Читать книгу Rivers Parting - Shirley Barker - Страница 8

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When I came here,” said John Scarlock one spring afternoon in 1644, setting his mug down hard on the pine table in George Walford’s ordinary, “this was a free country.” Older and leaner than the young man who had come out of England fourteen years ago, he still looked much the same.

Nobody seemed willing to pick up the argument. Renald Fernald stroked his beard that had a scatter of gray in it, and looked through the open door at the new green grass that would be all pricked red with strawberries, come June. Francis Williams, now governor, looked even further off ... at the sails of a fishing boat beating upriver against the tide. Cod were running well this year, and he had a part interest in every catch.

Finally Ambrose Gibbons replied cautiously. “Yes. The land was ours before the Massachusetts meddled with us.”

“Aye, it was,” said John defiantly, taking a long swallow of cider.

The reason for their silence and caution sat on a bench near the clay fireplace where only a few banked embers glowed, finishing a trencher of bacon and boiled pease. Thomas Wiggin, friend of John Winthrop, agent for the Puritans who had settled the upper river, turned a bland face with heavy-lidded eyes toward the Strawberry Bank men.

“That is true. You were a poor country without interest or influence at home. A group of woeful villages in the outskirts of our colony; east, like Cain who set up in the east of Eden, and like Cain, wicked. You scorned the vine and fig tree to nest in the bramble’s shadow. But finally, exhausted with sin and weakness, you signed yourself away into the protection of Massachusetts, and for that protection all we ask is that you live godly as we do. A free country! Bah! Who ever promised you such a thing? It would be a crime before the Lord!”

Henry Sherburne came into the low little room that was hardly more than a hut, a young man, moving like a breath of bright air.

“Oh!” he cried. “Welcome, Brother Wiggin. What kind of jackass burden do the holy brethren want us to bear now?”

John brightened at the coming of an ally, but not so Ambrose Gibbons, for Henry was married to his daughter, Beck, and he didn’t want to see the lad’s tongue get him in trouble.

“But I think I heard you say,” went on young Sherburne, who had come as a boy on the Warwick in the days of Walter Neal, and helped to take the country when times were hard, but God knows, a good deal more certain than they were now, “that you want us to live godly. Why not let us live honest instead? We’re men made out of earth, and wine tastes good to us—when we can get it—and wenches are sweet to lie with, and we pretend no different. Wine and wenches taste just as sweet in Massachusetts, no matter how much they deny it in Meeting. We’re as God made us, and so are they, and who’s any better?”

Fernald had slipped his hand into a fold of the speaker’s deerskin breeches and drew him down on the bench at his own left side.

“Henry’s a young man, Mr. Wiggin, and speaks out too bold, but many of us are not happy in the union. Only the Dover men signed it. None of us at the Bank.”

“But you had no one to fend for you. Neal, that strumpet soldier, had gone back to England. You had no government, no charter, no goods nor wealth from home. You were as chaff blown through the forest—after John Mason died. He left his servants destitute of means and support.”

“Aye, Mason died,” muttered John, remembering the plump, benign merchant who had waved at them from the wharves of Portsmouth. “Take this swill away, George, and bring me some good ale. He died, but we did not. We had the ground, and the trees, and the fields we cleared. John Mason died, but that didn’t stop the salmon runs, nor the corn from coming up green. The nut trees bore, and the fruit trees thrived, and the deer came down to the salt pans after dark. My right arm did not fail me when John Mason died. I still stood up a man. Destitute servant! In a pig’s snout, I was a destitute servant!”

“Talk won’t help now, John. We’re New Hampshire men, just as we always were.” Francis Williams spoke, kindly and troubled. “But New Hampshire’s gone under Massachusetts, and Mr. Wiggin is only here to advise us in our ways a little.”

“You have brought dangerous ways out of England,” went on Wiggin, folding his hands across his gently swelling doublet of stout Yorkshire cloth. “You have a chapel built in the King’s faith, and that smacks more of popery every day, and when the wars are over at home may be completely fallen. Soon you must receive a godly minister and I hope you will entertain him well. I understand you are furnished for the sacraments?”

“Yes,” replied Fernald, a little uncertainly, for the chapel had been used mostly to store beaver hides in, “there’s a great Bible, and a pewter flagon, I think; silver communion ware and two altar cloths. Mason sent them out on one of the early ships, as I remember. We unpacked them and looked them over when we voted the Glebe Land four years ago.”

