Page 110 of Dark Tides
Sarah smiled. “Of course,” she said. “Thank you. But I can easily find an inn and come back here.”
“My mother would never forgive me,” he assured her.
He opened the door and called up the stairs. “In Venice we have our kitchens under the roof, it is better in case of fire, you know? And here she is.”
A broad smiling woman came down the stairs, was told Sarah’s assumed name, and kissed her warmly on both cheeks. Her son instructed her in rapid Italian that Sarah could not follow, and the woman took the hatbox and led Sarah into a room overlooking the canal furnished with a curtained bed, and—even here—a great many marble figures.
“Yes, these too are for sale!” Signor Russo said from the doorway. “You shall examine them when you are rested. But we will leave you to make yourself at home and I will come for you in an hour or so. Rest now.”
“I can go to dine alone,” Sarah protested. “I don’t want to be any trouble.”
“No, I shall come with you. It is the greatest city in the world, but unsuitable for a beautiful young woman.”
“There are thieves?” she asked, glancing towards her box, safe on the bed.
“Of every legal sort, and lechers,” he said. “Gamblers and spies. Iam sorry to say we are decadent, Miss Jolie. We are all sinners in this most angelic of cities. You will find yourself much desired.”
Sarah tried to laugh carelessly, like a woman of the world, but found she giggled. He smiled at her and ushered his mother from the room and closed the door and there was silence.
DECEMBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND
Darkness held the sky from afternoon till midmorning, ice held the lakes and ponds, snow held Ned’s door closed so that every morning he had to break out like a man under siege. The path to the animals in their stall had to be dug out almost every day as the snow fell without ceasing; he did not even attempt to clean their pen, he just piled straw on straw so they were deep-littered on a thick bed.
Ned’s food stores were covered with a drift of snow and had to be dug out, but the maize was keeping well and the jars of dried berries. He had enough to trade when he made his weekly trek into Hadley for extra supplies. Ned forced himself to struggle down the common grazing lane, now a snowy plain of white, supplying dried goods to his customers, demonstrating his faith at the meetinghouse, and his loyalty to the men in hiding.
They had no need for a guard at the ferry in this weather. No Englishman would brave the woods in winter, no Englishman would dare put a boat on the river in this weather. The settlers were uncertain canoeists in the shallow rivers of summer, none of them would take to the icy water in winter floods when floes of ice came tumbling down on the deep waters and a fall into the river would mean almost certain death. In midwinter the rivers would freeze solid, the icycurrent moving darkly under a treacherous sheet of ice. Any accident in this weather, indoors or out, was sure to be fatal. Ned woke every morning with a sense of relief that his fire had kept in, that he had survived another night. He spent his days in wearying anxiety—fearing a fall as if he were an old man, fearing the cold as if he were a girl, fearing the dark and the howl of the wolves on the other side of the bank as if he were a superstitious townsman.
One morning he was amazed to hear the clang of the iron on the bar beside the pier, as if someone wanted to summon him, a ferryman, to a frozen river. He had to put on his fur hat, his buckskin cape, his buckskin leggings, his thick mittens, his moccasins, and his oiled cape before he could open his door, kick aside the snowdrift, and step into his basketwork shoes onto the high bank of snow. He tramped around to the side of his house, thinking that he must have imagined the summons, but there, strolling towards him on the top of the bank, coming from the forest, light-footed as a winter hare on his snowshoes, was Wussausmon, dressed in native winter clothes. Ned peered from under the brim of his thick fur hat at his friend, who seemed half-naked. “Good God, man! Are you not freezing?”
“I’m wrapped up warm enough,” Wussausmon said cheerfully. “You beware that someone doesn’t mistake you for a bear and shoot you. Where did you get that hat?”
“Made it myself,” Ned said. It was a pair of cured rabbit skins, stitched clumsily together, covering his head and the back of his neck. He had a scarf sent by Alinor from London, knitted wool, wrapped around his mouth which was rapidly growing a beard of freezing ice from his breath.
Wussausmon suppressed a laugh. “I’ve brought you some fresh meat,” he said. “I was hunting in the woods outside Norwottuck and Quiet Squirrel said you’d be glad of it.”
“I am,” Ned said, the juices rushing into his mouth at the thought of it. “I haven’t shot a thing for weeks.”
“They said you’d not been out for days.”
Ned glanced away from Wussausmon’s bright gaze. “I don’t like to hunt alone,” Ned said shortly.
“Why not?”
Ned hesitated to explain his fear. “If the weather closed in…”
Wussausmon was genuinely uncomprehending. “What?” he asked. “What would happen if the weather closed in?”
Ned ducked his head, awkward in his shame, lowered his voice though there was no one around the two men but the bare black trees, their trunks striped with snow. “I wouldn’t be able to find my way home.”
“Find your way home? In your own woods? To your own home? Why ever not?”
Ned shook his head, feeling embarrassed. “I get snow blind,” he said. “I can’t tell which way I am facing. If it snows heavily—I’m lost.”
“How can you not know where you are on your own land? It’s so strange.”
Ned could not argue that it was strange not to know the way to your own door. He shrugged, embarrassed. “Aye; but I don’t.”
“D’you want to come over to Norwottuck with me? We’re roasting venison.”
