plaintive, floated out of the house. The man’s eyes drifted sideways and tracked over the windows and roofline, all the way to the barn, and then returned to stare at Thomas. A racking chill suddenly passed through the man’s body and he coughed heavily, pulling his furs more tightly around himself. He extended his arm out for a moment before bringing his fingers up to his mouth. When no one in the house moved, he repeated the gesture.
Without taking his eyes from the man, Thomas said quietly over his shoulders, “Missus, go and put whatever food is on the table into a sack and bring it fast to me.”
The beginning sounds of protest from Patience brought a swift black look from Thomas. She quickly pulled the children from under the table and ran for her bedroom, desperately slamming the door behind her. With shaking hands, Martha scooped the remains of bread and meat into a cloth and handed the parcel to Thomas, who walked without hesitation into the yard. Ignoring John’s insistent tugging at her skirt and hissing into her ear, “Stay in the house or yer get yerself killed…,” Martha moved forward to stand in the doorway. She watched Thomas hold out the parcel, waiting calmly and patiently for the food to be taken.
The man in the yard had not retreated at Thomas’s advance. Rather, he had planted one leg behind the other, tilting himself backwards to take in the Welshman’s height. The man himself was not tall—Martha guessed him to be in fact shorter than herself—but there was a straightening of his spine and his arm extended outward, fingers encircling the sack with a gentle, almost delicate touch. The sack disappeared inside the folds of the doeskin, and slowly turning without a word or glance, he disappeared into the woody bracken opposite the entrance to the road.
Martha looked back at John standing in the middle of the room, his weapons held aloft. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, “put down the ax. Did y’think to cleave him in two and then eat him?” He sat heavily in a chair, placing the fork back on the table.
Thomas closed and bolted the door and took up his post again at the window. After a time he carefully shut and locked the sash in its casing, and she came to stand next to him, waiting for him to speak.
“That Indian was Wampanoag on his way back north, if he weren’t to die of the pox first,” he said. His breath appeared and reappeared on the glass in veiled patches. “Had they been Abenaki it’s likely you and I wouldn’t be here talking. They were all with plague or they’d not be begging.”
“They…?” she asked, startled. To her eyes there had been only one man in the yard.
“There were half a dozen more in the woods not forty feet away,” he answered.
She pressed her nose closer to the glass and scanned the woods for movement. “Will they come back?”
He shrugged and passed his hands over his eyes. She studied his profile, the darkened flesh trenched beneath his eyes and the scar that split one brow in two. “Am I Gelert?” she asked. He turned to her, and she asked again, “The hound killed by his master? You said the tale was about me.”
“No,” he answered. “You’re not Gelert.” His breath was moist in her face, scented with wild river onions, green and pungent, but he soon turned back to watch the woods and he didn’t speak to her again for hours.
THE MAY WINDS brought rain from the direction of Boston, the air sharpened with the taint of salt water, and Daniel Taylor appeared on such a morning through undulating currents of dampened air, his canvas coat turned black and heavy from the wet. He arrived as Martha and Patience stood in the yard, quickly gathering in the washing that had been hung to dry earlier that morning when the sun had burned free of the clouds. The women had mistaken the crashing and rumbling of the carter’s wagon as approaching thunder until they saw the barrel- chested gelding appear steaming and straining over the crest of the road.
Patience covered her face with her apron and sobbed at the sight of him. At his first embrace he said to her, “Now, now, my own little wife, I am home. Come see what I’ve brought you.” He carried into the house bundle after bundle of cloth as well as hides, tools, and foodstuffs: two barrels of small beer, a firkin of ale, one large keg of wheat, two cones of sugar, and a caged cockerel.
He proudly pulled out crates of woolens and linens for new shifts, caps, and aprons, smiling at his wife’s delighted surprise. In a friendly hug, he yanked up a startled Joanna, frightened at the appearance of this strange, unshaven man, but she quickly smiled when Daniel showed her a corncob poppet made, he said, by a Carribee slave. Seeing Will standing alone and frowning at his own lack of presents, Daniel set Joanna down and soberly gestured for his son to approach. With a serious face he pulled from a bag a tiny ax and presented it to the boy, as though the gift were the rarest of finds. Will yelled a full-throated cry and ran from the house, bringing laughter from everyone but John, who said, shaking his head, “Best hide the new rooster.”
