Page 72 of Dark Tides
He bowed, hiding his agreement. “I have some replies to the invitations.”
“Are people coming?” she asked eagerly.
He nodded. “About ten people have told me they will attend, and here—” He gestured to the desk. “There are more replies to open.”
“Oh, let me open them!” she begged. “Nobody ever writes to me these days, I never break a seal on good paper. Do let me!”
He laughed, feeling tender towards her. “Come then.” He drew back the chair so she might sit at his desk.
Sarah, mounting the steps to the terrace from the garden below, saw Livia brush against James, as she took her seat in his chair, at his desk, and took up his silver letter opener, as if she were the mistress of the house and his wife.
“Sarah was taken with your statues,” Alys remarked to Livia as they got into bed the following Sunday night. “She couldn’t speak of anything else this morning.”
“She has an eye for beauty,” Livia allowed, tying the ribbons at the front of her nightgown.
“She said she saw him.”
“He was there, but I sent him away to his study,” Livia said. “I knew you would not want her to see him.”
“Thank you for that. You’ll think me a fool but…”
Livia slid her arm around Alys and drew her close. “I don’t think you’re foolish,” she said, brushing back a lock of hair from the woman’s lined face. “I know he was your enemy. And I am not befriending him. I am using him to make our fortune. I ceased to be his friend from the moment that I understood how you felt. Your friends are my friends, your enemies mine. Your feelings are my feelings.”
Alys could feel the warmth of Livia’s body through the silky nightgown. “I hope you’re safe with him. He’s not a man I’d trust. He ruined us.”
“It will go well,” the younger woman said confidently. “It is he who should be anxious. I’m going to be the one who profits from this.” She drew closer and put her head on Alys’s shoulder. “I am not too heavy? I love it when you hold me and I can fall asleep in your arms. I feel beloved again. I need to feel beloved.”
“You’re not too heavy,” Alys said quietly, letting Livia press her cheek against her neck and snuggle in. “Will you go to his house all day tomorrow as well?”
“Of course! I have so much to do!”
OCTOBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND
As the weather started to turn colder and the trees shed blazing leaves of gold, bronze, and red, swirling around in a blizzard of color, Ned rethatched his roof of reeds, knowing that the nights would get longer and colder until the snows came to make everything white and silent.He was straddling his ridge pole, tying in the stacks that he had traded from the Nipmuc who brought great rafts of reeds upriver, towed behind their dugouts from the coastal marshes, when he heard the clang of the horseshoe from the far side of the river. Looking across, shading his eyes from the low red autumn sun, he could see the figure of an Indian man, the unmistakable profile of buckskin leggings and a bare chest half-covered with a leather cape. Ned grunted with irritation at having to interrupt his work, but went hand over hand down his roof ladder, and then scrambled down the rough wood ladder that leaned against his wall.
He went out of his garden gate, up the rough steps in the landward side of the bank, and stepped down to the frosty white pier on the river side. The water was colder every day. He rubbed his rough hands together as he stepped on the ferry, unhooked it, pulled on the cold damp rope, and saw, as the ferry bobbed and yawed across the river, that the Indian was Wussausmon, and behind him, shielded by the trees of the forest, were the puritan lords: William Goffe and Edward Whalley.
Ned jumped ashore with real pleasure, greeted Wussausmon, and turned to his comrades. “Good to see you! You’re well? Safe? All well?”
The three men embraced. “God bless you, Ned, here we are back with you,” said William.
“All quiet here?” Edward demanded, peering across the river to Ned’s house.
“All quiet, all safe,” Ned assured them. “I can take you across now, you can wait in my house till evening, and we’ll walk round the forest way to the minister’s house at dusk.”
“I can tell him you’re coming,” Wussausmon volunteered. “I’m going into town.”
“Like that?” Ned gestured to the buckskin leggings and cape.
“Like this,” he confirmed. “No one notices me like this.”
“Good, good,” William agreed, walking down the beach and onto the grounded ferry, followed by Edward and Wussausmon. Ned pushed off, and rocked the ferry to get it into the flow of the water so that he could pull them over.
“You look well,” he remarked.
They did. The summer at the shore had put a tan on their skin and flesh on their bones. They had walked and hunted, rested and gathered food. They had fished and swum. Their Pokanoket neighbors had loaned them a dugout and they had paddled up and down the coast and up the Kittacuck River. They had prayed with local people who listened to the gospel with courtesy but were not converted, and they had seen no English: not one settler, only a white sail, far away on the horizon.
“We’ve been desperate for news,” William said. “Any news from England, Ned?”
