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“Come with me, now -” said Stone, “and we’ll see Mr. Feake. We’ve put him temporarily in the home of Samuel Thatcher, who had an extra room, and will doubtless continue to take charge of him if adequately paid.”

They walked down Bank Lane and passed a handsome house upon the riverfront. “That’s where the Feakes lived when they were here,” said Stone, “belongs to the Rainsboroughs now. Samuel Thatcher’s place is the next beyond.”

Will glanced up at the house which had sheltered Elizabeth so long, seeing with a pang that it was a much finer place than the one they had at Greenwich. “Mr. Feake lives next door to his old home?” he asked.

“Aye,” said Stone with pity. “That’s why we put him there. He’s quieter when he can see his former home. Thinks he’s living in it He seems to have no memory for anything that’s happened in his life except at Watertown, but’ll say most anything you tell him to.”

Will was silent until they reached the Thatchers’, and saw Robert sitting on the grass, with a musket in his lap.

“Good Lord!” cried Will involuntarily. “Is that safe, and shouldn’t he be confined?”

Mrs. Thatcher came down the steps and heard this, she bowed to Stone and answered Will. “Oh, he’s quite safe, poor gentleman. He’s very good when he can see his house and the river. And the musket isn’t loaded. He likes to think he’s cleaning it, in readiness for drilling on the Common. A lieutenant he was, it seems, with a Captain Patrick years ago . . . Come now, Mr. Feake!” she said to Robert. “Here’s visitors for you.”

Robert looked up. He had grown completely bald and very fat. His pink scalp and his pink beardless skin gave him the look of an old baby. He smiled politely, the pale watery eyes resting on Hallet without surprise.

“So you came to see us, after all,” Robert said. “Bess’ll be so pleased that you didn’t sail before you visited us. She’s in the house, but she’s going to Ipswich tomorrow to see her sister, Martha Winthrop, but you must spend the night with us. Sally - !” he said to Mrs. Thatcher. “Run down the lane and see if Captain Patrick and his wife’ll sup here. They’re very agreeable folk,” he said, turning back to Will. “Our closest friends. I’m sure you’d like to meet them.”

“Aye, I would, thank you,” said Will hoarsely. His throat tightened, and he looked away.

Robert resumed polishing his musket, and Mr. Stone said in a low voice to Mrs. Thatcher, “Bring us that paper - maybe Mr. Hallet can understand it.”

Mrs. Thatcher brought a folded parchment and gave it to Will.

It was an affidavit signed in England by the House of Commons. It stated that Robert Feake had been granted full pardon for an unnamed offence.

“I think I know what it means,” murmured Will. “He had delusions. Thought he’d committed a crime that he hadn’t.”

“ ‘Twas all we found in his pocket when he got here,” said Mr. Stone. “Not a farthing besides. ‘Tis a miracle how he ever got back to Watertown.”

“I never
left
Watertown,” said Robert suddenly, with faint reproof. “Why should I leave Watertown?”

“Mr. Feake,” said Will abruptly. “Do you know aught about your property in Greenwich?”

“Oh no,” said Robert. “A stranger asked me that some - some days past. He wanted me to say ‘yes’ so I did. One must always be courteous to strangers. Governor Winthrop, my Uncle Winthrop that is, he says so, and ‘tis true. A most courteous man, and has taken
much
notice of me. He comes to visit us often - Bess being his niece.” Robert gave a pleased little laugh.

“I’ll get him his dinner now, sirs,” said Mrs. Thatcher. “He’s very biddable, but in truth, I don’t see how we can keep him longer, he has such a good appetite, and I’ve barely enough to make do with as it is.”

“You shall have enough from now on, Mistress,” said Will. “And may God bless you for your kindness.”

When he left Watertown he had deposited thirty pounds with Simon Stone in full payment for all Robert’s erstwhile lands in Greenwich, and in case that should not be enough he left the gold chain and the silver ladle. The town was to administer these funds and pay the Thatchers from them. In return Will got a deed and quit claim from the selectman who shook his hand warmly and thanked him several times, having learned enough about the case to know that Feake had no legal right to further funds.

Will left the Bay with a far lighter heart, and rode whistling through the splendour of the autumn leaves. Feeling now greater security than when he had journeyed up, he did not avoid the settlements. Ten miles below Hartford he ferried across the Connecticut to Wethersfield, to spend the night there in an ordinary.