Daniel sat and called for food and in between bites of his dinner rattled off an account of his travels. “I’ve been as far north as Salisbury and hope to go even farther on the next leg, perhaps as far as Portsmouth if there be enough clearing of woodlands up past Strawberry Bank. You can’t believe the farmsteads opening up between Casco Bay and Kittery. Pelts, timber, fish—more than one man can trap or catch in a lifetime.” His round and sympathetic face clouded only once, when he spoke of the whispering up and down the coast of Abenaki Indians chafing at the land and furs taken by the Englishers, and of the raids on settlements lying vulnerably close to the edge of the forests.
“It’s the French north of the Eastward,” he said, scratching at his scalp still burning from the lye soap he had used to kill the lice he had picked up in some bedstead in Boston. “They’re stirring and stirring the pot, making friends with the heathens so they’ll knock us about the head and drive us all the way back to England.” Patience began to cry again, and with a few words Thomas related the visit by the Wampanoag man and of the plague that had visited both colonist and Indian alike. Daniel made placating sounds, distracting his wife by saying, “Here, look, Patience. Have you seen the bowls I have brought you? Look how bright the pewter is.”
Martha made panbread for the evening supper with the new flour, molding a tender blanket to hold the old rooster that, over the protestations of Will, who wanted to try his new ax on the bird, was butchered and dressed by John within the space of an hour. Patience waited impatiently for Daniel to finish his portion and retire with her to bed, but he didn’t leave until he had generously shared the new ale, not twice, but three times with John and Thomas. When he finally took his wife’s hand, she led him off to their room saying, “Oh, Daniel. It’s been such a struggle managing all by myself.”
John hid a creeping smile, draining the dregs of his ale, and Martha threw him a warning glance, snatching away his cup. The children had been sent to her bed, and when she crawled under the blanket, fitting her body carefully between their huddled shapes, she was surprised to see that Will was still awake. His eyes turned in the direction of the wall where the rhythmic sounds of the creaking bed ropes that supported his mother’s bed drifted through the thin walls, and he began to cry. She shushed him and, placing her hands over his ears, pulled him tight to her own body until she felt him go lax and heavy in her arms.
In the morning, it was clear to Martha that the bed ropes weren’t the only things squeaking during the night. Prompted by Patience, who dug a sharp elbow into his side, Daniel cleared his throat and announced that a Reverend Hastings, newly appointed minister of Billerica, would be coming to dinner within a few days. He droned on at length about the minister’s qualities of piety and of his recently acquired status as widower. Martha had been wiping the bowls clean and felt pulled into the sudden cessation of talk as a clod of dirt into a tunnel of wind. Seeing the expectant looks of her cousin turned in her direction, she realized Daniel had been speaking of the reverend for her benefit.
Casually, he rattled on about the trading he had recently done with the minister, the frugal nature of his habits, the austerity of his bearing, the dignity of his house. Martha brooded on whether the Reverend Hastings would be like the reverend from her childhood; the man who, despite her best efforts, entered her thoughts at times like a clot in sour milk. If so, Reverend Hastings would have no apparent vices of his own to make him humble or soft in his opinions of others who had sinned. He would be dry and sharp and, worst of all, full of purpose. He would carry within the folds of his cloak the breath of winter and peer at everyone with pale robin’s- egg eyes, uncovering and revealing every speck of unlawfulness in moral conduct, and his hands would make a punishment of every caress.
Signaling to John to begin the morning’s work, Thomas stood up and walked out the door, shading his eyes briefly in her direction, as though he had come upon her naked. She turned away, suddenly angry, snapping the cleaning rag aggressively across the boards of the table, spraying the floor with remnants of cornmeal. She said to no one in particular, “I’ll not be trussed up and bundled off to the first man, reverend though he may be, who comes sniffing around. By God, I’ll not.”
For the first time in days, persistent thoughts of hen feathers filled her mind. Ripping the apron off her
