crossed her arms and looked away. Martha turned to hide a smile; the child had taken to imitating her habit of crossing her arms, and it brought no end of laughter from Daniel.
She held the stirring paddle out in front of her chest. It was about five feet in length, almost as tall as she. John’s battling giant of Edgehill had wielded a pike of twenty feet, or so he had said, making the pike four times as long, and four times as heavy, as the paddle. She tucked it under one arm and held it aloft like a spear. With a sharpened point at the end it could pierce the breast of any oncoming beast, but not clear through to the rider.
She looked around for a longer stick and left the pot boiling to search for branches in the stand of elm at the edge of the yard. A slender sapling had fallen with a storm and with some effort she snapped the lower part from the roots and stripped it clean. After grasping the heavier end, and cradling it beneath her arm, she raised the far end, quivering, holding it chest-high to a horse. Any charging animal would have propelled her backwards and trampled her underfoot, and she wondered what advantage the weapon would be to the men behind the advance guard, crushed beneath the recoiling pikemen.
“That’s no way to hold a pike, missus.”
She dropped the sapling and whirled around to find Thomas standing in the yard. He walked to where the discarded tree branch lay and picked it up, bending slowly at the waist, his long arms grasping the wood with a practiced grip. “You’d lose an arm with the first charge.”
He walked closer to her, standing within an arm’s breadth, and said, “First position. You must plant it between your legs and hold it thus.” He motioned for Martha to take hold of the pike at breast level, enclosing her hands in his own, pressing her fingers warmly into the wood. He reached forward with his boot to tap lightly at the instep of her right foot, saying, “Second position.” He tapped at her instep again. “Wider. You must stand wider or your knees will buckle.”
He let go of her hands and moved to stand behind her.
“Third position,” he said. “Lower the tip. Lower still, till your arms are straight. Now, brace the end against your right instep and step forward with your left. More forward still. And now you’re in fourth position. And now you wait.”
She tensed, her knees locked and cracking in the awkward stance, imagining his breath at her neck and his hands coming to rest at her shoulder or arm, but he did not touch her. Rather, he continued to stand behind until the rhythmic sounds of his exhalations became matched with her own.
Moments passed and she stretched her neck against the weight of the sapling. She finally asked, “For what do we wait?”
“Might be anything, missus. It could be a press of men on foot with muskets and pike. Or a charge of men on horse. Or”—he paused, and without seeing his face, she thought he smiled—“a swamp of woodland harpies.”
She laughed and shifted the weight of wood in her aching hands and felt the sharp stick of a splinter in her palm. She dropped the sapling, bringing the hand up into her mouth, the nib of the splinter scraping against her tongue, and turned to face him. He reached out, clasping her around the wrist, and lifted her palm higher to see the wound. With his other hand, he lifted the skinning knife that he always carried at his side, the knife he had sharpened evening upon evening, and solemnly passed the small edge of the blade across an inch of her palm. It separated the flesh easily, with little pain, and with the tip of the knife, he flicked out the splinter of wood. Blood sprang up through the wound, and he watched it pooling in her palm before pressing her palm to his chest, letting her blood spread on the linen of his shirt like a bloom.
“You told me before… that I’m not Gelert, the hound,” she said, breathing in once and looking up at his face. “Then I must be the infant prince, knocked from his cradle and set upon by wolves.”
He inclined his head to her and said, “No.” He smiled and inclined further until he felt the slightest stiffening clench of her hand and he carefully dropped his arm back to his side. Her hand, of its own accord, stayed poised on his chest for the briefest of moments before the wail of a child floated across the yard.
“Oh, Joanna!” she cried, and even louder, “Oh, the wash!” Remembering the clothes, in all likelihood boiling to cinders in the pot, she turned quickly and raced away. She did not dare look for Thomas again until she was certain he had left the yard to tend to his traps. Only then did she bring her hand to her mouth, sucking at the wound where the splinter had been, tasting salt and the faint rust of metal.
IT WAS THE last of the month before Martha found the courage to see for herself the great oak chest that sat by Thomas’s bed. She had waited until the men had gone out hunting, Daniel tagging along with them, eager as a boy, overstepping the tall grasses with the bobbing knees of a startled deer. Patience had lain down to sleep after the morning meal, her belly growing ever heavier, and the children Martha had sent out of doors, each holding a bit of a sugar teat.
The men’s room was deeply shadowed and dank, but she left the lantern unlit, fearful the children would see the light through a crack in the wall and come to question it. She stood at the door, poised to turn back, but the house was silent and there might not be another opportunity for a long while. John’s pallet lay closest to the door and she stumbled over it as she guided her hands along the timbers. She balanced herself and waited, adjusting her eyes to the dark, until she could make out the other objects scattered about the room: a once fine, heavy rug thrown carelessly across the boards, a shirt, some bit of toweling. Against the far wall was Thomas’s bed, two rope frames with a straw mattress laid end to end, and at its foot rested the chest, the wood mottled dark either from the stain of rainwater through the roof, or perhaps salt water from the passage to the colonies.
She crossed the few steps to the chest and knelt in front of it, spanning her arms across the metal bracing. Surprisingly, there was no lock on the clasp, and she pulled her hands back quickly into her lap. She had thought merely to explore the outside of the chest, never imagining it wouldn’t be locked. What of worth, or even intrigue, she thought, could be in an unlocked chest in a home with restless women and prying children. She frowned and leaned forward to stand, resting her two palms on the split seams of the lid.
In that moment, something of weight shifted below the floorboards. It was not the rattle of footfalls on the cellar stairs or the snick of a latch on a door. The disturbance was not even a thing she had perceived with her ears alone. It was more a vibration, passed through the shoe leather into the balls of her feet. She sank slowly back onto her heels, her hands still resting on the top of the chest, waiting for the movement to come again. But the house was quiet. From a distance, Martha could hear Will’s voice taunting Joanna to chase him through the garden, but there had been no creaking bedposts from Patience waking, nor any peevish summoning from her cousin for water and salted bread. A moment passed and there was nothing further to give alarm. Whatever had made the noise had departed; only the growing agitation of being discovered remained, along with an unbearable curiosity.
Without a conscious thought, she unhinged the clasp and heaved up the heavy lid. She had not meant to open the chest when she first entered the room and would have abandoned the action if the covering had resisted, but the hinges were well oiled and the lid was raised to its full open position against the chains without a sound.
The deep well of the chest at first appeared empty. With a breath, she reached down into it and pulled out, bunched in her hand, a pair of breeches and a shirt, both worn and familiar; she had scrubbed them often enough with the rest of the household wash. These she laid aside and reached her hand more deeply into the recess. Her hand touched something of cold metal and she pulled into the light a long, pitted dirk. The head was plaited into a design of serpents coiled together, the edges stained and ragged from years of disuse. It balanced in her open palm like a slender scale and she gripped the hilt, notched cunningly for grasping fingers. She set this aside, laying it carefully on top of the shirt, and reached once more to the bottom of the chest.
Her hand nestled into something heavy and woolen and she pulled free a long coat of faded red with facings of blue at the collar and cuffs. She stood and held it widely in both hands to see the whole of it. Its seams were ragged, the sleeves patched and mended many times, but the wool was as fine and tightly woven as she had ever seen, the color at the folds still resolutely scarlet. She brought one sleeve up to her face and smelled the heavy scent of aged oak.
A pale bit of falling paper caught the light, and she saw at her feet a tightly rolled bit of parchment, wrapped in stiff oiled yarn. Realizing it must have fallen from the other, dangling sleeve of the coat, she bent over to pick it up, and as she lifted the scroll from the floor, a flattened piece of wood, about as long and half as wide as her
