The Traitor's Wife Read online

  Blowing out the candle, Martha pulled both of the blankets close under her chin and lay in the dark. Here I am, she thought, traded like a kettle to yet another family. She knew it was not just for the wages, though, wages that went to her parents; it was to find her a husband. Her father had said to her that morning as they rode in the wagon, “Ye’ve spent more time in the company of far relatives than in yer own house and ye still have yer maidenhead. Fer Christ’s bloody sake, my hunting dog is more hospitable. Yer twenty-three and I begin to despair of ye ever comin’ to bed with a husband. Can ye not for once, just for once, guard yer tongue and mind yer place?”

  It had been pointed out, and often, that Martha’s own sister, Mary, had been married and settled in Billerica for ten years; she had a good home and a husband who provided for her, a son to share in their labors, and another babe on the way Martha rolled over on her side, restless and overly tired, and spread her hands over her belly She had at times wished it possible to be with child without having to be bothered with the needful attentions of men, their smells and their gropings, their intrusive probings. Even if she were to settle on a husband, and make children of her own, she doubted that her father would ever resolve his disappointments over her stubborn and contrary ways.

  Sleep finally came, washing over the demands of her family, the calculations of laundry to be done, the setting to rights of the cellar, the sweeping of the floor, the scrubbing and sanding of pots. The imaginings of work yet to be done stayed with her through her dreams and left her exhausted and ill-tempered in the morning.

  DESPITE A HIGH, buffeting wind and slanting rain, the entire household had embarked early on Sunday to attend the meetinghouse in the town proper. The women and children rode in the horse cart, each one struggling to hold on to a corner of the oiled canvas draped over their heads, while the hired men followed behind on foot. Sodden dirt caked their boots to midcalf, and the younger of the two, a Scotsman named John with a ruddy childish face, mired himself again and again in the muck. The other, a Welshman named Thomas, walked between the ruts in easy strides. He was, without doubt, the tallest man Martha had ever seen, and though she was accustomed to having indentured laboring men about her father’s house, he had a hard-bitten look about him that made her uneasy.

  Past the one-mile mark, the cart tilted dangerously into a hole, one wheel sinking to its upper rim, and Thomas moved quickly to support its sagging weight. John took the horse’s head and pulled at the trappings, but the cart would not be freed. They lifted Patience and the children onto a small hillock out of the ground water, but when Thomas offered his arm to help Martha down, she gave him a withering glance and waved him away.

  She jumped from the wagon into the mud, and as she struggled to keep her balance, she saw John palm a grin. Her pride would cost a good hour cleaning clods from shoe leather, and her irritation grew as John passively eyed her wilting progress to join Patience and the children on the hump of ground, already crowded with furze and lichen.

  Thomas bent his shoulder to the frame and, with little effort from the horse, pushed the cart rocking from the sump. There was no labored exhalation of air or grimacing of his face to prove to the women a superior show of strength. There was only a corded straining of tendons in the forearm and neck to mark the effort of freeing a baling wagon weighted with oak and a full morning’s rain.

  “As easy as plucking a plover’s egg from a nest,” John said with a grin and a whistle. He gave his hand to Martha to help her back into the wagon, but she refused it, barking her shins as she climbed over the spokes. He turned his head to stifle a laugh and she blushed with anger. The Scotsman may blow all he likes, she thought, but it did not give him a place to ridicule her. She would bide her time, waiting for the opportunity, and then he would learn who gave the marching orders in the Taylor household.

  After the evening meal, Martha lingered at the table, watching John as his head drooped into the hollow of his chest. The meal she had prepared was sparse but savory, with heat and grease enough to loosen the day from the men’s heads, and she knew John was thinking longingly of his bed in the new-built quarters behind the hearth. It was a room he shared with Thomas and was close and cramped. But the walls were boarded tight, the shake roof sealed properly with pitch, and, unlike the barn where the men had slept all last summer, it would not leak.

  “I heard howling during the night,” Martha said suddenly, turning to Patience. “The rustling of the hens has brought feral things from the brush.”