“You’ll soon be hearing sermons,” said Wiggin comfortably, “and you may as well start to observe the Sabbath. No fishing, bearing burdens, pulling pease, or harrowing the land; no dallying with your wives. And each of you may well begin to read the Bible every day to his household.”

“I’ll read mine Thomas Tusser,” muttered John, “and after that, if I can find my Free School Latin, I’ll borrow Georgius Agricolae from the Great House and read them that. But I won’t read them the Bible.”

“Why, John?” asked Ambrose Gibbons very softly at his elbow. “I’ve found more’n one good tale in it.”

“Sure there are,” said John. “I’ve got no quarrel with the Bible. But I’ll read it when I want to and not when I’m bid to. Who’s Winthrop and Wiggin to tell me what to do? Their fathers whistled to a team of horses the same as mine did.”

“I’m afraid,” Williams was saying to Thomas Wiggin dubiously, “that the land is still so hungry for our labors here, that we must give even our seventh day to it if we would have more than our families need, so that there may be goods for trade—beaver, and salt cod, and a load of pipe staves now and then.”

“Which had you rather set up here—Trade, or the Profession of His Truth?”

“Trade,” said all the Strawberry Bank men together.

Wiggin stood up. “Your country,” he said, smooth as one of the great eels that whipped its way through channels in the mud when the tide went down, “is still as little as it was in the days of blasphemous Neal; as little, and as full of infamy. But godly settlers are coming here, and they will bring you to the way of Christ, or have your land and send you mouthing into the forest with the other savages!”

“He could have said before,” whispered John to Henry, “it was our land he wanted. Walter said twelve years ago it was that; that in his heart he didn’t care any more for the way of Christ than we did.”

Wiggin heard him and turned about slowly. John set his mug down and stared unfalteringly back.

“You are Goodman Scarlock, are you not?”

“I am John Scarlock of Old Thorny.”

Why had he said that? He had only a few fields and cattle and a frame house like the other men had; no wise, settled home with a name. No use to think back to what was oversea.

“And you keep an abomination in your house named Bessie Goble.”

John stiffened his shoulders as if to take a blow. He looked down into the flagon of good malt ale George had brought him, and seeing the sloe-brown, frothy circle of it, he thought suddenly that just so his ale had looked when he stared into it that night at Jack Gambrell’s years ago, when Walter Neal was first telling him about Piscataqua Country. If one man can love another, John had loved Captain Neal, but when the high adventure of finding the great lakes had failed, when there proved to be beans and corn in the new country rather than gems for the court ladies, Neal had smiled and shrugged, written “non est inventa provincia” to John Mason, and gone home to captain the London artillery. And Catherine Warburton, Fernald’s sister and Joan’s friend, had cried for a week and then taken ship after him. No one had ever known all of what lay between them—but she had another man for her husband now, and lived at court, if the court hadn’t fallen. There’d been no news from the wars lately. No doubt Walter was in them, for he often said he hadn’t missed a good fight since he was eighteen, and fighting was more to his taste than salting cod fish and cutting marsh hay. But if only he were here, he’d settle this praying bastard.

“Yes,” he answered. “Bessie lives in my house.”

“Ah! Can your wife sew?”

“Yes ...”

“Then bid her make a scarlet W for the wench to wear on her gown. I shall expect to see it when I come here to pray for you next week. Good-bye, Governor, and God be with you.” He held out his hand to Francis Williams.

Williams bowed low so as not to see the hand. “Good-bye, Mr. Wiggin. We thank you—but we plead to be governed by the known laws of England, and not by the peculiar laws of Massachusetts.”

The stout Puritan sniffed, paused a moment as if to answer, then strode down the slope to the little wharf where he had tied up the shallop he used for running all over Great Bay and the river country on the business of God and Governor Winthrop.

Nobody said anything, and Walford brought some more ale from the keg in the corner. Finally Fernald spoke.

“It was wrong for him to speak of Bess. We know what she is, but even the godly must recognize that there will always be some tares in the vineyard.”

“We tried to make her a good lass, but she was full of lust from her first days. We had her ever since her mother drowned herself off the Pied Cow coming here with Joan.”

“I know. You were both good to her and you tried hard, and she fell into evil in spite of you. But I think I know an answer, John.”

