Within the half hour, they had entered the town green, the meetinghouse of Billerica situated on the northern end, its gray boards neatly patchworked with darker, newer planes of wood. The cemetery, already spilling from the front of the yard, spread like a stone curtain, first to its western edge and then to the back of the meetinghouse. To the eastern side sat the Reverend Hastings’s home, the minister she had turned away from Daniel’s table with her combative words. The house was small but with a wooden fence fortifying a generous house garden. A girl, perhaps seventeen, gracefully tended the garden, and Martha’s mouth twisted with the half-resentful thought that, though she was no doubt aptly servile as the minister’s likely wife, she was also quite young and lovely.
There were a dozen women on the green sitting close together, some with their willow-shoot baskets of early sprouts from their gardens, others with brooms or herbals. Apart from them sat or stood the men, coopers and potters, mostly idle as the harvest of summer grain had not yet begun but talking as noisily as the women. As John pulled the wagon up close, all talking ceased. The clump of villagers seemed to Martha like a hive of stinging insects, each contending for the highest position in the honeycomb, each with a stinger for a tongue. But unlike bees, which could sting only once and then died, these goodmen and goodwives could inflict the poison from their tongues again and again, like wasps. The buzzing ceased only so long as it took to scrutinize the new arrivals, and then the hissing was taken up again, no doubt, Martha thought, to the detriment of every visitor’s moral constitution.
Helping Patience from the wagon, Martha situated her cousin among the townswomen and went directly to the weaver, a stout man with bowl-cut hair. She was soon disappointed, though, to see only a few coarse blankets from the weaver’s own loom laid out on the ground. When she told him she was looking for the goods to make a new cloak, he smiled and beckoned her to his wagon, where he removed from a sack a bolt of English wool. She brushed at the covering of dust lying like a second skin over the surface and saw that the cloth had an almost glistening sheen, the color of slate after a heavy rain, and when she tested the weave with her fingers, she knew she must have it. But he would not take only one piglet for the woolen, and she would not readily give up both, as she had in mind to acquire a new lantern as well. Martha held up two fingers covered with grime to show the man she knew the cloth had long been in the wagon, too dear for any local villager to acquire it; and so it had rested there, perhaps for many months beyond the sea passage from England.
“But look here,” he said, “I have waited near eight months, eight months, for this cloth.” The weaver frowned, shaking his head. “Look at the weave. Feel the weight. Why, the shade of it is a mirror to your own eyes. Look here, missus, do not ask me to come so far down.”
“No,” she said, pinning him with her eyes, responding no to every one of his entreaties and proclamations of sacrifice in giving her back coin as overage on the second pig. Martha had seen enough of her father at bargaining to know when to stand and when to walk away. She shook her head and, giving the cloth over to the weaver, turned around. After twenty paces the weaver called out, “Very well, missus, I will give you back your sixpence, but it should be you and not I who tells my good wife of her newfound penury.”
Smiling, Martha accepted the cloth and the coins and pointed the weaver to the wagon to collect his pigs. When she asked him to direct her to the tinsmith, she was dismayed to see him gesture in the direction of a small outbuilding next to the reverend’s plot. The young woman in the garden had finished her work and had gone back inside, and Martha quickly walked to the small shed, hoping the minister would be in the meetinghouse and not at home. She knocked softly on the closed door and waited for the clopping of heavy footsteps of the tinsmith coming to let her in.
She heard the sound of jeering laughter coming from the far side of the green, and when she turned to look, she saw a small knot of children, and a few older girls, taunting something obscured by their swaying bodies. She shook her head, thinking how often a gathering of idle children meant the misfortune of some other child, or animal, smaller than themselves. A girl shrieked in gleeful malice and Martha’s face turned grim, remembering that children can often be sweetest before they turn bad.
