The Traitor's Wife Read online

  For Kevin and Kim

  PREFACE

  London, England, April 1649

  THE WOMAN WORKED her way out of the crowd, grabbing Cromwell by the cloak, and pulled at it until he turned to face her. She was small with plain wheat-colored hair, but the blush in her cheeks was high, as with a fever, and her voice was surprisingly deep.

  She said to him, “Sir, will you stay and speak with us?”

  He had a mind to pull his cloak roughly from her grasp and move away into the darkened safety of the House of Commons, but he looked over the shifting, enclosing mass of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, who had come to petition him to release the imprisoned leaders of the Leveller movement and he tempered his voice to a fatherly tone. “It is not for women to petition, missus. You should be home at your plates and bowls.”

  “Sir,” the woman said, “we scarce have any dishes left to tend, and those we have we are not sure to keep.”

  The minister of Parliament who had been close at Cromwell’s heels, and who was eager to pass into the Great Hall, said with little patience, “I find it strange that women are now petitioning.”

  The woman cut her eyes to the man and said immodestly, “That which is strange is not of necessity unlawful.” When the minister brushed past her, she turned back to Cromwell and said bitterly, “It was strange that you cut off the king’s head, yet I suppose you will justify it.”

  He stopped and this time he did pull his cloak roughly out of her hands. The supreme impudence of this little mouse, he thought, and turned the full import of his gaze on her. It was a gaze that had faced down generals in the field, brought court councilmen to anguished tears, and, some said, had looked without remorse or pity into the sightless eyes of the king as he lay in his lead-lined casket. There had been a time when he would have listened to the harpings of local women such as this, and their workaday husbands, when they still had the means to pay for armaments and food and fill the ranks with fighting bodies. But the Great War was over and he was nearly done with rubbing against the masses and would soon leave such rustic negotiations to the county councilmen.

  He motioned impatiently for her to move away but she planted her foot in front of him and called out hoarsely, “If you take away the lives of our leaders, or the lives of any contrary to law, nothing shall satisfy us but the lives of them that do it.”

  To his dismay he could feel the crowd pushing against them towards the open entranceway of the House. At first he had seen only women in the surrounding faces, but he realized they were solely at the fore, being shored up from behind by common men as well as rebellious soldiers, some of whom had raised their cocked pistols into the air. He watched as twenty or so men rushed into the House, shouting, “Free them, free them, free them…”

  Now half the day would be spent clearing the hallways of quarrelsome, menacing dissenters, his suit to raise the urgent funds needed to invade Ireland delayed for Christ knew how long.

  The woman’s sea green ribbon had slipped from her narrow chest, sliding down her arm, coming to rest like a wilted laurel around her waist. Two more women, likewise wearing the banner of the Leveller cause, emerged from the pack and entwined their arms with hers, forming a living chain to bar his movement forward. He had seen the same expressions on the faces of women fanatics of every degenerate caste and error-filled belief. Catholics, Anabaptists, Quakers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists—they all carried the same look of unreasoning, unbending fervor. When he was a child he had seen a witch burn, and she had held that same unyielding, outraged mask until the flesh curled away from her skull like an Easter candle.

  He took two steps towards the little mouse and, bringing his face close to hers, said firmly, “Will you to home, woman.”

  “This is England, sir. It is my home,” she answered. Her eyes fluttered fearfully, but she tightened her grip on each flanking woman as though steeling for a blow, and pressed her lips together into a thin, implacable line.

  And in that moment he recognized her. He had seen her many times from a distance: a screeching prophetess, standing on her box above the overanxious crowds, offering promises of impossible equalities. As though titled men of property would simply, upon hearing her words, yield up their ancient, hard-won inheritances to landless yeomen or their widows. He began to push his way around the women, using his staff to breach their clasped hands, demanding roughly, “What is your name?…By God, I’ll have it, and you shall know the reasons why.”

  “Morgan, sir. My name is Mrs. Morgan.” The fall of his staff had caught her sharply across the wrist and she pulled her stricken hand up to her breast, but she did not retreat from his path. She had spoken the word “Mor-gan” in two distinct parts, as someone in mourning would have said “death-knell” or “grave-stone” or even “mur-der,” and for an instant he lost his footing. He turned his head to follow the tunings of his ears, and when he again met her eyes, he knew he had got it right. The image of fresh-laid straw fouled with the blood and brain matter of a headless corpse slid into his mind, like mercury poured into one ear.

  “Jesu, woman, get you home…” He rushed past her into the darkened caverns of the House bristling with roaming bands of soldiers, clerks, councilmen, goodwives, and even a few doxies off the streets. Somewhere within the Speaker’s chambers, there were shouts and a clash of arms, and bits of shredded parchment swirled around his head as though the very weather had begun dissent, bringing snow in April. He slipped into a privy, blindly closing the weighted door. He went hard to his knees and heard his thick cloak catch and tear on a nail. Two men scuffling, perhaps a guardsman and a dissenter, fell heavily against the door and then moved away down the hall, swearing and making oaths against each other.

