The Wolves of Andover (6 page)

Even through the dim light, Blood could see the renewed flush of anger on Sir Joseph’s face, and the tic which began fluttering beneath one eye. “You may be a Protestant dog,” Sir Joseph said, spittle forming again on his lips, “but you’re an Irish dog as well, and had I less need for the fleas off your back, I’d have you drowned in the Thames, if only for the pleasure of seeing you float downstream, all the way back to the Irish Sea, where you came from.”

Blood’s fingers closed tightly around the grip of the cudgel and he brought it quickly up over his head and then down again, crushing the remaining chestnuts and precariously rocking the lone candle on the table. The swift action caused Sir Joseph to flinch, but before he could move to stand, Blood’s hand rested firmly over his arm, pinning him to the chair.

“Aye, Sir Joseph. I am a dog, but a dog must eat. A dog must have a place to sleep. And a clever dog never puts his muzzle into a fight unless he can feel the breeze of the open back alley at his arse. I know what you want me to do and I know you’ve already failed twice at it. I need the funds to hire the men to do it, as well as the funds to pay for passages, bribes, and, for myself, a retirement from having to pursue the vagaries of a restless marketplace. I know your little schemes. You take more bribes in one year running parcels and packets through your royal postal offices than most lords do off their lands. I’ll find your man. But for that you have to pay.” He pulled out of the same pocket from which he had extracted the chestnuts a piece of parchment and showed it
briefly to Sir Joseph, until he was sure the old man understood what Blood expected in payment for his services.

Blood then stood up and, throwing his scrap of paper into the darkening coals, walked from the room, leaving the cudgel and the withering shells of the chestnuts behind him.

He stepped rapidly down the stairs and back into the street, hurling a chestnut hard at the sleeping guard’s head as he passed. The guard snorted himself awake and looked upwards, as though the stinging missile had fallen from the sky.

As he strode down Pudding Lane towards the docks, he mused on the work that was yet to be done. He would need men and armaments, although the men he had in mind for the job could make do with a knife or length of rope to get the business done. He would hire Brudloe and Baker for certain; they were cunning. There were killers enough in London to populate a large town, but most of them were unreliable in their loyalties and, worse, stupid.

He’d need a big man, as well, with great strength, for the man they were to bring back was rumored to be quite large; although it was so often that the size of a man, like the size of a battle, grew in the retelling. Also, he would require a man who knew the colonies; that was essential, for the colonists were a prickly lot, small-minded and close-fisted when it came to protecting one of their own. The king had attempted the grand folly of sending bustling troops to the Americas twice before, and his prey, the regicides, had gone to ground, hidden by men who wouldn’t be bribed. Perhaps he would bring in Samuel Crouch, a man who had lived for a time in Boston before returning to England.

It would prove to be a simple thing, he thought, bringing back
to England one man; but there was much to do before the ship upon which he would book passage for the bounty men set sail. Five men should be able to overcome one colonial lout. His pace quickened, and he figured, based on the call of the street watchman, that if he could strike a deal with the gun merchant within the hour, he would have time to pay a visit to Fanny Mortland’s whorehouse before she closed her doors at dawn.

T
HE WOLVES RETURNED
to Billerica, killing three more of the neighbors’ lambs and savaging a milk cow so that she had to be taken for the butcher. Hard by the barn, Thomas made his wolf pen from woven willow and birch rods staked to the ground, and he scattered cow offal about as a trail to lead the wolves to the hen tied within the cage. If the beasts entered to devour the hen, the men, hiding up in the hayloft, would then pull the trip rope, trapping the beasts inside.

At dawn, Martha dressed quickly and slipped from the house to inspect the cage. There were no large, hulking forms within, only the hen, which sat ruffled and shivering in the morning cold. She could hear the sound of lax-lipped snoring coming from the open hayloft above, and she shook her head at the thought that the men would catch anything other than a wet lung from sleeping in the open air. The trip rope, snaking its way up the side of the barn, was still taut, and she thought to give it a good pull and startle the men into waking.