What answer could there be? thought John, turning his mug round and round, not drinking. Bessie, the orphan girl, hardly fourteen, had eyes like blackberries, an ample smile, and a tangle of light brown hair that flowed to her plump waist. She was no use in the house or the fields, but could often be seen in the lane that led to the huts of the Danish men John Mason had sent over to make potash, or hovering about the waterside in talk with the sailors or hunters just come downriver from the beaver country. Her charm was not that of a beautiful woman, not the frowsy willingness of Moll Doubleday back home, rather that of a friendly animal sidling up to be petted. But she always had shillings and pence in her pocket, which was more than most of the goodwives had.

Once she had let a coin fall on the kitchen floor, and John had picked it up and asked her where it came from.

“Oh, I found it in the lane below the Great House. Some sailor must have dropped it.”

“Yes,” John had answered slowly, “likely one did.”

There could be no answer in the matter of Bessie Goble, but Dr. Fernald was still talking.

“Do you know Daniel Knight? A tall, dark man—has a face like a crag, and the best heart in this country? He owns a house by Hampton Cow Common, and has more in his pocket than any of us.”

“Brother to Roger Knight who came with us in the Warwick?”

“No, but some kin, I think. Owned three farms in Devon, but his wife died there when he was young, and he wanted to get away from everything they’d shared together, so he came here. I’ve seen him often since the cod started to run, for one of his fishing boats puts out from Spring Hill Wharf, and he’s watched Bess and her ways, and talked with me about her.”

“What did he say?”

“He says he’ll marry her, John, if you and Joan are willing.”

“Marry her?”

“He thinks she’s a good lass at heart, and there are ways, he says, a husband can use to keep her in order which a foster father cannot.”

“Yes,” said John, still unbelieving, “he’s right there.”

“He thinks she will settle down and be a good wife to his old age, and he’s ready to stand up with her any time. Why don’t you ask Joan before Thomas Wiggin sets that letter on the poor girl.”

“I will. Can’t see she’d have but one answer. It’s not good for her to be in the house with our own girls growing.”

“No. Isn’t Joan’s time about here?”

“Any day now.” John stood up. Then he smiled. “One thing—I never worry when Joan’s with child. She just lies down and calls to them and they come tumbling into the world like kittens.”

“I wager she’d not tell it that way.”

“Likely not.” John turned back from the doorway. “I’ll come over tomorrow and tell you what she says about Bess.”

“Do. Daniel’s gone to the Bay, but he’ll be back next week, and wants to go forward with the business. He’s a good man, John.”

John paid his reckoning, made his farewells, and stepped out on the beaten turf in the warm afternoon. The houses of Strawberry Bank, peaked and timbered like his own, lay along a rough track that followed the river edge, beaches or little wharves in front, gardens and fields spreading up the slope behind them. On the crest of the hill, stretching west and north, certain goodly acres called the Glebe Land had been set apart for the support of John Mason’s chapel, but they would be used now for Thomas Wiggin’s Puritan minister. John swore softly and lifted the small wooden plow he had left leaning against the clapboarded wall of the ordinary, under the two wolves’ heads nailed up for bounty and still reeking of dried blood. He walked along the uneven road past the Great House, noticing that one of the windowpanes was broken, and stopped at Rafe Gee’s, for Rafe had a small forge and a knack with ironwork, and he wanted a keener edge put on the plow’s metal tip. But Rafe wasn’t in, though John called and whistled and all the casements were blowing open. Probably up with the cattle in the town field at the head of the creek. Well, he’d not had his trip to town for nothing; there’d been good talk with the lads in spite of that knave from Dover, and an offer of honest marriage for Bessie Goble. He began to whistle an old sailor’s tune Rob had learned in the Navy, as he walked back to where he had tied up his boat just below the town. Most of the men were at work in the fields or woods, but women’s voices chimed low from the windows and gardens. Johnny Crowther’s wife was setting out some plants in her front yard and called to him.

“How’s Joan?”

“Well ... and waiting.”

“When she’s up again, I’ll give her some of these rosebushes! My sister sent them from England.”

“Thank you, Jane,” he called back. “That’ll please her.”

