Page 27 of Dark Tides
“Is this your last word?”
Wearily she turned her head away from him and caught Livia’s dark intent gaze on her. The younger woman’s eyes were filled with tears; Livia was following every word, moved to deep emotion. “She said so,” Livia spoke gently from the doorway. “She has given you her last word. You can ask for nothing more from her.”
He looked at Alinor, as Livia opened the door in silence, and there was nothing he could do but leave. Livia followed him out and closed the door quietly behind them.
On the narrow landing, he caught her sleeve and she turned her beautiful face up to his.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I love her, and together we have a child. I promised her marriage and now I need a wife, and I need my child to inherit.”
Gently she put her warm hand over his. “But I do understand,” she said surprisingly. “And I will help you. Come tomorrow and walk with me.”
“On a Sunday?” he asked.
She had been raised as a Roman Catholic, and had never observedthe Sabbath like a puritan. She shrugged. “Meet me tomorrow after dinner, and we can decide what is best to do.”
JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND
Ned, planning to send a barrel of goods and herbs to England at the end of summer, traded a whole freshly caught salmon for a pair of barrels from the cooper. The minister’s housekeeper was there, ordering a barrel for the manse.
“Good morning, Mr. Ferryman, I’ll take some fresh fish for the minister, if you’ve got anything nice,” she said.
“Of course,” Ned said. “I’ve set my traps again and I’ve got some beautiful fat trout. Shall I carry it to your door?”
“I’d be grateful,” she said.
“May I carry your basket for you? Are you finished here, Mrs. Rose?”
She put her initials in the cooper’s book for the minister’s order, and then gave Ned her basket as they walked around the cooper’s house, out of his gate, and back into the broad street, past the meetinghouse, to where the minister’s house was set at the junction. The wide green common grazing land ran north to south past his front door and at the side of his house was the west-to-east lane called the Middle Highway running out of town to the woods. The town fence protected his land and house from the grazing animals; his own gate led to a path to his front door, fastened with ironwork—a handsome latch.
“Fair weather,” Ned said shyly, casting about for something to say to her, knowing that the whole town had watched them walk up the lane together. Everyone expected them to marry. Single men were notwelcomed in these frontier plantations where a man could only survive with the work of his wife and children, and a woman had to have the protection of a man. There were only two other bachelors in the town and each had been given a plot in return for plying his trade, his specialist skills; both of them would be expected to marry. The minister John Russell had invited Ned to join the community and given him the riverside lot outside the town fence and the ferry beside it, for his loyal service in Oliver Cromwell’s army. Mr. Russell wanted a man he could trust to watch the north road and guard his secret guests. If Ned wanted to settle in Hadley and be granted more land, and a bigger house, he must marry. Mrs. Rose was a widowed indentured servant at the manse. When her contracted time was served, she would have to find another post and work for another household or marry one of the settlers to get a house and land.
“It’s fine now but it’ll soon be too hot to speak,” she predicted. “The summers here are as cruel as the winters. I miss an English summer day!”
“We all do, I think. But I like this warm weather.”
The minister lived in a well-built house; handsome wooden steps led up to a double front door. The housekeeper led Ned around to the back, where the grassy lot stretched away east to the start of the forest. Near the house a black slave chopped a tree into firewood, another stacked it. Mrs. Rose led Ned up the two steps to the kitchen door. They went in together, and Ned put down the baskets on the scrubbed table.
“You can go down,” Mrs. Rose said quietly. “They thought they’d keep out of sight today in the cool, while there are messengers coming and going.”
She nodded him towards the main part of the house. Ned opened the door and stepped into the wooden-floored hall. A long-case clock ticked loudly, as if to proclaim the wealth of the master of the house. Ned glanced into the empty study where the minister wrote his impassioned sermons. No one was there, so he rolled back the rug that covered the trapdoor to the cellar. He tapped on the hatch door, the old familiar rat-tat-tat-tatta-tatta-tat, and opened the hatch. A ladder extended below him into darkness. Ned climbed down into thepitch-black and only when the hatch above him thudded back into place and he heard the shuffle of Mrs. Rose rolling back the rug, was there the sharp click of a flint, a spark, and the flare of a flame.
Ned felt his way to the bottom of the ladder and there, faces illuminated by the bright flame of candlewood, were his former commanders, both men in their sixties, exiles from the English Civil War which had finally turned against them: Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, regicides, men who had signed the death sentence for their own king and were now hiding from a warrant of arrest from his son, the restored king. The three shook hands in silence and went from the foot of the ladder to the end of the storeroom where a window set high in the stone walls admitted a greenish light and fresh air to the cellar.
“No strangers in town? No one asking for us?” Edward asked of Ned, who had served them and guarded them for the five and a half years they had been living in Hadley.
“No one that I saw, no one came in on my ferry,” Ned told him. “But you’re wise to stay down here, there’s another town meeting this afternoon and messengers expected from Boston. They’re warning about the Pokanoket—if they’re planning something? People out of town are fortifying their houses. I had one of the selectmen at my house telling me to come and translate for the town council, and that next I’d be mustered.”
“Of course you’ll serve,” William told him. “There’s not one of them has ever seen warfare. Half of them can’t light a matchlock. The town needs you.”
“There’s not one of ’em I’d trust with a weapon,” Ned said scathingly.
“Aye, but they’re our people,” Edward agreed with his son-in-law. “And they can be trained. Don’t you remember the early days of the New Model Army? You can make a great army from ordinary men if their cause is just and you have time to train them.”
“I was proud to serve then,” Ned said quietly. “But that was my first and last cause. I served a great general to free my people from a tyrant. It was an honor to serve the Lord Protector against the tyrant King Charles. And when we won, and you two sat in judgment onhim, I was there! I was in court for every day of his trial and I knew it was justice. I watched him step out of the Banqueting House that morning and put his head on the block. I swore then that I’d finished soldiering. I’d never take arms again. I swore I’d live in peace to the end of my days. I’d never make war on innocent people.”
“Aye, but savages are not innocent people, Ned! These are not comrades like us in the New Model Army. They’re not Christian, half of them are pagans. They don’t think like we do. And mark my words, you’ll have to choose a side sooner or later. Josiah Winslow himself said to me that there will come a time when it’s us against them.”
“His father would never have said that,” Ned pointed out. “Everyone says his father and the Massasoit were true friends.”