A movement at the far edge of the yard caught her eye. Thomas
stood alone, raking the ground over with the heel of his boot. A knot of flies rose and fell with the movement, finally settling back onto a clot of what looked to be blackened entrails. She could smell the rotting bait mixing thickly in the morning breeze and knew that if Patience caught a whiff of it, she would have her face in the bucket all morning.

Thomas scratched his chin thoughtfully as she approached, and she fought the impulse to cross her arms in front of her chest. She regarded the swarming mess with a disapproving sweep of her hand. “Well, I see we have caught something, and plenty of those. It’s a pity, though, there’s no bounty on
flies
.” She ejected the last word as though she had said, “Satan, the father of
lies
.”

He ducked his head, the brim of his hat hiding his face, and said nothing. But she sensed it was not an attitude of submission, rather more a desire to hide his expression.

“The wolves did not come,” she said with certainty. “So you must wake John and clean this mess from the yard before Patience can wake to find it…”

“You’re wrong,” he said suddenly. “They did come in the night.” He motioned for her to look past the bait and she saw the depressions in the mud. At that moment the breeze lifted, carrying with it the odor of stinging musk; a wild, uneasy odor like the pungent smell of a dog in heat.

There were two sets of tracks, side by side, one smaller than the other. The larger of the tracks was bigger than any dog or fox could have made. The paired wolves had been standing, perhaps for a long while, regarding what lay in the clearing beyond the forest. The sharp imprint of their nails pointed, like an arrow’s mark, back towards the house. Then the tracks wheeled sharply
about, disappearing into the bracken. She saw a soft bit of gray undercoat still clinging to a thorn briar, insubstantial and filmy like the downy top of a puff-away weed. She plucked it from the branch and brought it to her nose. The heavy, musky smell was stronger there, reminding her of her own body at the bleeding time.

Once, when she was fourteen and living in Andover, her father had trapped and killed a young wolf. The wolf was small enough for her father to carry the carcass home over one shoulder. “Hardly worth the skinnin’,” he had said. But he had skinned it nonetheless, making a fur frill for her cape. The fur, more white than gray, had a warm lair scent about it, as though the pup still carried within his very skin his mother’s milk. It had been a rare kindness from her father, and he was wounded deeply when she gave the fur over to her sister, Mary. It was the smell of it she couldn’t abide—the overwhelming smell of brutalized innocence.

“These are smart ones,” Thomas said. He had come to stand next to her and she startled at his voice. “I’ve never seen the cunning like. They never even touched the bait.”

She took a few steps back from him, hiding the bit of fur under her apron. “Well, what are you going to do about it?” she asked impatiently, coloring darkly at her own thoughts.

“We’ll need a sweeter come-hither,” he answered.

The tone of his voice was hard to place. Not mocking, but flat and dry in a way that made her think he was masking something not quite proper. Narrowing her eyes, she said, “I suppose you’ll be wanting to risk freezing two chickens now instead of one?”
She snapped the hem of her apron, clearing away some unseen clod of dirt, and fought the impulse to move back another step.

“No,” he said, drawing out the
o
as if singing the final amen to a solemn hymn. “I’ll be thinking something larger, and more tempting.” He said the words slowly and carefully, as if speaking to someone cleft in the head.

A bead of sweat vibrated at the curve of his jaw, like oil on heated metal, and the heavy scent of musk and burned wood pulsed from his clothes and skin. She paused and waited for him to speak. She was not certain he had been sparking her with his talk of tempting, sweet come-hithers, for men rarely spoke true their intentions, but she would be wary for a reach and a grab nonetheless. Yet Thomas only stood, his arms tightly crossed, the vertical lines of his face impressed deeper into the hollows of his cheeks.

When it was clear he wasn’t going to offer anything more, she returned to the house and began cleaning in earnest. The boards on the floor were swept, scrubbed, and sanded. The table was polished with butter and ashes, the great pot scoured and greased. The pewter was rubbed, and the blankets were shaken, the ticking boiled, the mattresses taken out to be emptied and refilled with new husks. The great cloud of winter’s detritus was lifted and settled back down over her head, and with it came a growing irritation.