He stopped suddenly, almost jumped backward to keep from running into a tall, bony figure that stood in front of him. It was an Indian, one of the nobler ones, with sharp, bronze-cut features and blue-black hair, no paint or ornaments, or skins, only a rough woolen robe draped over one shoulder and dyed a sort of periwinkle color. Why, he’d seen this fellow before. It was old Passaconaway, the wizard. John had had little to do with the Indians since the first days, except to best one in a trade or tell him to be gone, for the narrow arm of the sea between his farm and the mainland shut him off from many meetings with them which the townsmen had. He wished them no particular harm, but he could not honor them—owning all that good land since the time of God, and what had they done with it! He did not know quite how to greet a wizard. But the man stood there in front of him and would not go. He had to say something.

“Do you want to ... talk to me?” he asked finally.

“To you—to any man who can help. I am Passaconaway.”

“Yes, I know. I saw you once when I went to look for the Chrystal Hills twelve years ago. I saw you at the trading post at Newichwannock once. You can make water burn and trees dance. You can change yourself into a flame, and in winter you can raise up a green leaf from the ashes of a dry one, or a living serpent from one that is dead.”

John’s speech was all mockery, a mockery that made him feel mean and uneasy. He was treating the Indian just as the other men at Strawberry Bank treated them—he knew no other way—and yet he felt there should have been another way.

The Indian looked back calmly at him out of eyes opaque and muddy as a turtle’s.

“Other men say that. I do not say it.”

“Then you’re not a wizard?”

“Where a wizard has no honor, there his power is gone. Long ago—when the White Men first come—we gather, all of us, to try our magic. I was a young man then. In the twiggy thickets of a great swamp we meet. First, we bid fire go and eat your wigwams, and we blow forth the fire, but it does not obey, and still the wigwams stand. And then we blow forth the sickness that is like winter in a man’s throat and chokes him—and many die—but more live, more come. The spirits do not obey, and we are weak without the spirits. Your spirits still obey you, so you take our country.”

John shifted a little to one side. Past the scrub oaks to the south, he could hear the voices of men coming home from their day’s work on the iron bog. The shadows of the elms were drawing themselves out long on the shingly beach, and he wanted to get to his house and see how Joan was.

“Yes,” he said. “We’ve taken some of it, but there’s plenty for you still—more than you’ll want to plant this season.”

“Trade?” asked Passaconaway, his eyes fixing John like a spear.

“I don’t know. What do you want?”

“That. Not yellow beads nor fire water. We must live in your way now, or we die. We must groove our fields—not in the squaw’s way, but in yours. We need that—in your hand.”

John stroked the small plow he was carrying on his shoulder.

“But you can make one for yourself. See—it’s wood. Out of any tree ...”

“Not that,” said Passaconaway, running his hand along the iron edge of the share, “but this.”

“What’ll you give?”

“Cornfield by Hogstye Cove. Here is a leaf that says I give it. I had it made to carry like wampum.” From the fold of his robe he drew a strip of deer hide with rough lettering in red paint. “This man own field by Hogstye Cove. Passaconaway.”

The Indian held out the deerskin. “I take your plow,” he said simply, “for my people.” He reached over and lifted it from John’s shoulder.

John let him take it, felt the deed pressed into his limp hand. What good to him was a field by Hogstye Cove over on the Great Bay, away from the Bank and the road to England? Good land, maybe, but Joan would never live there. And everybody knew that an Indian’s name to a deed was no better than the scratch of a bear’s claw. And there was his plow being carried off into the woods toward Little Harbor! But the man had taken it for his people. “We must learn your ways or die.”

John freed his boat suddenly from the overhanging willow he had tied it to and jumped in. Hell, he thought, let the poor devil have it. I’ve got the bigger one.

When he got to the island and hurried past Fernald’s house, he began to feel suddenly anxious about Joan. He went by the round salt pond and grazing cattle, and along the edge of his fields, all plowed and spread with fish carcass, and ready for seed that would be sowed in the Indian fashion with pumpkins, beans, and corn all hilled together. What would Old Tusser say to such a planting, he thought, or to any farm where you couldn’t sow till mid-April and there was no winter crop but snow? We have to learn Indian ways, too, he thought, they’re not the only ones who must change. And then he was at the house—try as he would, he’d never been able to make it look like Old Thorny, but it had a wide hearth and chimney corners with room for old people and children, and maybe time would do what he hadn’t been able to. He went around to the front, crossed the ledge under the open casements, and lifted the wooden latch of the sea-weathered door.

Before Joan Scarlock put herself to bed for her fourth childbirth, she stood in the doorway a long time and looked downriver, at the slate-colored water swirling past the fishermen’s huts on Great Island, and the banks of blue-green spruce that curved, and narrowed, and hid the wide sea. Beyond that sea lay England—Nottingham and St. Nicholas’ workhouse, Jack Gambrell’s and Old Thorny. She had not thought about them so often when she first came here, but now the girls were growing up and liked to hear about “home,” for she and Johnny still spoke of it that way. At night after supper was the best time, when they were scouring the pewter and woodenware, for then Johnny would put down his pipe and join in. They’d listen when he told about Watch and Warn, or the ghost of Old Will, but when he tried to tell them about the Armada Fight, they’d get out their corn husk poppets and straggle off, playing. Joan understood; she’d never got straight in her head what it was all about either.

This afternoon, right in the middle of a green and forward April, they were playing down in the rushes at the edge of the salt marsh behind the house, and Joan could hear their laughter, hated to put an end to it, but the faint uneasiness stirring throughout her body told her she should be sending for Joanna Fernald. There wouldn’t be time to get Sarah Scriggins from her house on the other side of the Glebe Land, for Joan never spent many hours of her busy, happy life in the woes of childbirth. First there was the discomfort that told you you had better lie down and call some other woman to be there, and then the sudden burst of sickness, frightening the first time, but not again; the short, sharp wrestle with pain, and then the blissful weakness, when you lay, and gave suck, and were glad.

The gulls went over, white and shrill in the spring sunshine, and new grass shoots were coming through the yellow mat of last year’s fallen leaves. Even the little, dead-looking trees in the dooryard, dwarfed and gnarled by the sea wind, had covered themselves overnight with hard, orange buds. She did not want to go inside, to the bedchamber, clean, but dark after this moment of blue brightness, and musty from being lived in all winter. She wanted to stay out here on the point where she had made Johnny build their house—because it faced toward England. She wanted to be a girl with her own girls, and run to the spring and gather the tiny violets that were budding where the sweet water overflowed, or down to the little cove beyond the hog pens, to pick up scarlet mussel shells and scale flat stones off the sleek roof of the river.

“But I’ve cleared land at the head of Sagamore Creek for us, Joan. There’re a spring, and a fresh marsh, and an Indian cornfield ready to plow....”

“No,” Joan had said, “I want my house where I can stand in the doorway and look to England.”

“But you’ll have to look at the river you’re so afraid of.”

“If I’m to turn away from everything that frightens me, you’d best swaddle me in lambswool and lock me in a chest in the chimney cupboard.”

“Well,” said Johnny, “we’ll build it where you want it.”

And she had wanted it here, on the crest of a little island, high and craggy where it jutted into the river, sloping back gently into fields and marshes, with Renald Fernald’s house on the inner shore, and, across a stone’s throw of channel, the town.

With a sigh now, she stepped heavily off the doorstone, went past the open casements of her tidy kitchen, and called down the hill to her daughters. “Kitty! Oh, Kitty, Mary, Alice!”

“What do you want?”

“Is it suppertime?”

“We just found a starfish! He’s all wiggly green!”

Three blond heads, set at varying heights, burst out of the rushes, and three little figures, demure in homespun, scrambled across the wet sedge and oozing moss. Pain twisted Joan’s comely face for a moment, then her body; she did not want them to come any nearer.

“Go to Aunt Joanna’s! Quick!”

“Why? What for? What’ll we tell her?”

“She’ll know when she sees you. Just go there. Run!”

Away they tore in the direction of a tall chimney and gables that looked out, reassuring, from a covert of elms feathered with new green.

Joan drew a deep breath, straightened herself, and went into the house. She looked around the kitchen and everything seemed to be in order, from the heavy black ironware hung by the fireplace to the shining pewter on the dresser between the windows. She poked the fire and threw in some birch wood Johnny had cut up small so she could handle it. She filled the largest kettle and swung its crane over the fire. Then she went into the buttery at the back of the house, under the stairs. A good thing she’d baked yesterday, and cut up that dried pumpkin this morning, and of course there was the bacon flitch and half a cask of salt cod, and a kettle of pease porridge ready to heat. If her family didn’t have any supper tonight it was their own fault.

