time while indoors confined to her room, sewing or furtively writing in the diary, at times overcome with tears for the boy. Blessedly, no one else in the family had become ill, and John would soon be sent to bring back Joanna.
Earlier, she had heard the unmistakable sounds of an argument between Patience and Daniel coming from the common room. There were suppressed, passionate exchanges punctuated by the sounds of her cousin’s angry weeping, and Martha had waited until silence had returned, making her think that Daniel had led her cousin into their bedroom. Placing the cloak aside on the bed, she walked into the common room to build up the fire for the noon meal. She was startled to see Patience standing behind a chair, her fingers tightly gripping the ladder back, and in the chair in front of her sat Daniel, holding in his hands a red leather-bound book.
There was a moment of confusion when Martha simply stared, wondering that there should be a twin to her own singular journal. But Daniel’s face was stricken with something beyond grief. A crimped mask of fear had compressed his lips into two white slashes, and he asked, “Is this your doing?”
“Patience gave it me,” she answered quickly. “The book is for the house accounts.” She heard from her cousin an ugly exhalation of air, and when Martha met her eyes, a prickling band of sweat sprang up around her neck.
“I will ask you again, Martha, is this your doing?” He anxiously palmed the stubble at his chin, and Martha frantically searched his face, trying to gauge the depth of his knowledge. How far beyond the beginning entries, the notations of supplies and homely expenditures, had he read of a regicide’s life?
“It was given to me by your wife, Daniel. It is mine.” Martha dropped her chin, clenching her hands together. “I thought my property to be inviolable.”
“Your property.
More than the pity Martha felt for her cousin in that moment—the thought of Patience trying desperately to breathe in the remaining scent of a dead child impressed onto a pillow—she awakened to an overarching terror that she had, through her own playing at secrets, betrayed Thomas.
She met Daniel’s gaze and held out her hand to receive back the book. He looked away from her, gripping the book’s binding tighter, turning it end over end in his hands. He said, “You will leave today for your father’s house until such time as I have reflected on this. I will keep the book and you will not return until—”
“She will
“Silence!” Daniel roared. “Enough.” Wounded and shaken, Patience gathered up the folds of her skirt and left the room, weeping.
“Martha,” Daniel said, “John will take you in the wagon today.” He laid the diary on the table, his palms splayed over the binding as if seeking to hide it. Martha could see the lines entrenched in his face, and she knew his sadness would never find release pinioned against his wife’s towering, extravagant grief.
“Daniel,” she began. “Cousin, I have never asked you for anything, and have done all I could for your family. But I ask you, I beg you, to burn this book rather than read it more. I would you call me thief and have me arrested rather than harm come to another through my indiscretion.” She took a few steps closer to the table. “Cousin, the teller of these words has no knowledge of this book. Think what may come from revealing these pages to others. I, myself, have not told another soul. Please.”
“No,” he said, taking the book from the table. “You must promise me you will never again speak of this. I will reason with Patience. She is—” He paused for a moment before continuing. “She has faults enough, but she is my wife and will be silent on this if I demand it. You must understand… she had no knowledge…” He stood abruptly, dragging a hand through the tufts of his hair. He stepped closer, saying, “You have put us all in grave danger with this book, cousin.”
Martha looked at his red-rimmed eyes and knew in the instant that he had read the whole of the book. “It was recklessness that led me to write it. I see that now.”
He clasped her firmly by the elbow and walked with her out of the house, leading her into the garden, dotted with swelling gourds. He stood scanning the surrounding fields, cropped bare through autumn harvesting, and said, “Martha, if Thomas ever knew of this book, it could be the end of the trust he has placed in you.” When she tried to speak, to tell him of the bounty men, he held up a hand and said harshly, “Not another word. You must leave now. Speak to no one else about this. I will think on what is best to be done.”
Martha searched his face, which seemed to reflect only the flushed and open visage of a simple carter. A kind and generous man who had coddled and spoiled his wife and children alike; a man who could not, though it save his very life, hit the broadside of a barn with a primed and ready flintlock. But she also sensed a forcefulness that he had, until that moment, hidden from her. Or perhaps it was that she had not looked closely enough to find the greater substance in him.
He glanced at the house, the door still open and beckoning, and Martha could see the rings of black under his eyes and the stubble of beard that proved the cost of hiding her secret.
Martha quickly bundled her few things together and, wearing the new cloak, climbed into the waiting wagon. Thomas had gone hunting hours before, or so he had said, but she wondered if his going had been a kind of self- protection. She craned her neck again and again for some glimpse of him, but the wagon was quickly engulfed by spiraling wisps of fog dissipating with the rising heat. John sat next to her on the driving board, his face anxious, his eyes, wide and blinking, fixed on the road ahead.
Midway through the journey John said to her, “Do not worry about the Taylors. I will see to them, no matter what…” He paused, his voice trailing away.
She sat shivering with the cloak drawn tightly around her shoulders, even after the sun broke free, shining hotly on their necks, and a pounding like the threshing of grain began in her ears. She suddenly pressed her hands over her face, her breath exhaling raggedly against her palms, and she felt John’s hand go to her shoulder briefly before she turned her head away.
“Thomas will never break faith with you,” he said. “Never.”
She shook her head, voiceless, searching the familiar pathways of burled oak and elm already washed with russet brown and yellow. She smelled the honeysuckle, made heavy and overripe by the rains, remembering that its scent could foretell weddings. On the day of the summer harvest, Thomas had proudly pointed out to her his plot of land at the bend of the Concord. A place of sandy shale and gray rock pressed firm and flat by rushing seasonal tides, facing the rolling furze of Broad Meadow on its westerly side. Wood and stone, he’d once said, about his house that was to be. It was to stand on the banks above the glistening boulders, settled in sheltering birch and ash, the great common fields at its back, the gold and amber of the setting sun at its front.
Now, in all probability, through the determination or spite of her cousin, the house that stood at the bend would be shackled to a miller’s wheel, and the man dispossessed of it perhaps manacled to a prison ship bound for England. There would be no marriage now, in any event, if Thomas believed that she had betrayed him.
John stopped the cart some distance away from the Allen house at Martha’s insistence. She climbed weakly from the wagon and stood mute in the shifting dust of the path, unable to say the simplest of good-byes.
She turned and walked across the yard to the house. Standing silently at the open door, without greeting or explanation, she took in the surprised looks on the faces of her father and his two hired men. They had been eating supper and they sat with their spoons poised over their laps as though she had appeared like a nymph, come from the woods to haunt them. Andrew Allen slowly lowered his spoon to the table, his surprise quickly turning to dismay, and then to suspicion, and motioned abruptly for the men to leave.
When he and Martha were alone together, he wiped his mouth carefully with the back of his hand and asked, “Are ye in the family way?”
Setting the empty bowl from her bundle on the table, the bowl she had taken to the Taylors’ to fill by her own labors, she shook her head, and without a word, she crept to the attic, to her old bed, and lay down to sleep.
When Martha woke, it was daylight but on which day, she wasn’t sure. She had fallen asleep on her belly, her arms curled under her chest, and her eyelids felt swollen shut with crying. She had woken and slept in so
