Page 160 of Dark Tides
FEBRUARY 1671, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND
Ned was smoking meat in the chimney of his house, long strips of venison that Quiet Squirrel had given him earlier in the day when she had crossed the river for trade. She said that she wanted some pins for sewing, an excuse so transparent that Ned did not even count the pins he poured into her sack, and neither did she.
“Want news?” he asked her, thinking that his grasp of the language was so poor that he could never convey to her his anxiety about what was to come, especially his fears for her, and the little village with the new palisade around it.
She nodded, her eyes on his face. “If you know anything, Ned.”
“Massasoit must go to Plymouth, understand? He must make answer, he must say: sorry.”
She sighed and he thought it was impatience at the childishness of his speech in their tongue. “I wish I could tell you that I know all this,” she said to him in her own language, knowing he would grasp one word in ten. “I know all this! We’ve all seen it coming. What I want you to tell me is when the men at Hadley, even the old soldiers that we helped to hide, are going to come against my people? I know they will. I don’t ask if, I ask when.” She took his hands and looked into his face as if to summon his attention. “Hadley men?” she asked him. “Are they going to march against us? Against my children?”
He understood at once what she meant. “No,” he said, then he checked himself. It was not for him to reassure her so that she trusted her neighbors when they were arming themselves, when they were talking of teaching a lesson to this wise old woman and the village. “Maybe,” he said, his face grim. “Maybe.”
“They are arming?” she asked him. “They are drilling?”
Before he could answer her head jerked up to listen to a noise outside, and at the same moment Red raised his head from his paws and growled.
“Someone at the door?” Ned asked, and turned back to her, but she was already gone. She had melted to the back of the room and slid herself under Ned’s big winter cape on its peg and stood perfectly still.
The hammer of a fist on the door echoed in the snow-silent cabin and Ned shouted: “Who’s there?”
“Selectman!” came the reply.
Ned opened the door and wrapped his jacket around himself against the cold as the man jumped down from the drift of packed snow into the house. Ned slammed the door behind him.
“Long way to come in the snow,” he said.
“I didn’t think I’d get through.” The man gestured at himself. He was dusted with snow from head to feet. He had been struggling through waist-high drifts up and down the common lane. “I’m going into all the houses this end of the village. You’re mustered: town militia. You’re to attend first Saturday on the meadow if fine.Next Saturday if snowing. One after that if still bad. You’re to bring your own weapons. D’you have a musket?” He looked above the door where Ned’s gun hung. “You’re to bring it.”
“What’re we doing?” Ned asked him.
“Drilling,” he said. “Practicing marksmanship, practicing marching.”
“To defend?” Ned asked, his last hope.
“To attack,” the man said. “To march with other militia under commanders appointed by the Council. A force of all New England, advancing together. You’re to be captain.”
“Marching against who?” Ned asked.
“Against the savages,” the man said generally.
“Who?” Ned demanded. “What tribe?”
The man made a lordly wave. “All of ’em,” he said. “They’re all as bad as each other. D’you accept your summons?”
“Yes,” Ned said. “Of course.”
The man turned, opened the door, and grunted as he heaved himself up the big bank of snow. He set off at once, without saying good-bye, struggling through the thick snow, falling, picking himself up again. Ned shut the door against the cold and Quiet Squirrel came out from his cape.
“What will you do?” she asked him, her face as tender as a mother to her son. “Nippe Sannup—what will you do?”
FEBRUARY 1671, AT SEA
True to his word, Rob had gone straight into the cabin that Felipe hastily vacated and did not come out for forty days, a self-imposed quarantine that he would not break. His food and beer were left at thedoor, and he returned the plates scraped clean, throwing the scraps and his slop bucket from the porthole. A bowl of vinegar stood outside his door and his plates and cups were soaked in it before they were collected. An old sailor, who had survived the triangular trade to the killing coasts of West Africa with one of Mrs. Reekie’s plague purses sewn around his neck, swore he would catch nothing, and served Rob, steeping his clothes in seawater and vinegar and then boiling them in hot water, pressing them with a scorching iron to kill the lice.
“He’s cleaner than I am,” he said with satisfaction on the fortieth day of the voyage when it was thought safe that Rob should come out.
“Really, that’s not the highest accolade in the world,” Felipe said.
