prophetess, standing on her box above the overanxious crowds, offering promises of impossible equalities. As though titled men of property would simply, upon hearing her words, yield up their ancient, hard-won inheritances to landless yeomen or their widows. He began to push his way around the women, using his staff to breach their clasped hands, demanding roughly, “What is your name?… By God, I’ll have it, and you shall know the reasons why.”
“Morgan, sir. My name is Mrs. Morgan.” The fall of his staff had caught her sharply across the wrist and she pulled her stricken hand up to her breast, but she did not retreat from his path. She had spoken the word “Mor- gan” in two distinct parts, as someone in mourning would have said “death-knell” or “grave-stone” or even “mur- der,” and for an instant he lost his footing. He turned his head to follow the tunings of his ears, and when he again met her eyes, he knew he had got it right. The image of fresh-laid straw fouled with the blood and brain matter of a headless corpse slid into his mind, like mercury poured into one ear.
“Jesu, woman, get you home…” He rushed past her into the darkened caverns of the House bristling with roaming bands of soldiers, clerks, councilmen, goodwives, and even a few doxies off the streets. Somewhere within the Speaker’s chambers, there were shouts and a clash of arms, and bits of shredded parchment swirled around his head as though the very weather had begun dissent, bringing snow in April. He slipped into a privy, blindly closing the weighted door. He went hard to his knees and heard his thick cloak catch and tear on a nail. Two men scuffling, perhaps a guardsman and a dissenter, fell heavily against the door and then moved away down the hall, swearing and making oaths against each other.
Every undoing makes a sound, he thought, and these are the sounds of the unraveling of kingships and alliances and nations. For the hundredth, for the thousandth, time that day he prayed for guidance but felt his spirit blunted against the building noise and chaos outside. He heard his name being called from somewhere inside the chamber, faintly but desperately, sounding like a drowning man calling out for a line of hemp.
He stood and placed his hand against the door, dignifying his presence, setting his face to iron, and when he finally exited the privy into the tide of men-at-arms, he braced himself by saying, “Mrs. Morgan, Mrs. Morgan, if you can bear to carry that name, I can bear to remember it…”
CHAPTER 1
THE YOUNG WOMAN stepped from the wagon and turned to face the driver still holding the slackened reins. From Daniel’s vantage point, looking through the shuttered windows of the common room, he could not read the woman’s face but could see the rigid set of her back. The man in the wagon was small and as hard-set as a dried persimmon. The brim of his felt hat was slung so low and angled over his eyes that its very putting on must have been an act of vengeance. Daniel had met his wife’s uncle only once at market, and the number of words exchanged between them could not have filled a walnut. But Daniel remembered well the look of triumph on Andrew Allen’s face when the old man bested him at a calf auction. That he was now giving his daughter the last of his cautious, brusque advice was clear from the way he punctuated his words with a string of country sayings: “Hech, now listen to me,” and “Hark you well to me now.” The sorts of words that the old Scotsmen still used were like pepperweed in a mutton stew.
Daniel moved through the common room and stood at the open door. He saluted the old man, saying, “Will you come in for a breakfast?”
To his relief Goodman Allen shook his head and with a few muttered words of good-bye pulled his wagon around, taking the road back towards Andover. The woman stood for a long while watching her father ride away, the hem of her dress slowly soaking up the wet, ice-filled mud of the yard. Daniel studied the unbending arch of her neck, thinking it was a sad thing that she be past twenty and not yet married, still sent out by her parents into service, her few things put into some bit of cotton sacking.
Taking the full measure of her forlorn appearance, Daniel shook his head in sympathy. Andrew Allen was prosperous enough; he could have at the very least provided his daughter with her own bed. But Daniel knew from his wife, Patience, that for all the old man’s parsimonious airs, he swore, drank hard ale, and gambled at dice whenever, and wherever, the opportunity arose, and was tighter than a tick paying for anything he couldn’t raise from the ground or fashion himself from driftwood.
