John shrugged and answered doubtfully, “I know not about that, but had I been older, I would’ve fought fer Cromwell as my father had done.”
“There you see, sister,” Roger said, nodding. “Blood stirs a man to poetical leanings, just as naturally as love stirs a woman to tend the pot.” He grinned at Martha good-naturedly and she snorted, but she returned to the hearth to begin boiling water for broth. Though her back was turned, she could hear the rasping sound of clay over wood and knew that Roger was pulling the jug closer towards himself. It was so much to Roger’s character, she thought angrily, that he would seek to liken a blood-letting to a bard’s song while his wife lay unattended in a back room. She moved to stand at the table, her arms crossed, muttering indignantly, “There is no more meat. And this is the last of the bread. It’s good that I’ve brought all for the table or we’d have to send John out with the flint.”
Roger rose abruptly from his chair, his color high, and brushed past her, pulling from the sideboard three cups. He set them noisily on the table, and as he scratched the wax from the neck of the jug, Martha deliberately pushed her cup away. Roger poured a measure into his and John’s cups and quickly took a sip, closing his eyes to the spreading warmth. Turning to John, he drawled, “John, have you accompanied the cart today because you’ve a mind to finally marry this one here? Or have you only come to drive the nag?” He placed a heavy emphasis on the last few words while looking at Martha. She slitted her eyes but moved away from the table and into the bedroom where her sister lay.
Mary had fallen to sleep, but the boy turned his head to stare up at her, his eyes pouched and glittering. She sat at the edge of the bed, listening to the men talking, first with Roger’s clipped speech dominating, as was common when her brother-in-law conversed. But soon John’s more resonant voice gained confidence; the r’s rolling extravagantly, his breath eager, the swearing and oath-taking growing through the heat of the liquor. There were short bursts of muffled laughter, as though they hid their mirth in their sleeves, and the rise and fall of queries and answers. The men’s voices turned to sniggering whispers and Martha strained to hear more. She stood and moved softly to the open bedroom door, pressing herself against the frame to listen and not be seen. There was a sudden quiet and she froze, thinking she had been discovered, but they had stopped speaking only long enough to fill their cups again.
She heard Roger take a slow, satisfied breath. “It’s put about,” he slurred, “that your fellow Thomas is a dead shot. A fine counterweight to these yeomen who wouldn’t know a flintlock from the back end of their wife’s…” He paused a moment, finishing with “broomssss.”
“Oh, aye, aye,” John said, laughing. “The back end of their brooms, indeed. Thomas is a dead shot, t’ be sure.”
“I’ve heard that Carrier fought for the Puritan cause with Cromwell.” Roger’s voice dropped to a whisper, coarse and confidential. “Although, it is also rumored that he was bodyguard to the first Charles.” When there was silence from John, Roger slapped his palm on the table. “Come now, John. We have no fiery leanings one way or the other. I’m a good colony man. I pay my taxes to the king. I’ve served in the militia. But this, this Carrier, is a one to inspire fantastical musings. I mean to say, just look at the man.”
“Hmmm, aye,” John muttered wetly, as though still holding the cup between his lips.
“I’ll tell you what I’ve heard, John, and you tell me if it’s true. I heard”—Roger paused to drink again, and then belched loudly—“that during the Great War most of the king’s men were so ill-trained that they buried more toes and fingers than men. The Royalists were always running away. Ha-ha-ha.”
John guffawed and beat the table, saying, “Ha! It’s been said in just a way from m’ own father.”
“An’ yer own father fought with Cromwell, did he?” There was the slow scrape of the jug over the table once more.
“My father rode for Sir Will’m Balfour’s reg’ment,” John said proudly. His words slid over his tongue like heated grease over thick bacon. “It were the first year of the war in… in… sixteen and forty-two. Hard by the village of Kineton, a real be-shited li’l town, or so I’ve been told.” He chortled unevenly for a moment. “They… the Parl’ment men… piled a mountain of severed arms an’ legs afterwards. My father found the king’s standard boy with his arm cleaved clear through… clear through! His hand, lyin’ twenty feet away from the rest of himself, still holdin’ tight to the banner.” He paused briefly to drink. “If not for Thomas, my father would’ve died fer certain. But… Thomas don’t like t’ dwell on it.” The final words dribbled away into mumbling, and John hiccupped.
