waist, she threw it to the floor and fled from the house, keenly aware of the astonished looks traded between her cousin and Daniel.
She walked in circles around the yard until the pumping in her chest slowed. Daniel soon emerged from the house and, awkwardly gesturing an apologetic hand to her, began to hoe weeds in the garden. He threw himself into the work as though he would, in a single day, make up for all the time gone, and Martha thought she had never seen a man flail himself so at a task. Every limb was at odds with every other, elbows flying, knees bobbing, face as red as autumn cranberries, until, she thought, he would wear himself into the very soil. She looked at him critically for a while and then turned towards the barn, her arms crossed, regarding the shadow of Thomas passing back and forth through layered columns of sunlight from the open hayloft above.
In the barn she found Thomas running his hand over the flanks of one of the milk cows. The cow had been bawling fitfully for days, moving back and forth in a disquieting motion as it shifted its weight from one front hoof to the other. Thomas didn’t turn at her approach, but she knew he was aware of her presence. To make conversation she thought to ask him if the beast had stones in the belly, even though she knew it was a blocked hind stomach. Thomas had once remarked in passing to John that if a Welshman knew nothing else at all, he would know about sheep and cows and, for all their great size, the delicacy of their inner workings. She moved to cradle the cow’s neck in her arms, scratching at its cross-grained hide with her nails. It lifted its head, thick upper lip twitching, and Martha breathed in the smell of sour grasses fermenting in the maw behind the animal’s grinding teeth and knew from this that it was not fatally sick. Thomas knelt down, pressing his hands gently into the cow’s underside, shielding his face from Martha with the brim of his hat.
She sat down next to him and played with the straw between her fingers before asking, “What’s a Swedish feather?”
He turned to her, startled, with raised brows, as though she had asked him to jump off a cliff.
“John says I have a tongue like a Swedish feather.” She had asked the question in all earnestness, but when he moved to hide a smile, she bridled.
He straightened his mouth and answered, “It’s a weapon. A short pike with a steel-pointed blade. I say so as I have had necessity to use one.”
“And where,” she asked stiffly, “would you have had use for such a one as those?”
“Most times, missus,” he said, standing, “between the eyes and the belly.” He walked to another stall but soon returned with a flannel cloth and a bottle of oil. He uptilted the bottle onto the rag and commenced gently rubbing the cow’s hide, darkening it into circled, glistening patches. “I’ve been a soldier.” He looked at her significantly. “And I believe you know on which side I fought.” He set the bottle down, balancing it into the straw, and began carefully pressing his fingers into the cow’s soft underbelly, expertly probing the length of the entrails through the tightened, distended skin. “I were a pikeman, so I had use for such as a Swedish feather.”
“And did you live in London, as Will says?” she asked, and she was all too aware that her mouth had fallen slightly open, like a girl who is starving, fed with a very small spoon. She had once heard her sister’s husband, Roger, say that there was no greater place than London, or more wicked, as men walked with less reverence into a church than a tinker and a dog into an alehouse.
“Aye, I lived in that place. I left Wales, suddenlike, and by sixteen I were a man-at-arms.” He nodded for her to hand him the bottle again and he oiled both hands, rubbing them briskly together, warming them. She watched his splayed fingers moving knowledgeably over the cow’s hide, and when it bawled again in pain, he called to it chidingly,
She ducked her head, feeling his gaze raking the top of her skull. “Why do you tell me this?” she asked defensively.
“Because… I believe you know what it’s like to carry the weight of something hidden that can’t be spoken of. Not to friend, nor ken, nor to the closest partner of your bosom.”
As he spoke, she had placed her own mirroring hand across the beast, making an unlinked arc of both their arms. She couldn’t look at his face, unnerved that he would know she had secrets to keep; instead, she intently studied the knotted joints of his hands and the calluses that shielded the pads of his fingers. She willed herself to think of the wooden trunk set next to his bed, and the red coat Will had told her was nestled within. There came to her then the stories that her father had told her of the long and bloody civil war in the old England thirty years ago; of the red coats of Cromwell’s New Model Army, an army that was, in its day, one of the best and most disciplined to fight in the known world.
She met his eyes and asked, “What could I possibly have to hide? I’ve never been anywhere, I’ve never seen anything.” A note of bitterness had crept into her voice and she tamped it down lest he think her shrewish. His hand, still coated in a fine membrane of oil, crept over her own, the calluses rasping and unyielding across her skin; but there was no proprietary feel to the touch, and he didn’t move his body closer to hers as a preamble to some coarser action, and there were no whispered words as a ploy to reach and grab.
“And the women of London. Were they lovely?” She regretted her question as soon as she asked it and waited for him to deride it as vanity, most certainly what the Reverend Hastings would have done.
There was a slow shifting of weight as though he was considering the best way to answer. “In London,” he began, “just before the Great War, fishwives and housewives stood cheek by jowl with great ladies. You could see the mayor’s wife pulling up her skirts against the muck like any oysteress. You smile, missus, but it’s the truth. During the days before the war, the women of that time were infected with the same fever as their men, and they matched them brick for brick in building the ramparts to shield the city against the king and his army. It was a fever we held on to because to cure it meant to wake again to tyranny. You ask what makes a woman comely?” He tapped one finger lightly against her temple and said, “Thoughts, missus. It’s thoughts that make a woman so.”
She had opened her mouth to speak when John shuffled noisily into the barn, calling out, “Missus, there’s a journeyman come for you. With a letter.” John had turned away slightly, and she colored to think he had come upon them having a conversation which had moved beyond the health of the livestock. She quickly buried her chin in her shoulder, hiding her expression, until John had left again. Slipping her hand free, she moved away reluctantly, saying, “You know a lot, for a farmer.”
As she passed him, Thomas’s head tilted back, eyes narrowing as though to focus better on something wavering and indistinct, and he countered, “Enough to know you’ll never be settled with some parson.”
As she stepped from the barn, she shook the folds of her skirt into order, all too aware that anyone seeing her then would think her a wanton emerging from a toss in the hay: bothered, flustered, her backside covered in straw. But she found the entire household gathered around the journeyman already being fed at her cousin’s table, a man so thin his shanks would have whistled in a high wind. He wiped his hand on his trousers and, handing her a folded piece of parchment, went back to stuffing his mouth with the remnants of cold porridge left over from breakfast.
Martha quickly opened the letter, written on the back of a fragment of a pamphlet from Boston trumpeting the arrival of ships from England, anticipating some homely bit of news about the Toothaker settlement ten miles to the north. She sensed Patience move up close to her and felt a flash of irritation that her cousin would seek to rob her of solitary discovery of news from her sister. The letter, in Mary’s hand, was brief; she had lost the pregnancy in her seventh month and was much taken down through the disappointment of her husband, Roger. She had written simply, “Please come.”
“Disappointment of her husband,” Martha muttered resentfully, remembering bitterly how ill her sister had been at the previous miscarriage. From the first she had laid eyes on her brother-in-law, she had always believed him to be a husband by convenience, and a father by accident. Her hand holding the letter had no sooner dropped to her side in a shared sense of grief than Patience asked, with alarm, “What’s amiss? Has anyone died?”
“Mary has lost her babe,” she answered and saw Patience grab instinctively at her belly. “And her son, Allen, is ill. I must go straightaway.”
The journeyman, finished with his meal, shook his head vigorously, saying, “Large bands of Wabanakis have been seen moving through the forests ’cross town. There’s no doubt they be on the path to malice. Stay armed and stay sheltered. I myself am staying in the next settlement until they have moved on.”