  John opened one eye drowsily and said, “Oh, it’s only a fox come to pester the hens.”

  “No,” Martha said, shaking her head. “It was a wolf I heard.”

  The rattling on the roof surged louder as the day’s rain turned to ice. It would be an especially cold night, Martha knew, for anyone sleeping outside the walls of the house.

  “Mark me,” Martha said to Patience, her eyes resting heavily on John. “Someone should stay in the barn tonight or we’ll wake tomorrow to find feathers with nothing besides but air.”

  John had been roused fully from his pleasant nodding and he lifted his head, cutting his eyes to Thomas, who sat close by with a whetstone, slowly sharpening a hoe. The stone made harsh scraping noises at odd intervals, and Martha sensed, although she was not certain, that the Welshman was marking every one of her pronouncements with purposefully long screeching sounds.

  “But surely,” Patience answered weakly, “it is too cold. And Daniel has never before insisted the men sleep in the barn before the first of April…”

  It took another quarter hour for Martha to cow Patience into submission. She reminded her cousin that Daniel would be sorely disappointed to lose his prized hens to his wife’s careless disregard, while bringing base and predatory beasts to their front door, endangering the very lives of their children, and on and on. Patience, complaining weakly, finally retreated to her bed, dragging the children along behind her. Martha, left alone with the men, turned triumphantly to John and pointed to the front door.

  John, walking as though carrying a sack of stones on his back, took his time putting on his greatcoat and sighed at long intervals, hoping for some word of intervention on Thomas’s part. But Thomas said nothing as he quietly put away the whetstone and walked to the warmth of his own bed. John soon followed him behind the hearth, harping at his bad luck. His voice carried back to the common room, muffled but angry. “She’s a feckin’ night-terror driven to ground, Thomas.…To be sent out to the barn like a dog.…Come morning she’ll know what for…”

  There was a dull creaking of ropes, as though Thomas had settled his tall form onto the rope bed, and he said in warning, “Lay it by, John, or she’ll beggar you.”

  Martha walked to the linen chest and pulled from it the thinnest quilt. She waited for John to reemerge from his room and, handing the quilt to John, said pleasantly, “You’ll need this. It’s no doubt very cold in the barn.” She opened the door and then, as John stepped into the chafing rain, said, “You’ll next time think before laughing at me.”

  She firmly closed and latched the door behind him. Her mouth curled tightly upwards as she thought of John climbing, diminished and swearing, into the manger, the barn filling with the murmuring of hens and horse’s, a chorus blending with the sounds of wounded muttering.

  BEFORE DAWN, MARTHA roused the entire house to help with the washing. She sent Thomas to fetch John from the barn and he appeared at the table sullen but silent, his hair and coat covered in straw. In the midst of the breakfast meal, the giving and taking of food and the talk of work to be done, Patience sat slumped in her chair, carelessly picking at bread soaked in milk. One lock of hair fell in a limp ribbon over her face and her skin held a greenish pallor.

  Martha scratched with her nail a split seam in a stocking she had been mending and wondered if Patience would be well enough to at least mend some of the fraying collars and cuffs. A dark thought, playing beyond her work-filled mind, shifted and settled behind her eyes. It
was common-enough knowledge among mid-wives that the unborn, to be born in good health, would by necessity make the mother sick, the mother’s vital essences usurped by the quickening child.

  But something unwholesome and yeastlike in the pregnant woman’s sweat made Martha uneasy. She would try to remember later to save by her cousin’s water. In this way she would sniff out the unbalancing elements. She had been present at numerous difficult, painful, and even violent births, but she had never yet lost a babe and had learned from older, more experienced women the collective wisdom of generations: the seeing, the smelling, the touching, the knowing of the sacrificial rites of birth. No, she had never lost a babe, but three women had been laid into the ground, two of them shrouded in cloth made to grace their infants’ swaddling.

