The Wolves of Andover Page 8

  “Would ya like me to find ya a horse’s head, Georgie? I could ask my ol’ man. He’s a carter with more dead nags in a week than there’r martyrs in Heaven.”

  He smiled at her gratefully and she sent him away, promising to meet him at the tavern before daylight with a handcart bringing a fresh-severed head.

  She brought food to the table and the sweet wine for Thornton, ignoring his disapproval over the crusted, half-emptied bottle. She seated herself in the fifth open chair and turned to Brudloe, who was speaking softly of the ship that had been chartered.

  “The captain’s name is Koogin,” he said, spearing a sausage with his knife. “He was born a Dutchman, but only insofar as his mother’s cunny was filled up with some Low-Country yeoman. He’s of no country now. His only ’vestment, and loyalty, is to his own pockets and he’s been proven more than once. He’s run powder and flint to the colonies for ten years or more and he’ll ask no questions. His ship is a three-masted hull with a crew of only a dozen or so men.”

  Baker roused himself, saying, “Blood’s paid for five men and he’ll know if we board only the four of us. How do we propose to fill our fifth?” It was the first time he’d spoken and Anne marveled at the gentleness of his voice. She tried to imagine how many times he had softly, and reasonably, questioned prone men screaming out their last agonies into his face.

  Brudloe said, “There’s only a few left alive, or out of prison, who’ll serve for our purposes. There’s Pillater, for one.” He looked around the table and seeing no affirmation or dissent continued, “What about Knox?” He looked to Cornwall, who shrugged and rolled his head. “Christ on a cross. Well, then, there’s Markham.”

  “Ah.” Baker smiled musingly and shook his head.

  “Frig me, then,” Brudloe muttered. “We’re in for four, and Blood will take his own back.”

  Thornton snorted. “Four of us and one colonial dirt farmer…”

  An enormous hand wielding a knife plunged onto Thornton’s plate. The knife slowly removed the remaining sausage, dripping grease over the younger man’s velvet breeches, and Thornton’s startled, angry gaze turned to Cornwall, who shoved the sausage whole into his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully for a moment and then rumbled, “Big man. Big, big man.” He pointed the knife blade at Thornton and uttered carefully, “Little man.”

  Brudloe guffawed and clapped Cornwall on the back, saying quickly to forestall Thornton’s reach for the butt of his sword, “Calm yerself, Edward. Do you know what it means when there are three nuns together with a horse? It means the horse is in for a rough ride.” His smile vanished and he gave the rake a serious look. “You’re the young blade here, laddie. Keep quiet, listen good, and you’ll live to collect yer pay.”

  “I reckon a ship’s passage to be a danger,” Annie said suddenly, as though thinking aloud. Her voice cut through the fog of tension and she looked cautiously around the room, seeing only the sleeping man left at the fire. She lowered her voice to a forced whisper. “Who’s to say what will happen on the water with a hard blow and a rollin’ deck so bad as to pitch a man o’er the side?”

  Brudloe smiled and reached for her arm. “What are you sayin’, Annie, dear?”

  “I’m sayin’ five men board a ship and four men get off.” She looked to each man but when her eyes fell on Thornton, he smirked and said, “Look out, boys, she’ll snap your wick right off with her cunny.”

  “At least any of their dicks’d be stiff enough t’ hit the mark,” she snapped.

  Thornton scowled but buried his face in his cup.

  Brudloe tapped her arm and said, “Go on.”

  “What if I can find someone t’ fill the gap? No need to pay the impress men. I’ll find th’ mark and we’ll split the fifth man’s pay.” She turned to Thornton and said, pointedly, “Equal shares.”

  “Blood won’t like it,” Brudloe said.

  “Blood won’t know,” Anne answered, looking around the table, each man giving his nod of complicity.

  “He always knows,” Cornwall mumbled sadly, eating the last of the damp morsels off the table with his fingers.

  As Brudloe signaled for the men to go, she saw that the sleeping man had left his place at the fire, the door just closing on his retreating form. As Baker stood from his stool, he pointed to the rabbit and asked politely, “May I take the rabbit for my wife?” She nodded and he saluted her, his fine hands gently folding the rabbit’s corpse into his cloak.

