Dark Tides

by Philippa Gregory

  “Oh, Grandma— I know you hope I do, I’d like to think that I did,” she said quietly. “But I don’t have the sight.”

  “I know you do,” Alinor challenged her.

  “Well it’s not clear to me…”

  “It’s rarely clear,” Alinor confessed. “And I’ve no proof of anything. Nothing to say to your mother. Nothing to ask anything of Livia.”

  “What would you ask her if you could?”

  “I’d ask why she’s dressed in black but spending every day with another man? Is her little heart broken but mending fast? And if she is no widow; then where is my boy?”

  SEPTEMBER 1670, LONDON

  The tide was on the ebb and the terns, hovering over the water, were dropping into the waves with a splash and coming up with tiny silver fish in their sharp beaks. Livia hesitated in the doorway of Alinor’s bedroom, Matteo in her arms, and spoke to Alys, who was collecting a tray full of posset bags from her mother’s worktable.

  “Can you have him this morning?” she asked. “I need Carlotta to walk me over London Bridge.”

  “Not now,” Alys answered. “I’m expecting a ship.”

  “He can spend the morning with me,” Alinor offered. “He’s no trouble.”

  “I’ll take him for a walk when they’ve unloaded,” Alys promised. “I’ll be free at noon, but then I should have another cargo this afternoon…”

  There was a shout from the quay below, where a lighterman stood up in his rocking boat. “Delivery for Reekie Warehouse,” he yelled.

  Alys opened the door and stepped out onto the little balcony. “Reekie Wharf! What’ve you got?” she shouted down.

  He gestured to the crate in the prow of his boat. “From New England,” he said. He pointed to the ship behind him, hove to, and taking on lines from a barge to go upriver.

  “Wait there! I’ll come down.” Alys hurried from the room.

  Livia raised her arched eyebrows at Alinor. “How she runs when someone shouts for her!”

  “She has to pay for their time,” Alinor said. “Of course she runs. I’ll go down and see as well. It’ll be something from Ned.”

  “More herbs?” Livia suggested limpidly as she followed Alinor downstairs, Matteo against her shoulder.

  The lighterman and a couple of dockers carried the crate into the warehouse. Alys paid for the shipping and then fetched the hammer from the wall to open the lid.

  “Tabs can do that,” Livia said.

  “I can do it.” Alys pulled nails from the top of the crate till it was ready to open. She smiled at her mother. “I know you’ll want to open it.” Skillfully, she levered up the lid but left it resting on top.

  Alinor cautiously lifted the lid and at once the rich strong smell of sassafras breathed into the room.

  “There must be something else inside,” Alys told her. “It was heavy.”

  Alinor scraped a little of the dried leaves aside and found the cool globe of rock. “It feels like pebbles.”

  “Could it be ore?” Livia asked, interested at once. She handed the baby to Alys and stepped forwards to see. “Gold-bearing ore?”

  “He wouldn’t send gold in a crate.” Alinor drew it out and weighed it in her hand. It was a big stone, the size of a cobble, gray and uninteresting on the outside but it was split, it opened in her hands and she gave a little gasp.

  It was a treasure, a sparkling sharp-toothed cave of jewels, purple as dark as indigo, and so white as to be translucent. “Will you look at this?”

  “Are they diamonds?” Livia breathed. “Has he found diamonds? Purple diamonds?”

  “He’s written.” Alys pulled out the sheet of paper packed in the crate.

  “Dear Sister and Niece Alys,” she read aloud. “Here is a crate of sassafras leaves, which I know you can always use, and a stone that the Norwottuck people call ‘thunderstones.’ They say that a stone like this draws lightning away safely to the ground. I have not seen such a thing, but I thought it might be helpful in the spires and roofs of London. If you can sell them at a profit I can get more. It cost me 6d. in trade goods, so let me know if it’s worthwhile. In haste to catch the boat—your loving brother, Ned.”

  “He says nothing about me? Nor his nephew?” Livia asked.