  Walking out into the yard, she lifted her face towards the morning sun and, closing her eyes, felt the heat of it draw blood into her cheeks. The frigid sleet had ceased during the night, and the clouds, which had covered the skies for weeks, began to disperse into crisscrossed bands of gray. A crown of sweat soon prickled her skin under her cap and she opened the laces, pulling it from her head. An easterly wind, chilled and saltwater pungent, blew at her back, filling her apron like a sail and lifting the ropy strands of hair at her neck. She opened her eyes again, slowly, lids creased and fluttering from the sudden light and, with her fingers, smoothed away the sweat from the hollow of her throat. She tried banishing the dark thoughts about her cousin and filled her lungs with the briny air.

  A lengthy shadow over the yard startled her and she turned to meet the unapologetic gaze of the Welshman. He had been studying her, she had no doubt, while her eyes were closed and had come upon her with soft-footed guile. Behind him stood John, who was also staring, but he dropped his eyes once she pierced him with a threatening look.

  “Well?” she asked, jerking the cap back over her head, hiding the tangles of black hair. “The two of you won’t work off servitude in the company of mischief.”

  “I need my man to come trapping with me,” Thomas answered, his voice deeply resonant, as though he had swallowed pebbles with his mash.

  Martha crossed her arms and considered him. She was a tall woman but next to Thomas she felt near to a child. She hated the way she had to tilt her chin up to see the whole of him. “My man,” he had said. “My man,” as though John Levistone were indentured not to the Taylors but to Thomas.

  “You can tend to your traps when the other one has finished the clearing,” she said, turning on her heel and walking away. There was a satisfactory silence that followed her to the house, and when at length she looked over her shoulder, Thomas had returned to the barn. John gathered up a hoe and a slotted rake and began pulling a winter’s worth of dirt and leaves away from the damp foundation of the house.

  She sat for an hour or more, sorting through the seeds that would go into the house garden. From time to time she looked up through the window or open door, following John’s progress around the house. He sang snatches of a song, “ ‘For other manly practices she gain’d the love of all, for leaping and for running or wrestling for a fall,’ ” sometimes stopping to swear softly or moan to himself, “Christ, the woman is a tartar.”

  When she had finished counting the seeds, she glanced through the window and saw Thomas coming from the barn. He stood looking fixedly at the ground as though the firing pan had fallen off his flintlock. Something about the way he stared prickled the back of her neck.

  Leaving her shawl in the house, Martha quickly crossed the yard to the barn, coming to stand behind Thomas, who had knelt down and was examining a late bank of snow worn down to gray, rounded lumps of slush and mud and pocked with deep channels and ridges. When her shadow crossed his path, Thomas stood upright again, suddenly alert, his gaze sweeping across the melting fields and into the surrounding woods. She followed his gaze but could see nothing beyond the bare trees.

  He pointed to a marked depression in the mud. There, impressed like a mold into the wasting snow, were four distinct circlets over one larger circlet. Martha bent and spread her closed fist over the print and saw her own hand dwarfed by the size of it.

  “Wolves,” Thomas said, looking at her with frank appraisal. “Two of them. It seems John and I will both be in the barn tonight.”

  Martha hugged herself tightly with her own arms, shivering slightly in the cool, shaded air. There was no look of satisfaction on her face. Only a deepening crease between her brows, and lips that were open and moist, like a child’s mouth caught at the moment of surprise.

  LATE AFTER DARK, Martha kept vigil by the window, listening for the howling or yipping that was not from a fox or badger. She sighed, remembering her last worded exchange with her cousin. Patience, ill and fretful, wanting only to escape to her bed, had become overwrought and cried uncontrollably when Martha pressed her to take greater charge of the men, especially now that wolves had come prowling to feed at their door. Clapping her hands over her ears, Patience had cried, “Do what you will, only leave me be.”

  Rushing for the comfort of her bed, she had tripped over a stool, and when Martha rose to catch her, Patience waved her away and ran to her room, breathing bubbles of snot from her nose like an infant. Later, when Martha brought her a strained broth, Patience grabbed her hand and, holding it to her belly, wailed, “I am afraid of this birthing.” She began to cry miserably and Martha stayed with her for a while, smoothing her hair and whispering reassurances that she herself did not feel, until her cousin had fallen into a heavy sleep.

