More men forced their way into the fray. They finally knocked Peter from his feet. A man rained blows on the Indian’s face.
“Get off him!” James roared.
He reached into his jerkin and drew his dagger. A woman screamed.
A man reached for him, but James slashed at the man’s chest and drove him back. He threatened and waved the dagger until he had forced his way to Peter’s side. He grabbed the jacket of the man pummeling the Indian and tore him off. He swung an elbow to shove another man out of the way. Soon he had the pew cleared. He lifted Peter to his feet. Blood streamed from the man’s nose, and he looked shaken.
Half the congregation had fled the building, but the remainder gathered in an angry mob, shouting and waving fists. It was precisely the disturbance James had been hoping to cause, yet the savagery of it left him stunned. He struggled to recover his wits.
“Quiet, all of you! I am James Bailey, and by the authority of His Majesty, by the grace of God your sovereign and king, I order you to disperse.”
They did not disperse. They did, however, ease off with the shouting. It was enough for Peter to start up again. He lifted his hands, palms up, like a prophet. Or a madman.
“Good folk of Boston—”
“Be quiet, you fool,” James said.
Peter fell silent. Thank God for that.
“Now listen to me,” James said to the crowd.
“No, we will not,” Reverend Stone said. “We have listened quite enough.”
Stone pushed his way through the crowd. Samuel Knapp was with him, the short man red faced and huffing. A taller man with long, flowing hair came in behind them. As Knapp and Stone cleared away the mob, this man approached.
“Goodman Knapp says you have papers, a commission from the king,” the man said. “Do you have them on you?”
“Who are you, sir?” James said in as cold a voice as he could manage.
“I am William Fitz-Simmons, the deputy governor. And as God is my witness, if this commission from the king is false, I shall see both of you hanged.”
CHAPTER FIVE
James stood in front of the three men with his hands bound behind his back. They’d taken his dagger and stripped open his jerkin and undershirt, then groped him from head to toe to check for other weapons. He had none. They had not rummaged through the pockets in his great cloak, thankfully.
The three men—Reverend Stone, Deputy Governor Fitz-Simmons, and the self-proclaimed Indian killer Samuel Knapp—sat together in the front pew, while James stood where Stone had been delivering his sermon less than an hour earlier.
Peter remained unbound and sat two pews back. Knapp had argued strenuously that they should tie up the Indian too, but he was overruled by Stone and Fitz-Simmons. Apparently they believed that Peter’s Quaker pacifism would master his savage nature.
Fitz-Simmons laid the king’s commission, still unopened, across his lap. He wore a gold signet ring on his right middle finger, twisting the ring back and forth while he stared down at the king’s wax seal.
“Why haven’t you broken the seal?” Fitz-Simmons asked.
“Why should I?” James asked. “That is King Charles’s emblem. Nobody else has questioned my orders. Or are you claiming that it’s a forgery?”
“What else would we expect from the likes of you?” Knapp said.
James gave him a withering look. “You, sir, are a fool.”
Fitz-Simmons stroked the seal with one finger. “It’s not a forgery. But it may well be a fraud.”
“How so?” Reverend Stone asked. He looked less angry than the other two, more thoughtful, though it had been his services that James and Peter had disrupted.
“For all we know,” Fitz-Simmons said, “it’s an order to buy a thousand hogsheads of barley in New York. Or letters of marque to attack Spanish shipping. It could be anything, or nothing at all.”
James snorted as if that were the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. Inside, he was pleased. After the initial threat, the seizure of his weapon, the way they’d rudely tied his hands and groped him, he’d wondered if he’d underestimated the boldness of these Puritans. They acted as if monarchy had never been restored, as if the Roundheads still held sway over England.
But the way the deputy governor fondled the orders, but didn’t dare break the seal, was emboldening.
“The point is,” Fitz-Simmons continued, “you carry secret orders and rely on their secrecy to work your purposes. I say there’s nothing here.”
