Page 128 of Dark Tides
“We know no one whose help we want,” Alys ruled, looking from Livia’s half-hidden smile to her mother’s gray gaze which was fixed, speculatively, on Livia’s downturned face.
“We’d rather make our own way than depend on someone’s favor,” Alinor supported her daughter. “Wouldn’t you, Livia?”
“Oh, I suppose so,” Livia concurred, glancing up at Johnnie almost as if she would wink.
DECEMBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND
On his Christmas Eve in Hadley Ned was surprised to hear a whisper of displaced snow at his door and a quiet tap from a mittened hand.
“Who’s there?” he shouted. He did not reach for the musket, but nor did he think for a moment that it was Mrs. Rose.
“I don’t know!” came the laughing response in a deep voice. “Am I John Sassamon, or Wussausmon?”
“I think it depends what you’re wearing?” Ned said, opening the door and welcoming the tall man dressed in Indian winter clothes into his room.
He brushed snow from his head, from his shoulders, from the iced fringes of his buckskin leggings and then stepped inside. “I will make a lake here, where I melt,” he said.
“I see you, Lake,” Ned said. “But come in anyway, and get warm. Will you stay the night?”
“If you will have me? I leave for my home at dawn. I said I’d be there for Christmas Day.”
“Lord, is it Christmas Day tomorrow?” Ned asked.
“Heathen,” Wussausmon said comfortably. “Did you not know?”
“It makes no difference to a godly man.” Ned followed the old ruling of Oliver Cromwell. “It’s not a celebration ordered in the Bible so it’s an ordinary day of prayer to me and all true Christians. Certainly to all of us in Hadley. So who’s the heathen now?”
Wussausmon laughed shortly, shook off his undercape, and came to the fire. “Ah, you’ve let your dog in,” he said as Red came to sniff him. “I wondered if he would spend the winter outside.”
“He sleeps out,” Ned said defensively. “I’m not making him soft. He’s a working dog.”
The Indian raised his hands. “Why would I care?” he asked. “You Coatmen are so strange with your animals. Both tender and cruel. You put your dog out but you sleep with hens?”
Ned laughed. “I do,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“It shall be our secret,” Wussausmon promised. “Please God we never share any worse between us.”
“Will you take a glass of cider?” Ned invited. “A small glass, and don’t get drunk and sell me your fields at Natick?”
“A small glass, and then I must sleep. I will have to leave at dawn.”
Ned poured a tiny measure for him and his guest and the two men stretched their feet to the fire and sipped.
“D’you know the name of the translators for the Coatmen who first came?” Wussausmon asked Ned.
“No,” Ned replied. “No, wait, someone told me. When the English first arrived on the first ship, theMayflower? You mean, translators like you?”
Wussausmon smiled. “Maybe they were like me. I hope to God that they were not. One was called Squanto and one Hobbamok; they were rivals, they each told the English that the other was a Judas, a betrayer. Nobody could decide who to believe. Perhaps they were both liars, perhaps they were both betrayers of their people and their birthright.”
“I told John Russell of your fears.” Ned guessed that Wussausmon was speaking of his sense of being in two worlds and belonging to neither. “I told him of Norwottuck arming, I warned him as you wanted me to do.”
“Will he pass on the warning to the Council? Will the hidden generals speak for us to their friends?”
“I think they will. I think they’ll persuade the Council to make an agreement with the Pokanoket in spring. I tried to tell them of everything—both the wrongs against the Indians, and their arming.”
“They believed you? They believed me?”
“Yes, they know what’s happening. They weren’t glad to hear me name Josiah Winslow as one of the merchants who are foreclosing on Indians; but they didn’t deny it.”
