Cape Cod (25 page)

Jack gave up the last of his own. “Bigelow spoilt the gift-givin’?”

“We are friends with Winslow, but this Bigelow is no friend with us. Père Druillettes say ’e wait for
une entente
, armed men in the field ’gainst the Iroquois, before ’e give the gift. Until then,
pas de mot.”
He pressed his fingers to his lips, in the universal gesture for silence, and seemed startled that the index fingers were not there.

“The book goes back to Port Royal, then?”

The priest nodded.

“Would the Patriarch let a ignorant whaler read it?”

“No. It is a secret.”

“Well, how’d the Ca-poo-chins get it, then?”

“I tell too much already, but that is the part
plus intéressant.”

That night, Jack Hilyard slept by the fire, and as he drifted to sleep, the story of the book’s journey entered his dreams. The orange glow of the fire still danced before his eyes. Out of it came five Indians. They called him Weston Bloody Christian and ordered him to give over the box. He tried to protect it, but they tore it from him and pulled it open, and out dropped the book.

The fire burned brighter and he felt greater heat. In his sleep, he kicked off his blanket. The Indians were holding him over the flames with the book in his arms. One of the Indians was speaking in his own tongue, but Jack understood.

“Do not burn the book. The black robes say that God is in books. They read from books, then kiss them and hold them up to the sky. When they make their God from bread, they see how to do it from the book. We will give this to the black-robe priests to please them.”

The Indians took the book from Jack’s arms, then threw him into the fire. He awoke with a shout, covered in sweat. The fire was burning down, the flames glimmering weakly on the great room walls. He reached for Elizabeth… or Kate, as he did each night, but a priest with mangled hands was snoring beside him, so he pulled up his blanket and slipped back to his dream.

A candle glimmered on the chapel walls. With a hand pierced by nail holes, a priest turned the pages of the master’s journal. “The Indians bring it to one of our outposts to gain favor. The missionaries send it here to Port Royal. But it is useless.” He slid the book across a table, and Jack picked it up.

“Useless to the French,” whispered Kate, and her face became that of Elizabeth, “useless to the French, but for us, it do buy Nauseiput.”

iv.

Four years later, Port Royal lay quiet in the cool August sun. Cattle grazed in the fields. Smoke from cookfires curled into the sky. And the river ran like a ribbon of blue down from the green hills.

“Somewhere in that town,” whispered Jack, “be the metal box that hold the key to our future.”

“I came for no metal box,” said Jonathan. “What we do we do for the colony. ’Twill never be forgot.”

“What we do we do for ourselves,” grumbled Christopher.

“Find the Capuchins and there be the box,” whispered Jack to Christopher.

“All you Massachusetts men,” cried the English sergeant, “into the boats!”

“Forget not the Plymouth men!” added Robinson Bigelow, eldest son of Ezra.

“Right well call yourselves
king’s
men. Into the boat!”

On the poop deck of the
Augustine
, the drumbeat began. A moment later, it was taken up on the
Hope
and the
Church
. On the distant hills, the cattle began to run. On the fortress walls, men began to scurry. And down the valley rang the frightened sound of church bells on a Wednesday morning.

Christopher Hilyard felt in his own gut the pounding terror that the drums were meant to drive into the people of Port Royal. He had no fear of whales, angry elders, or Cape Cod Indians, but he had not been made for war.

Three sudden clouds of smoke shot up and out from the fortress walls. The thundering crump of three cannon pounded against the drumbeat in Christopher’s belly. Three columns of water rose around the
Hope
.

“Pay no mind,” called Major General Sedgwick from the poop deck. “God will let no cannonball strike us.”

“Lest we be fool enough to get in range,” whispered Jack.

“Sedgwick speaks true,” chided Jonathan. “God protects the righteous.”

“Then for certain he’ll show
us
no quarter,” said Christopher.

Ezra Bigelow had been a prophet, after all. Whenever the struggle for faith and empire flared in the New World, England and France were no allies. The men of Plymouth had supported Father Druillettes, had even convened the United Colonies in New Haven to hear him present his case. But no English army had taken the field against the Iroquois. And now an English army was moving against the French.