The group parted, scattering into differing tribes of girls and boys apart, and she saw what they had been tormenting. A woman, bolted fast in the stocks, her head pointing towards her toes, cried loudly and bitterly to be freed. She called for water, and for pity, but the children had moved on with their games and no one else on the green gave her any notice beyond a nod of annoyance. Martha turned back to the door, and with her hand poised to rap again, it swung widely open, revealing a slight man in well-worn but clean linen and vest, and with the milky eyes of the blind. His chin pointed beyond her shoulder but his head cocked as though following the sounds of her breathing. “Good day,” he said formally. There was a slight pause, and he added, “May I hear your voice? To place you, you understand.”
“I’m here for a lantern,” she answered, casting one last look at the woman in the stocks.
“Ah, yes, of course,” he said and stepped aside, allowing her to enter.
The room inside was as shaded as a cavern, and she realized, as she moved hesitantly over the threshold, that he must work in darkness, as there were no discernible windows set into the walls, the only light coming from the fire pot close to the bench, faintly glowing with copper soldering fragments. He promptly closed the door and she stood in the blackness in uncertain silence. He walked confidently to his workbench and bent over the fire pot, lighting a short taper which he fit into a reflecting lantern.
The startling light revealed a workroom, well swept and orderly, with lanterns of differing sizes pegged to the walls. Baskets fronted the walls, some with cups and long-tined forks, some with smaller workpieces not easily identifiable. The bench was filled with tools, in exacting rows, from the most brutish-size pliers down to smallest, hair’s-width dowels and punches. The smith stood at the desk, fingering the tools gently, as if to assure himself of their placement. She stared at his hands, fascinated by their restless creeping, as though the fingers, long as alder whips, had been fashioned with too many articulating joints.
“I do not know your voice.” He had waited to speak, talking only when she had drawn in a breath to inquire about the lantern.
“I am Martha Allen,” she said, beginning to feel the acrid burn of the soldering pot behind her tongue. The smith raised his brows expectantly but said nothing.
“I would like a lantern. For evenings.” She had added the last foolishly, as if he would not know a lamp would be useless in daylight.
There was a slight pursing of the lips, and the man’s eyelids fell more heavily towards closing, making him appear at once disappointed and yet self-satisfied. “For evening reading, perhaps? Or for the keeping of personal writings?”
At his insinuating tone, she stiffened, remembering the red book sewn into her pillow casing.
He moved assuredly to the wall with the lanterns and asked, “Which one would you choose?”
“I would have something that gives greater light than a candle might. For the writing of accounts, you see. A reflecting lantern, like the one on your bench.”
He clasped his hands together, the long fingers dangling loosely at his groin. “Ah, the pity is I have only one, which, as you can see, is mine own.” He placed the slightest pause before the word “see,” tilting his head to the opposing side, and waited.
“That is a pity,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “Well, then. I thank you…. My cousin Goodwife Taylor waits for me…”
She turned to leave but he surprised her by saying, “If you wish, I could sell you mine.” He returned to his bench, his hands encircling the base of the lantern.
“I have only sixpence to pay for it,” she began. The large, mirrored lantern on the tinsmith’s table, she knew, was dearer by far than the coins she held in her apron
.
“Well, the lantern is old. Stay but a moment and I’ll grease the hinges and polish the mirrors. Come sit while you wait.” He motioned to a stool next to the bench, his manner suddenly solicitous, his smile seemingly ingenuous.
His warmth disarmed her, and despite being disquieted over his initial aloofness, Martha walked to the stool and, balancing the woolen cloth over her lap, sat down.
“I did not realize you were family to the Taylors,” he said. He took out the candle that had been burning inside the reflecting lantern and placed it in a simple brass holder close by. He began to dismantle the lantern, laying the pieces carefully on the workbench. The lack of reflected light from the single, guttering candle diminished the scope of the room, crowding the corners into shadow again. “You are, I think, daughter to Goodman Allen of Andover.”
“You know of my family?” she asked.
The tinsmith pointed his face towards her, one corner of his mouth curling into a half smile. “I am blind, missus, not deaf. There is very little that escapes my attention. Mind you, I have never traded with your father, but I have heard enough to know the measure of Goodman Allen.” There was the faintest hint of mockery in his voice, but he had turned away to breathe moist air onto one of the mirrored panels. He rubbed it vigorously for a time with a cloth before asking, “How is it, your time spent with the Taylors?”