She set a narrow-backed chair under the eaves to stand on and began sweeping out the gutters with violent thrusts of the broom, practicing in her mind what she could have, what she should have, said to Thomas. The leaves, erupting with spiders and mice, first
exploded in rustling showers, falling to the ground brittle and sharp, like shards of thin glass. Will soon began to scatter the leaves over the newly swept yard, throwing and kicking them into the wind. Martha had only just resolved to chase him away when Will asked, “Who’re ya talkin’ to?” He had come to stand next to the chair and craned his neck to see what lay on the roof. From the look on his face she knew she had been revealing her thoughts aloud.

“I’m talkin’ to the mice,” she said, her irritation firing to red, and with the next jab of the broom she felt the handle break in two. “Now see what you’ve made me do,” she muttered, stepping off the chair. Will retreated quickly backwards, his arms shoved behind him, wide-eyed and frightened, as though he had broken the shaft himself.

Seeing his stricken face, she softened her tone. “I don’t suppose you can mend it, then.” He shook his head, and fearing he would begin to cry, she asked, “Have you ever seen the down of a wolf?” She pulled the tuft of fur out from under her apron and showed it to him. He looked at her wonderingly as he stroked it gently with one finger.

“Will Thomas kill it, then?” he asked. His childish wriggling and shifting about had given way to a sudden, doubtful silence.

“He will try,” she answered, nodding what she hoped would be taken for a certainty.

“And what if he cannot?” he whispered. His face had begun to crumple into fear, his brows crouching low over his eyes.

“Then,” she said solemnly, smoothing her hand once across the runnels of his hair, “we shall have to run very fast indeed.” Her lips, which had been downturned, arched up into a teasing
smile, and the boy whooped away, loosening his fear into the cascading piles of leaves.

Watching his exuberant dash across the yard, she was suddenly very tired, the last of her anger extinguished, smothered within the press of punishing labor. She sat on the chair and brought the bit of wolf down to her nose. She breathed in the wolf’s scent, a scent brought from ceaseless roaming over darkened fields and haunted fens, through gates of slanting twilight. The odor, both sharp and intimate, offered up the violent submission of the kill, and a no less forceful submission into coupling. Thoughts of an obdurate Thomas slipped unwanted into her mind, and she opened her fingers, letting the wind blow the clump of fur across the yard, where it mixed with the leaves and was gone.

T
HE BOUNTY FOR
the wolves was raised to seventy shillings apiece and Patience agreed to sell to Thomas the smallest of her four lambs for the pen. Martha took the hen, still ruffled and peevish from spending the night in the open, and put her back into her roost. Thus was it ever with men considering women, she mused, watching the bird settling herself deeper into the straw; plain and pecking creatures, such as herself, were passed over for those more meek and tempting.

A heavy rain had fallen the night before, bringing with it a chill wind that blew and cracked at the roof with empty branches. With morning, the wind had stopped, leaving pollen-green ponds in each rut in the yard. Early buds, torn loose by the storm, floated like rafts on miniature oceans, making intricate swirls and arcs in their wake.

From the open common room window Martha watched Thomas as he stood in the yard, looking for rain to fall from the clouds dispersing darkly over the rooftop. She knew he was ruminating over his plans to bait the pen with the lamb. From a reeking pail he spread new entrails in a line to the pen, wiping the trap door with the oozing guts to hide his own scent.

He led the lamb struggling and bawling against the tether, wild-eyed at the coppery smell of blood, and tied her to a stake inside the pen. The creature was still piebald from having the wool eaten off her back by her brothers, hungry and near to freezing from the desperate winter. Still, she was clamorous and lively and would bring the wolves to trap, if they hadn’t already tracked onto another’s field.

Patience came to stand in the yard as well, watching Thomas carefully, her every gesture a testament to her worries over the possible loss of a valuable lamb. She called tersely to Will, who had followed Thomas inside the pen, laughing and excited to a fever by the thought of wolves coming to their very door. Jabbing at the lamb with a stick, the boy cried desperately, “Can’t I help kill th’ wolves too, Thomas?”