Martha gathered her shawl around her shoulders, and without looking behind her to see if Thomas followed, she walked purposefully towards the river. When they reached the embankment, Thomas walked ahead of her and she fit her shoes to his footprints, sunk deeply into the soft, loamy soil, up the steeply angled hillock towards the river, which lay in a depression on the other side. Halfway to the crest, he motioned for her to sit on a fallen log and wait. He disappeared quietly over the ridge, moving with caution through the undergrowth, using the barrel of his flintlock to prod his way forward through the tangle of maidenhead ferns.
He was gone for a short while, but she soon heard a low whistle and saw him at the ridge, farther south this time, waving for her to come on. She climbed with some difficulty the last short distance to the top, pulling on roots and jutting rocks to scramble over the peaked ridge, and saw the river running fast and clear below her. Carefully hitching up her skirt, she sidestepped down the far embankment to the water’s edge. The boggy ground was chilled, but she felt warmth on her upturned face through branches of willow and beech. She smiled in surprise at the coltsfoot growing like borrowed sunlight along the shaded dimples at the river’s edge; and on the opposite shore she spied columbine, its red blossoms stirred into motion by hummingbirds.
Thomas had propped himself against a beech, crooking one foot up on a jutting root, and was looking to the right and the left, scanning the bank and the stream for any movement. His silence was of a belligerent sort, like a guard dog gone mute, so she turned her back on him and began pulling up the tender shoots of leeks, which yielded easily in the damp earth.
She soon had a small sack filled, the wet green stalks soaking the coarse linen, their sharp odor staining her hands and apron. But she was loath to leave the spot and decided to look for wild onions as well. When she caught him, through the reflection on the water, looking at the back of her head, she said in an offhand manner, “I am told you have been as far as London.”
There was a long silence as she picked through the plaited shafts of river grasses before she heard him say, “Aye.” She waited for tale-telling or bragging of some sort, but the silence stretched into minutes. “Well, then,” she prompted, “you must now think Billerica flat and rude.” She turned to face him, her expression challenging.
He abruptly swept away the small battery of flies hovering below the brim of his hat and answered, “There’s good in it. Here ’n there.” He met her gaze and stared long past the point of courtesy.
Finally dropping her eyes, she fussed with the linen bag and said, “Will was told you have been a soldier.”
He shifted his weight restlessly against the tree and lowered his chin in the way she had come to recognize as a defensive stance and exhaled heavily, compressing his mouth for a moment into a thin, tight line. Then he inhaled slowly and said, “When I were a boy in Wales, the first thing I kenned from my father was to look out across the land to tell the dry ground from the wet.”
Martha waited for the story to continue, but after a silent pause, she said, “I don’t understand your meaning.”
“It means, missus, that the world is a very large place. Full of mean marshes and moors, as well as meadows an’ streams. And if you don’t want to bog down and drown yourself, it’s keen to learn where to step lightly an’ where to tread not at all.”
He pushed himself away from the tree and was soon climbing back up the hill to the crest, never looking to see if she would follow. Martha stared after him gape-mouthed before she quickly picked up her skirt and scrambled after him.
“Wait… wait,” she called and he paused at the crest until she joined him, breathing heavily for a moment and struggling to speak again. “I meant only… to know that which is…” She stopped with a flush of uncertainty when he turned to face her. “I meant only to learn that which is proper as to who you are and… what you are about.”
He studied her for a moment before saying, “I were born near Carmarthen. In the uplands.” He balanced both hands on the barrel of the standing flintlock, crossed at the wrist, in a practiced way.
“So then, you were a farmer?” she asked, and suddenly to her own ears she sounded tight-lipped and sour.
“No,” he answered, looking to the middle distance at the clearing where the Taylor house sat, sending long plumes of dove-gray smoke from its chimney. “My father were a farmer. The year I were born, in ’twenty-six, the winters were so cold that the hand froze to the hearth back. My father had thirty acres of grazing and five for planting. He had four cows, two bullocks, one horse, fifty-two sheep, and a family. He lost most of it that winter and spent his whole life trying to catch back the past. When I were fifteen I left.”