It had begun in disagreement between England and the Protestants of Holland. They had gone to war over trade, which, as Thomas Weston once said, mattered more to nations than faith. Lord Protector Cromwell, seeking to carry the conflict to the New World, had commissioned Boston Puritan Robert Sedgwick to raise an expedition against the Dutch at New Amsterdam and had sent seventy Roundhead troops, veterans of Naseby and the Irish Wars, to stand with the Colonial volunteers.

Robinson Bigelow, a student at Harvard College, brought the call to Plymouth. Like his father, he believed that the future of Plymouth rested in the hands of the more powerful Massachusetts Bay Colony, and thus was it in Plymouth’s interest to join the expedition. But the men of the Plymouth Colony had known only good dealings with the Dutch, and only a few volunteered, among them Cape Cod militia captain Jonathan Hilyard.

Then, just before the English flotilla left Boston, word arrived that the Dutch had sued for peace. And there sat Sedgwick, with three ships and a hundred and thirty men, yearning to fight for lord protector and country. In such circumstances, what would any good Englishman do but turn on the French?

To entice more Plymouth men, young Bigelow sent word that they were now attacking Saint John, Port Royal, and the Penobscot trading post that the French had stolen from Plymouth twenty years before. When the name of Port Royal was heard at Billingsgate, the Hilyards became Cromwellians and Jack the oldest volunteer in the army.

Now Christopher feared that he might vomit. With each thundering shot from the fortress walls, the knot in his throat nearly unraveled onto the men clambering ahead of him into the longboat. But he held on. Foul the helmet of one of Cromwell’s Roundheads and find yourself on the end of his pike.

They landed beyond range of the guns and fanned out on the coastal plain below the fortress. By noon, the siege was neatly laid. And for the rest of the day, people from the village and the surrounding countryside streamed toward the gates, their children and livestock in tow. And for the rest of the day, the Hilyards studied the spired building that rose to the right of the fort.

The Capuchins had erected a church and seminary at Port Royal, and it would seem that they were not about to leave it to the English.

“They think God’ll pertect ’em,” Jack said to Christopher as they ate an afternoon meal of salt meat, hardtack, and beer, “so they’re staying close to their house.”

“ ’Tis them bloody guns’ll do the pertectin’.”

All day, the French had kept up the artillery fire, as much to show the abundance of their munition as their displeasure.

“We needs to get into that church, fortress be damned.”

“It be scarifyin’ work, Pa.”

“Don’t be losin’ thy spine after all these years. Nauseiput be
our
island.
Ourn
from the time of the First Comin’. And this be the way to get it.”

“It do us no good if we be dead.”

“Before
I
die, I’ll bring me sons to Nauseiput. ’Tis me dream. I be old, but thou and Jon—”

“I be forty-six.”

“Younger ’n me, and in need of that master’s journal.”

“I never needed it yet.” Christopher tore a piece of salt meat with his teeth and tried to swallow it.

“Had I that log twenty-odd years ago, no Bigelow would’ve broke up our family and set us to wanderin’. Wif your taste for Injun women, you need a weapon ’gainst that man. So screw up the courage in that big gut of yours and think on the future.”

“The future.” Christopher managed to swallow the meat. “Aye.”

They told Jonathan nothing of the plan they made, for he would not have understood. He had no love of Nauseiput, nor any hatred of Ezra Bigelow. He was merely a brave Protestant answering the call of Cromwell, bravest Protestant of them all.

Around four hours after noon the doors of the fortress swung open and out marched a hundred and twenty men. Though the French had supplies to last five months, they did not choose besiegement. Better to end the engagement quickly than suffer Englishmen or hunger for too long.

In the camp, the drums began to beat and the men formed their ranks.

Christopher Hilyard moved into position behind his father. He was no child to be taken by dreams of battlefield glory, no veteran of the Civil War carrying the banner of Protestantism. His goal was simpler. From the day that he first saw the Scusset Indians riding their canoe toward dusk, he had dreamed only of being like them. From the day that he saw Witawawmut’s head, he had dreamed only of peace.

