He looked down at the parchment and saw he had been crying, his tears streaking the ink on the page. He struggled with the quill for a moment, resolved to put his last thoughts on paper.
Early on, he, Brudloe, and Cornwall had made a foray into Salem to meet their contact, a miller by trade who told them the most likely towns and villages to search for their fugitive.
Brudloe had waved off the miller’s cautioning words about the dangers of tracking these wanted men, some of whom had experienced disciplined fighting during the English Civil War.
“How hard can it be to track down one great beanpole of a man?” Brudloe had asked.
The miller had looked at Brudloe, his jaw moving beneath a creeping smile. “Oh, it’s harder than you might think. To find men of stature in this place, in this hard wilderness, one has only to stand on a Boston wharf and look westwards.”
The men had been confident in their plans, but as soon as they returned to Boston, they all became suddenly ill again.
A rending spasm in his gut made him cry out. His hands clenched, crushing the parchment, and his knees drew up reflexively to his chest. He had within the past hour begun to bleed from his rectum, and he could feel a renewed warm trickle of blood seep onto the sheets. When the spasm had passed, he lay panting, his teeth clenching and unclenching. He had spilled most of the ink onto the mattress, but there was some yet in the bottle and it would serve for his purposes. He had only a little left to write.
He could hear Verity’s footsteps coming up the stairs to the garret and he paused, looking towards the door. Her step was usually quick and light, but today her tread was more deliberate. It was she who had told him that morning, after she had fed him his cup of chocolate, that she had been poisoning him all along, along with his partners. She had straightened the sheets and smoothed back his hair as he looked at her in horror. She had explained to him patiently that he was yet one more in a line of Royalist bastards who had killed and whored and burned their way through the colonies: corrupting good women, impressing good men, seeking to murder capable farmers because they had fought against some long-dead king. When he had pleaded with her to send for a doctor, she had shaken her head, saying, “It’s too late for that now, Edward.”
He had then begged the girl to allow him to make his will, and it was she who had given him the implements to write it. He garnered a last bit of strength, smoothing the rumpled parchment below his palms, and managed to bring quill to paper.
It would take another two hours for him to die, alone; Verity not returning again until late that evening. So he couldn’t have seen her first read the letter and then burn it in the small hearth, along with the bloody sheets, still warm from his body.
CHAPTER 13
THE FIRST WEEK of June, Daniel returned to his carting, the gelding plodding slowly past the burgeoning fields, shaking his tufted head against the heavy leads to the wagon. Martha stood with Patience at the door as Daniel waved cheerfully, exuberantly, to his wife and children. She passed her arm supportively around her cousin’s broadening waist, whispering to her all of the choice things Daniel would bring back to them—a bit of lace, a brace of pewter bowls—but five days would pass before Patience stopped sulking and soaking her pillow at night with tears. Martha could often hear her cousin’s indulgent weeping as she lay in bed trying to find sleep, and most nights Will would creep into Martha’s room, poking her with a finger until she relented by making room for him within the hollow of her arms. Daniel had promised to be home by the middle of July to see Patience through her birthing. Martha never spoke to him of her nagging fears about an early and difficult lying-in, thinking that to speak of such things would give substance to unhappy possibilities.
On the sixth day, Martha looked at her cousin sitting mournfully at the table, eyes glazed with tears and frowning into the palm of her hand, and said abruptly, “Right, then. I’ve never seen a woman more in need of a potted cheese.”
Patience furrowed her brows. “What?” she asked, dropping the hand from her chin.
“To market, cousin,” Martha said, smiling, wrapping a cloak around her shoulders. “And I’ll give you a quarter hour to comb your hair and wash your face or you’ll disgrace us all.”
Within the half hour, the cart rattled from the yard, Patience sitting next to John, her face for the first time bright and hopeful, while Martha sat in the back with Will and Joanna. Thomas had come out from the barn to watch them go, his eyes settling on her at the last. She at first averted her eyes, jerking her chin away, but then, pressing her lips together, she met his gaze full-on. She knew he would think her turning away a kind of modesty, a maidenly recoiling from the memory of the night before. She had come upon him in the barn, scraping the hide from the crippled calf he had slaughtered that afternoon; the animal’s malformed legs jutted out at odd angles, wobbling in a kind of ghastly dance with every jerk of the skinning knife against the dangling carcass.
His back and shoulders were bared and she had stood in the shadows watching the cording of the muscles under his skin, damp from sweat and pale as death, as white as lime dust next to the reddish brown of his forearms working to strip away the hide from the twisted flesh of the calf. Sensing her, he turned around, but before he could speak, she had spun away, rushing back to the house, hiding the flush of her neck with her hands. More disquieting than this, though, and the true reason for her turning away, was the knowledge that she had willfully, and shamelessly, plundered Thomas’s great oaken chest.
He followed slowly behind the cart for a short distance, his long legs keeping pace, until they turned onto the north road. He stood there, in the cascading dust from the cart, until it had risen up and over the crest, following the snaking of the Shawshin River.
As they rolled above the water’s course, trumpeting breezes blew the topmost of trees, whipping branches fully green in unpredictable patterns against the untainted blue of the sky. At the quarter mile Martha told riddles to the children: “At night they come without being fetched, by day they are lost without being stolen…. No, not candles, nor yet are they fireflies.
And John sang a London street song:
