The Wolves of Andover (17 page)

Without a conscious thought, she unhinged the clasp and heaved up the heavy lid. She had not meant to open the chest when she first entered the room and would have abandoned the action if the covering had resisted, but the hinges were well oiled and the lid was raised to its full open position against the chains without a sound.

The deep well of the chest at first appeared empty. With a breath, she reached down into it and pulled out, bunched in her hand, a pair of breeches and a shirt, both worn and familiar; she had scrubbed them often enough with the rest of the household wash. These she laid aside and reached her hand more deeply into the recess. Her hand touched something of cold metal and she pulled into the light a long, pitted dirk. The head was plaited into a design of serpents coiled together, the edges stained and ragged from years of disuse. It balanced in her open palm like a slender scale and she gripped the hilt, notched cunningly for grasping fingers. She set this aside, laying it carefully on top of the shirt, and reached once more to the bottom of the chest.

Her hand nestled into something heavy and woolen and she pulled free a long coat of faded red with facings of blue at the collar and cuffs. She stood and held it widely in both hands to see the whole of it. Its seams were ragged, the sleeves patched and mended many times, but the wool was as fine and tightly woven as she had ever seen, the color at the folds still resolutely scarlet. She brought one sleeve up to her face and smelled the heavy scent of aged oak.

A pale bit of falling paper caught the light, and she saw at her feet a tightly rolled bit of parchment, wrapped in stiff oiled yarn. Realizing it must have fallen from the other, dangling sleeve of the coat, she bent over to pick it up, and as she lifted the scroll from the floor, a flattened piece of wood, about as long and half as wide as her forefinger, fell out of it.

Draping the coat over the lip of the chest, she regarded the slender piece, trying to place what it might be. Too small and fragile to be a dowel of any useful sort, it was too large to be a
needle. Perhaps it was a gaming piece, she thought, and reached her hand forward to examine it more closely. As her fingers grazed the wood, she froze. Her fingers curled reflexively away and she quickly stood again, her clenched hands crossed defensively over her chest. An aversion as strong as anything she had ever felt unfurled its way down her spine and she stepped back, knocking into the chest. She imagined fully and vividly, had she touched the wooden piece with her bare flesh, it would have brought fresh blood from the wound in her hand, the wound Thomas had opened with his knife to remove the splinter; first seeping, then pulsing, then gushing like a town pump. She saw, in her mind’s eye, the red bloom on Thomas’s shirt, the stain from the cut in her hand, spreading over his breast until it fell in torrential droplets to the ground, the linen too saturated to absorb the blood more fully into its fibers.

In her alarm, she had dropped the scroll, and she hastily retrieved it from the floor. Wrapping her hand tightly in the hem of her skirt, she raked up the wooden piece and dropped it back into the parchment. The scroll was slipped into the arm of the coat, and then, carefully, she repacked all of the things she had removed from the chest. The lid was securely closed, the clasp fastened, and Martha stepped from the men’s room, rigid and blinking.

The children had moved to the far end of the garden, and she could hear their voices as wavering patterns of sound as though they ran chanting, weaving in and out of the planted rows. Patience still slept; there was no movement or stirring from her bedroom. Martha sat at the table, staring at nothing, her breathing evenly paced. But as she had done with her tongue, running the tip of it
over the ragged splinter in her hand, her thoughts pulled against the memory of the small wooden piece, no larger, or seemingly more significant, than any sliver of wood carved by man, smoothed by handling and subject to the laws of time and use. She listened intently for any shifting sound coming from under the floorboards, but the space below her feet was voiceless.

E
DWARD
T
HORNTON, HIS
gathered lace nightshirt soaked through with acrid sweat, shifted his swollen legs more comfortably on the bed, and began the letter to his mother.

His fingers, made awkward by the poison, lost their grip on the quill, and it dropped onto the parchment. Even if his mother agreed to the reading of the letter, he wasn’t sure the words he had so painstakingly written could be deciphered, so great was the pain in his hands. A cup of water had been placed on the mantel opposite the bed and he desperately wished for a drink but did
not have the strength to cross the floor. The head pains that had plagued him for so many weeks had taken on the quality of heated nails pushed slowly through his skull. He closed his eyes and rested for a moment, listening to the cacophony from the streets.

When first arriving in Boston with Brudloe and Cornwall, he had often come to this garret to visit with Verity, a maid to his innkeeper, Mrs. Parker. Verity had caught his eye within the first few days in port. A lovely girl of sixteen, with pale skin and dark wavelets of auburn, she soon, with only a token struggle, became his frequent mistress. She would not take coin from him like some common whore, but she seemed to delight in little gifts bought from the streets: ribbons, a peacock feather, a pair of earrings made of cut glass.

He would come to her often those first few weeks in Boston, spending afternoons locked together with her in her narrow bed. Later, he came to be nursed by her, having symptoms of dizziness and gut cramping, which worsened by the day. Verity’s rented room was on the north end of town, close to the wharves, and had he screamed his loudest, even in the hours before dawn, the shipyard sounds would have drowned him out. Of all the places he had come to inhabit, of all the risk-laden ventures and squandered resources, he had never imagined making his death in a girl’s trundle bed, fouled with his own waste.