“It is all well enough. They are good to me.” The smoke from the fire pot had suddenly made her sleepy and she stifled a yawn.
“You do not find Goodwife Taylor a bit… a bit… how shall I say…” He paused and pointed his eyes towards the ceiling as though deep in thought. “Parsimonious?” He beamed at her broadly and she smiled in return, ducking her chin with the urge to laugh out loud.
With exaggerated seriousness he said, “I should not say such to you, as she is, above all, your cousin.” He smiled overly long at her, the opaque surface of his eyes unblinking, and, unnerved, she glanced away.
“The Taylor household is well turned-out, so I have heard,” he said, returning his attention to his work. “There are two landsmen on the settlement, are there not? One a Scotsman, the other a Welshman.” He paused a moment before adding, softly, distinctly, “Morgan by name.”
Martha looked up, surprised. “No. His name is Carrier. Thomas Carrier.”
“Carrier? Then perhaps I am mistaken. Though…” His voice trailed off and he shook his head once.
“Though…?” she echoed.
He leaned over the bench towards her, dropping his weight onto resting elbows, his face close to hers. “It’s been said that the Welshman got on the boat with one name and stepped off the boat with another. It’s common enough. Many of the first families have done it. Just after the Great War, when they had need of safe haven in the colonies.”
“Safe haven,” she said, her voice turning sharp and wary. “From what?”
The tinsmith’s lids came down, half-mast, over the pale, marbled surface of his eyes, his lips pursing suggestively. “The king’s justice, of course. He hunts, even now, for his father’s killers. All have been pardoned. All but those whose hands signed the death warrant, and those whose hands wielded the implement of death.” His fingers brushed over the tools, coming to rest on a small, needle-like screw turn. With a few exacting twists, the trap hinges on the lantern fell free with a clatter, making her jump. “Surely you know that Cromwell’s confederates yet live here, hiding in plain sight?”
His mouth twisted for a moment bitterly. “If I may use such a common phrase. There has been offered a generous bounty for the capture of these accused men. As you are not native to this town, you may not know that Thomas Carrier has long been suspected of being Thomas Morgan, the man who, for love of Cromwell’s cause, swung the ax, taking the life of an anointed king. It is said that after the blade came down, he held up the royal gourd for all to see.”
He waited for her to speak, and when she didn’t respond, he extended one arm over his head to demonstrate, adding, “He was chosen because he was so tall, you understand, so that when he reached out his hand, holding the still-dripping head, even those pressed to the very front of the platform could gaze upon it.” He dropped his arm and shrugged. “But this is only rumor. Perhaps, as you are a woman, I should speak no more on this…” One side of his mouth curled up, his voice trailing into silence.
A sudden recollection of the flat wooden piece in Thomas’s oak trunk was followed with the vision she had had of his shirt, stained and running with blood, and she felt a panic building in her head like mercury rising. She sensed the tinsmith listening to her quickened breaths, perhaps waiting for her to press him into revealing more about the regicides, questioning him about rumors that must have wafted through the workroom like smoke from the fire pot.
From her childhood she had heard stories, told as frequently as the coming of tides, from her father, and his cronies, that Cromwell’s cousin and son-in-law had long been hidden and fed by local Massachusetts farmers. The glories of the civil war, and Cromwell’s decadelong reign between the executed Charles the father and the restored Charles the son, were often burnished and constructed anew at night in secret when the fire was banked and the doors locked. It was a source of deep-seated pride to the New Englanders that not one man, woman, or child had taken the king’s bounty in arresting Edward Whalley and William Goffe, Cromwell’s kin and fellow regicides, and others besides, who had fought against the first Charles. The colonists were a thorny, resourceful, and resistant lot when it came to betraying one of their own to the Royalists, and they held a perverse pride that common men, for the sake of common rights, had had the temerity, and nerve, to pull down a king.
“Gossip is like a poisoned soup,” she said, the tension in her voice making her sound waspish and scolding. “Delicious at first but deadly over time.”