Here in the taproom he heard some startling news as he sat on a corner bench, drinking a pint of ale and thinking with pity of Robert, and yet relief that the madness had taken so benign a form, and the man escaped into a span of memory where he was content to be.

Will was jerked to awareness by a voice saying “Greenwich,” then he heard “Stuyvesant” and jumbled exclamations of astonishment and laughter.

What
now?
Will thought, stiffening.

He pulled his wide hat lower over his face, and looked carefully around the smoky low-beamed taproom. There was a dozen men sprawling on the benches, and near the fire, but all of them were strangers.

Will got up and joined three men who sat at a corner of the trestle table. “Your pardon,” he said, “but having just come from the Bay, I’m fair bewildered by the things you’re saying. Did I understand aright that the Dutch Governor is at Hartford?”

“Oh, indeed,” and “To be sure,” chorused the men, nodding and chuckling. “A week he’s been there.”

“What for?” said Will, instinctively addressing a lean man with a crest of sandy red hair, who had an air of quiet authority.

“Why, for the boundary dispute- - settle old Peg-Leg’s fantastical notion that Holland owns half New England,” answered the sandy-haired man.

“And is it settled?”

“Settled indeed, since we’re in possession. ‘Twas bluster anyway. And a good diddling we gave him! We agreed to call Dutch his mouldering old fort on the Connecticut, and in return he moves the boundary west and gives us Greenwich. That’s a wee settlement t’other side of Stamford. Has fine lands.”

“You
ought to know, Jeff?” cried one of the other men, chortling. He turned to Will. “Jeffrey Ferris here, he was the first settler in that Greenwich. Named the town, didn’t ye, Jeff?”

“Aye,” said Ferris. “Still got a plot diere. But I left when the largest landholders went to the Dutch and turned patroon. Now I’ve a mind to go back again since it’s English.”

“Where is the boundary now?” said Will in a voice he strove to make casual.

“Four miles farther west, at a river ye wouldn’t know - called Mianus.”

So! Will thought, one negligent pen stroke in Hartford, and they lost their home again. His stomach knotted in a spasm of rage. His eyes stung. He clamped his teeth on his lip, and the mug of ale wavered in his hand. The inner shaking ceased gradually as the men went on talking, and he heard Ferris say in answer to a question, “I don’t know what the Greenwich settlers’ll do, they’ve leave to stay o’ course if they want to, being Englishmen, but I’d like to pick up some acreage if I can.”

Will bided his time until the curfew horn blew at nine, and the barmaid yelled out the sums that were owing. Then as the other men rose, Will said to Ferris, “I’d like a word with you in private.”

Ferris grunted, and they moved behind the settle.

“D’you want to buy most of Greenwich?” said Will in a voice so sharp with irony that Ferris stared and backed away. “No, I’m not drunk, or jesting either,” said Will. “I’m William Hallet, my wife Elizabeth and I are the largest landholders you spoke about. It seems that we will have to sell.”

Ferris tilted his head and frowned. “Not a likely tale,” he said. “Where’s Robert Feake and Daniel Patrick?”

“Feake is mad, and I have bought his interest. Patrick is dead. You’ve heard nothing of this?”

“Nay, I’ve not been in Stamford for some time.” Ferris scratched his chin, watching Will thoughtfully. At length he spoke. “Are you off to Greenwich in the morning?”

Will nodded.

“We’ll travel together and discuss the matter,” said Ferris.

Will arrived home, three days later, and ha broke this latest development to Elizabeth as well as he could, hiding with brave words his own discouragement. “And so we’re on the move again, hinnie,” he said. “I think we must be born beneath the sign of Mercury, naught else would make it so hard to keep a home.”

“I never have kept anything for my own,” she said, turning her back on him, and staring out the window towards the cave. “And, I’ll
not
give up Monakewaygo!”

“You must, darling,” he said. “Ferris is willing to buy
all
our holdings, and we’ll need every penny we can get. And what use is that Neck to you? God knows when it’ll be safe for you to enter English territory.”

She pressed her face against the pane, looking at the dim white line of sands far beyond the mud flats and the shingly isthmus. “Monakewaygo was always mine,” she said, “even if I didn’t go there. I knew it was waiting.”

“There are other places you can buy, be hopeful.”

“So Thomas Lyon has won,” she said in a strangled voice.