“It’s the Battle of Edgehill, isn’t it? What you’re speaking of,” Roger whispered dramatically, the words running thick-lipped together. “The first great battle of Parliament against Charles I.” He inhaled a sharp breath in awe, and held it in, as though reluctant to speak further; but Martha knew, of course, that he would. A chair creaked with a body settling in for a long story, and Roger said, “I’ll tell you what I’ve heard from th’ men who were there. It was in winter, the wind blowing hard from the North.”
“From the North. Aye, cold, so cold,” John said. Martha could hear him sniffling, almost weeping at the memory.
Roger made conciliatory noises and John said, raggedly, “Tell me it. Tell the story, fer I love it well.” He hiccupped once more abruptly and groaned.
“Both sides, king and Parliament,” Roger began, “were drawn up opposing each other west of the village of Edgehill. The Royals on a hillock, Parliament’s men facing them on the lower ground.” He stumbled over the last few words and paused to sip loudly from his cup. “The soldiers of each array were in their regimental colors of blue and red and russet, each carrying their standards at the fore, like a field of Turks flowers growing in the snow. The Scots, as was your father, were aligned with the English Parliament. The Welsh and the Cornish, aligned with the king.
“Parliament fired their cannons first but soon the king’s nephew Prince Rupert charged with his horsemen straight down the hill and into the heart of Parliament’s men, scattering them right back to Kineton.”
John’s heated voice suddenly erupted. “But the Royalists didn’t rally th’ charge, the cowardly pricks! They were too busy robbin’ th’ town blind to wheel ’round and renew their advan’age.” He laughed excitedly, pounding the table with his fist. “But Parliament rallied, by Christ, dinnit they?” He pounded the table once more, fiercely, as though Roger had challenged him. “Fer a time after, it were sword-to-sword an’ hand-to-hand, with limbs bein’ hacked away and blood sprayin’ o’er all like a Frenchman’s fountain. The king’s banner were taken by the Roundheads, but in the tumble of battle my father’s horse were killed and fell to the groun’, pinnin’ him underneath.
“He lay, his leg broken, and saw a horseman comin’, a king’s man with a gold-hilted sword raised to sever his head right off. He said a prayer, a good… feckin’… Protestan’ prayer, when a long shadow fell over him, an’ a giant, a pikeman as big as a tree, speared the chargin’ horse right through to th’ rider. So help me Christ! The giant pulls free the pike, twenty foot long or more, with one hand and with th’ other draws out a sword and cuts a bloody swath around my father until he can recover his feet and get on with the fightin’.”
There was a pause, and a belch, and a quick muttered oath. A chair scraped loudly across the floor as though someone had moved it suddenly to stand. She heard John moan and then hasty, unsteady footsteps running towards the door. The other chair moved and Roger called out, drunkenly, “Wait, John, wait. I’ll attend you. I have a purge that will serve.”
Martha slipped into the common room, where the cauldron had begun to boil at the hearth. She picked up the chair, overturned by John’s hasty departure, to set it right and carefully laid into the churning water the meat and herbs to make the broth for her sister. She could hear John in the yard, first laughing, then swearing, then
retching. She hoped Roger’s physic would work so that John would be well enough for work in the morning. As it was, she would most likely be listening to John’s groaning the whole day over his thick head and watery bowels.
She flung open the front door and loudly shushed the men, and then pointed them to the barn, scolding, “If you wake my sister, I’ll purge the both of you till you’re as dry as Lot’s wife.”
She closed the door and returned to stab at the sluggish fire in the hearth, thinking that a man’s storytelling was like a madwoman’s embroidery, plied repeatedly in careful rows that, by themselves, knot by knot, could be neat and pleasing, but that taken together made a larger grotesque image of mayhem, becoming more monstrous with every reworking.