He had started reassembling the pieces of the lantern, but he put the tools aside and said, “Well, then, we will not drink of the poisoned cup. We will speak only of cordial things. To my mind, it is a winning trait when a woman does not sup on gossip. It means she can keep an intimate confidence.” He leaned forward on his elbows, his nostrils widening, breathing in some scent that inhabited the place where she sat. “You have a deep voice for a woman, but for all that, it is pleasing. You are not yet married, I believe.” She dropped her gaze away from his sightless stare, drawn again to the play of his fingers, searching the air like the eye stalks of an insect.
Repressing the longing to jerk the stool farther away from the bench, she gathered the cloth closer to her chest and said, “I must leave now.”
His tongue flicked absently at the corner of his mouth. “But I am not yet finished.”
“Then I will come back another day.” She rose, scraping the stool against the floorboards, and walked swiftly towards the door. Before she could grasp the latch, the tinsmith blew out the candle. She stood for a moment in complete darkness, trying to calm her unreasoning fear that he would come upon her from behind. She groped to find the handle, taking first one step and then another, until she touched what she hoped was the door. She ran her hands searchingly over the wood, feeling for the latch, and when she found it, she tugged hard. The door would not open and she realized he had bolted the lock when she first entered.
She slipped her hands up along the frame, frantically searching for the lock, listening for the sounds of approaching footsteps but hearing nothing. When her fingers touched metal, she slipped the bolt and fiercely tugged open the door.
As she rushed over the threshold, he called to her sharply, “Missus.” Reflexively, she paused, and he said, calmly and clearly from his place at the bench, “Ask him about the Prudent Mary.”
Leaving the door ajar, she hurried past the rectory and, looking up once, saw the minister’s face at the window, starkly assessing her panicked flight towards the green. She willfully slowed her pace, matching her breathing to the reflective chanting of the unfamiliar name given to her by the tinsmith: “Pr
udent Mary, Prudent Mary.” John beckoned to her from the wagon, and Martha could see Patience and the children waiting restlessly for her to join them.
She was flushed and shaken, but Patience was too satisfied with her afternoon of trading and preoccupied with a crying Joanna to take note. As John pulled away from the green, Will slipped his hands, tightly closed into two fists, onto her lap and asked, “Butter or cream?” He tapped at her legs until she faced him, and he asked again, “Butter or cream?” It was a guessing game they often played where a treat was hidden in one of the asker’s hands; left was “butter,” right was “cream.” If the guesser picked the correct hand, the asker must give over the treat. Martha studied the boy’s dirty face, stricken with childish concern for her inexplicable distress, and she smiled, tugging roughly at his hair with her fingers.
“Butter,” she said, tapping his left hand. He grinned with relief and opened an empty palm to her. “Go on,” she prompted, and he quickly shoved into his mouth the bit of damp sugar that had been clenched in his right hand.
As they rolled past the now-silent figure in the stocks, the woman craned her neck to the side and stared up at Martha with accusing eyes. Rage had replaced the shame of being pilloried, and her piercing look came like a mother’s slap, and a mother’s warning. The woman’s eyes, the palest of blue and clouded with the beginnings of elder blindness, craned and looked at the wagon until it had pulled out beyond the town marker.
THE MOWING OF the common fields began upon the cresting of the sun. The entire town of Billerica had come out to harvest the green and fibrous grasses, sawing at the wind in nodding waves. Each settlement would share in its deserved portion, the largest homesteads getting the largest share of fodder for their farm stock. Well before dawn, men and women on foot and in carts, carrying scythes and rakes and pitchforks, had joined the road winding north beyond Loes Plain. They came together in banded groups, families by blood or marriage, or in camps of common-minded neighbors, eager to give or receive news and gossip of the recent births and deaths in a neighboring village, or the vagaries of trade in a marketplace that lived or died much as the people did. They spoke in quiet undertones, calling to one another in hoarse whispers, as though the sun were a living thing that could be frightened away by the sudden remonstrations and shouts of people.