“Then go ahead, defy me. Defy the king. Break the seal. If you are right, if the orders amount to nothing, what risk do you face? But if you’re wrong . . .”
“He’s bluffing,” Knapp said. “I can see it in his face.”
“What do you know of bluffs?” James said.
“I know plenty.”
James raised his eyebrows. “Why, are you a card player? What is your game, Knapp? All fours? Pharaoh? I thought gambling was illegal in Boston. I thought this was a Godly land.”
Knapp sprang to his feet, eyes bugging. Fists clenched, he made as if to spring at James, but Fitz-Simmons and Stone grabbed his arms and forced him back to his chair.
“Let him come,” James said. “I’ll smash his face in.”
Knapp strained against the grip of the other two men. “With bound hands? Hah!”
“I don’t need hands. Your head is so low to the ground I’ll use my knees.”
“Peace, friend,” Peter murmured from his pew. “Must thou goad them so?”
James had almost forgotten about his companion. The Indian was sweating in spite of the chill inside the unheated meetinghouse, the residual warmth of the parishioners almost completely bled away in their absence. The man should be in bed, not here listening to James arguing.
He was about to suggest they release Peter when he glanced behind the man. A woman stood quietly at the back of the meetinghouse by the door.
It was Prudence Cotton, her expression unreadable, her hands clasped in front of her. What was she doing here? And how long had she been standing there?
James didn’t want to stare and draw the others’ attention to the widow, so he strode up to Fitz-Simmons. “Untie my hands, sir. I’ll break the seal and show it to you.”
“You will?”
“If you promise to obey the king’s commission, yes. Can you do that?”
Fitz-Simmons glanced at Stone.
The reverend furrowed his brow, then nodded. “We’ll obey any command that does not contradict a higher law.”
“There is no higher law than the rule of your sovereign.”
“Who is not a despot, as he is anxious to remind us,” Fitz-Simmons said. “Very well, let us see what you have. Untie him, Goodman Knapp.”
Knapp had stopped straining, but now, as he rose and approached, he got a nasty look on his face that only James could see. James braced himself to be assaulted, vowing that he’d make this arrogant little twat pay dearly, bound hands or no. But Knapp came around behind without further ugliness and untied his hands.
James rubbed his wrists, laced up his jerkin, and took the sealed paper from Fitz-Simmons. “I was only waiting for some civility. Was that too much to expect?”
He broke the seal and handed the paper to the deputy governor. Fitz-Simmons and Stone read it at the same time, and then Fitz-Simmons handed it to Knapp.
“This is meaningless,” Knapp said. “Vague words about passing unmolested through the colony.”
James took the paper and read it as if seeing it for the first time. The wording was hardly a surprise; he’d been in the king’s antechamber when it was written by Lord North, and then taken it in himself to be signed by the king.
“And so you have molested me.”
“Only when you disrupted services,” Fitz-Simmons said.
“I was saving my companion from violence. Peter Church is mentioned here too. Men were attacking him. They might have killed him if I hadn’t intervened.”
“What
is it that you intend to do in the Bay Colony, Master Bailey?” Fitz-Simmons asked.
“Not be hanged, for a start. Nor trussed up, nor put in the pillories, nor suffer any other indignity.”
“So, to live peaceably?” Fitz-Simmons said. “Any man may do that. You don’t need the king’s signature and seal. So what brings you?”
“First, I demand respect as the agent of the king. So far I have been treated with hostility by the likes of this man.” James nodded at Knapp, who glared back.
“You ate at my table,” Stone said. “You slept under my roof. That’s hospitality, not hostility. No, I wasn’t pleased that Master Church spoke his heretical views in a most odious manner, but I would have treated it with forbearance if you had not drawn arms.”
“He was about to be killed!”
“The reverend is more forgiving than I am,” Fitz-Simmons said. “I think you purposefully disrupted our services, although to what end, I cannot fathom.”
