Will succumbed during the night. Martha knew the exact moment of death, even as she sat at the common room table, locked out of the sickroom. Patience had begun a low, muffled moaning, as though she had buried her face in the bedclothes, repeating “no, no, no,” over and over. Her voice soon rose in pitch to a shrill keening that went on until Daniel, driven from the barn by her screaming, threatened to take the door off its frame. When Patience unlatched the door, she collapsed at his feet, and Martha staggered to her own bed. She thought sleep would come, exhausted as she was, but she found the porcupine on the pillow that Joanna had left behind, the toy that Will had so gleefully tried to dismantle, and she wept, tearing at her pillow.
At dawn, wrapped in a quilt, Will was taken for burial. Daniel drove the wagon, Patience walking behind him like a penitent. She would not look at Martha and angrily pulled away when Martha reached out to touch her shoulder. After the wagon had pulled out of sight, Martha stood gazing at the pale crimped clouds and the arrow-shaped flock of birds surging south, like the wake from the prow of a great ship, and felt a desire to settle into the ground, resting there for the whole of winter, blanketed by the weight of snow. For the first time in days, fearful thoughts of the bounty men surged in her head, mixing with her grief like a noxious poison.
As she stood in the yard, she felt Thomas’s presence, and before his arms could enfold her, she had begun an open-mouthed, anguished sobbing, threads of saliva mixing with tears on her chin. She had shed tears the night before, the bereft and insistent weeping of loss. Now was the futile cry of the wet nurse, breasts still swollen and leaking milk, who had tended and night-watched the dead child of her heart; the wail of the stepmother, the caretaker, whose own cries must not be heard above the din of the helpless parents.
He took her arm and led her stumbling and blind onto the path to the river. They climbed slowly up and over the embankment, their clothes soaked with the heavy dew on leaves of ferns clotting the rise, until Thomas finally settled her on the fronds at the water’s edge. They sat close together and for a while Martha wiped at her face with her apron, soon wet through with her tears, and followed aimlessly the course of eddies and shallow pools not yet filled with autumn rains.
“I told you I had a wife in England,” Thomas began. He had turned to face her, bringing his arm tentatively around her shoulder. “But I had a son as well. He died along with his mother.”
She looked at him, surprised, astonished, and yet she wondered why she had never considered it before. He had been married for years, why would he not have had a child? But the news in that moment had also made her feel defeated and added to her sense of loss. She turned her head, biting her lip, afraid of sobbing uncontrollably again. He lowered his arm and she saw that she had wounded him with her moving away. She drew herself closer, sliding her arms tightly around his ribs, burying her head against his chest. She breathed in the smells of musk and old wood fires and folded her legs next to the long bones of his thighs.
After a while he spoke, and listening to his words within the concavity of his chest was, to Martha, like hearing a mine shaft closing in on itself.
“I had fought for seven years as a soldier for Cromwell, killing my own countrymen; killing a man who had been king. I thought I’d seen every base thing a man could do to another. But in this I was wrong. I was sent by Cromwell to Ireland to help crush the Catholic rebels. Those that threw down their weapons were murdered along with the ones who refused to surrender. The resisting were burned alive in their churches; priests spitted like spring lambs in the marketplace, women raped while lying over the bodies of their children, babes dashed to the stones.”
She stirred against his ribs as though in protest but he quieted her, shushing her like an infant, and went on.
“I was sent out to a settlement hard by a town called Drogheda to clear out the miserable hovels there. Not even proper houses but caves dug into hillsides covered over with daub and thatch. From the last hovel a man, wearing no more than a linen shift and felt-tied boots, reared himself from his nest, slashing at my arm with an old clannish dirk. I’d never seen a man so wild in his attack. I killed the man but kept to this day his dirk to remember that a man is most savage when fighting for his home.
“It was then I heard a child’s wail coming from inside the cavern. There was no door, but a sheep’s hide covering it. I crawled into a chamber, smoked and reeking of death, and spied a small boy, no more than four years old, clinging to the body of his mother. She had cut her own throat rather than be taken by us.
“I have seen harried deer with less fright than was there in that boy’s eyes. I sheathed my sword and held out my hand to him. He bared his teeth at me, for he had been told by the Irish priests that the English would eat him. The boy believed I’d tear the flesh from his bones for my supper, and he took the knife with his mother’s blood still warm on it, and brandished it at me.
“For an hour or more I spoke to him, of cattle and fields and harvesting grain. And even though I did not speak his Irish tongue, my own good Welsh is drawn from the same well. I told him of my brother, gone from the earth. I told him of my own son just his age, and after a time he crept towards me and fell onto the bread I had offered. When I left the hovel, he followed after.
“From that day forward I thought I was done with killing, and when my wound grew rank and would not close, I was mustered out and sailed for England with others whose limbs could not fester, for they had been hacked off, by Irish rebels or English surgeons. I did not learn of my family’s death till I returned to London. They had been dead near three months.”
He paused, inhaling deeply as though the air had thinned, settling his chin more heavily on the crown of her head. His fingers dug into her, and she held her own breath, willing herself not to flinch under his hands so that he would go on.
“My wife, Palestine…” His voice thickened for a moment. “My wife died for a man named Lilburne, leader of the Leveller cause, put in the Tower for preaching the rights of men. Petitioning for his release, she challenged Cromwell himself in front of the Hall of Commons. She caught his cloak, calling him to task for killing the king and jailing people of goodwill. Can you imagine it? A man who was like a king himself, called to task by a girl. There was not a man living who dared put hands on the Protector, but my wife dared. By Christ she did.” A brief exhalation of air, coarser than a laugh and more prideful, passed through his lips. She felt a lightning stab of something close to jealousy but willed it gone before he could feel it through the crown of her head like a fever.
“It was Cromwell’s men who jailed them, taking my wife and son to the Tower. The bastards had waited till I was shipped for Ireland. They meant only to frighten her, to stop her from calling Cromwell to task for becoming a tyrant himself, but the Black Dog had come breathing contagion, and she and the boy died in the filth of their cell.”
She tried to push herself away out of the hollow of his arms so that she could see his face, but he held her tightly to his chest. Her forehead rested against his neck and she could feel the working tendons and muscles of his throat constricting, his jaw hinging wordlessly up and down, up and down, as though testing the air for further grief. She reached up and felt the slick of tears in the hollow of his cheek. Placing the flat of her palm over one eye, she gently stroked with her fingers the place where the scar on his brow lay, and waited for him to speak.