The Hearth and Eagle (8 page)

Phebe continued past the two-room houses belonging to Mr. Higginson and Mr. Skelton, past the Governor’s larger frame house, where there was much bustle of coming and going, for Winthrop was inside and holding conference, and on a little way up the lane to the next house which was that of the Lady Arbella.

She knocked timidly and waited. There was a scuffle within and suppressed giggles. At last the door was opened by a frowsy maid, her cap awry, her holland apron stained with the claret she had evidently been sampling. She stared sullenly at Phebe, impudence just held in check by Phebe’s clothing and dignity.

“Might I have a word with the Lady Arbella, if it’s convenient?” said Phebe.

“ ’er Ladyship’s resting,” answered the girl in her flat Lincolnshire twang. “She wants no company,” and she made to shut the door, staying her hand at the sound of a clear firm voice calling, “Who’s at the door, Molly?”

“Mistress Honeywood,” supplied Phebe. The maid shrugged, and walking two steps to the shut door on the right, imparted this information.

“Let her enter,” called Arbella. Molly stood aside long enough for Phebe to pass, then darted back to the house’s other room, the hall or kitchen where she rejoined her two companions by the wine cask.

Phebe entered the other room which was also the bed-chamber. The servants slept above the kitchen in the unfinished loft.

Arbella lay on a feather bed raised a foot from the planks by a rough pine frame. She wore only a bedrobe of transparent blue tiffany, but her pale face was bedewed. Her golden hair as it branched from her forehead was dark with sweat, and there were bistre shadows beneath the large blue eyes. But her smile as she greeted Phebe had its usual gallant sweetness.

“Welcome, mistress, it’s kind that you come to visit me. How comely you look.”

“To do you honor, my lady—” said Phebe, accepting the ladderback chair indicated by Arbella. “ ’Tis most good of you to receive me.”

Arbella shook her head. “Nay, I’m much alone. My husband still at Charlestown, and my friends who returned, the Governor and Sir Richard, so much occupied. And my servants—” She shook her head again. “But you saw Molly, how she was. And the others worse. It’s hard to believe a new country or a sea voyage could so change them. And I’ve not—not yet—the strength to rule them properly. I must save my strength.”

As she said this a light came into her eyes, and her lips lifted in a joyous and secret smile. She looked at Phebe and saw in the younger woman’s face the eager admiration which had been there from their first meeting in Yarmouth, and the need to speak overcame Arbella’s reticence.

“I’m with child—” she said very low. “At last. Wed seven years and I had lost all hope. Our dear Lord has rewarded me for braving the new land.”

Phebe swallowed. For an instant she could not properly answer the lady’s confidence. It pierced through the foolish barrier Phebe had built against her own realization. And through the rent, like the mounting sound of tempest waves, she heard the rushing of fear.

And again Arbella had shamed her, by the radiance in her thin face, and thrill in the low voice.

“I’m happy for you, milady,” Phebe said gently. She hesitated. “I think I too am with child.”

Arbella gave a little cry and stretched out her hand until Phebe came to the bedside and took it in hers. “We have then that great bond between us—” said Arbella. Her pale cheeks flushed, and she sat up, her long braids of wheat-colored hair falling back across her thin shoulders. “Tell me—” and she asked eager questions, and as they talked together, she seemed the younger of the two women.

Both babies would be born in the winter they decided, Arbella’s the earlier, in January, for she had reason to guess it had been conceived in England before the sailing. “And you will stay near me, Phebe—won’t you,” Arbella said—“that our babies may know each other and grow together in the new land?”

“Indeed I hope so, milady.” Now Phebe’s eyes too were shining, Arbella’s courage and Arbella’s pride had become hers too. “But I don’t know where Mark will decide our settlement. He—he wrote me a letter, I brought it—” Phebe stopped and blushed. “I hoped—” She stared down at the letter in her hand.

Arbella was briefly puzzled. She had been talking to this girl as she would have talked to her own sister, Lady Susan, and had forgotten that there was difference between them. Nor did the rigid class distinction seem to matter much in the wilderness. She covered Phebe’s embarrassment at once by taking the letter and calmly reading it aloud.

“'Tis evident he takes thought of you and loves you,” she commented smiling.