It would be a blessing for his wife to have another woman at the settlement. He could hear Patience even now retching and puking into a bucket by the bed, as sick in her fifth month with their third child as any girl would be with her first. He was eager to see his wife’s cousin settled into the house as quickly as possible. The roads were freeing themselves of ice, and though they be a rutted misery, Daniel had a certainty that if he didn’t attend to his carting soon, others would beat him to Boston, getting the best of the off-loaded goods from England, Holland, and Spain.
He called her gently by name, “Martha,” telling her to come in and settle herself by the fire. She slowly turned her head in profile to him as though still reluctant to give up her vigil on the road. A few dark strands of her hair, as coarse as a horse’s mane, had blown free from her cap and whipped around her cheek in the damp wind. He braced himself for the onslaught of tears that surely must come in answer to being left, yet again, in the home of near strangers. But when she turned fully to face him, his breath caught in his chest, for there, in place of tears, was dry-eyed fury, and a mouth so pinched and implacably set that his first thought was to hide his tender belly from her approaching form. Good God, he thought, and cleared a wide space at the door for her to enter.
A HEAVY RAIN had started that morning, pouring in unbroken sheets, and though Patience had begged her husband to put off his leaving one more day, Daniel had thrown an oiled canvas over his head, mounted his carting wagon, and clucked his heavy gelding out of the yard and onto the road. But for the downpour, Martha thought, her cousin would still be standing at the door crying, holding her slightly protruding belly, seemingly unaware that Daniel had made all haste in leaving. Martha looked about the room, noting all of the tamped-down and dirt-ridden rushes scattered beneath the table, the scabs of food clinging to the previous evening’s dishes, the soiled linen loosely draped over a chair—the entire unwholesome mess creating odors both fetid and close. Patience, finally closing the door against the rain, began showing Martha the places where the house goods were stored.
“Of the cellar,” Patience said, motioning for Martha to lift the trap in the floor, “there are cranberries in a firkin of water, some wheat flour, cornmeal, two baskets left of apples, pumpkins, and squash.”
Martha took a candle from the table and, lifting the hem of her skirt, stepped down the shallow ladder to the cellar. She held the candle high and saw at once that rats and mice had done their job during the winter months, chewing through the poorly tended baskets. Remembering her mother’s stone-lined cellar, carefully cleared each day of blackening mold or encroaching pests, she wrinkled her nose at a braid of darkly speckled onions, rotted and evil-smelling from hanging too close to the sweating dirt walls. She could hear Patience shifting her weight restlessly in the space above her head. Finally Patience called down, “It’s been a month or more that I cannot climb the ladder. I send the children down to fetch food for the table… and they… things may not be as they should…”
In the small arc of light, Martha quickly tallied the remainder of the cellar’s holdings: one half-barrel of cider, thirty head of dried corn mixed with peas, two sealed pots of salted pork and salted cod each, one covered tin of autumn tallow, and fifteen candles in a box. The approaching scarcity of food would have to be addressed at once, as it would be days yet before any seed could be put to ground for the house garden. She had been told by Daniel that one of his two field men was a creditable hunter. They would need his skill, and soon, for they would all require fresh meat, whether it had swum or crawled, to have the strength to put the house to rights.
She prodded with her foot a bag of potatoes made unfit for eating by lying too long on the damp floor, but she reckoned with a hard boiling the spuds could be rendered to starch for the wash. It would take a week at least to get clean all the dirty linens. Even now there were three or four baby’s clouts hung close to the fire drying, looking as if they had not been scrubbed for weeks.
She held the candle up to light her way to the ladder and saw the pregnant woman’s face appear at the hatchway, her eyes and lips still swollen from crying. Underlit by the soft yellow light, Patience looked like nothing so much as a petulant child, even though the woman was on the downhill path to twenty-five. As Martha climbed up out of the cellar, Patience was saying, “I think it fitting that Will and Joanna be made a porridge now.” Two