“No, Bess, he hasn’t. Your thinking’s muddled. He’ll get no profit out of this, nor has he actually from any of his efforts. And what is he really but a meddlesome, greedy, stupid young man? And not all bad either, nobody is. Remember he felt himself defrauded and that moreover our behaviour offended his religious principles, as it did those of many other people.”

“I hate him,” she said, not heeding. “He’s stolen my Joan from me, he tried to destroy us,”

Will swallowed, looking at her set white face. His Bess was as staunch a hater as she was a lover; dimly he recognized that this one blind, unreasoning streak in her might come from long-past injuries as well as .more recent ones, and that perhaps something never quite expressed in her relationship to John Winthrop the elder had openly transferred itself to Thomas Lyon. She had cause certainly for both antipathies, but in respect to her son-in-law, she had created an invincible image of shrewd, jeering malevolence which did not exist. Will could face it fairly now. His and Elizabeth’s past troubles had come largely from their own flouting of the conventions, while this present setback, though it sprang partly from that too, insofar as Bess was forbidden residence in New England, was largely chance - Governor Stuyvesant’s impulsive acceptance of an international bargain. Would these reasonings solace her? He glanced at her anxiously and saw that they would not.

“Don’t look like that!” he said. “I understand how you feel at giving up everything here that we’ve struggled so hard to keep. I too was filled with helpless rage when I first heard of this in Wethersfield, but we must be the ‘seasoned timber that never gives,’ as my old parson advises. There’s naught else to do.”

She turned and looked at him sombrely. “Where are we going this time?”

Will laughed wryly. ‘To Hell Gate, hinnie! To Hell Gate!”

The hardness and the green glint left her eyes, her hands unclenched. “Ah, that was what you always wanted, wasn’t it, Will? For that at least I can be glad.”

He sighed. “ ‘Tis not the way I wanted if, and not at all for you, knowing how you love this place.”

A wincing and renewed shadow passed across her face. “I doubt that I’ve the courage to start over again,” she said.

“Oh, yes, you have,” He took her by the shoulders and locked down at her searchingly. “You’ve endurance and courage beyond the reach of most, as who knows better than I.”

She stood stiff and quiet under his hands, gazing past him to the window.

“ ‘Follow my love, come over the strand . . .’” he said softly.

She turned slowly back to him, and in a moment she met his intent searching look with a shrug and a faint smile. “Aye, my love - needs must,” she said bitterly, “over and over again.”

By midmorning of September 14, 1655, Elizabeth began to watch for guests to appear on the lane which led to Hallet’s Point above the Hell Gate whirlpools. The guests had been invited for a fete to celebrate Hannah Feake’s eighteenth birthday.

In the roomy Hallet farmhouse there had been days of preparations, and Elizabeth on the bright morning was tired, but full of satisfaction. Ready-dressed in a gown of soft blue taffeta she sat on the sunny bench Will had carved for her long ago in Greenwich. It had been painted white, and placed near the stoop where it overlooked the garden and the lawn. Elizabeth had a proper English lawn now, Will had made it for her, and the boys tended it with enthusiasm because one part was a bowling green, where they were allowed to play skittles whenever chores were finished. The garden was decorated today in Hannah’s honour; there were garlands of pink daisies nailed to the surrounding locust trees, there was a target set up for archery, and since there was to be a special ceremony a little platform had been built, and two chairs, wound with scarlet streamers, placed upon it.

What wonders they had achieved here in the five years since leaving Greenwich behind, thought Elizabeth, admiring the garden. Her complacent eyes went to a trestle table which was set up in the shade of an elm near the well, and covered with a fine new linen cloth. Lisbet and Hannah ran gaily to and from the kitchen laying the table for the feast later.

Elizabeth watched them, then turned with a smile as Anneke plumped down beside her on the bench. “Oof - ” said Anneke, fanning herself with her apron and loosening the laces of her puce silk bodice. “ ‘Tis good to sit.” She had grown very stout of late years, beneath the white cap her neat hair had lost its gold, but her face was still like a rosy apple.

She had driven over in an oxcart from Flushing the day before so as to help with the party. The Toby Feakes had moved to Flushing when the Hallets left Greenwich, and though both were on Long Island and in Dutch territory six miles separated the families and they did not meet as often as they used to.

“Pretty girls -” Anneke said, following Elizabeth’s glance. “And your sons handsome too. They take after you I”