tonight or we’ll wake tomorrow to find feathers with nothing besides but air.”
John had been roused fully from his pleasant nodding and he lifted his head, cutting his eyes to Thomas, who sat close by with a whetstone, slowly sharpening a hoe. The stone made harsh scraping noises at odd intervals, and Martha sensed, although she was not certain, that the Welshman was marking every one of her pronouncements with purposefully long screeching sounds.
“But surely,” Patience answered weakly, “it is too cold. And Daniel has never before insisted the men sleep in the barn before the first of April…”
It took another quarter hour for Martha to cow Patience into submission. She reminded her cousin that Daniel would be sorely disappointed to lose his prized hens to his wife’s careless disregard, while bringing base and predatory beasts to their front door, endangering the very lives of their children, and on and on. Patience, complaining weakly, finally retreated to her bed, dragging the children along behind her. Martha, left alone with the men, turned triumphantly to John and pointed to the front door.
John, walking as though carrying a sack of stones on his back, took his time putting on his greatcoat and sighed at long intervals, hoping for some word of intervention on Thomas’s part. But Thomas said nothing as he quietly put away the whetstone and walked to the warmth of his own bed. John soon followed him behind the hearth, harping at his bad luck. His voice carried back to the common room, muffled but angry. “She’s a feckin’ night-terror driven to ground, Thomas…. To be sent out to the barn like a dog…. Come morning she’ll know what for…”
There was a dull creaking of ropes, as though Thomas had settled his tall form onto the rope bed, and he said in warning, “Lay it by, John, or she’ll beggar you.”
Martha walked to the linen chest and pulled from it the thinnest quilt. She waited for John to reemerge from his room and, handing the quilt to John, said pleasantly, “You’ll need this. It’s no doubt very cold in the barn.” She opened the door and then, as John stepped into the chafing rain, said, “You’ll next time think before laughing at me.”
She firmly closed and latched the door behind him. Her mouth curled tightly upwards as she thought of John climbing, diminished and swearing, into the manger, the barn filling with the murmuring of hens and horses, a chorus blending with the sounds of wounded muttering.
BEFORE DAWN, MARTHA roused the entire house to help with the washing. She sent Thomas to fetch John from the barn and he appeared at the table sullen but silent, his hair and coat covered in straw. In the midst of the breakfast meal, the giving and taking of food and the talk of work to be done, Patience sat slumped in her chair, carelessly picking at bread soaked in milk. One lock of hair fell in a limp ribbon over her face and her skin held a greenish pallor.
Martha scratched with her nail a split seam in a stocking she had been mending and wondered if Patience would be well enough to at least mend some of the fraying collars and cuffs. A dark thought, playing beyond her work-filled mind, shifted and settled behind her eyes. It was common-enough knowledge among midwives that the unborn, to be born in good health, would by necessity make the mother sick, the mother’s vital essences usurped by the quickening child.
But something unwholesome and yeastlike in the pregnant woman’s sweat made Martha uneasy. She would try to remember later to save by her cousin’s water. In this way she would sniff out the unbalancing elements. She had been present at numerous difficult, painful, and even violent births, but she had never yet lost a babe and had learned from older, more experienced women the collective wisdom of generations: the seeing, the smelling, the touching, the
Walking out into the yard, she lifted her face towards the morning sun and, closing her eyes, felt the heat of it draw blood into her cheeks. The frigid sleet had ceased during the night, and the clouds, which had covered the skies for weeks, began to disperse into crisscrossed bands of gray. A crown of sweat soon prickled her skin under her cap and she opened the laces, pulling it from her head. An easterly wind, chilled and saltwater pungent, blew at her back, filling her apron like a sail and lifting the ropy strands of hair at her neck. She opened her eyes again, slowly, lids creased and fluttering from the sudden light and, with her fingers, smoothed away the sweat from the hollow of her throat. She tried banishing the dark thoughts about her cousin and filled her lungs with the briny air.
A lengthy shadow over the yard startled her and she turned to meet the unapologetic gaze of the Welshman. He had been studying her, she had no doubt, while her eyes were closed and had come upon her with soft-footed guile. Behind him stood John, who was also staring, but he dropped his eyes once she pierced him with a threatening look.
“Well?” she asked, jerking the cap back over her head, hiding the tangles of black hair. “The two of you won’t work off servitude in the company of mischief.”
“I need my man to come trapping with me,” Thomas answered, his voice deeply resonant, as though he had swallowed pebbles with his mash.
Martha crossed her arms and considered him. She was a tall woman but next to Thomas she felt near to a child. She hated the way she had to tilt her chin up to see the whole of him. “My man,” he had said. “My man,” as though John Levistone were indentured not to the Taylors but to Thomas.
“You can tend to your traps when the other one has finished the clearing,” she said, turning on her heel and walking away. There was a satisfactory silence that followed her to the house, and when at length she looked over her shoulder, Thomas had returned to the barn. John gathered up a hoe and a slotted rake and began pulling a winter’s worth of dirt and leaves away from the damp foundation of the house.
She sat for an hour or more, sorting through the seeds that would go into the house garden. From time to time she looked up through the window or open door, following John’s progress around the house. He sang snatches of a song, “ ‘For other manly practices she gain’d the love of all, for leaping and for running or wrestling for a fall,’ ” sometimes stopping to swear softly or moan to himself, “Christ, the woman is a tartar.”
When she had finished counting the seeds, she glanced through the window and saw Thomas coming from the barn. He stood looking fixedly at the ground as though the firing pan had fallen off his flintlock. Something about the way he stared prickled the back of her neck.
Leaving her shawl in the house, Martha quickly crossed the yard to the barn, coming to stand behind Thomas, who had knelt down and was examining a late bank of snow worn down to gray, rounded lumps of slush and mud and pocked with deep channels and ridges. When her shadow crossed his path, Thomas stood upright again, suddenly alert, his gaze sweeping across the melting fields and into the surrounding woods. She followed his gaze but could see nothing beyond the bare trees.
He pointed to a marked depression in the mud. There, impressed like a mold into the wasting snow, were four distinct circlets over one larger circlet. Martha bent and spread her closed fist over the print and saw her own hand dwarfed by the size of it.
“Wolves,” Thomas said, looking at her with frank appraisal. “Two of them. It seems John and I will both be in the barn tonight.”
Martha hugged herself tightly with her own arms, shivering slightly in the cool, shaded air. There was no look of satisfaction on her face. Only a deepening crease between her brows, and lips that were open and moist, like a child’s mouth caught at the moment of surprise.
LATE AFTER DARK, Martha kept vigil by the window, listening for the howling or yipping that was not from a fox or badger. She sighed, remembering her last worded exchange with her cousin. Patience, ill and fretful, wanting only to escape to her bed, had become overwrought and cried uncontrollably when Martha pressed her to take greater charge of the men, especially now that wolves had come prowling to feed at their door. Clapping her hands over her ears, Patience had cried, “Do what you will, only leave me be.”
Rushing for the comfort of her bed, she had tripped over a stool, and when Martha rose to catch her, Patience waved her away and ran to her room, breathing bubbles of snot from her nose like an infant. Later, when Martha brought her a strained broth, Patience grabbed her hand and, holding it to her belly, wailed, “I am afraid of this birthing.” She began to cry miserably and Martha stayed with her for a while, smoothing her hair and whispering reassurances that she herself did not feel, until her cousin had fallen into a heavy sleep.
