Page 8 of Dark Tides
Ned turned from the gate to end the argument, dropped to his knees, and picked up his hoeing stick, to weed around his vines of golden squash.
“What’s that stink you’re spreading there?”
“Fish guts,” Ned said, ignoring the smell. “Shad. I plant one in each hillock.”
“That’s what natives do!”
“Aye, it was one of them taught me.”
“And what’s that you’re using?”
Ned glanced at the old hoeing stick which had been rubbed with fat and roasted in ashes till it was hard, sharpened till it was as good as hammered iron. “This? What’s wrong with it?”
“Native work,” the man said contemptuously.
“It was traded to me for fair payment, and it does the job. I don’t mind who made it, as long as it’s good work.”
“You use native tricks and tools, you’ll become like them.” He spoke as if it was a curse. “You be careful, or you’ll be a savage yourself, and you’ll answer for it. You know what happened to Edward Ashley?”
“Forty years ago,” Ned said wearily.
“Sent back to England for living like a native,” the selectman said triumphantly. “You start like this, with a hoeing stick, and next you’re in moccasins and you’re lost.”
“I’m English, born and bred, and I’ll die English.” Ned reined in his irritation. “But I don’t have to despise anyone else.” He sat back on his heels. “I didn’t come here to be a king looking down on subjects, forcing my ways on them in blood. I came here to live at peace, with my neighbors. All my neighbors: English and Indian.”
The man glanced to the east, upriver where low-lying water meadows on the other side of the river became deep thick forest. “Even the ones you can’t see? The ones that howl like wolves in the night and watch you from the swamp all the day?”
“Them too,” Ned said equably. “The godly and ungodly, and those whose gods I don’t know.” He bent over his plants to show that the conversation was over; but still the messenger did not leave.
“We’ll send for you again, you know.” The man turned away from Ned’s garden gate and headed back to the town. “Everyone has to serve. Even if you don’t come now, you’ll have to come to militia training. You can’t just be English sitting on the riverside. You have to prove yourself English. You have to be English against our enemies. That’s how we know you’re English. That’s how you know yourself. We’re going to have to teach them a lesson!”
“I should think we’ve already taught them a lesson,” Ned remarked to the earth beneath his knees. “Better not invite us in, better not welcome us.”
JUNE 1670, LONDON
The Italian lady had to take off her hat and the dark veil, her black lace mittens, and wash her face and hands in the little attic bedroom before she could visit her mother-in-law. The baby was still sleeping but she took him in her arms and came into the room, strikingly beautiful, like a sorrowful Madonna. Alinor took in the dark gown cut low over her breasts, the creamy skin veiled by black lace, the pile of dark curling hair under the black trimmed cap, and the wide tragic eyes; but her attention was on the sleeping baby.
“Rob’s boy,” was all she said.
“Your grandson,” Lady da Ricci whispered, and put the baby into Alinor’s arms. “Doesn’t he look like Roberto?”
Alinor received the baby with the confidence of a midwife who has attended hundreds of births, but she did not embrace him. She held him on her lap so that she could look down at the sleeping face, round as a moon with red lips that showed a rosy little sucking blister. She did not exclaim with instant love; strangely she said nothing for long moments as if she were interrogating the dark eyelashes on the creamy cheeks and the snub little nose, and when she looked up at the widow kneeling beside her sofa, her pale face was grave: “How old is he?”
“Ah, he is just five months old, God bless him, to lose his father when he was newborn.”
“And his eyes?”
“Dark, dark blue, you will see when he wakes. Dark as the deep sea.”
The Italian lady felt, rather than saw, the little shudder that Alinor could not suppress.
“He is so like his father,” she asserted louder. “Every day I see it more.”
“Do you?” Alinor asked neutrally.
“He is Matteo Roberto, but you must call him Matthew of course. And Robert, for his father. Matthew Robert da Ricci.”
“Da Ricci?”
