Upon landfall in Boston the captain had led the three of them to what he declared was a reputable inn, clean and no questions asked. Recently, however, Brudloe had wondered about the timing of their illness and the indisputable fact that since his partner’s death, the serving maid, who was also Thornton’s slut, had disappeared.
A few days earlier, Brudloe, still weak from illness, had gone looking for ale and came upon the constable and Mrs. Parker whispering together in the common room. He had thought at first that the constable was another one of Mrs. Parker’s lovers. But she slipped the man a packet of letters with the dry, assessing look of a trading partner, certainly not the face of a woman in the grip of passion, and when the man in turn handed her a bag of coins, Brudloe began to suspect that she might have another business besides innkeeping.
He began searching her bedroom when she went out to market and found buried in a wardrobe letters from a man named James Davids from New Haven, Connecticut. They were instructions, some of them numerically coded, to closely follow the actions of her boarders from England; “pigeons” he had called Brudloe and his fellows.
James Davids was suspected by those in the informing game to actually be John Dixwell, one of the judges who sentenced Charles I to death. Davids had lived in the colonies for years, marrying, prospering at his practice in the law, a confessed confederate of the other regicides as yet to be found and brought back to England for trial and execution. His network of spies was said to be crawling all over New England, and if Davids knew of Brudloe’s plans in coming to Boston, so did everyone in the New Englander’s pay.
Brudloe had let Mrs. Parker go on thinking he was her pigeon for weeks. Her coy questioning, her spying, her passing of notes to the constable and others continued unabated until he was sure he had convinced her of his and Cornwall’s intentions to go north along the coast up to Portsmouth instead of to towns more inland, where Brudloe suspected his quarry to be. They could have just slipped away one evening while she slept and none would have been the wiser. But last night he had heard her weight on the floorboards at the door while he and Cornwall talked of leaving for Salem again, and he knew he could not leave the woman alive.
After supper, he plied her with drink and led her to bed, sticking as close to her as fur on a dog. He enjoyed her not once but twice, and in the morning while she sat across from him as he ate his breakfast, he let her chatter on and on, one slipper dangling archly off one toe, her smiling, dimpled chin cupped in her hands. Then he had taken her hand and led her back to bed, laid her down, and put a pillow over her face. She had fought harder than he had expected, scratching him, gouging the flesh with her nails, until he had called for Cornwall to pull the blanket up over her arms and legs and sit on the damnable whore. It had taken both of them to get the job done and a part of him had to admire her fight.
The lump beneath the quilt was finally still, and when he pulled the pillow away, her eyes were staring blankly, her doll’s mouth open and glistening. He fell back against the wall, nursing his scratches, and looked once more at the morose Cornwall. Something about the expanse of the wilderness at the near perimeter of Boston had unnerved the larger man. The port town was a ragged dock city like any other, with porters and thieves and doxies strolling the wharves at all hours, albeit with considerably less noise and swagger than in London. But there, beyond Fox Hill, over the Roxbury Flats, grew a forest without visible end, with roads disappearing into a limitless, rolling expanse of thickets and green impenetrable undergrowth mirroring the jade green wall of the ocean that had almost drowned them.
Brudloe had seen with his own eyes his large companion kill three armed footpads with an ax when they had tried to rob goods that Cornwall himself had only just stolen. It enraged the big man no end to see his hard work come to naught. And yet here he sat like a cropped gelding, meek and soundless.
Brudloe said confidingly, “You need cunny, my friend, and right quick. Your wastin’ about’s frayin’ my patience.”
Cornwall looked at him, expressionless, and shrugged. The sound of a fist on the door below made them both startle, and Brudloe held out a cautioning hand to his partner, who had begun rising from the bed. Brudloe stepped to the window and looked cautiously down to the street.
“It’s the constable,” he whispered, gesturing for Cornwall to stay where he was. The sound of pounding began again, more forcefully, and Brudloe ducked behind the casement as the constable backed into the street, peering upwards to the second-floor windows. The man banged once more on the door, calling out to Mrs. Parker to come quick, but soon he mounted his horse and clucked to it to move on.
Brudloe turned back to Cornwall only to find the man observing Mrs. Parker’s silent form with something akin to sympathy, shaking his head as though he had come upon her lifeless body by accident.
With any luck it would be another day before their minder was discovered, and there would be no mark on her body to bespeak imposed violence in the event of their being detained and questioned. Brudloe had pointed the trail northward, and by the time their pursuers discovered their error, both he and Cornwall would be well hidden, and provided for, by their contact in Salem. There they could rest and plan for the killing of Thomas Morgan. He had often, on their miserable voyage overseas, relished the idea of hog-tying Morgan and slowly peeling him like an orange. But now he was tired, too tired to wrestle with the man; he could be happy with the criminal’s head alone. He had once gone to see the embalmed, desiccated head of Oliver Cromwell, kept on a pole outside Westminster Abbey, bits of flesh and hair still clinging to the skull. He imagined with satisfaction Morgan’s head like that, slowly drying to bacon in a salted barrel.
And then they could quit this sweltering, pine-boxed outpost at the arse end of the world.
CHAPTER 15
A BAG OF GOOSE down lay opened on the bed, the curling, delicate quills startlingly white against the dark gray sacking. There were other things as well, carefully positioned and repositioned next to the bag: four buttons carved from the tiny bones of a squirrel, a cloak pin for the English woolen bought at market, shaved from the pointed splinter of a stag’s antler, a doeskin throw, supple and warm from being cured in the sun. Martha sat, picking up and setting down again each thing, one by one, regarding the treasures that Thomas had left for her almost daily since the mowing of the fields, leaving them in places he knew she would go; shyly, stealthily, without any show or stated expectation for return of favor.
Patience had said nothing of the gifts. She would merely, with a disapproving glance, turn away with a cautionary exhalation of breath as though the frequency of the offerings was suspect, even though Thomas was as ever steadfast in his work on the settlement.
Martha picked up the red book and painstakingly recorded each offering, noting with satisfaction the growing list. It was only recently that she had begun writing again in the journal. Each morning or evening, whenever she could be alone, she would carefully tear open the seam in the pillow casing, make her few entries, and then carefully sew the book back into its hiding place. It was the only thing that she could hold completely, without the prying eyes of others, to herself. Patience had not yet asked her about the book. Her cousin was too preoccupied with her own fears about the coming labor pains to think on that which held for her no great worth.
Martha turned back a page and read the entry from the day before.
Thomas had wordlessly upended the green and glistening clusters on the table to dry, their red stalks pointing up towards the ceiling. Like tiny advancing pikemen, she thought. She knew he had picked the purslane for her because she had said in passing that she hungered for it. She stuffed a few of the leaves raw into her
