Page 6 of Dark Tides
“Has she come to stay? I saw trunks on the coach?”
“I don’t know how long…”
“I doubt this’ll be good enough for her.”
“I’ll get Sarah’s room ready for the maid and the baby, and I’ll offer her Johnnie’s room in the attic. I should have done it earlier butI never dreamed she’d get here so soon. She hired her own carriage from Greenwich.”
“Rob wrote that she was a wealthy widow. Poor child, she must feel that her old life is lost.”
“Just like us,” Alys remarked. “Homeless, and with the babies.”
“Except we didn’t have a hired carriage and a maid,” Alinor pointed out. “Who was the gentleman? I couldn’t see more than the top of his hat.”
Alys hesitated, unsure what she should say. “Nobody,” she lied. “A gentleman factor. He was selling a share in a slaver ship to the Guinea coast. Promised a hundredfold return, but the risk is too much for us.”
“Ned wouldn’t like it.” Alinor glanced down at her inadequate letter to her brother, far away in New England, escaping his country that had chosen servitude under a king. “Ned would never trade in slaves.”
“Ma…” Alys hesitated, not knowing how to speak to her mother. “You know that there can be no doubt?”
“Of my son’s death?” Alinor named the loss she could not believe.
“His widow is here now. She can tell you herself.”
“I know. I will believe it when she tells me, I am sure.”
“D’you want to lie on your sofa when I bring her up? It’s not too much for you?”
Alinor rose to her feet and took the half-dozen steps to the sofa and then seated herself as Alys lifted her legs and tucked her gown around her ankles.
“Comfortable? Can you breathe, Ma?”
“Aye, I’m well enough. Let her come up now.”
JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND
Ned was in a land without kings, but not without authorities. A selectman from the town council of Hadley banged through the north gate from the town and clambered up the embankment of the river and down the other side to the rickety wooden pier, so he could clang the dangling old horseshoe on a rusty iron bar to summon the ferryman from wherever he was. Ned mounted the bank from the back yard of the little two-room house, wiping the earth from his hands, and paused at the summit to look down on him.
“There’s no need to raise the dead. I was in my garden.”
“Edward Ferryman?”
“Aye. As you know well enough. D’you want the ferry?”
“No, I thought you might be in the woods, so I clanged for the ferry to fetch you.”
Ned silently raised his eyebrows, as if to imply that the man might call for the ferry but not the ferryman.
The man gestured to the paper in his hand. “This is official. You’re wanted in town.”
“Well, I can’t leave the Quinnehtukqut.” Ned gestured to the slow-moving river in its summer shallows.
“What?”
“The river. That’s its name. How come you don’t know that?”
“We call it the Connecticut.”
“Same thing. It means long river, a long river with tides. I can’t leave the ferry in daylight hours without someone to man the boat. You should know that. It’s the town’s own regulation.”
