“I broke the back of the jailer who had locked my family away, and spent a month in Newgate Prison. From my cell, I heard the outcry of men and women, confined and tortured, attesting to the thing Cromwell had become: a man of treachery who schemed to claim kingship in all but name.
“The Protector himself paid for my release, but I took off the red coat of my rank then and put it in a wooden chest. The Irish dirk, the wooden stake that committed me to being an executioner, and even a parchment note written in Cromwell’s own hand were all put away from the prying eyes of men. I took up shop on Fetter Lane as an ironsmith and never again saw the living Cromwell.”
He pulled away, encircling her face with his two hands, tracing with his thumbs the swollen lids beneath her eyes. She met his gaze reluctantly, thinking of the time she had plundered the great oaken chest. But she now had a history for everything inside it: the faded red coat, the curious dirk, and the rolled parchment, within which the little wooden stake had been wrapped. She shivered, suddenly cold.
He said, “I yet think on my son as he could have been, were he to have lived. He was tall for a boy and had his mother’s love for music. But he is gone from me forever, and though I grieve for him, I cannot wish myself to be in that place where he is. Not yet, not yet.” He clasped the back of her neck and brought his forehead to rest against hers. “Children may die, Martha, as will we all. No one knows when that end-time may be. But for this day, we live. So bide with me. Bide with me and take from me what you can, as I will from you. And however long it is that we walk this earth, we can stand for one another and leave off grieving until one of us is gone. I’ll not ask you to be mine, for you were mine at the moment my eyes opened to you, fuming and roaring into the mouth of a wolf. I will never seek to blunt the fury in you, never, and will honor your will as my own. What say you? Can you be a soldier’s wife?”
She looked at him wonderingly and at length, remembering other women’s acquiescence to an awkward suitor’s prologue to marriage: girlish smiles and laughter following some artless boy’s long-limbed shuffling and shy proposals. In all her imaginings of a sober and practical union, the breeding of children, and the laboring drudgery of a woman’s sphere, she had never dared hope for the promise of this; that a man would take her knowingly for all her mannish, off-putting certitudes and canny will, her prickly refusals to adhere to womanly scrapings, her ferocious and ill-tempered nature. But how could it be other? To be a soldier’s wife would suit her well.
She kissed him in answer, pressing her body for a while into his, and, after a time, he gathered her up and led her home.
IT WAS THREE days afterwards that Patience found the red diary.
Martha had been finishing the hem of her cloak made from the English woolen for which she had traded the piglets at market, the blue-green cloth that Thomas had said was the color of the Irish Sea before a storm. She gathered it into folds around her neck, placing Thomas’s antler clasp first at one shoulder, and then the other, before moving to the small bedroom window to better see her work. It had stormed earlier in the day, but the rain had slackened and turned to a rolling fog, settling into dells like ponds of lambs’ wool. She caught herself humming a snatch of song before remembering the words: The song of winter becomes like sleep and drowns the air with a gentle roar; and limbs like fingers grasp the fruit, into which time doth pour.
The tune was mournful—it made her think of the inevitability, the nearness, of death—but she stopped her humming, guilty that Patience might have overheard her. Patience had barely spoken to her since Will, placed in a small coffin hastily provided by a neighboring carpenter, was laid into the ground. Martha had spent most of her time while indoors confined to her room, sewing or furtively writing in the diary, at times overcome with tears for the boy. Blessedly, no one else in the family had become ill, and John would soon be sent to bring back Joanna.
Earlier, she had heard the unmistakable sounds of an argument between Patience and Daniel coming from the common room. There were suppressed, passionate exchanges punctuated by the sounds of her cousin’s angry weeping, and Martha had waited until silence had returned, making her think that Daniel had led her cousin into their bedroom. Placing the cloak aside on the bed, she walked into the common room to build up the fire for the noon meal. She was startled to see Patience standing behind a chair, her fingers tightly gripping the ladder back, and in the chair in front of her sat Daniel, holding in his hands a red leather-bound book.
There was a moment of confusion when Martha simply stared, wondering that there should be a twin to her own singular journal. But Daniel’s face was stricken with something beyond grief. A crimped mask of fear had compressed his lips into two white slashes, and he asked, “Is this your doing?”
“Patience gave it me,” she answered quickly. “The book is for the house accounts.” She heard from her cousin an ugly exhalation of air, and when Martha met her eyes, a prickling band of sweat sprang up around her neck.
“I will ask you again, Martha, is this your doing?” He anxiously palmed the stubble at his chin, and Martha frantically searched his face, trying to gauge the depth of his knowledge. How far beyond the beginning entries, the notations of supplies and homely expenditures, had he read of a regicide’s life?
“It was given to me by your wife, Daniel. It is mine.” Martha dropped her chin, clenching her hands together. “I thought my property to be inviolable.”
“Your property. Your property.” Patience rapped fiercely on the back of the chair, making Daniel wince. “Everything in this house by rights is ours. The food you eat, the bed you shared with our children. The cloth that came from the sale of our pigs…” She stopped for a moment, collecting herself. “I went to lie down on my son’s bed and found that… accounting book sewn into your pillow, next to where my own child laid his head. In truth it is an accounting book, but not such a one that is to our prosperity. Indeed, I think it is to our ruin.”
More than the pity Martha felt for her cousin in that moment—the thought of Patience trying desperately to breathe in the remaining scent of a dead child impressed onto a pillow—she awakened to an overarching terror that she had, through her own playing at secrets, betrayed Thomas.
She met Daniel’s gaze and held out her hand to receive back the book. He looked away from her, gripping the book’s binding tighter, turning it end over end in his hands. He said, “You will leave today for your father’s house until such time as I have reflected on this. I will keep the book and you will not return until—”
“She will not return to this house, and as for the Welshman—” Patience began.
“Silence!” Daniel roared. “Enough.” Wounded and shaken, Patience gathered up the folds of her skirt and left the room, weeping.
“Martha,” Daniel said, “John will take you in the wagon today.” He laid the diary on the table, his palms splayed over the binding as if seeking to hide it. Martha could see the lines entrenched in his face, and she knew his sadness would never find release pinioned against his wife’s towering, extravagant grief.
“Daniel,” she began. “Cousin, I have never asked you for anything, and have done all I could for your family. But I ask you, I beg you, to burn this book rather than read it more. I would you call me thief and have me arrested rather than harm come to another through my indiscretion.” She took a few steps closer to the table. “Cousin, the teller of these words has no knowledge of this book. Think what may come from revealing these pages to others. I, myself, have not told another soul. Please.”