Phebe smiled back, unable to suppress the leap of hope again. If Mark continued to be disappointed in conditions as he found them—perhaps after a few months of roving and striving...

“I too had a letter this morning from my husband—” said Arbella. “He favors a place called Shawmut—it’s across a river from Charlestown—and is starting to prepare for me. You must bear on your Mark to settle there too.”

Phebe was silent for a moment, glad that the lady did not guess her unbecoming hope, and considering this new idea.

“Why, is there fish at this Shawmut, your ladyship?” she asked with her sudden quiet twinkle.

Arbella laughed. “There must be. Is he still set on fishing?”

“More than ever. He is most apt.” But he might fish from Weymouth at home, she thought, it was scarcely farther to the great fishing banks from there than it was from any part of this unwelcoming wilderness.

“I shall speak to Mr. Johnson,” said Arbella with decision. She said nothing more but she was thinking. She would use her influence to settle the Honeywoods in Shawmut, or Boston as Isaac proposed to call it from their own shire town.

“When the Governor leaves again,” she said, “he’ll bear a letter to my husband. I shall request that he find your Mark and take interest in him.”

Phebe gratefully acquiesced, nor voiced her doubts of Mark’s reception of this affectionate and natural patronage.

That was the first of many visits. As the days passed and the heat wave lessened, Arbella grew stronger, and together Phebe and she stood on the bank by the landing place and watched the ship
Arbella
sail down the river, bound southward to the new plantations with two hundred aboard her.

Except for the few like Phebe and Arbella who remained to wait for their men to fetch them, and the very few who desired to settle there, Salem reverted to its earlier population. In the North Village there lived a handful of the first planters who had not followed Roger Conant across the river to Beverley; and in the south or main village, lived those who still survived from the companies which had come with Endicott or the two ministers. True, throughout June and July many ships touched at Salem, as the rest of Winthrop’s fleet straggled into port. But the passengers were not disembarked. All sailed again at once for Charlestown to join the others.

On July 3, Phebe, asleep in her wigwam, was wakened by the now familiar shouts and creakings and bustle which meant the arrival of another ship. She dressed hastily and opening her door was delighted to see that it was the
Hopewell
which had in England been destined for freight. Mooings and cracklings and bleatings echoed in the early morning air, and the inhabitants of Salem crowding down to the dock let out a cheer. Most of them were disappointed. The livestock must go on to Charlestown, where already there was famine. But Phebe, finding courage to board and seek out the master herself, discovered that her milch-cow had survived the trip, and demanded that it be landed.

In this she would not have succeeded, between the Captain’s haste to be on to Charlestown and finish this tedious trip, and her lack of the necessary papers, had not Arbella, hastily summoned by Phebe, come down to the boat and straightened the matter.

Phebe coaxed and tugged the terrified cow down the gangplank; and when her prize was safely on shore could not resist kissing the soft fawn-colored muzzle. Betsey was living link with home. Phebe had last seen her standing in the Edmunds’ barn, her new calf beside her and placidly munching while the younger children decorated her with a wreath of early primroses, “because Betsey was a cow princess and going to America with sister Phebe.”

Phebe soothed the cow with soft whispers—“So-o-o-o, Betsey—Hush, Betsey, it’s on land again you are. Ah poor beast, you’re nearly dry. Didn’t they milk you right or was it the seasickness?”

The cow looked at her mournfully, and Phebe threw her arm around the warm furry neck.

The Lady Arbella had been watching with some amusement. “Aren’t you afraid of its horns?” she asked. “I’ve never seen a cow so close before.”

Phebe looked from the cow to her friend. Friend, yes, the only one in Salem, and they seemed to share much together. But in truth they did not. The lady’s fine white hands had never labored with anything rougher than the embroidery needle. A spasm of homesickness overpowered Phebe. For her father’s hearty laugh and broad speech, for her mother’s kindly bustle. “Phebe, child, do you finish the milking, the dairy maids are at the churns.” For the fresh voices of the younger children singing “Oh Lavendar’s green, dilly, dilly—” and tumbling about the grassy courtyard, while the doves cooed accompaniment from their cote.

“I’ve milked Betsey many times, milady,” she said very low, and pulling on the halter, she began to lead the cow up the path from the dock to her wigwam.

Arbella followed. “Will the animal not be a great care?” she asked gently. “And how will you feed it?”