As she crossed the kitchen again on her way to bed, she had to rest for a few minutes on the settle while a wave of pain swelled and ebbed in her body. At the foot of the narrow stairs that wound themselves around the great brick chimney to the garret where Bessie and the girls slept, she looked upward. She hadn’t been able to get up there since February. Bessie said it was clean enough, but Bessie’d say the same of a stable midden. Likely Joanna wouldn’t go up there, and she knew what bearing a child was like—but still, a dirty house was a shame to any woman.

Once in the bedroom she strewed white sea sand on the floor that was beginning to splinter along the cracks after twelve years of feet going over it, dressed the bed with clean, worn linen, and pinned back the hangings of pink, painted chintz that were the finest things she owned, except the silver tankard Johnny’d brought home the time he went to the Bay. As she loosened her dress, she turned her eyes to the window for one last look at the spring sunshine, and saw nothing but a great, evil, gray sweep of water rushing by. Then Joan lay down alone with the pain.

In all the whole world there were only the two, the pain and she, but she did not fight it in the terror of a young wife, nor writhe with a novice’s abandon. She used it expertly, as a master craftsman uses a tool. Once she thought she saw Joanna go by the bed, but how could she be sure, in a world that held only the pain and she? And then suddenly her enemy dwindled and left her, lying spent but unbroken, and she knew that in a few moments she would be able to lift her head up and rejoice. As the familiar room came back into sight again, she saw that Ann Warnerton from the Great House was there, and that she held a bundle of clean, old shawls, and then Joanna came to the bed with rags and water to cleanse her gently of birth.

Joan spoke first, still a little mazed from her task and its sudden ending. “I think I’ll call this child ‘Cecily’ for John’s mother,” she said.

“You’ll never call this child ‘Cecily,’ ” beamed Joanna. “What was his father’s name?”

“His father? Why ... why ... it was Will. But you ... you ... why ... it’s never a boy? After all those girls I thought I could have only the one kind! Dr. Renald said ’twas like I could have only the one kind ... though he wasn’t sure. Oh! Oh, somebody go tell Johnny!”

“ ‘Will’ it is,” said Ann, holding him up for Joan to see. “Johnny was in the town when I came away.” Suddenly she began to weep.

“Poor Ann,” sighed Joanna. “Thomas threw a stool at her, so she walked out of his house and rowed herself over the channel to me.”

“Why didn’t you throw it back, Ann?” asked Joan weakly, reaching up to take her baby.

“I couldn’t. It went through the window.”

“Ann says he’s entertaining lewd company,” said Joanna soberly, and then with something that was almost accusal, “She thinks he’s been with Bessie Goble.”

Joan held her son in her arms and tried to see past the baby softness to the man his father was, the man he would grow into. Why didn’t these prattling women go away, and get Johnny, and leave the three of them together? But she remembered Alice Goble’s dead face lying on the reef with the kelp streaming over it, and she struggled up in her sick bed to defend Bessie.

“What I hear of your husband, Mistress Ann, he was a wicked man before Bess was born,” she said.

“Hush!” broke in Joanna. “Someone’s coming. It must be John. Beck Sherburne is at my house, and she said she’d keep the children till we sent for them.”

A man’s tread, quick and sure, sounded on the ledge that ran under the chamber window. The door swung open and there he stood, against an evening sky the color of the violets by the spring. A draft of sweet air blew in, cooling Joan’s forehead. “Look, Johnny,” she said, pulling the blankets away, leaving the tiny body bare.

John strode across the room, thinking first of her until he saw what it was she wanted him to see. And then what he thought of was neither woman nor child, but the pit whence he was digged, and the rock he was hewn out of, and his own father in another April twilight, walking across the plowed earth of Old Thorny, head up, whistling to his team of horses.

“See,” said Joan. “Will Scarlock.”

“Yes,” said John, his voice low and shaken. “Yes. I know.”

But from every holy moment there must he a descent into hell. Later that night he found himself back in Strawberry Bank, approaching the Great House after a few careful questions had directed him there. A lush, too-warm darkness had settled softly on town and river, and as he turned from the path he could just see that the grape vines covering the low wall had begun to put forth new leaves ... vines that had been sent over to grace John Mason’s manor that never came to be. Halfway up the sloping yard behind the wall he stopped, and what he saw through the broken window kept him from going any further.