He grasped again at the quill and, spilling only a little of the India ink from the bottle, continued to write.

It seemed to him, upon reflection, that the trip to the colonies from the very beginning was darkly favored. Their mission’s decline had begun before they had even left England with the torture and killing of Sam Crouch, Blood’s former associate and double-dealer. Crouch had died cursing them and their passage westward to Hell. He had gone to his end raving from Ecclesiastes: “Receive deceitful men into thine house and they will estrange thee from thine own.”

Their numbers had dwindled again when two more of their group had been washed away during the storm. He smiled, exhaling bitterly, over the apt name of the ship,
The Swallow
; it had certainly swallowed both the eel boy and Baker like a rapacious beast, leaving no trace. So witless had he been on the ship, by the action of the sea and the shrieking of the ocean wind, that he sometimes thought he heard the eel boy’s voice, coming from belowdecks days after he had been washed overboard, singing some fragment of lamenting song.

He thought he had known what true sickness was when they first landed at the docks, still miserable from the crossing, but within hours, it seemed, of coming to the colonies, he and his two remaining partners had had bouts of a great malaise and loose,
spotty bowels, along with hours of retching into basins and buckets provided by their landlady.

These periodic incidents had not dampened his pursuit of pleasure, though. Boston had inns enough, the Salutation Inn and the Ship Tavern among them. Though there were a few discreet bawdy houses, sheltering women in drab dresses and with little, if any, paint on their faces, he soon abandoned these dens in favor of Verity’s company.

And Verity, though young, had been no stranger to the pleasures of a bed. She had the downy skin and unclouded eye of a virgin, and there was a sweetness to her that moved Thornton in a way he had not been moved in a long while. She had had her belly stuffed with child by a Royalist soldier who had abandoned her, the child subsequently dying. When she told Thornton, as they lay under a homespun quilt, of her lost infant, she cried bitterly and he had tenderly rocked her, soothing her with kisses. He had told her he knew what it was to suffer such a loss, although he did not tell her when and how these things had taken place.

He began to come to her every day, and she would feed him, and couple with him, bathing his forehead when he sickened, solicitous in the extreme. They would stroll together on the public square, along Bell Alley and Garden Court, and once, on a Sunday, sauntered into the North Meeting House. There they heard a preacher with the impertinent name of Increase Mather, who preached a sermon “Woe, to Drunkards; the Sin of Drunkenness.” He and Verity had snorted so loudly, giggling and gesturing irreverently, that they had been asked to leave by one of the meetinghouse Elders.

Thornton had begun to believe that, after they accomplished their mission, he might even stay in Boston, making his way in land speculation or merchant trading, keeping Verity in comfort in a town house. Maybe even marrying her in a quaint New World ceremony, joined in a pastoral setting, the girl’s hair bound up in a wreath of daisies or some such prosaic flower.

He looked down at the parchment and saw he had been crying, his tears streaking the ink on the page. He struggled with the quill for a moment, resolved to put his last thoughts on paper.

Early on, he, Brudloe, and Cornwall had made a foray into Salem to meet their contact, a miller by trade who told them the most likely towns and villages to search for their fugitive.

Brudloe had waved off the miller’s cautioning words about the dangers of tracking these wanted men, some of whom had experienced disciplined fighting during the English Civil War.

“How hard can it be to track down one great beanpole of a man?” Brudloe had asked.

The miller had looked at Brudloe, his jaw moving beneath a creeping smile. “Oh, it’s harder than you might think. To find men of stature in this place, in this hard wilderness, one has only to stand on a Boston wharf and look westwards.”

The men had been confident in their plans, but as soon as they returned to Boston, they all became suddenly ill again.

A rending spasm in his gut made him cry out. His hands clenched, crushing the parchment, and his knees drew up reflexively to his chest. He had within the past hour begun to bleed from his rectum, and he could feel a renewed warm trickle of blood seep onto the sheets. When the spasm had passed, he lay panting, his teeth clenching and unclenching. He had spilled most of the ink onto the mattress, but there was some yet in the bottle and it would serve for his purposes. He had only a little left to write.

He could hear Verity’s footsteps coming up the stairs to the garret and he paused, looking towards the door. Her step was usually quick and light, but today her tread was more deliberate. It was she who had told him that morning, after she had fed him his cup of chocolate, that she had been poisoning him all along,
along with his partners. She had straightened the sheets and smoothed back his hair as he looked at her in horror. She had explained to him patiently that he was yet one more in a line of Royalist bastards who had killed and whored and burned their way through the colonies: corrupting good women, impressing good men, seeking to murder capable farmers because they had fought against some long-dead king. When he had pleaded with her to send for a doctor, she had shaken her head, saying, “It’s too late for that now, Edward.”