  She locked the door behind them and smiled at her own cleverness. As long as the work at hand was attended to, Blood would never begrudge her initiative. He had sparked to her abilities, and though he could have his pick of any woman, he had chosen her for his special attentions. It wasn’t merely the sweaty business in bed that she was partial to; his parts worked like any man’s. It was the talking he did when they were about it. He would whisper wetly into her ear, “My oyster, my briny-dewed oyster… my careless pearl… my wine-dark abyss,” and other such nonsense. The words stretched out into the long groan of rutting, words which uttered at any other time would have brought laughter from her mouth, but which, at the frantic moment of release, brought violent and thrilling images of falling from a vast height, with nothing but rocks below to catch her.

  One brief moment of doubt crossed her thoughts, that he would settle on her harshly for dealing him false; but it was only flickering, soon gone with the rapid pulse of her breath. Blood would be in her room close by, still warm from the long wait by the fire, perhaps yet good-humored that his hired assassins had been so close and yet unaware that he had been seated in the tavern all along. She would trust, due to their greed and their fear in equal parts, that none of the men would reveal their little plan for the fifth man, and though she had grown fond of Georgie, it would be a very small thing to replace one eel boy with another.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE STRENGTHENING SUN had passed the noonday hour, and already Martha had hung clean shirts and breeches along low-lying bushes, dividing her time between watching the level of the boiling water in the great iron wash pot and spying on Will as he marched up and down the yard, a stick balanced over his shoulder the way he had seen Thomas balancing the long barrel of his flintlock.

  The quiet, solitary preparations of the wash had come as a soothing ritual after a frantic morning preparing the house against the plague. They had learned of the outbreak from the Taylors’ nearest neighbor, who shouted out the news from the road, not wanting to come even so close as the yard to prevent contagion. Martha had painted the lintels with vinegar, smoked the rooms with sage, and regardless of the warmer breezes bringing the scent of early iris throughout the house, she had closed all the windows tight to keep any errant winds from bringing ill humors into the house.

  She had not spoken more than a dozen words to Thomas since the evening he told of the hound, Gelert, and the meaning of the tale, or lack of it, had rankled her as though she had swallowed a smelt whole, one whose bones had stuck in her belly long after the flesh had melted away. The hot and piercing rage she had felt after the wolf attack had passed away, taking with it the savage dreams; but now, in place of anger she had a restless, almost hostile, curiosity about the Welshman.

  She pulled a tiny fragment of cone sugar out of her apron and called to the boy. She smiled at his eagerness to grab at the sweetie and she toyed with him a bit, holding it just out of his grasp before placing it with her own fingers on his tongue.

  She pulled him down to sit with her on a patch of drying grasses, the sun hot at their backs, and asked, “What, then, do you know of Thomas?”

  He answered, smacking his lips, “Thomas has been all t’ way to London.”

  “You mean New London, don’t you, Will?” she asked, giving him a doubtful look.

  He boldly reached into her apron, looking for more sugar until she pushed his hands away, shaking her head.

  “More,” he demanded, his mouth opening like a baby bird’s.

  “Tell me, then,” she said w
ith mock seriousness.

  “He was t’ London, old London, and he fought the king, with Cromwell. John told me an’ he hasn’t told you.” He began to squirm, and she knew he would tolerate only a few more questions before he dashed away.

  “Want more?” she asked, taking his hands in hers, tethering his restless form a moment longer. “Tell me and you’ll get another pinch of sugar.”

  “He’s got a great… a great…” He faltered, his attention captured by a squirrel gnawing at a seed in the garden.

  She shook his hands to draw him back. “A great what, Will?”

  “A great wooden trunk,” he said, following the squirrel with his eyes. “Next t’ the bed.”

  “And what’s inside?”

  “A coat. A’ old red coat,” he answered, jerking his hands free, and he ran, brandishing his stick, for the squirrel.