“That’s preposterous. I had no idea. Peter was so well behaved on the Vigilant that I forgot about the peculiar habits of his sect.”
“What do you want, Master Bailey?” Fitz-Simmons asked again.
“I want to know what happened at Winton.”
“Are these details unknown in London?” Fitz-Simmons asked. “The Indians of Sachusett swore they would remain neutral in the war. Then they fell like wolves upon the innocents of Winton and slaughtered Sir Benjamin and others to whom they had pledged peace and friendship.”
“Many details remain unknown,” James said. “And I want justice for Sir Benjamin.”
“He had his justice,” Knapp said. “The savages who did it are dead. They are quite extinct in these parts.”
The deputy governor nodded. “Goodman Knapp speaks truth. We punished the Indians of Sachusett for their villainy. Drove them into the wilderness and pursued them without remorse. When we overtook them at last, we freed the Widow Cotton from her captivity, and then, when the natives refused generous terms, finished matters at Crow Hollow.”
James resisted glancing at Prudence Cotton. He assumed she was still there by the door. “So I have heard,” he said, leaving a note of skepticism in his voice.
“What more evidence do you need?” Knapp demanded. “I rammed the sachem’s head on a spike myself. It sits outside the Winton meetinghouse next to the heads of wolves and other vermin. I hanged three of the murderer’s sons and two of his brothers. I burned the savages’ village to the ground.”
“Who is the savage?” Peter said in a quiet voice.
Knapp whirled. “Good men are dead because of them, you son of the devil. Either you hold your tongue, or so help me I’ll—”
He stopped and his eyes widened. “Widow Cotton!”
CHAPTER SIX
Prudence froze at the door as the five men bored into her with their gazes.
What are you doing? Go, run.
Reverend Stone looked stern and disappointed, Deputy Governor Fitz-Simmons more annoyed than anything; Knapp stared. She didn’t meet his gaze. Knapp had bought her husband’s lands in Winton, and rumor had it he wished to plow more than the dead man’s fields. In that, Prudence had no interest whatsoever.
As for the strangers, James looked momentarily concerned, before his expression changed to calculating, scheming. He may not welcome her presence, she decided, but now that she’d supplied it, he meant to turn it to his advantage. Peter Church barely glanced at her and looked pale and sickly, as if he’d eaten a bad piece of fish.
“What do you want?” Fitz-Simmons asked. The annoyance deepened on the deputy governor’s face.
“I heard what you were saying,” she began, faltering.
“And what business is that of yours? Reverend, have you no mastery within your own household?”
Stone sputtered at this but fixed his anger in Prudence’s direction, not at the man who’d challenged him. “You weren’t invited to this meeting. Go home.”
“I want to know what she’s doing here first,” Fitz-Simmons said.
“She suffers from childish curiosity, that is all. I’ll see that she’s disciplined later. My wife will get to the bottom of it.”
Why was Prudence here? After the evacuation of the meetinghouse following Peter Church’s outburst and the subsequent scuffle, she’d had no intention of hanging about to find out what they intended to do with the two strangers. Only on her way home did she remember James’s shocking suggestion that she meet him at the Common at dusk.
No, she would not. She wasn’t Lucy or Alice Branch, the servant girls, who had been whispering breathlessly about James when they thought nobody was listening.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
The words from her husband’s Shakespeare folio had seeped into her conscience as she had approached the Stone house with her sister’s children in tow. And then she had another thought—and almost cursed herself for her foolishness.
James didn’t want to meet her on the Common to satisfy his lusts. He’d read her pages, that’s what. The chapter about her daughter. He wanted to help. So she’d entered the house and immediately slipped out the back door as if going to the privy, but really to hurry back up the hill to the meetinghouse.
Except now that Prudence was here, facing these men in defiance of clear rules about a woman’s place at a man’s council, she felt frozen, unable to respond.
“Master Fitz-Simmons asked you a question,” Knapp said, his tone demeaning. “Are you going to answer or stand there in contempt?”