Phebe considered. “I’ll arrange with little Benjy, the herd, to take her each day to the common to graze with the other stock. At night I can tether her by my door. ’Twill be well worth it, if I can coax her milk back.”

“For butter?”

Phebe nodded, “If I can borrow a churn, but mostly for milk. That will do us good. You too, my lady.”

Arbella looked so astounded that Phebe smiled. She knew that except on farms neither milk nor plain water were considered wholesome. Arbella like all the gentry drank wines, often diluted. The lower classes drank strong liquor, beer or cider or mead. But milk was considered valuable only for its ability to produce cheese and butter.

Nor did she ever persuade Arbella to try it. By the time the cow had adjusted herself to her new home and the coarse pasture land on the common so that Phebe’s persuasive handling would fill a night and morning pail, Arbella was confined to her bed again with a mysterious illness. And the
Arbella's
physician Mr. Gager was in attendance.

Those were grim days that set in after the middle of July. Many were sick besides the Lady Arbella, some with the ship fever which swelled mouths, loosened teeth, and sent cruel pains through the body. Others like the Lady herself were afflicted by excessive languor, headache and colic, and these though often able to get about seemed to grow burning hot towards evening, and day by day to lose strength. The weather too ceased to be pleasant. There was much heavy rain. The lanes turned to quagmires. The reed thatching on Phebe’s wigwam leaked in a dozen places, and when there was no rain, the mosquitoes swarmed through the new-made crannies and attacked voraciously. Phebe set her teeth and settled to day by day endurance as she had on the boat. The friendly Naumkeag Indians came and went in town. She had quickly become accustomed to their nakedness and dark painted faces, and she learned to barter with them as did the others. A little of her meal she had exchanged for corn and pompions, the great golden fruit which might be baked or stewed into good food.

Sometimes she dug clams or made a hasty pudding from the corn, but mostly she lived on corn cakes baked on a shovel over the flames—and Betsey’s milk. She grew very thin, and sometimes felt light-headed, and that the wigwam and the rain and the mosquitoes, the heavy-eyed people in the village, the close pressing forest—and even Arbella lying white and silent in her house, were all painted on smoke. Shifting figures without reality that a strong breath might blow away. Still Phebe had few pains. She even found a way of lessening the surface discomfort from the mosquitoes. On the lane to the common she had spied a small herb, pennyroyal, much like that which grew at home. Well instructed by her mother in the making of simples, she had gathered a horde of it, and distilled it over boiling water. The pungent mint odor, when rubbed on the skin, repelled fleas at home, and did discourage the mosquitoes here.

She carried some of it to Lady Arbella on one of her daily visits. There was now no need to knock. Molly, the impudent maid servant, was herself ill and lay groaning in the loft. The manservant and the other maid gave only grudging and frightened service, held from actual escape by the knowledge that there was no safe place to go.

Phebe’s daily arrival was heartily welcomed for she did much of the nursing.

Today Mr. Gager, the physician, was there, bleeding Arbella. He acknowledged Phebe’s quiet entrance by a curt nod, and went on with his task. Phebe took off her muddy shoes and placing them in a corner of the room, came to the foot of the bed. Arbella started to smile a greeting as she always did, but at once her gaze slid past Phebe, and into the staring blue eyes came a distant intent look. “Think you, madam, ’twill be a fine day for the chase?” she said. “I hear the huntsmen winding their horns. Will Charles ride the gray stallion?”

Phebe’s breath caught, and her eyes met the physician’s. His mouth set, and he nodded his gray head. “She wanders.” He sighed heavily. “It’s enteric, I believe. There are the rose spots.” He drew the coverlet down a little. The delicate white skin of the swelling abdomen and slender waist was sprinkled with pinkish dots.

“I must find someone to help you and the servants,” he said, rising, “but so many are sick. Each day a new case. Would that her husband were back—” he added half to himself.

“I’ll not leave her,” said Phebe.

William Gager picked up his leech bag and threw in the lancet. “You’re a good girl, mistress. I’ll come back later—I—I must rest. Give her nothing but wine and this oil of fennel.” He indicated a flask on the rough stool by the bedside. He put his hand to his head, and swayed a little as he stood up. Phebe saw his Ups twitch, and fear pull at his face. “This thrice cursed country,” he said under his breath, and went out.