  A coat, she thought, disappointed. There was nothing remarkable in that, unless there were other, more telling things inside the trunk. The cone of sugar was almost gone, and she wondered how much more she could extract from the boy before there was none left for so much as a pasty. She pestered him off and on for the remainder of the day, but Will could reveal only the little he had heard and seen with his own eyes: that Thomas had fought against the Old Charles during the English war and that Thomas kept the wooden trunk at all times near the place where he put his head at night. She finally gave up her questioning when he began to look at her as a goose regards a butcher who is standing with a sprig of parsley in one hand and a small ax in the other.

  She lay in her bed that night, turning over in her mind the few things that Will had told her, and decided that when morning came, she would question Thomas more directly about his past. Her fingers crept up to the space beneath the pillow and she felt the smooth edges of the red book there. She had not yet been able to tear out the pages as she had intended to do, the pages where she had deposited her troubling thoughts. The book seemed to her to be an integrated, almost animate, thing. It had a spine and a hide and within the coverings were stiff, rustling pages that moved the air about like the wings of a bird. Ripping out the glistening paper would be like plucking the white feathers from a goose while it yet lived. It came to her that she would soon have to hide the book from the prying eyes of others if she could not bring herself to blot out the clandestine words.

  At first light, upon the last of the breakfast dishes put away, Martha announced to Patience that she would go to the river for leeks and that Thomas should accompany her.

  When Patience raised a brow at her, Martha said, “There may be Indians.”

  “God help the Indians,” John mumbled, handing the older man the flintlock.

  Martha gathered her shawl around her shoulders, and without looking behind her to see if Thomas followed, she walked purposefully towards the river. When they reached the embankment, Thomas walked ahead of her and she fit her shoes to his footprints, sunk deeply into the soft, loamy soil, up the steeply angled hillock towards the river, which lay in a depression on the other side. Halfway to the crest, he motioned for her to sit on a fallen log and wait. He disappeared quietly over the ridge, moving with caution through the undergrowth, using the barrel of his flintlock to prod his way forward through the tangle of maidenhead ferns.

  He was gone for a short while, but she soon heard a low whistle and saw him at the ridge, farther south this time, waving for her to come on. She climbed with some difficulty the last short distance to the top, pulling on roots and jutting rocks to scramble over the peaked ridge, and saw the river running fast and clear below her. Carefully hitching up her skirt, she sidestepped down the far embankment to the water’s edge. The boggy ground was chilled, but she felt warmth on her upturned face through branches of willow and beech. She smiled in surprise at the coltsfoot growing like borrowed sunlight along the shaded dimples at the river’s edge; and on the opposite shore she spied columbine, its red blossoms stirred into motion by hummingbirds.

  Thomas had propped himself against a beech, crooking one foot up on a jutting root, and was looking to the right and the left, scanning the bank and the stream for any movement. His silence was of a belligerent sort, like a guard dog gone mute, so she turned her back on him and began pulling up the tender shoots of leeks, which yielded easily in the damp earth.

  She soon had a small sack filled, the wet green stalks soaking the coarse linen, their sharp odor staining her hands and apron. But she was loath to leave the spot and decided to look for wild onions as well. When she caught him, through the reflection on the water, looking at the back of her head, she said in an offhand manner, “I am told you have been as far as London.”

  There was a long silence as she picked through the plaited shafts of river grasses before she heard him say, “Aye.” She waited for tale-telling or bragging of some sort, but the silence stretched into minutes. “Well, then,” she prompted, “you must now think Billerica flat and rude.” She turned to face him, her expression challenging.

  He abruptly swept away the small battery of flies hovering below the brim of his hat and answered, “There’s good in it. Here ’n there.” He met her gaze and stared long past the point of courtesy.

  Finally dropping her eyes, she fussed with the linen bag and said, “Will was told you have been a soldier.”

  He shifted his weight restlessly against the tree and lowered his chin in the way she had come to recognize as a defensive stance and exhaled heavily, compressing his mouth for a moment into a thin, tight line. Then he inhaled slowly and said, “When I were a boy in Wales, the first thing I kenned from my father was to look out across the land to tell the dry ground from the wet.”