  In a year’s time, Martha thought, shifting her weight to peer out the window again, Patience would be delivered of another child, with a husband and a home. Even Thomas and John Levistone would, next spring, have land on which to build. Earlier that evening Patience had corrected Martha’s mistaken belief that the men were indentured for the accustomed term of seven years; Thomas and John had in fact been hired by Daniel to work for three years in trade for prime land owned by the Taylors on the Concord. They had one more year of laboring on another’s land, and then they would have their own.

  And what would she gain with her own sweat? Even the room in which she slept would have to be shared with Joanna and Will once the babe was born. And once Patience had recovered her strength and Daniel had returned, she would most likely be sent home. An unmarried woman too long in a strange household of men was a challenge to virtue, a carnal distraction not to be borne.

  * * *

  Well, then, she thought, spring would bring open roads, and if she had exhausted her chances for a husband in Andover, perhaps the market or meetinghouse in Billerica would bring more success. Tomorrow would be the first of April, a day of hopeful warming, and she would begin the cleaning in earnest. She would open all the doors and with sand and ashes and birch rods both dirt and despondency would be swept away with the old season as proof of renewal for the new. Perhaps, she thought, her mouth twisting into a grim smile, some journeyman, still damp from the crossing, would stumble upon their threshold and see some coveted quality beneath the gritty sweat over her lip, and the stains through her bodice, and say to himself, “Here is a woman to wife.”

  And thus would things be decided; for, Christ knew, the man who had a mind to marry her would not sit and talk to her about it. He would know that at her advanced years, if she had had a choice for husband, she would already have come to the marriage bed. It would be taken as a matter of course that the set of her back and the knitting together of her brows signaled the Work of Ages. It would be taken for granted that she did not have a thought or a wish for herself apart from carrying a man’s seed in her belly.

  “And if I hardly dare speak to myself of other hopes,” she whispered, “how can I speak of them to another?”

  She regarded for a minute more the ebbing light on the walls, and when the candle at last extinguished itself, she felt her way to her bed in the dark.

  CHAPTER 2

  London, England, March 1673

  THE ANTEROOM
OUTSIDE the king’s chambers was cold and the braziers set out to take the chill from the air were ineffective, except to further smog the air with some musklike perfume meant to cover the evil smells pooling in the darkened corners. Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, rubbed at the black plaster covering the scar at the bridge of his nose and tried to keep his breathing from sounding ill-tempered. He knew for a fact that only a few nights before, the Duke of Buckingham had, in a drunken stupor, pissed in the corner. He knew it because he had seen it with his own eyes. The stain still marked the walls like a waterfall in miniature.

  It had been close to an hour that he had waited on the king after being urgently summoned, and he resisted the temptation to sit in the one lone chair that had been placed there originally for Clarendons use. Since the old man’s banishment, no one had risked sitting in it for fear that the ex-chancellor’s bad fortune would rub its way into the sitter’s buttocks, clinging there like a painful boil.

  He watched William Chiffinch standing patiently by the door like an old hound, and when the man looked in his direction, Bennet decorously gestured with one hand and smiled politely.

  Yes, I’m still here, you old satyr, Bennet thought, setting his face to a courteous mask. Bennet had his own private entry from his quarters to the king’s, but the sovereign of all England had been in a rare mood of genuine anger and had made it known that the only person he would be closeted with for the afternoon was his twenty-four-year-old French mistress, Louise de Keroualle. To be alone with one of his court favorites was Charles II’s preferred manner of releasing tension, and the length of the assignation gave testament to his towering rage after leaving Parliament that morning.

  Bennet took from his pocket a small jeweled case filled with snuff and allowed himself a modest pinch, bringing to his nose a lace handkerchief given to him by his own mistress, a Spanish lady who was not young but was very supple, and still very grateful to be kept. At fifty-five the earl knew that gratitude, combined with experience, brought a certain exquisite frisson to the bedroom, not yet the desperation of a matron in her declining middle years, but more the ardent willingness of a ripening woman to please. With the certain knowledge of decay comes true passion, he mused. It trumped the demands of youthful entitlement and inexperience in matters of sex every time.