Page 22 of Dark Tides
“I don’t want to buy from them,” she said, walking away, her expression sour.
“By the looks of it, they don’t want to sell to you,” Ned said under his voice.
Ned went on to the blacksmiths’, where Samuel and Philip Smith worked at the forge in the double lot behind their clapboard houses. Ned swapped some leeks for a bag of new nails to fix the shingles on his house walls against the coming winter.
“Heard you refused to come into town,” Samuel Smith said with a slow smile at Ned. “Thought it was odd.”
“I didn’t refuse!” Ned exclaimed. “I’ll come when I’m needed. But I can’t leave the ferry without warning. I’ve got to get someone to man it. Like now, Joel’s lad is minding it for me. I’ll come when I’ve something to sell or to buy, or when I can serve my neighbors or the Lord. Not because some selectman, in his place five minutes, comes and tells me I’m to take orders from him.”
“All you old roundheads will only take orders from your own,” Philip joked, and saw Ned’s slow smile.
“Thing is,” Sam interjected, “you don’t know, living that far out and ferrying the savages as you do, friendly like, that there’s rumors that the French are sending messages to them, stirring up trouble against us. Telling them we can’t be trusted.”
Ned gave him a rueful look. “Oh, can we be trusted?” he asked. “For I heard that the Massasoit—their chief—swore that he would sell no more of his people’s land, and we swore he should keep his own; and yet we go on buying. I heard it was the Plymouth governor’s ownson: Josiah Winslow himself! Taking up mortgages on Indian lands and making them sell when they’re caught in debt.”
“But why not? Mr. Pynchon is buying land at Woronoco and Norwottuck. These lands are empty!” Philip protested. “The plague killed them before we arrived. It’s God’s own will that we take the land.”
“Was London empty, after the great plague killed a family in every street?” Ned demanded.
The man hesitated, leaning on the bellows so the forge glowed red with the hiss of air: “What d’you mean?”
“Would it have been right for French families to move into the London houses that had a big red cross on the door, and the owners dead inside?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why call the lands empty, when you can see they were farmed, and worked for years? When you use their well-worn paths and trails through the forest and can see their fields well worked and the forest they’ve cleared of undergrowth for hunting? Just because they were sick, don’t mean they don’t own their fields as much as ever.”
The two men looked at Ned, as if they were disappointed in him. The town of Hadley clung together with a common purpose, survived by a common will. Dissent in anything—from religious tradition to politics—was not welcome. “Nay, Ned, don’t talk so daft,” the older man counseled him. “You’ll make no friends here talking like that. We’ve all got to stick together. Don’t you want more land to master?”
“No,” Ned said bluntly. “I had enough of masters in the old country, I don’t want to breed more here. And I don’t want to be one myself. I came because I thought we would all be equal, simple men together starting a new life among other simple men without masters. All I want is enough of a garden to farm and feed myself.”
Philip Smith laughed and clapped Ned on the shoulder. “You’re a rarity, Ned Ferryman!” he told him, despising his simplicity. “The last of the Levelers.”
JUNE 1670, LONDON
James was waiting at the far end of the quay beside a stack of barrels, hidden from the blank windows of the house where every blind was drawn down, except the ones in the turret—Alinor’s eyrie. The front door opened and the Italian widow stepped out, opened a black silk parasol against the glare, and tripped lightly in her little silk shoes over the cobbles towards him.
“We will walk towards the City,” was the first thing she said.
“Not to the fields?”
“No.”
He offered his arm and she took it, resting her hand on the crook of his elbow. “Is this very shocking?” she asked him, peeping upwards. “Should we have a chaperone?”
“Not since I am a friend of the family,” he answered her seriously. “I hope you have told them you are meeting me?”
“I must make sure you are always on friendly terms!” She avoided the question. “For I want you to take me to London, even perhaps to visit your friends at court.”
“The court is no place for a lady,” he corrected her. “Nobody attends court but for gambling and vice. I only go for essential meetings of business.”
“But I have business there,” she surprised him.
“You do?”
The black ribbons on her hat trembled at her determined nod. “I do,” she confirmed. “I am not quite a pauper. My first husband left me his antiquities, some beautiful sculptures from days long ago. Iwas told in Venice that the best prices are paid in London. Is that not true?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said gloomily. “Certainly, they seem to be mad for spending.”
