Artists made sketches of the relic to be engraved onto pamphlets, which were circulated within hours to a wider populace whose dissatisfaction grew daily, pinched as they were by the taxes for the third Dutch war and the outrageous expenses of keeping the king’s whores and bastards fed and housed. The secret, dishonorable pacts by the second Charles Stuart with the Catholic French, the betrayal of a morally upright Protestant Dutch king, and the lack of legitimate successors to the throne had all brought disenchantment to the English people for their bonny wayward boy-king who was now an aging reprobate: a cynic and a secret heretic to the Anglican Church.
Charles replaced the lid on the barrel, his lips curled into the public show of insouciance. Throwing the accompanying scroll of parchment, along with the little wooden stake, into the fire grate, he gestured for Arlington to dispose of the barrel. The king would now visit his mistress Louise de Keroualle and their infant son. As he left, the dozens of timepieces in his chamber struck to twelve, the sound of their gongings and tinklings following the king’s footsteps, along with the clattering of the royal spaniels, roused to partner his stride. Arlington bowed as the king departed and then directed Williamson, who in turn directed Chiffinch, to remove the offending object. Buckingham had left the chamber even before the parchment had finished burning.
Chiffinch, Keeper of the Privy Closet, gestured for a guard, who in response clambered down the stairs, calling to a passing chamber orderly. The orderly opened the outward privy stairs door and called to a porter to come right quick. The porter and his mate retrieved the barrel, bumping it down the stairs, and boarded it onto a wherry, where it was directed to be thrown into the Thames farther downstream. The wherryman rowed with the current towards the docklands, discharging his cargo into the dark waters there.
After days and weeks, the rotting wood of the barrel expanded and broke apart, expelling the head like a birth into the tidal wash. By measures the skull, its prominences of brow and jawbone catching in the tumultuous mud, came to rest on the shores near Wapping, where it lay until at length it came to be found by a boy scouring the shores for eels.
From Martha Carrier’s Diary: Andover, Massachusetts,
Thursday, January 28th, 1692
My dearest and most beloved daughter Sarah,
If ever you are to read this, you will surely wonder at the tenderness of these opening words, as we have, so many times, been set at odds with each other. It has been said that when the daughter draws her nature from the mother, rather than from the father, there will be disharmony between them. And certainly discord has been in the house in which we have lived since the time you took your first steps. But you must know that as I have many times harshly tended to my children, scolded them, beaten and brayed at them, so, too, have I always loved them.
You would say a painful thing is this my love after you have felt the tender ministering of your aunt Mary. Sending you away to my sister’s house as I did was a hard thing, and yet I hoped to save you from the pox that threatened to take the life of your brothers, and which killed my own mother. But taking you back home again, away from a gentler house, was perhaps the cruelest thing that ever I could have done, for next to my sister’s sweet and exemplary nature, I must have seemed unyielding beyond bearing.
But you must believe that I know the workings of the world, and I would tell you that I did you a greater service in hardening you to the uncertainties of life, as well as strengthening you to its certainties of Age, Loss, Illness, and Death.
Some have said it is a sin to feel a greater measure of affinity for one child over another, but I have always seen in you the best, and most forward, parts of myself. I cannot say in truth that you are wholly the mirrored image of me, for where I am importune in my emotions, you are studied and cautious, like your father. Where I am quick to berate, you are more tempered in finding fault. You are brave and loyal and steadfast.
It may be that you and I will never come to a place of greater felicity, or even understanding. Perhaps it will be that the best we can hope for is a more charitable patience between us. It has been many years since I made entry to this diary, and if you have found these end pages, you will now know the history of the ones you called Mother and Father, he who has been to me, and above all else, Friend; and perhaps it may be that, in reading these words, you will come to understand, and forgive.
I have wondered countless times over the years since I began this work why I continued to keep it, dangerous as it is. Many times I have held the book over a fire, meaning to drop it into the flames. But it is a true accounting book, and the best kind; an accounting of your family, and your past. Perhaps it is only pride which keeps me from destroying these pages, an action which would keep us safer from those who would gain in status and wealth in its ransom. But, dear Sarah, once the storyteller is gone, so, too, is the story, unless it is committed to the written word, and I would have you know the whole of us; knowing, too, the sacrifices we have made.
And now I have come to the final pages. These will be my last observances in the red book.
There is of late a brooding, unsettled timbre to the air, stirred about by gossip and the unkind thoughts of others, and throughout the goodness of these days, I feel a shadow that may one day harden and congeal itself to the hateful acts of others. It is a danger that I daily bring closer to myself by being what I am. I can no more deny the nature of myself than a lump of coal can unprove its hardness, or an egg its smoothness. And these things give up their best gifts to the world upon their demise. The coal is burned by fire and brings warmth. The egg is broken and feeds a hungry mouth. It may be that the greatest gift I will ever give you will come only after I am gone, my body broken on the wheel of time and circumstances, and you will come to understand the full measure of my love.
I hear you in the next room, struggling to wake as you lie next to Hannah, overtired from tending well into the night your sister’s terrible burns. So like a little child to pull a scalding pot upon her head, not knowing for what she reaches but desiring above all else to have the very thing that is beyond her grasp. Someday it will be that you will have your own children to tend, though I now fear I will never see them.
You are even now rising from your bed, stretching out your arms, pushing away sleep.
Tell your children your mother was a woman who, with all her multitude of shortcomings, was more ferocious than kind, more contentious than agreeable, more irate than placid; but who cherished her family above all else. And when you are asked, tell them you are Martha Carrier’s daughter; that you had a mother who cared for you beyond reason, beyond tepid courtesies, beyond the brief, struggling hollow that is this life. That you are, and ever will be, loved.
