The Wolves of Andover

forefinger, fell out of it.

Draping the coat over the lip of the chest, she regarded the slender piece, trying to place what it might be. Too small and fragile to be a dowel of any useful sort, it was too large to be a needle. Perhaps it was a gaming piece, she thought, and reached her hand forward to examine it more closely. As her fingers grazed the wood, she froze. Her fingers curled reflexively away and she quickly stood again, her clenched hands crossed defensively over her chest. An aversion as strong as anything she had ever felt unfurled its way down her spine and she stepped back, knocking into the chest. She imagined fully and vividly, had she touched the wooden piece with her bare flesh, it would have brought fresh blood from the wound in her hand, the wound Thomas had opened with his knife to remove the splinter; first seeping, then pulsing, then gushing like a town pump. She saw, in her mind’s eye, the red bloom on Thomas’s shirt, the stain from the cut in her hand, spreading over his breast until it fell in torrential droplets to the ground, the linen too saturated to absorb the blood more fully into its fibers.

In her alarm, she had dropped the scroll, and she hastily retrieved it from the floor. Wrapping her hand tightly in the hem of her skirt, she raked up the wooden piece and dropped it back into the parchment. The scroll was slipped into the arm of the coat, and then, carefully, she repacked all of the things she had removed from the chest. The lid was securely closed, the clasp fastened, and Martha stepped from the men’s room, rigid and blinking.

The children had moved to the far end of the garden, and she could hear their voices as wavering patterns of sound as though they ran chanting, weaving in and out of the planted rows. Patience still slept; there was no movement or stirring from her bedroom. Martha sat at the table, staring at nothing, her breathing evenly paced. But as she had done with her tongue, running the tip of it over the ragged splinter in her hand, her thoughts pulled against the memory of the small wooden piece, no larger, or seemingly more significant, than any sliver of wood carved by man, smoothed by handling and subject to the laws of time and use. She listened intently for any shifting sound coming from under the floorboards, but the space below her feet was voiceless.

CHAPTER 12

EDWARD THORNTON, HIS gathered lace nightshirt soaked through with acrid sweat, shifted his swollen legs more comfortably on the bed, and began the letter to his mother.

Dearest Madame,

I cannot say for truth that you will be glad of receiving this letter, sent to you from Boston Harbor; whether for news that I am yet alive, as of this, the 8^thday of May, or gladder still for the knowledge that I have, by the time you read these words, passed out of this world altogether. It cannot give you much comfort either of ways, as I have been the source of most, if not all, of your misery and distress these four and twenty years.

His fingers, made awkward by the poison, lost their grip on the quill, and it dropped onto the parchment. Even if his mother agreed to the reading of the letter, he wasn’t sure the words he had so painstakingly written could be deciphered, so great was the pain in his hands. A cup of water had been placed on the mantel opposite the bed and he desperately wished for a drink but did not have the strength to cross the floor. The head pains that had plagued him for so many weeks had taken on the quality of heated nails pushed slowly through his skull. He closed his eyes and rested for a moment, listening to the cacophony from the streets.

When first arriving in Boston with Brudloe and Cornwall, he had often come to this garret to visit with Verity, a maid to his innkeeper, Mrs. Parker. Verity had caught his eye within the first few days in port. A lovely girl of sixteen, with pale skin and dark wavelets of auburn, she soon, with only a token struggle, became his frequent mistress. She would not take coin from him like some common whore, but she seemed to delight in little gifts bought from the streets: ribbons, a peacock feather, a pair of earrings made of cut glass.

He would come to her often those first few weeks in Boston, spending afternoons locked together with her in her narrow bed. Later, he came to be nursed by her, having symptoms of dizziness and gut cramping, which worsened by the day. Verity’s rented room was on the north end of town, close to the wharves, and had he screamed his loudest, even in the hours before dawn, the shipyard sounds would have drowned him out. Of all the places he had come to inhabit, of all the risk-laden ventures and squandered resources, he had never imagined making his death in a girl’s trundle bed, fouled with his own waste.

He grasped again at the quill and, spilling only a little of the India ink from the bottle, continued to write.

Having borne such a wastrel, and borne in good patience and earnestness the repeated disgrace of creditors hounding you on my account, until you have spent all but the barest remnants of your good husband’s fortune—I will not shame his name by calling him Father as I have no good reason to claim any but the Devil for my patronage—you must at least rest assured that I am most wholly and pitiably sorry for my actions and will beg you to remember some part of me that was good. Take comfort that you will never hear the worst of my deeds as the men whose company I have kept will soon, I have no doubt, pass on their way behind me.

It seemed to him, upon reflection, that the trip to the colonies from the very beginning was darkly favored. Their mission’s decline had begun before they had even left England with the torture and killing of Sam Crouch, Blood’s former associate and double-dealer. Crouch had died cursing them and their passage westward to Hell. He had gone to his end raving from Ecclesiastes: “Receive deceitful men into thine house and they will estrange thee from thine own.”

Their numbers had dwindled again when two more of their group had been washed away during the storm. He smiled, exhaling bitterly, over the apt name of the ship, The Swallow; it had certainly swallowed both the eel boy and Baker like a rapacious beast, leaving no trace. So witless had he been on the ship, by the action of the sea and the shrieking of the ocean wind, that he sometimes thought he heard the eel boy’s voice, coming from belowdecks days after he had been washed overboard, singing some fragment of lamenting song.

He thought he had known what true sickness was when they first landed at the docks, still miserable from the crossing, but within hours, it seemed, of coming to the colonies, he and his two remaining partners had had bouts of a great malaise and loose, spotty bowels, along with hours of retching into basins and buckets provided by their landlady.

These periodic incidents had not dampened his pursuit of pleasure, though. Boston had inns enough, the Salutation Inn and the Ship Tavern among them. Though there were a few discreet bawdy houses, sheltering women in drab dresses and with little, if any, paint on their faces, he soon abandoned these dens in favor of Verity’s company.

And Verity, though young, had been no stranger to the pleasures of a bed. She had the downy skin and unclouded eye of a virgin, and there was a sweetness to her that moved Thornton in a way he had not been moved in a long while. She had had her belly stuffed with child by a Royalist soldier who had abandoned her, the child subsequently dying. When she told Thornton, as they lay under a homespun quilt, of her lost infant, she cried bitterly and he had tenderly rocked her, soothing her with kisses. He had told her he knew what it was to suffer such a loss, although he did not tell her when and how these things had taken place.

He began to come to her every day, and she would feed him, and couple with him, bathing his forehead when he sickened, solicitous in the extreme. They would stroll together on the public square, along Bell Alley and Garden Court, and once, on a Sunday, sauntered into the North Meeting House. There they heard a preacher with the impertinent name of Increase Mather, who preached a sermon “Woe, to Drunkards; the Sin of Drunkenness.” He and Verity had snorted so loudly, giggling and gesturing irreverently, that they had been asked to leave by one of the meetinghouse Elders.

Thornton had begun to believe that, after they accomplished their mission, he might even stay in Boston, making his way in land speculation or merchant trading, keeping Verity in comfort in a town house. Maybe even marrying her in a quaint New World ceremony, joined in a pastoral setting, the girl’s hair bound up in a wreath of daisies or some such prosaic flower.