Knapp’s rudeness brought Prudence’s courage to a boil. She walked down the aisle until she stood between James and the men seated in the pews. “I’m here because of Winton and Crow Hollow.”
The scowl on Fitz-Simmons’s face turned to confusion. “What do you mean?”
“I heard you talking. Master Bailey said something about going west, about finding out what happened.”
“We know what happened,” Knapp said. “I was there, remember?”
She turned on him. “So was I. You seem to forget that.”
“Prudence, please,” Stone said. “I beg you. Now is not the time.”
“And at Crow Hollow,” she continued, “when you were as brutal as the savages themselves. How about the Nipmuk village? What did you do there? That’s the part they wouldn’t let me see.”
“Do you want particulars, is that it?” Knapp said. “I can share every ugly detail, though it would make you faint from the horror of it.”
Her fists clenched. “I don’t easily swoon, Goodman Knapp.”
He snorted. “You’re a woman. You have no idea.”
“Leave her be,” James said.
Knapp glared at him. “You know nothing about the war, so I would suggest that you shut your mouth.”
“I’ve read the widow’s account, and that’s more than enough. The hardships she endured while you strutted around, ordering men about, slaughtering unarmed Indians—you are a coward in comparison.”
“This man is a knave,” Knapp said. “Bind him, stick him in the pillory. Then flog him and send him back to England on the next ship.”
“Will you guard your temper, for heaven’s sake?” Fitz-Simmons said to Knapp. He turned back to James. “We’ve all read the widow’s account. What of it?”
“You haven’t read it all,” Prudence said, “so you don’t know everything. The reverend does, though he refuses to accept it. And now Master Bailey knows too. That’s why I came back.”
“I do?” James said. He glanced at Peter, who was wiping the perspiration from his brow with a handkerchief. The Indian gave a confused shake of the head.
An ugly misgiving settled into her belly.
“The papers. The missing chapter from my narrative. Didn’t you read it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The worry in her belly became a writhing mass of snakes. She had mistaken his message during services. Her pages must still lie undisturbed within
the pockets of his cloak. He had not invited her to meet him on the Common because he had read her narrative. Rather, for some other reason she couldn’t guess at.
James’s cloak was lying on the pew between Stone and Fitz-Simmons, with the man’s dagger sitting on top of it. If she pressed the matter, had him bring out her unpublished chapter, one of them would surely confiscate the pages.
“Then why are you going to Winton?” she asked.
“I’m not.”
“I thought you said—”
“I said no such thing. I said I need to know what happened, but I have no intention of setting off into the godforsaken wilderness myself. Boston is cold and dreary enough as it is. No, I intend to speak with knowledgeable parties, yourself included, and get to the truth that way. Then I’ll return to London.”
But . . . but then why did he have the Indian with him? It wasn’t so Peter Church could speak directly to the Nipmuk? Was it only to goad the good folk of Boston with Quaker heresies to trump up grounds for the Crown to interfere, as Anne had claimed?
“So you see, it was a simple misunderstanding,” Stone said. “Now run home and help Anne with supper. There’s a good girl.”
“Before she goes, I want to see these papers Widow Cotton mentioned,” Fitz-Simmons said. “What are they?”
“It’s nothing,” Stone said, his tone a little too dismissive to be believed. “The records of a nightmare she suffered in her captivity. Not fit for publication.”
“Nevertheless.”
“I don’t have them anymore,” Prudence said. “I got rid of them.”
“That’s the truth?” the deputy governor asked her.
“Aye, Goodman Fitz-Simmons. As the Lord is my witness. I got rid of them.”
“I am relieved to hear it,” Stone said. Then, to his two companions, “I told her and told her. Burn them, I said. They’re only causing you trouble.”
“Again,” Fitz-Simmons said. “You are the master of your own house, are you not? You should have cast them into the fire yourself.”
Prudence tried one more time. “Master Bailey, please. My daughter was taken from my arms.”
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