“Did you… were you close to anyone?” A quickening breeze blew, uplifted from the river, and a piece of her hair floated across her eyes, momentarily blinding her.
He slowly reached out and grasped the hair, carefully rolling each strand around one finger. “I had a brother who died at seventeen, elder than me by three years. His name was Richard.” He rolled the strands again in the opposite direction, like unspooling yarn, and carefully tucked it back behind her ear. “He could run. By God, he could run. He ran every race in Carmarthenshire and won every prize. But the Welsh uplands have a temper all their own. And the very crags and heath that made him fast took away his heart at the end.” He dropped his hand and said softly, “
She shook her head, confused. He said, “It means, ‘Death spares not the fairest forehead.’ I held tight to my father’s farm in my brother’s stead for one year. And then I walked away for good.”
She stared at his solemn mouth and at the dark stubble on his cheeks, growing like a crown of briars surrounding the pale and weather-worn flesh that were his lips, and unthinking, she placed a cautious finger to the deeply recessed hollow at the base of his throat and felt his pulse strengthen under her touch. His eyes darted to the side and his head followed quickly, looking over her shoulder, and grasping her arm, he began to pull her roughly after him down the hill towards the settlement. He whispered to her, urgently, “Don’t talk. Don’t look back until we are safe within the house. Say nothing to the missus.”
She tried to crane her neck around to see what lay behind them, but his loping walk caused her to run hazardously down the hill, and she stumbled in her effort to match his long strides. He whistled John from the barn and whispered to him urgently, gesturing towards the river, and placed a silencing hand over John’s arm when the younger man’s eyes went big and round. Once inside, Thomas bolted the door, posting himself at the open window. When Martha came to stand next to him, he pointed back to the embankment where they had talked moments before. She observed nothing at first and then she saw a slight shifting of the landscape at the crest; dun-colored shapes moving in concert, heaving subtly as though the earth itself had learned to crawl.
Patience, seeing the men returned to the house, served up the midday meal, a thin ladle of soup with dried deer meat and the last of the bread baked days before. She chatted on happily about the leeks brought from the river and the fineness of the weather, of her absent husband, and of the seedlings coming up in the garden, unaware of the guarded looks passing between Thomas and John, and of the alarm that kept Martha rigid and silent in her chair. Thomas sat closest to the door with the flintlock at arm’s length and soon the only sounds were of the scraping of spoons against the pewter.
Her bowl finally empty, Patience stood and stretched with her knuckles against the small of her back. She looked at Martha and, frowning, asked, “Are you ill? What’s the matter?” Martha’s eyes tracked instinctively to the window, and before anyone could stop her, Patience strode to the door, slipped the bolt, and opened it wide. She screamed and staggered backwards, her arms flailing wildly in front of her. Both men stood from the table with such force that their chairs upended behind them. With astonishing speed Thomas pushed Patience roughly aside and stood, his flintlock raised, at the open door.
Thrusting the children under the table, Martha planted herself protectively in front of Patience, waving her farther back into the house. She felt a rapid, hot breath at her neck and turned to see John standing next to her, quaking and sweating, with a small ax in one hand and a large-tined fork in the other.
Patience, her voice shrill with terror, cried out, “They will kill us, Thomas…” He raised one hand sharply to her to be quiet but kept the long sights of the rifle pointed into the yard. Martha braced herself for the blast from the barrel, but after a moment there was no explosion. She stepped closer to the table, thinking to arm herself with a knife, and from her new vantage point she could see beyond Thomas’s bulk into the yard.
A man stood motionless and alone not twenty feet from the door. He was wrapped in doeskin and furs, his chest and arms naked, a club with a knotted head hanging at his side, and on his skin were the angry, festering sores of the plague. The man watched them watching him until the sound of Joanna’s voice, frightened and
