The Wolves of Andover (18 page)

He had then begged the girl to allow him to make his will, and it was she who had given him the implements to write it. He garnered a last bit of strength, smoothing the rumpled parchment below his palms, and managed to bring quill to paper.

It would take another two hours for him to die, alone; Verity not returning again until late that evening. So he couldn’t have seen her first read the letter and then burn it in the small hearth, along with the bloody sheets, still warm from his body.

T
HE FIRST WEEK
of June, Daniel returned to his carting, the gelding plodding slowly past the burgeoning fields, shaking his tufted head against the heavy leads to the wagon. Martha stood with Patience at the door as Daniel waved cheerfully, exuberantly, to his wife and children. She passed her arm supportively around her cousin’s broadening waist, whispering to her all of the choice things Daniel would bring back to them—a bit of lace, a brace of pewter bowls—but five days would pass before Patience stopped sulking and soaking her pillow at night with tears. Martha could often hear her cousin’s indulgent weeping as she lay in bed trying to find sleep, and most nights Will would creep into Martha’s room, poking her with a finger until she relented by making room for him within the hollow of her arms. Daniel had promised to be home by the middle of July to see Patience through her birthing. Martha never spoke to him of her nagging fears about an early and difficult lying-in, thinking that to speak of such things would give substance to unhappy possibilities.

On the sixth day, Martha looked at her cousin sitting mournfully
at the table, eyes glazed with tears and frowning into the palm of her hand, and said abruptly, “Right, then. I’ve never seen a woman more in need of a potted cheese.”

Patience furrowed her brows. “What?” she asked, dropping the hand from her chin.

“To market, cousin,” Martha said, smiling, wrapping a cloak around her shoulders. “And I’ll give you a quarter hour to comb your hair and wash your face or you’ll disgrace us all.”

Within the half hour, the cart rattled from the yard, Patience sitting next to John, her face for the first time bright and hopeful, while Martha sat in the back with Will and Joanna. Thomas had come out from the barn to watch them go, his eyes settling on her at the last. She at first averted her eyes, jerking her chin away, but then, pressing her lips together, she met his gaze full-on. She knew he would think her turning away a kind of modesty, a maidenly recoiling from the memory of the night before. She had come upon him in the barn, scraping the hide from the crippled calf he had slaughtered that afternoon; the animal’s malformed legs jutted out at odd angles, wobbling in a kind of ghastly dance with every jerk of the skinning knife against the dangling carcass.

His back and shoulders were bared and she had stood in the shadows watching the cording of the muscles under his skin, damp from sweat and pale as death, as white as lime dust next to the reddish brown of his forearms working to strip away the hide from the twisted flesh of the calf. Sensing her, he turned around, but before he could speak, she had spun away, rushing back to the house, hiding the flush of her neck with her hands. More disquieting than this, though, and the true reason for her turning away,
was the knowledge that she had willfully, and shamelessly, plundered Thomas’s great oaken chest.

He followed slowly behind the cart for a short distance, his long legs keeping pace, until they turned onto the north road. He stood there, in the cascading dust from the cart, until it had risen up and over the crest, following the snaking of the Shawshin River.

As they rolled above the water’s course, trumpeting breezes blew the topmost of trees, whipping branches fully green in unpredictable patterns against the untainted blue of the sky. At the quarter mile Martha told riddles to the children: “At night they come without being fetched, by day they are lost without being stolen…. No, not candles, nor yet are they fireflies.
Ah, yes, stars!
”

And John sang a London street song:

“I was commanded by the Water Bailey,

To see the rivers cleansed both night and daily.

Dead hogs, dogs, cats and well-flayed horses,

Their noisome corpses soiling the water’s courses.”

Both the children and the women squealed in delighted protest.

Patience had been good as her word, giving Martha two of her piglets for trade, and Martha regarded them, their snouts straining wetly through the wicker cage, thinking they would bring enough for a new winter cape and a mirrored candle holder. She had spent most evenings stealing a few moments to write in the red book before bed. It had begun with entries of so much wheat
kept in the cellar, so much corn, so many seeds, all matters of the Taylor house. But more and more of her musings had turned to Thomas, recording not only the things he said to her, which were more often like the riddles she had told the children, but how he looked at her, much like a starving man looking at a pasty, as though he would devour it whole. Or, she mused, like a man on campaign, long used to depriving himself, warily wakening to the knowledge of his own hunger.

Within the half hour, they had entered the town green, the meetinghouse of Billerica situated on the northern end, its gray boards neatly patchworked with darker, newer planes of wood. The cemetery, already spilling from the front of the yard, spread like a stone curtain, first to its western edge and then to the back of the meetinghouse. To the eastern side sat the Reverend Hastings’s home, the minister she had turned away from Daniel’s table with her combative words. The house was small but with a wooden fence fortifying a generous house garden. A girl, perhaps seventeen, gracefully tended the garden, and Martha’s mouth twisted with the half-resentful thought that, though she was no doubt aptly servile as the minister’s likely wife, she was also quite young and lovely.

There were a dozen women on the green sitting close together, some with their willow-shoot baskets of early sprouts from their gardens, others with brooms or herbals. Apart from them sat or stood the men, coopers and potters, mostly idle as the harvest of summer grain had not yet begun but talking as noisily as the women. As John pulled the wagon up close, all talking ceased. The clump of villagers seemed to Martha like a hive of stinging insects, each contending for the highest position in the honeycomb, each with a stinger for a tongue. But unlike bees, which
could sting only once and then died, these goodmen and goodwives could inflict the poison from their tongues again and again, like wasps. The buzzing ceased only so long as it took to scrutinize the new arrivals, and then the hissing was taken up again, no doubt, Martha thought, to the detriment of every visitor’s moral constitution.

