Page 69 of Dark Tides
“No. But I can’t help but wonder what she thinks of him, and he of her.”
Alys was shocked. “She thinks nothing of him! She’ll never recover from the loss of Rob. She still cries for him in the night. Her only comfort is to be with us, to be with me. She says that she’ll stay with us for always. We’re her family now. She does not think anything of… him.”
“I’m glad of that,” Alinor said calmly. “If that’s what she says. I’m glad that we comfort her for her loss—if we do.”
“Does it not comfort you?” Alys whispered. “To have Rob’s wife and his baby under our roof?”
In the silence, Alinor shook her head.
“Why not?” Alys demanded. “Why does she not comfort you, Ma?”
“Ah,” said Alinor. “That I can’t say. I’m not yet sure enough to speak.”
SEPTEMBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND
Ned was called to the ferry in the morning by a clang of a horseshoe on the far side, and when he went to the pier and looked across he could see Quiet Squirrel and some women from her village. One of them had a little girl, of about six, gripping her buckskin skirt.
“Coming!” Ned called, and stepped from the pier to the ferry and pulled it across the wide river.
Chattering among themselves, the women came down the shingle beach and stepped on board the grounded ferry. Quiet Squirrel was last on, taking one hand of the little girl while her mother held the other.
“Netop,”Ned said to the child, and all the women on the ferry replied: “Netop, Nippe Sannup! Hello, Ferryman.”
The little girl looked up at the tall Englishman, her dark eyes taking in his friendly open smile, his white linen shirt, his thick trousers. Her dark gaze scanned him from his tall black hat to his heavy shoes. She turned to her mother: “He smells very strange,” she said in their language. “And why does he stare at me?”
“He can understand some of our speech, you know,” Quiet Squirrel told her. “Better not say he smells. Besides, he can’t help it, they spend all their time wrapped up in thick clothes as if it were winter.”
“I think you strange,” Ned replied to the child. He did not know the word for “smell.”
The little girl laughed. “Why does he speak like a baby?”
“He speaks like a child, but he is a man,” Quiet Squirrel replied.
Ned took hold of the rope, rocked the raft gently to free it from the beach, and then pulled it steadily across the river.
“Can we pay in dried meat?” Quiet Squirrel asked. “You’ll want dried meat for your winter stores, Ferryman.”
“Yes-yes,” Ned acknowledged. He smiled down at the little girl. “She too heavy! Pay twice!”
There was a chorus of laughter from the women. “Pay by weight!” they exclaimed. “Quiet Squirrel costs nothing!” The little girl squirmed near to her mother and hid her face in her skirts, she was laughing so much.
“You very fat!” Ned told her. “You sink my ferry.”
The child had to sit on the planks as her legs buckled beneath her with laughter.
“Nippe Sannup, you’re very funny,” Quiet Squirrel told him. “This is my little granddaughter, Red Berries in Rain.”
“Not little,” the child said, her eyes on Ned’s smiling face.
“Very big,” Ned said in her language. “Married?”
The child rocked with laughter. “I’ll marry you!”
All the women cried out and laughed together. “No! No! Sannup! You must marry me!” one of the bolder ones cried, leading a chorus of proposals. “Marry me! Marry me!”
“Aren’t you marrying the thin one with no home? The one who never pays full price?” Quiet Squirrel asked.
“You know everything?” Ned demanded, easily recognizing Mrs. Rose from this description.
