Page 152 of Dark Tides
DECEMBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND
Ned went out through the kitchen door to give the dried fruit to Mrs. Rose. She was stewing a pot of succotash in the fireplace, native food in an English kettle.
“I brought you these.” Ned put the woven basket of fruit on the table.
“I’m grateful,” she said, and tipped them into the storage jar and gave him back the basket. He could see her hands were shaking with fear.
“You’ll have heard the news?” he asked.
She looked strained. “I was in the room when the minister read the letter from Plymouth to the guests,” she said. “It’s just as I feared. Only worse. It’s war, isn’t it? Between us and the Indians?”
“They’ve ordered me into town,” he said. “I’ll have to leave my home and my land and my ferry as soon as it thaws.”
“We’ll have no chance against them out here,” she said. She tried to put a cork into the top of the storage jar and she fumbled with shaking hands.
Ned took it from her and corked the jar. “It may come to nothing,” he told her. “We’ve had scares before, and it’s come to nothing. We’ve marched out before and…”
“We’ve done more than march, we’ve wiped them out,” she said fiercely. “Over and over again. Last time, against the Pequot, we burned their village and them inside it. Those children that weren’t roasted alive, we sent into slavery. We told them to forget their families, to never say their tribal name. We wiped them out, ended their line. But they just melt into the forest and then they come back. They keep coming, from the west, from the south, and the more we kill, the more spring up. And they never learn, they go on refusing us, blocking our way.”
“No, no, they are just like us,” Ned protested. “They just want to keep their own lands and us on ours, they want to live at peace.”
She shook her head. “I can’t bear it,” she told him flatly. “When my time is up I’m going to ask the minister to find me a servant’s place in Boston rather than a plot here. I want to be among my own. I want to be in a town with a stone wall around it. I want to be somewhere that the savages are ordered to come to answer, where they are hanged on the green, where they are enslaved, not somewhere that they can stroll up the street whenever they like, or pitch one of their houses on our common, as if it was shared land.”
“Leave here?”
“You could come too!” she said boldly. “You could get a post as a servant, a footman, or a groom or something. Or perhaps you could be an agent to a slave trader? Shipping men into slavery in the Sugar Islands and sugar and rum on the return voyage? That’s a goodbusiness! You could get a job with a factor, we could go together? We could find work together?” Her color rose as she tried to persuade him, her face strained with anxiety. “It’d be hard work but better work than stuck out here waiting to be scalped. If you don’t want to fight for settlers, you don’t have to! You don’t have to command the militia if you have no stomach for it. We could be safe in Boston.”
“I’m not afraid to fight!” Ned was stung into objection. “It’s not that I won’t serve! It’s that they’re not my enemies. I won’t kill men who are not my enemies.”
“They’re not now,” she pointed out. “But they will be in the spring. You won’t open your door to your friend then. You’ll open your door and get an arrow through your gut and feel a tomahawk cleave your forehead.”
DECEMBER 1670, LONDON
Alys was lighting Alinor’s fire, on her knees before the fireplace, carefully placing the pieces of coal on the kindling, then sitting back with satisfaction when the little blaze licked its way along the sticks and then caught.
“At least the evenings are getting lighter,” she said. “The year has turned.”
“And who knows what this new year might bring,” Alinor said.
“Ma, you’re not thinking that Sarah will bring Rob home, are you? Because you know that’s really…”
“Really?”
“It’s not possible, Ma. Whatever we might wish. Whatever you might feel. I just pray to God that she comes back safe.”
“Captain Shore will guard her.”
“I know he will. But for you to send her all that way!”
“She’s got a good head on her shoulders, I trust her.”
“You could say all the same for Rob; and he never came home.”
“I believe he’s coming home now. I dreamed of him. I’m sure.”
“I know it,” Alys cut across her mother. “I know you’re sure. But I’m waiting and waiting for her and I don’t have your certainty, and I don’t have your dreams. I am too earthly to have your visions. I just want my little girl home again.”
Alinor heard the tremor in her daughter’s voice. “Be brave,” she said quietly. “Be patient. And trust her.”
