard to the barn, coming to stand behind Thomas, who had knelt down and was examining a late bank of snow worn down to gray, rounded lumps of slush and mud and pocked with deep channels and ridges. When her shadow crossed his path, Thomas stood upright again, suddenly alert, his gaze sweeping across the melting fields and into the surrounding woods. She followed his gaze but could see nothing beyond the bare trees.
He pointed to a marked depression in the mud. There, impressed like a mold into the wasting snow, were four distinct circlets over one larger circlet. Martha bent and spread her closed fist over the print and saw her own hand dwarfed by the size of it.
“Wolves,” Thomas said, looking at her with frank appraisal. “Two of them. It seems John and I will both be in the barn tonight.”
Martha hugged herself tightly with her own arms, shivering slightly in the cool, shaded air. There was no look of satisfaction on her face. Only a deepening crease between her brows, and lips that were open and moist, like a child’s mouth caught at the moment of surprise.
LATE AFTER DARK, Martha kept vigil by the window, listening for the howling or yipping that was not from a fox or badger. She sighed, remembering her last worded exchange with her cousin. Patience, ill and fretful, wanting only to escape to her bed, had become overwrought and cried uncontrollably when Martha pressed her to take greater charge of the men, especially now that wolves had come prowling to feed at their door. Clapping her hands over her ears, Patience had cried, “Do what you will, only leave me be.”
Rushing for the comfort of her bed, she had tripped over a stool, and when Martha rose to catch her, Patience waved her away and ran to her room, breathing bubbles of snot from her nose like an infant. Later, when Martha brought her a strained broth, Patience grabbed her hand and, holding it to her belly, wailed, “I am afraid of this birthing.” She began to cry miserably and Martha stayed with her for a while, smoothing her hair and whispering reassurances that she herself did not feel, until her cousin had fallen into a heavy sleep.
In a year’s time, Martha thought, shifting her weight to peer out the window again, Patience would be delivered of another child, with a husband and a home. Even Thomas and John Levistone would, next spring, have land on which to build. Earlier that evening Patience had corrected Martha’s mistaken belief that the men were indentured for the accustomed term of seven years; Thomas and John had in fact been hired by Daniel to work for three years in trade for prime land owned by the Taylors on the Concord. They had one more year of laboring on another’s land, and then they would have their own.
And what would she gain with her own sweat? Even the room in which she slept would have to be shared with Joanna and Will once the babe was born. And once Patience had recovered her strength and Daniel had returned, she would most likely be sent home. An unmarried woman too long in a strange household of men was a challenge to virtue, a carnal distraction not to be borne.
Well, then, she thought, spring would bring open roads, and if she had exhausted her chances for a husband in Andover, perhaps the market or meetinghouse in Billerica would bring more success. Tomorrow would be the first of April, a day of hopeful warming, and she would begin the cleaning in earnest. She would open all the doors and with sand and ashes and birch rods both dirt and despondency would be swept away with the old season as proof of renewal for the new. Perhaps, she thought, her mouth twisting into a grim smile, some journeyman, still damp from the crossing, would stumble upon their threshold and see some coveted quality beneath the gritty sweat over her lip, and the stains through her bodice, and say to himself, “Here is a woman to wife.”
And thus would things be decided; for, Christ knew, the man who had a mind to marry her would not sit and talk to her about it. He would know that at her advanced years, if she had had a choice for husband, she would already have come to the marriage bed. It would be taken as a matter of course that the set of her back and the knitting together of her brows signaled the Work of Ages. It would be taken for granted that she did not have a thought or a wish for herself apart from carrying a man’s seed in her belly.
“And if I hardly dare speak to myself of other hopes,” she whispered, “how can I speak of them to another?”
She regarded for a minute more the ebbing light on the walls, and when the candle at last extinguished itself, she felt her way to her bed in the dark.
CHAPTER 2
London, England, March 1673
THE ANTEROOM OUTSIDE the king’s chambers was cold and the braziers set out to take the chill from the air were ineffective, except to further smog the air with some musklike perfume meant to cover the evil smells pooling in the darkened corners. Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, rubbed at the black plaster covering the scar at the bridge of his nose and tried to keep his breathing from sounding ill-tempered. He knew for a fact that only a few nights before, the Duke of Buckingham had, in a drunken stupor, pissed in the corner. He knew it because he had seen it with his own eyes. The stain still marked the walls like a waterfall in miniature.
It had been close to an hour that he had waited on the king after being urgently summoned, and he resisted the temptation to sit in the one lone chair that had been placed there originally for Clarendon’s use. Since the old man’s banishment, no one had risked sitting in it for fear that the ex-chancellor’s bad fortune would rub its way into the sitter’s buttocks, clinging there like a painful boil.
He watched William Chiffinch standing patiently by the door like an old hound, and when the man looked in his direction, Bennet decorously gestured with one hand and smiled politely.
Yes, I’m still here, you old satyr, Bennet thought, setting his face to a courteous mask. Bennet had his own private entry from his quarters to the king’s, but the sovereign of all England had been in a rare mood of genuine anger and had made it known that the only person he would be closeted with for the afternoon was his twenty-four-year-old French mistress, Louise de Keroualle. To be alone with one of his court favorites was Charles II’s preferred manner of releasing tension, and the length of the assignation gave testament to his towering rage after leaving Parliament that morning.
Bennet took from his pocket a small jeweled case filled with snuff and allowed himself a modest pinch, bringing to his nose a lace handkerchief given to him by his own mistress, a Spanish lady who was not young but was very supple, and still very grateful to be kept. At fifty-five the earl knew that gratitude, combined with experience, brought a certain exquisite frisson to the bedroom, not yet the desperation of a matron in her declining middle years, but more the ardent willingness of a ripening woman to please. With the certain knowledge of decay comes true passion, he mused. It trumped the demands of youthful entitlement and inexperience in matters of sex every time.