  “This will have crossed with my letter,” Alinor told her. “It takes a long time for news to reach him—a month and a half—sometimes more?” She put the thunderstone together and then opened it up again. “This is beautiful.” She turned to Alys. “Will you take it to the apothecary and see if he has any sale for it?” she asked her. “You can tell him we’ve got a new delivery of sassafras too. I’ll keep some back to make bags and tisanes, but you might ask him what he’d pay by the pound?”

  “I’ll go this afternoon,” Alys started, but then she clicked her tongue in irritation. “No, I can’t, I’m expecting some fruit from Kent.” She turned to Livia. “Could you go? You could go on from the Strand with Carlotta.”

  “I?” Livia asked, looking from one woman to another as if it were an extraordinary request that she could hardly understand.

  “Why not?” Alinor asked quietly.

  Livia just glanced at Alys, who answered for her. “Oh! No, Ma, of course she can’t.”

  “Why not?” Alinor turned the question to her daughter.

  Alys flushed. “She’s a lady, she can’t go selling things to a shop. It’s not right. She can’t go into a shop and haggle for something… in English… with Mr. Jenikins who’s always so… It’s not her language, it’s not her place.”

  “Is this true?” Alinor asked Livia as if she were curious. “Our work is beneath you?”

  “No! No! Of course I will go,” Livia said gracefully. “If you ask me, I will go, Mia Suocera. Of course. I can’t do it as well as darling Alys, but I can try. If you wish it, I will try. I want to help, I will do anything you ask me.”

  Alinor turned to her daughter: “You go when you’re able. See if he wants more of these thunderstones and what he’ll pay.”

  “But I will go if you want me?” Livia interposed.

  Alinor did not even glance at her inquiring face. “Nay, you think no more of it,” she said.

  SEPTEMBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  Ned’s garden sprawled with green weeds at the end of the hot humid summer, the river broad and limpid green, the woods on the far side a wall of green, the meadows above them a yellowing green, and the pines above them a deep purple green. Even Ned’s clothes in his box were green with mold, and every hole under his eaves and every corner of his root cellar was sprouting a little nest of green shoots. He spent hours every day hoeing his crop with his stone-blade hoe, and peeling back the leaves from the ripening heads of corn so they dried brown. As his crop of beans flourished, climbing around the corn stalks, and his squash vines trailed on the ground, more and more animals came from the forest on either side of his acreage to raid his harvest. Black flocks of crows darkened the sky and would have stripped the field bare if Red had not bounded barking from his kennel. Squirrels came scampering along the branches of the trees overhead, partridge hens led their fat chicks, ducking under his fence to pick and scratch in his precious seedbeds. Ned repaired his fence, sticking willow wands into watered earth, weaving them together, to mark out his half lot of four acres, trying to grow a tame little English hedge to keep out a wilderness of trees that stretched for miles, greater than all of England, perhaps greater than Christendom. Nobody knew how far the land extended, it could go on to the Indies for all anyone knew.

  Wussausmon, walking up the broad common stretch from the south one evening, was unrecognizable, dressed as an Englishman in breeches, shoes, and a shirt and a jacket. He opened the north gate from the town, came to Ned’s garden gate, and remarked: “You English, you cannot leave anything alone.”

  Ned looked up at the friendly voice, and looked again as he recognized the Pokanoket man under the English hat. “I didn’t recognize you!”

  “These are the clothes of m
y other world,” he said. “And now my name is John Sassamon.”

  Ned rose to his feet. “Come in, whatever your name,” he said, taking the loop of twine off the little gate.

  “I won’t interrupt your work.”

  “I’ll go on with it. Sit here. I’ll be finished in a moment.”

  Ned pinched the garden soil into a low wall of mud around the willow whip and puddled the water to its bare stalk. “Every beast from the forest thinks it can overrun my garden and eat my crops,” he complained. “I wish I could build a wall against them! Or carve a moat from the river.”

  The man laughed. “Why not move the forest back?”