Thomas Warnerton, the wicked soldier who had taken the Great House after Mason died and Humphrey Chadbourne moved upriver to the trading post at Newichwannock, was sitting at a table drinking. He wore velvets and a lace collar, and a hat with a feather, pushed back on his dark hair. No one in town could ever keep track of his comings and goings. And beside him sat another man, dressed much the same, but older, with bright, sunken eyes and a sneering mouth. The men were talking in the candlelight that sparkled whenever they lifted their goblets that were finer than any the good folk of Piscataqua had ever been able to purchase by honest means.

“Those were the days, Thomas, and we had a rare good time at it.” The stranger was talking. “All those ripe young squaws dressed as English milkmaids, winding their colored ribbons round a lopped spruce for a maypole. God, it was a rare japes till those old drizzle-beards from Plymouth and Naumkeag got there. Old Endicott gaped at the bare bosoms like he’d never seen one, and Captain Shrimp near fell over the sword he had that was bigger than he was. I offered them any shes of the lot, and they never so much as made me a civil answer. We’d have beat the prayers out of them if we hadn’t been so drunk.”

“Ah, the Bay is lined with rogues that should have their throats cut,” growled Warnerton. “Something there is about praying, I’ve always noticed, takes the manhood out of the body, and leaves but a sack of dry, sharp bones. Neighbor Fernald’s a great doctor. Shall we go and ask him why that is so?”

“But it’s not always so,” leered the stranger. “I’ve been in gaol with praying men both sides of the water, and they had nothing lacking. Truth, since the old Merry Mount days, I’ve been in gaol more than out. No town has a welcome for poor Thomas, and that’s why I’m here to go with you. Where is it we are to go?”

“Port Royal. When Mason’s land and goods were divided up, things fell out willy-nilly, but I kept to myself this house, mostly for what’s in the cellar of it.”

“What?”

“Powder and ball. I’m taking them to sell to the Tarrantines.”

“That’s treason. They’re like to come right back at this country, blasted out of a musket.”

“I know they are, but I won’t be here; I’ll be in England selling the furs I took for them.”

John Scarlock stood in the moist green turf, watching, listening, wondering if there was any way he could keep this evil thing from happening. And then he knew there was not. Whatever lay in the Great House belonged to Warnerton, simply because he had possessed himself of it when honest men did not dare to, and he could ship it downriver with any bland excuse he chose, and no one would move to stop him. Perhaps the law of Massachusetts might not be so bad a thing to have over them, since here there was no law, only the goodness of man, and that did not always hold. And then, into the candlelight beyond the broken panes, stepped Bessie Goble. First he noticed that for skirt she wore a bright, rich thing he had never seen before, and then he noticed that above the skirt she was naked, and her round breasts hung full and heavy, heavier than Joan’s, who had nursed three children. She stepped forth thus between the two men, and stood there, her small eyes shining dully, her shoulders moving, almost with a lilt.

“Ah, Bessie, my dear,” said Warnerton, drawing her to him. “This is my friend, Thomas Morton, once of Merry Mount, erst of—what English gaol was it, Thomas?”

“None.” Morton spat on the floor. “It was a Massachusetts gaol—and filthy.”

“Ah well. Little Bessie, my dear Ann is away this evening, but we shall make you good cheer, Thomas and I.” He reached out to fondle her. John Scarlock swore and knocked heavily on the front door panel.

He could no longer look through the window, being too close, but he could hear a scuffle inside, then heavy steps, and Warnerton threw the door wide open so that the whole room could be seen. Bessie was gone, but a hanging twitched at the rear. Morton was filling a third goblet from a silver flagon.

“Goodman Scarlock,” cried Warnerton smoothly. “What brings you here? Will you share ... ?”

“I—I—” John could feel his face turning hot and ashamed in the darkness, but he spoke doggedly. “I’m looking for Bessie Goble,” he said.

“Ah, Bessie—the little wood dove, the little sea pigeon. She is not here. I have not seen her.” The first words were oily, but the last five had the cut of steel.

The two men faced each other. I could go in there, thought John. I could tear the house apart, and beat them both—they’re drunk on their feet—but what would be the use? She’d go back there the minute I took my eye off her.

He looked straight at Warnerton and the shame left him. “Well,” he said, “my wife needs her. Tell her not to stop anywhere else on the way home.”