But she knew that women, as well as men, had their own history of blood-letting, their own lust for conflict. In some moments of dire threat, she had desired to run screaming towards the danger, brandishing a knife, with her hair on fire. She had listened, rapt, to John’s every rendering of the battle and felt no aversion to the descriptions of carnage, or of the tall soldier of Edgehill, rather, only a taut, vibrant anticipation.
She felt a presence at her back and looked around to see Allen standing at the bedroom door, frowning, his brows knitted together like two geese in a fog. She smiled at him but he turned back into the room and soon she heard Mary calling for her.
THE DAY WAS too hot for Patience to stand over the huge washing pot. The rain had vanished, leaving clouds at the top of the sky, crimped and mottled like the underbelly of a sea turtle. There was no breeze, and dampness hung in the air like in late summer even though it was still May. Martha wiped at the sweat around her collar and lifted, with both hands, a weighted pile of boiled linen with the paddle. Not satisfied, she dropped the clothes back into the water and stood back from the heat.
She heard Joanna singing to herself as she sat, bare-bottomed, on a bucket, her apron and skirt tied up around her middle. The child had resisted all efforts to stop wetting herself, demanding to still wear clouts, and Martha was intent on breaking her of the practice before the new babe came. Martha had warned Joanna not to stand from the bucket until she had passed her water into it. She called encouragingly to the girl, but Joanna crossed her arms and looked away. Martha turned to hide a smile; the child had taken to imitating her habit of crossing her arms, and it brought no end of laughter from Daniel.
She held the stirring paddle out in front of her chest. It was about five feet in length, almost as tall as she. John’s battling giant of Edgehill had wielded a pike of twenty feet, or so he had said, making the pike four times as long, and four times as heavy, as the paddle. She tucked it under one arm and held it aloft like a spear. With a sharpened point at the end it could pierce the breast of any oncoming beast, but not clear through to the rider.
She looked around for a longer stick and left the pot boiling to search for branches in the stand of elm at the edge of the yard. A slender sapling had fallen with a storm and with some effort she snapped the lower part from the roots and stripped it clean. After grasping the heavier end, and cradling it beneath her arm, she raised the far end, quivering, holding it chest-high to a horse. Any charging animal would have propelled her backwards and trampled her underfoot, and she wondered what advantage the weapon would be to the men behind the advance guard, crushed beneath the recoiling pikemen.
“That’s no way to hold a pike, missus.”
She dropped the sapling and whirled around to find Thomas standing in the yard. He walked to where the discarded tree branch lay and picked it up, bending slowly at the waist, his long arms grasping the wood with a practiced grip. “You’d lose an arm with the first charge.”
He walked closer to her, standing within an arm’s breadth, and said, “First position. You must plant it between your legs and hold it thus.” He motioned for Martha to take hold of the pike at breast level, enclosing her hands in his own, pressing her fingers warmly into the wood. He reached forward with his boot to tap lightly at the instep of her right foot, saying, “Second position.” He tapped at her instep again. “Wider. You must stand wider or your knees will buckle.”
He let go of her hands and moved to stand behind her.
“Third position,” he said. “Lower the tip. Lower still, till your arms are straight. Now, brace the end against your right instep and step forward with your left. More forward still. And now you’re in fourth position. And now you wait.”
She tensed, her knees locked and cracking in the awkward stance, imagining his breath at her neck and his hands coming to rest at her shoulder or arm, but he did not touch her. Rather, he continued to stand behind until the rhythmic sounds of his exhalations became matched with her own.
Moments passed and she stretched her neck against the weight of the sapling. She finally asked, “For what do we wait?”
“Might be anything, missus. It could be a press of men on foot with muskets and pike. Or a charge of men on horse. Or”—he paused, and without seeing his face, she thought he smiled—“a swamp of woodland harpies.”
She laughed and shifted the weight of wood in her aching hands and felt the sharp stick of a splinter in her palm. She dropped the sapling, bringing the hand up into her mouth, the nib of the splinter scraping against her tongue, and turned to face him. He reached out, clasping her around the wrist, and lifted her palm higher to see the wound. With his other hand, he lifted the skinning knife that he always carried at his side, the knife he had sharpened evening upon evening, and solemnly passed the small edge of the blade across an inch of her palm. It separated the flesh easily, with little pain, and with the tip of the knife, he flicked out the splinter of wood. Blood sprang up through the wound, and he watched it pooling in her palm before pressing her palm to his chest, letting her blood spread on the linen of his shirt like a bloom.