  “The Dutch, in their country, hold back the sea,” Ned told him.

  “So I heard. Does the sea not push back? Do the rivers not mind?”

  “Actually, the sea does push back,” Ned conceded. “And perhaps the river does mind. I’ve never thought of what they might feel—the rivers and the seas—when we master them.”

  “Of course they mind—are we not the same being as them? The blood in my veins, the water in the river? We all flow. We all move with the moon.”

  Ned sat back on his heels. “When I was a lad I thought that it was the tide that pulled up the moon and turned my days into nights.” He finished the watering in silence, his finger over the top of the stoneware bottle regulating the flow that dripped from the hole in the bottom. “My sister believes that women’s moods and courses come and go with the moon, and with the tides.”

  “Of course they do,” John said simply. “You’ve missed that one.” He pointed to a willow whip. “And this is squaws’ work. You should marry a woman to do this work for you.”

  “You think it’s beneath a man to hoe and weed?”

  John laughed. “No! No! Beyond us! It’s a skill that we men lack. Only the women have the skills to feed everyone. They learn from their mothers, and their mothers from the grandmothers, backwards and backwards to the day when Mother Earth taught women. All we men grow is tobacco. A white man like you’ll never feed a family from your planting. You can’t care for the earth like a woman can.”

  “I could take a plow to it,” Ned pointed out. “A pair of ox and a man. Then you’d see a crop of wheat that no squaw could grow.”

  “It’d be a desert in four seasons. And the dust would blow around you like snow. This is no land for plowing, it has to rest; but you English will never let anything rest. You enslave everything.”

  “I don’t,” Ned objected. “I feed the land as Quiet Squirrel told me. Why—I’m half a Norwottuck already,” he claimed, making the man laugh. “The people in Hadley accuse me of turning Indian. They say that I don’t know what I am.”

  “Between two worlds, and unsteady in both,” John suggested.

  Ned looked up at the dark broad-planed face under the ugly English hat.

  “Unsteady.” Ned repeated the word, and shifted his feet in his uncomfortable shoes. “Anyway, no woman would live with me out here. She would say it’s too far out of town, and too close to the forest.”

  “What about the one that you walk with?” John suggested. “Mrs. Rose? You carried her basket.”

  “You saw me? Where were you? I didn’t see you?”

  John shrugged. “I wasn’t in my hat,” he said, as if native dress made him invisible.

  Ned was strangely disturbed. “I didn’t know you were watching me.”

  “We watch all of you.”

  The two men moved to the rough bench that Ned had at the back of the house, facing the river. They could see the posts of the pier, the raft rocking at the side, the ropes looped to the opposite bank dipping and rising in the water with the flow.

  “Because you don’t trust us anymore?” Ned said gloomily.

  John chuckled, distracted by the river. “You caught my cousin in your ferry rope the other night. He did not see the rope across the river and he forgot it was there. Nearly overturned him in his dugout. He was cursing you and your water-walker.”

  “I thought you all just ducked under the ropes, or paddled over them?”

  “It was dark, he forgot.”

  “And where was he going downriver in the dark?” Ned asked.

  John shifted his gaze, looked over at the hills, shrugged. “Taking a message… I don’t know.”

  “The Massasoit is still unhappy with the Council at Plymouth?” Ned asked. “He’s talking to other tribes? I spoke to the minister and he said he would warn the Council.”

  “Your Council speaks to him as if he were one of their servants. I translate their words, I hear them speak as if we are theirs to command. They snap out orders as if we are slaves, as if this land is not ours; though they know they are newcomers. It has been ours since the rising of the first sun shone first on us, long before Englishmen came.”

  Ned fetched two cups of root tea. John gave him a pinch of tobacco from the pouch at his belt and they both filled their pipes and smoked in silence. The aromatic cloud kept the insects away from their faces, and they were both aware that the smoke was sacred in the religion that neither practiced. Together they watched the sun set on their left behind the high terraces of the river, as the sky slowly turned from cream to darkness.