  Martha waited for the story to continue, but after a silent pause, she said, “I don’t understand your meaning.”

  “It means, missus, that the world is a very large place. Full of mean marshes and moors, as well as meadows an’ streams. And if you don’t want to bog down and drown yourself, it’s keen to learn where to step lightly an’ where to tread not at all.”

  He pushed himself away from the tree and was soon climbing back up the hill to the crest, never looking to see if she would follow. Martha stared after him gape-mouthed before she quickly picked up her skirt and scrambled after him.

  “Wait… wait,” she called and he paused at the crest until she joined him, breathing heavily for a moment and struggling to speak again. “I meant only… to know that which is…” She stopped with a flush of uncertainty when he turned to face her. “I meant only to learn that which is proper as to who you are and… what you are about.”

  He studied her for a moment before saying, “I were born near Carmarthen. In the uplands.” He balanced both hands on the barrel of the standing flintlock, crossed at the wrist, in a practiced way.

  “So then, you were a farmer?” she asked, and suddenly to her own ears she sounded tight-lipped and sour.

  “No,” he answered, looking to the middle distance at the clearing where the Taylor house sat, sending long plumes of dove-gray smoke from its chimney. “My father were a farmer. The year I were born, in ’twenty-six, the winters were so cold that the hand froze to the hearth back. My father had thirty acres of grazing and five for planting. He had four cows, two bullocks, one horse, fifty-two sheep, and a family. He lost most of it that winter and spent his whole life trying to catch back the past. When I were fifteen I left.”

  “Did you… were you close to anyone?” A quickening breeze blew, uplifted from the river, and a piece of her hair floated across her eyes, momentarily blinding her.

  He slowly reached out and grasped the hair, carefully rolling each strand around one finger. “I had a brother who died at seventeen, elder than me by three years. His name was Richard.” He rolled the strands again in the opposite direction, like unspooling yarn, and carefully tucked it back behind her ear. “He could run. By God, he could run. He ran every race in Carmarthenshire and won every prize. But the Welsh uplands have a temper all their own. And the v
ery crags and heath that made him fast took away his heart at the end.” He dropped his hand and said softly, “Ni edrych angau pwy decaf ei dalcen.”

  She shook her head, confused. He said, “It means, ‘Death spares not the fairest forehead.’ I held tight to my father’s farm in my brother’s stead for one year. And then I walked away for good.”

  She stared at his solemn mouth and at the dark stubble on his cheeks, growing like a crown of briars surrounding the pale and weather-worn flesh that were his lips, and unthinking, she placed a cautious finger to the deeply recessed hollow at the base of his throat and felt his pulse strengthen under her touch. His eyes darted to the side and his head followed quickly, looking over her shoulder, and grasping her arm, he began to pull her roughly after him down the hill towards the settlement. He whispered to her, urgently, “Don’t talk. Don’t look back until we are safe within the house. Say nothing to the missus.”

  She tried to crane her neck around to see what lay behind them, but his loping walk caused her to run hazardously down the hill, and she stumbled in her effort to match his long strides. He whistled John from the barn and whispered to him urgently, gesturing towards the river, and placed a silencing hand over John’s arm when the younger man’s eyes went big and round. Once inside, Thomas bolted the door, posting himself at the open window. When Martha came to stand next to him, he pointed back to the embankment where they had talked moments before. She observed nothing at first and then she saw a slight shifting of the landscape at the crest; dun-colored shapes moving in concert, heaving subtly as though the earth itself had learned to crawl.

  Patience, seeing the men returned to the house, served up the midday meal, a thin ladle of soup with dried deer meat and the last of the bread baked days before. She chatted on happily about the leeks brought from the river and the fineness of the weather, of her absent husband, and of the seedlings coming up in the garden, unaware of the guarded looks passing between Thomas and John, and of the alarm that kept Martha rigid and silent in her chair. Thomas sat closest to the door with the flintlock at arm’s length and soon the only sounds were of the scraping of spoons against the pewter.