Helping Patience from the wagon, Martha situated her cousin among the townswomen and went directly to the weaver, a stout man with bowl-cut hair. She was soon disappointed, though, to see only a few coarse blankets from the weaver’s own loom laid out on the ground. When she told him she was looking for the goods to make a new cloak, he smiled and beckoned her to his wagon, where he removed from a sack a bolt of English wool. She brushed at the covering of dust lying like a second skin over the surface and saw that the cloth had an almost glistening sheen, the color of slate after a heavy rain, and when she tested the weave with her fingers, she knew she must have it. But he would not take only one piglet for the woolen, and she would not readily give up both, as she had in mind to acquire a new lantern as well. Martha held up two fingers covered with grime to show the man she knew the cloth had long been in the wagon, too dear for any local villager to acquire it; and so it had rested there, perhaps for many months beyond the sea passage from England.

“But look here,” he said, “I have waited near eight months,
eight months,
for this cloth.” The weaver frowned, shaking his head. “Look at the weave. Feel the weight. Why, the shade of it is a mirror to your own eyes. Look here, missus, do not ask me to come so far down.”

“No,” she said, pinning him with her eyes, responding
no
to every one of his entreaties and proclamations of sacrifice in giving her back coin as overage on the second pig. Martha had seen enough of her father at bargaining to know when to stand and when to walk away. She shook her head and, giving the cloth over to the weaver, turned around. After twenty paces the weaver called out, “Very well, missus, I will give you back your sixpence, but it should be you and not I who tells my good wife of her newfound penury.”

Smiling, Martha accepted the cloth and the coins and pointed the weaver to the wagon to collect his pigs. When she asked him to direct her to the tinsmith, she was dismayed to see him gesture in the direction of a small outbuilding next to the reverend’s plot. The young woman in the garden had finished her work and had gone back inside, and Martha quickly walked to the small shed, hoping the minister would be in the meetinghouse and not at home. She knocked softly on the closed door and waited for the clopping of heavy footsteps of the tinsmith coming to let her in.

She heard the sound of jeering laughter coming from the far side of the green, and when she turned to look, she saw a small knot of children, and a few older girls, taunting something obscured by their swaying bodies. She shook her head, thinking how often a gathering of idle children meant the misfortune of some other child, or animal, smaller than themselves. A girl shrieked in gleeful malice and Martha’s face turned grim, remembering that children can often be sweetest before they turn bad.

The group parted, scattering into differing tribes of girls and boys apart, and she saw what they had been tormenting. A woman,
bolted fast in the stocks, her head pointing towards her toes, cried loudly and bitterly to be freed. She called for water, and for pity, but the children had moved on with their games and no one else on the green gave her any notice beyond a nod of annoyance. Martha turned back to the door, and with her hand poised to rap again, it swung widely open, revealing a slight man in well-worn but clean linen and vest, and with the milky eyes of the blind. His chin pointed beyond her shoulder but his head cocked as though following the sounds of her breathing. “Good day,” he said formally. There was a slight pause, and he added, “May I hear your voice? To place you, you understand.”

“I’m here for a lantern,” she answered, casting one last look at the woman in the stocks.

“Ah, yes, of course,” he said and stepped aside, allowing her to enter.

The room inside was as shaded as a cavern, and she realized, as she moved hesitantly over the threshold, that he must work in darkness, as there were no discernible windows set into the walls, the only light coming from the fire pot close to the bench, faintly glowing with copper soldering fragments. He promptly closed the door and she stood in the blackness in uncertain silence. He walked confidently to his workbench and bent over the fire pot, lighting a short taper which he fit into a reflecting lantern.

The startling light revealed a workroom, well swept and orderly, with lanterns of differing sizes pegged to the walls. Baskets fronted the walls, some with cups and long-tined forks, some with smaller workpieces not easily identifiable. The bench was filled with tools, in exacting rows, from the most brutish-size pliers down to smallest, hair’s-width dowels and punches. The smith
stood at the desk, fingering the tools gently, as if to assure himself of their placement. She stared at his hands, fascinated by their restless creeping, as though the fingers, long as alder whips, had been fashioned with too many articulating joints.

“I do not know your voice.” He had waited to speak, talking only when she had drawn in a breath to inquire about the lantern.

“I am Martha Allen,” she said, beginning to feel the acrid burn of the soldering pot behind her tongue. The smith raised his brows expectantly but said nothing.

“I would like a lantern. For evenings.” She had added the last foolishly, as if he would not know a lamp would be useless in daylight.

There was a slight pursing of the lips, and the man’s eyelids fell more heavily towards closing, making him appear at once disappointed and yet self-satisfied. “For evening reading, perhaps? Or for the keeping of
personal
writings?”

At his insinuating tone, she stiffened, remembering the red book sewn into her pillow casing.

He moved assuredly to the wall with the lanterns and asked, “Which one would you choose?”

“I would have something that gives greater light than a candle might. For the writing of accounts, you see. A reflecting lantern, like the one on your bench.”

He clasped his hands together, the long fingers dangling loosely at his groin. “Ah, the pity is I have only one, which, as you can see, is mine own.” He placed the slightest pause before the word “see,” tilting his head to the opposing side, and waited.