  “Your friends will come back next moon,” John said. “It’s not been a good summer for them.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  John shrugged. “Who knows? They have discontent in their blood.”

  “Will you bring them?”

  “As I promised.”

  “Thank you.” Ned hesitated. “They’re not happy?”

  John shrugged. “They eat well enough and they are warm and dry. The women take them extra food sometimes. But they miss their homes. And they say they will never get home to England, not while this king is on your throne.”

  Ned nodded. “They were two of the judges that executed this king’s father. He forgave those who fought—I was in that army—but he said the judges must die.”

  John nodded; it was part of his law that a life should be paid for a life, so that part of the story did not surprise him. But a rebellion against a leader was unknown. “You took up arms against your own king? And they killed him?”

  “He was a tyrant,” Ned tried to explain. “In my country we have an agreement about what kings may do. Even though they are kings. We had a parliament—like the General Court here. But he did not respect them, so we fought him and caught him and then we executed him.”

  “I have heard of this. Did your friends smash his head? With a club?”

  Ned choked on shock at the picture John conjured up and laughed awkwardly. “No, no,” he said. “We beheaded him. With an ax.”

  It still sounded barbaric. Ned wondered that he had never thought of this before. “We built a scaffold, outside his palace,” he said, thinking that everything he said made the execution sound worse. “It was a proper trial. Before judges, many judges.”

  John looked incredulous. “We’d never kill a king.” He shook his head, disbelieving. “You are a most violent people.”

  “I’m not explaining it well,” Ned said. “Don’t tell people—it’s more complicated than I can say.”

  “But you crucified your God as well?”

  Ned tried to laugh. “That wasn’t us! That was years before!”

  John shook his head. “You are a strange people to us,” he said. “I was raised in an English family and studied at Harvard, but I don’t think I will ever understand you. I translate between my people and the people of my raising—English—and I know the words, but the meaning!” He broke off.

  “An Englishman’s word is as good as an oath,” Ned said stiffly.

  John shook his head. “We both know that’s not true,” he said.

  Ned felt anger rise and then he slapped his guest on the shoulder. “God forgive us,” he said. “You’re right. God help us, indeed. We speak falsely to you and to each other. We’re sinners indeed.” He got to his feet and fetched the jug of small
ale; but he paused before he poured a cup. “I’m forbidden from giving you liquor,” he said, “for fear that I cheat you while you’re dead drunk. We are trying to be good neighbors, you know.”

  “Oh, get me drunk and buy my land.” John held out his cup. “I’ve got an eight-acre plot in a praying town; it’s only mine if I obey your laws and deny my people’s faith. I go between my angry ruler and yours. Get me drunk, steal my land, and throw me onto the streets of Plymouth.”

  Ned poured the small ale. “They don’t want your eight acres in Natick. You know what they want: the great lands near Boston. So the city can grow and spread.”

  John nodded. “I know it. We all know it. But this has been our land forever, tracked with our feet, the animals we hunt are the kin of the animals our ancestors hunted. They are kin to us. We belong here. We can’t sell.”

  “Are you agreed?” Ned asked curiously. “Are you coming together as people say? To resist us?”

  John raised his cup to the silent river. “You know I can’t say. Would you not be bound to pass my words to your elders? Would they not tell the governor? And then they’ll summon the Massasoit as if he were their servant, scold him and fine him and take more of our land and pretend it is a just punishment and not your greed? I warn you—I want to warn you; but I will not betray him.”

  “He mustn’t gather the tribes together,” Ned said flatly. “I warn you in return: it would be the end of all our hopes to live free and at peace here.”

  “But we are not free,” John pointed out. “We are not at peace. When your king overstepped his rights you killed him. What should we do when you overstep? The Pokanoket are tired of you, and your broken promises. I translate nothing but insults. The Pokanoket are tired of me too.”

  “Are they? Is the Massasoit tired of you? Is it dangerous to go between two worlds? Should you stay in the praying town and be an Englishman, where we can keep you safe?”