  Every undoing makes a sound, he thought, and these are the sounds of the unraveling of kingships and alliances and nations. For the hundredth, for the thousandth, time that day he prayed for guidance but felt his spirit blunted against the building noise and chaos outside. He heard his name being called from somewhere inside the chamber, faintly but desperately, sounding like a drowning man calling out for a line of hemp.

  He stood and placed his hand against the door, dignifying his presence, setting his face to iron, and when he finally exited the privy into the tide of men-at-arms, he braced himself by saying, “Mrs. Morgan, Mrs. Morgan, if you can bear to carry that name, I can bear to remember it…”

  Lord, thou knowest how busy I must be this day; if I forget thee, do not thou forget me.

  — SIR JACOB ASTLEY,

  prayer before the Battle of Edgehill, English Civil War

  I had rather a plain russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a Gentle-man and is nothing else.

  — OLIVER CROMWELL

  [The Celts] were chopped down with axes and swords but the blind fury never left them while there was breath in their bodies.

  — PAUSANIAS,

  Greek historian

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER 1

  Billerica, Massachusetts, March 1673

  THE YOUNG WOMAN stepped from the wagon and turne
d to face the driver still holding the slackened reins. From Daniel’s vantage point, looking through the shuttered windows of the common room, he could not read the woman’s face but could see the rigid set of her back. The man in the wagon was small and as hard-set as a dried persimmon. The brim of his felt hat was slung so low and angled over his eyes that its very putting on must have been an act of vengeance. Daniel had met his wife’s uncle only once at market, and the number of words exchanged between them could not have filled a walnut. But Daniel remembered well the look of triumph on Andrew Allen’s face when the old man bested him at a calf auction. That he was now giving his daughter the last of his cautious, brusque advice was clear from the way he punctuated his words with a string of country sayings: “Hech, now listen to me,” and “Hark you well to me now.” The sorts of words that the old Scotsmen still used were like pepperweed in a mutton stew.

  Daniel moved through the common room and stood at the open door. He saluted the old man, saying, “Will you come in for a breakfast?”

  To his relief Goodman Allen shook his head and with a few muttered words of good-bye pulled his wagon around, taking the road back towards Andover. The woman stood for a long while watching her father ride away, the hem of her dress slowly soaking up the wet, ice-filled mud of the yard. Daniel studied the unbending arch of her neck, thinking it was a sad thing that she be past twenty and not yet married, still sent out by her parents into service, her few things put into some bit of cotton sacking.

  Taking the full measure of her forlorn appearance, Daniel shook his head in sympathy. Andrew Allen was prosperous enough; he could have at the very least provided his daughter with her own bed. But Daniel knew from his wife, Patience, that for all the old man’s parsimonious airs, he swore, drank hard ale, and gambled at dice whenever, and wherever, the opportunity arose, and was tighter than a tick paying for anything he couldn’t raise from the ground or fashion himself from driftwood.

  It would be a blessing for his wife to have another woman at the settlement. He could hear Patience even now retching and puking into a bucket by the bed, as sick in her fifth month with their third child as any girl would be with her first. He was eager to see his wife’s cousin settled into the house as quickly as possible. The roads were freeing themselves of ice, and though they be a rutted misery, Daniel had a certainty that if he didn’t attend to his carting soon, others would beat him to Boston, getting the best of the off-loaded goods from England, Holland, and Spain.

  He called her gently by name, “Martha,” telling her to come in and settle herself by the fire. She slowly turned her head in profile to him as though still reluctant to give up her vigil on the road. A few dark strands of her hair, as coarse as a horse’s mane, had blown free from her cap and whipped around her cheek in the damp wind. He braced himself for the onslaught of tears that surely must come in answer to being left, yet again, in the home of near strangers. But when she turned fully to face him, his breath caught in his chest, for there, in place of tears, was dry-eyed fury, and a mouth so pinched and implacably set that his first thought was to hide his tender belly from her approaching form. Good God, he thought, and cleared a wide space at the door for her to enter.

  A HEAVY RAIN had started that morning, pouring in unbroken sheets, and though Patience had begged her husband to put off his leaving one more day, Daniel had thrown an oiled canvas over his head, mounted his carting wagon, and clucked his heavy gelding out of the yard and onto the road. But for the downpour, Martha thought, her cousin would still be standing at the door crying, holding her slightly protruding belly, seemingly unaware that Daniel had made all haste in leaving. Martha looked about the room, noting all of the tamped-down and dirt-ridden rushes scattered beneath the table, the scabs of food clinging to the previous evening’s dishes, the soiled linen loosely draped over a chair—the entire unwholesome mess creating odors both fetid and close. Patience, finally closing the door against the rain, began showing Martha the places where the house goods were stored.

  “Of the cellar,” Patience said, motioning for Martha to lift the trap in the floor, “there are cranberries in a firkin of water, some wheat flour, cornmeal, two baskets left of apples, pumpkins, and squash.”