“You told me before… that I’m not Gelert, the hound,” she said, breathing in once and looking up at his face. “Then I must be the infant prince, knocked from his cradle and set upon by wolves.”
He inclined his head to her and said, “No.” He smiled and inclined further until he felt the slightest stiffening clench of her hand and he carefully dropped his arm back to his side. Her hand, of its own accord, stayed poised on his chest for the briefest of moments before the wail of a child floated across the yard.
“Oh, Joanna!” she cried, and even louder, “Oh, the wash!” Remembering the clothes, in all likelihood boiling to cinders in the pot, she turned quickly and raced away. She did not dare look for Thomas again until she was certain he had left the yard to tend to his traps. Only then did she bring her hand to her mouth, sucking at the wound where the splinter had been, tasting salt and the faint rust of metal.
IT WAS THE last of the month before Martha found the courage to see for herself the great oak chest that sat by Thomas’s bed. She had waited until the men had gone out hunting, Daniel tagging along with them, eager as a boy, overstepping the tall grasses with the bobbing knees of a startled deer. Patience had lain down to sleep after the morning meal, her belly growing ever heavier, and the children Martha had sent out of doors, each holding a bit of a sugar teat.
The men’s room was deeply shadowed and dank, but she left the lantern unlit, fearful the children would see the light through a crack in the wall and come to question it. She stood at the door, poised to turn back, but the house was silent and there might not be another opportunity for a long while. John’s pallet lay closest to the door and she stumbled over it as she guided her hands along the timbers. She balanced herself and waited, adjusting her eyes to the dark, until she could make out the other objects scattered about the room: a once fine, heavy rug thrown carelessly across the boards, a shirt, some bit of toweling. Against the far wall was Thomas’s bed, two rope frames with a straw mattress laid end to end, and at its foot rested the chest, the wood mottled dark either from the stain of rainwater through the roof, or perhaps salt water from the passage to the colonies.
S
he crossed the few steps to the chest and knelt in front of it, spanning her arms across the metal bracing. Surprisingly, there was no lock on the clasp, and she pulled her hands back quickly into her lap. She had thought merely to explore the outside of the chest, never imagining it wouldn’t be locked. What of worth, or even intrigue, she thought, could be in an unlocked chest in a home with restless women and prying children. She frowned and leaned forward to stand, resting her two palms on the split seams of the lid.
In that moment, something of weight shifted below the floorboards. It was not the rattle of footfalls on the cellar stairs or the snick of a latch on a door. The disturbance was not even a thing she had perceived with her ears alone. It was more a vibration, passed through the shoe leather into the balls of her feet. She sank slowly back onto her heels, her hands still resting on the top of the chest, waiting for the movement to come again. But the house was quiet. From a distance, Martha could hear Will’s voice taunting Joanna to chase him through the garden, but there had been no creaking bedposts from Patience waking, nor any peevish summoning from her cousin for water and salted bread. A moment passed and there was nothing further to give alarm. Whatever had made the noise had departed; only the growing agitation of being discovered remained, along with an unbearable curiosity.
Without a conscious thought, she unhinged the clasp and heaved up the heavy lid. She had not meant to open the chest when she first entered the room and would have abandoned the action if the covering had resisted, but the hinges were well oiled and the lid was raised to its full open position against the chains without a sound.
The deep well of the chest at first appeared empty. With a breath, she reached down into it and pulled out, bunched in her hand, a pair of breeches and a shirt, both worn and familiar; she had scrubbed them often enough with the rest of the household wash. These she laid aside and reached her hand more deeply into the recess. Her hand touched something of cold metal and she pulled into the light a long, pitted dirk. The head was plaited into a design of serpents coiled together, the edges stained and ragged from years of disuse. It balanced in her open palm like a slender scale and she gripped the hilt, notched cunningly for grasping fingers. She set this aside, laying it carefully on top of the shirt, and reached once more to the bottom of the chest.