To gain the island where he had known his happiest moments, he had joined this little war. He longed, as much as his father, to live on Nauseiput. And for Nauseiput he would conquer his fear. He swallowed the knot in his throat and shambled off, eyes fixed on his father’s skinny back, hand around the stock of his gun.

A mixed company of Massachusetts and Plymouth men had been given the right flank. Massachusetts men held the left. And in the van, separated from the flanking Colonials by twenty yards, were the red and blue tunics, the fierce helmets, and the pikes of Cromwell’s soldiers.

To a European general on a hilltop, this engagement might have seemed like poor men’s war indeed. A few pennants fluttered in the sun. A handful of English advanced toward a line of fewer French. A tiny fortress, surrounded by rude dwellings, sputtering smoke and shot like an angry old man, stood the prize. And the vast Acadian wilderness paid no mind to any of it.

But for the men in the lines, who heard the thundering cannon, felt the ground shake with each shot, saw the enemy through a curtain of dirt and smoke, a few minutes of bravery and chance would determine their fates.

As he advanced across the grass, Christopher felt his wampum necklace tighten around his throat. He watched the sack at his father’s belt swing in rhythm with his gait. He listened to his holy brother Jonathan sing the Twenty-third Psalm like a song, while Robinson Bigelow kept up a brave line of talk for them all. And none of it made him feel any the braver.

Then the French stopped. They dug their rests into the ground and mounted their muskets, which caused some of the green Colonials to hesitate, a few to fall back. But the Roundheads kept up their thudding step, and the sergeant who commanded them shouted to the flanks, “Run now and let their cannon shred you. Close with ’em and watch ’em fly.”

“Aye!” cried Robinson Bigelow. “Show your courage or leave the field to men!”

“Give ’em good Protestant fire,” added Jonathan Hilyard. “And remember what these bloody French say. The English may best the Dutch at sea, but one Frenchman’s match for ten English on land.”

“We’ll not brook
that
!” shouted Jack Hilyard from the column, as though he truly believed it.

“Run that lie down their gullets!” cried Jonathan.

Jack dropped back and whispered to Christopher. “I sometimes marvel that he be me son.”

“Or my brother.”

“Remember, no matter what be said, when the volleyin’ start, we see fire comin’ down from that church.”

“Aye,” grunted Christopher.

“Halt!” The sergeant had not taken off his helmet all day, and in the heat, his face looked to have been cooked to the metal like beef to a grate.

His disciplined Roundheads ceased their advance, and the Colonials did likewise.

Now the artillery quit. A gentle wind drifted across the plain and blew the smoke off toward the ships. The field grew quiet. The soldiers had drawn close enough to settle the issue themselves. Though their muskets were not accurate weapons, when many were fired at once, a great gust of lead was blown toward the enemy. Thus were men grouped tightly to kill and be killed.

The English sergeant ordered the flanks to fix rests.

And the French sergeant ordered his men to fire. But of the fifty French weapons fired, at least forty were poorly sighted, aimed by shaking hands, or improperly powdered, so that only four shots reached the English.

God, fate, or a French marksman chose Robinson Bigelow as one of the four. His beaklike nose, which had earned him the name Honker, was blown apart. He dropped his cutlass, spun about, and came stumbling toward Christopher.

Now the English sergeant gave the word. A thunderous volley echoed from the flanks. But Christopher did not hear it. His eyes were fixed on Robinson, who held his hands to his face, as if to hold back the blood welling like springwater through his fingers. “Robby, lad—”

Now the English sergeant ordered the charge, and his regulars lowered their pikes. But Christopher put his arms around Robinson Bigelow and tried to lower him to the ground while all about him he felt the nervous scuttling of leaderless militiamen, men seeing the effect of French gun on English flesh for the first time.

Robinson Bigelow’s eyes were the eyes of a cow the moment after the butcher had slit its throat. Where the ball had embedded itself, the blood bubbled up unstanched. He opened his mouth to call the charge, but first poured out blood from the shattered bone behind the nose, then strange, squashed sounds from a voice that no longer had an upper cavity to give echo. He spun away from Christopher, staggered against someone else, and fell face-forward into the grass.

Jonathan Hilyard drew his cutlass and tried to take command of the right flank. “C’mon, lads. Let’s show ’em what good Protestants can do.”