  Martha took a candle from the table and, lifting the hem of her skirt, stepped down the shallow ladder to the cellar. She held the candle high and saw at once that rats and mice had done their job during the winter months, chewing through the poorly tended baskets. Remembering her mother’s stone-lined cellar, carefully cleared each day of blackening mold or encroaching pests, she wrinkled her nose at a braid of darkly speckled onions, rotted and evil-smelling from hanging too close to the sweating dirt walls. She could hear Patience shifting her weight restlessly in the space above her head. Finally Patience called down, “It’s been a month or more that I cannot climb the ladder. I send the children down to fetch food for the table…and they…things may not be as they should…”

  In the small arc of light, Martha quickly tallied the remainder of the cellar’s holdings: one half-barrel of cider, thirty head of dried corn mixed with peas, two sealed pots of salted pork and salted cod each, one covered tin of autumn tallow, and fifteen candles in a box. The approaching scarcity of food would have to be addressed at once, as it would be days yet before any seed could be put to ground for the house garden. She had been told by Daniel that one of his two field men was a creditable hunter. They would need his skill, and soon, for they would all require fresh meat, whether it had swum or crawled, to have the strength to put the house to rights.

  She prodded with her foot a bag of potatoes made unfit for eating by lying too long on the damp floor, but she reckoned with a hard boiling the spuds could be rendered to starch for the wash. It would take a week at least to get clean all the dirty linens. Even now there were three or four baby’s clouts hung close to the fire drying, looking as if they had not been scrubbed for weeks.

  She held the candle up to light her way to the ladder and saw the pregnant woman’s face appear at the hatchway, her eyes and lips still swollen from crying. Underlit by the soft yellow light, Patience looked like nothing so much as a petulant child, even though the woman was on the downhill path to twenty-five. As Martha climbed up out of the cellar, Patience was saying, “I think it fitting that Will and Joanna be made a porridge now.” Two children, a boy of perhaps five and a much younger girl, came to stand behind their mother, yawning and rubbing at their faces. Martha bent to drop the cellar trap, hiding a look of disapproval, as it was long past the breakfast hour. When she raised herself upright again, she realized with a jolt that Patience had given her her first order. She’d been there only an hour and already she was being sorted like a common stone to the bottom in household prominence.

  “When you are finished with the porridge you may—”

  “Cousin.” Martha’s arms had crept together to cross in front of her apron, fingers gripping tightly at opposing arms. She saw Patience wince at the biting tone, and she quickly unclenched her hands, letting them fall to her sides. She cautioned herself from speaking so abruptly, a habit she had learned from her father, and one her mother had warned her would chase away flies, leaving only the vinegar.

  She gentled her tone and began again. “Cousin, if I am to be both husband and wife to this house, there must be an order to things. Breakfast is past, and since there is no greater sauce to a meal than hunger, the children will eat at midday with the rest of us.”

  “Martha,” Patience said testily, her mouth pinched and resolute. “The children are hungry. I cannot have them hanging about me, crying for their breakfast for two hours or more until their dinner. Cousin though you may be, you are here to aid me in my labors. So now, if you will be so kind, you may serve the porridge for my children.”

  Martha saw it all clear in that moment: this was the instant her place in the family would be decided. If she lost her footing at the outset, she would forever be dealt with as no more than a servant. She resisted the indignation
that threatened to turn her voice shrill and said quietly, “Very well. But then Will may fetch the rain barrel, as he is such a great big lad, and if Joanna can stand on a stool, she may wash and wipe the bowls. You will need to call in the men straightaway and, if you can push a broom, you need to sweep free those rushes or we’ll have rats crawling into the stew. I will soon need a book for the house accounts, a quill, and whatever ink you have for writing. The washing will be started as soon as we are free of rain, and I will want to strip today every bed and mattress and smoke them for lice.”

  There was silence in the room for a few breaths until Patience, grabbing the mantel for balance, retched violently into the hearth. After the spasms had passed, she took each child in hand and walked them back to the bedroom, firmly closing and latching the door behind her.

  THE EVENING WAS late before Martha closed the door to her own narrow room. It was farthest from the hearth and cold; she could see her exhaled breath by the circle of candlelight. She sat carefully on the edge of the bed, feeling the ropes under the mattress give way, and began sorting through her meager belongings: two blankets and a pillow with ticking, a pair of summer stockings for the coming warmer weather, a good collar and cuff. Her father had given her a bowl to show Patience and her husband that his daughter would work to fill it with her own labors and not be a burden to them in this regard.

  I have certainly been a burden in my own house, she thought bitterly—although not from what went into her mouth but rather from what came out of it. Earlier, Martha had tried to make amends for her harsh words to her cousin by kneading the pregnant woman’s back with lard and mustard seeds. Patience had shown her gratitude with a kiss on the cheek, and Martha had felt a more amicable balance restored between them. But in her deepest heart, she knew that relations between them would always be more like servant and mistress. Patience as a child had been sullen and demanding, with an inborn grasping nature that had blossomed into a sense of entitlement after she had made a profitable marriage with Daniel.

 
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