Goody Hull groaned. “My husband. He was there. I saw what they did to him. They tortured him, mutilated him.”
Prudence reached over and put a hand on the woman’s hand. “My Benjamin too.”
“How did you survive?” James asked the old woman.
Goody Hull touched a hand to the twisted scar on her face. “One of the Indians hit me in the face with his hatchet and left me for dead. Goody Harris and Goody Tilman dragged me away. Some of us hid in a barn, behind bales of hay. They came for hay to set their fires, but they never did find us.”
Prudence turned to see James studying her. “But you saw them kill Goodman Hull, your husband, and the others?” he asked.
Prudence nodded. “Aye. They took the survivors to the commons while they tortured and murdered. That’s when they finally killed my husband. When they’d had their fill, they marched us into the wilderness.”
James had a curious look on his face, like he was trying to figure something out. “Back to Sachusett?”
“No, we never went to their village. They must have known ’twould be the first place the militia would go when they saw what had happened to Winton.”
“And then?”
Her mouth felt dry. If she closed her eyes, she knew she would see the crows. The eye in the beak.
“They took us north. You’ve read the rest of it.”
“Why did they do it?” Goody Hull asked, her voice plaintive. “We never did them no harm. Why would they hurt us?”
Prudence had asked herself that many, many times. She’d asked her captors, but they’d never given a good answer. Perhaps Mikmonto had heard about the slaughter of the Narragansett, or maybe it was nothing more than suddenly believing that King Philip and his allies stood a chance of wiping out the English.
“Wait a moment,” James said to Goody Hull. “I thought you said Knapp rescued you in the meetinghouse. But you said you hid in a barn. Which is it?”
“The meetinghouse,” the old woman said. “Five of us had been hiding in the barn. After all the screaming, it grew quiet, but we didn’t dare leave. It was so hot. I was so thirsty. And faint from my wounds. The barn stank. They’d killed all the animals, and in the heat they were squirming with maggots and flies. We waited for three days without daring to leave. Then we heard voices. English voices, so we came out.”
“The militia?” James asked.
“First it was other survivors,” Goody Hull said. “They’d hid in the woods or behind stone walls. We went to the meetinghouse, or what was left of it. We were trying to fortify it when the militia returned.”
“Of course it would be Captain Knapp at the head,” James said.
“I wouldn’t have expected it,” Prudence said. “Knapp was from the coast, and his forces mostly Plymouth and Boston men. I’d have expected Captain Pearson—he was the head of the Springfield militia, and his sister’s family lived in Winton.”
“We were glad to see him, though,” Goody Hull said. “He was our savior, Captain Knapp. After he finished off the brutes, we were happy to see him settle in Winton.”
Prudence sat up straighter. “What do you mean? He lives in Boston.”
“Only until spring, that’s what they say.” Goody Hull turned her head, almost birdlike, to fix Prudence with her good eye. “Why, Goody Cotton, you were the one who sold him your land.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Someone did, and in your name too. Six hundred acres right here in Winton that he’ll be farming with his brothers, and another two hundred where Sir Benjamin wanted to build the mill.”
Any doubts Prudence might have cherished now vanished. Her face grew hot with anger thinking how Knapp had profited from this ungodly business. She exchanged glances with James, whose mouth settled into a tight line.
“How else would we resettle Winton?” Goody Hull continued. “Half the town died that day. If it weren’t for good folk like Knapp and his men bringing their families, the wilderness would soon reclaim this land. Why, even the deputy governor is coming. Goodman Fitz-Simmons owns most of old Sachusett now.”
“Oh he does, does he?” James said. “Well, now we know.”
James was still digesting this new piece of information when the door to Goody Hull’s cottage flung open. James and Prudence were both on their feet before they saw that it was Cooper. The man glanced at the widow and recoiled from her ruined features. His horrified expression vanished in a second, but the old woman looked aghast. She whipped the shawl in front of her face to hide it.
James had reached for his pistol, but now he removed his hand from his cloak. “What is it?”
“A man is standing at the head of the alley. He’s holding a musket.”
James rushed to the door. Sure enough, a solitary figure stood next to the meetinghouse, staring hard down the lane in their direction. He glanced back over his shoulder toward the commons, as if expecting someone.
James ducked back in. “Prudie, we have to go. Now.”
“Already?” Goody Hull said as Prudence sprang to her feet. “Oh, couldn’t you stay a spell?”
James turned on his heel without offering additional explanation and raced after Cooper as he ran around the side of the house toward the horses. Prudence joined them, with the widow’s thin voice still calling after them, begging them to tarry. Moments later, the three companions were back in the saddle.
When they rode into the lane, James fully intended to charge the single man guarding the end of the lane. If the villain tried to stop them, James would blow out his brains. But in the few short seconds since Cooper had raised the alarm, two more men had arrived, one of them on horse.
The rider was Samuel Knapp. No covered face this time—if indeed that had been he on the road. This time he sat proudly in the saddle, his lips pulled into a sneer.
The first man was still glancing over his shoulder. No question what that meant. More men were on the way.
To James’s rear, the lane ended shortly beyond the widow’s cottage, where it gave way to pasture. At the moment, the open land was a solid field of white, stretching perhaps a half mile until it reached the forest. Not a single track or trail broke the expanse. There might be rocks to break the ankles of horses or other hidden obstacles to send riders flying from their saddles. But he didn’t see as he had a choice.
“This way!”
He turned his horse toward the pasture. Prudence and Cooper followed on their mounts. The animals plunged into the snow. Shouts sounded at their backs.
James led the horses as fast as he dared across the field. He glanced over his shoulder to see Knapp giving chase, with the men on foot following. The latter struggled when they reached the knee-deep snow. James led his companions a good two hundred yards into the pasture, before ordering Cooper to follow him about. The two men wheeled around.
Knapp drew short when the two sides were roughly a hundred yards apart. He held a musket, against James and Cooper’s pistols, which would be useless at this range. But Knapp’s companions on foot had fallen well behind, and he must know that if he fired, he’d have only one shot. Then James and Cooper would charge him.
“Prudence Cotton!” Knapp roared. “Come away from those villains at once.”
“The devil take you, Samuel Knapp!” she answered. Though she wasn’t armed, she’d come up beside James and Cooper.
“This is your last chance, woman.” He spat this last word as if it were a curse. “Leave these men or suffer the consequences.”
“You will burn in hellfire,” she snapped. “But first you’ll swing from a rope, I swear before God, you miserable cur.”
Knapp let out an incoherent bellow of rage. He lifted his musket to snap off an ill-advised shot. The range was too great, and the musket was the only advantage he had until the rest of his men could catch up. The fool.
But Knapp was aiming not at the men, James saw to his horror, but at Prudence. She must have seen the same thing, because she flinched. The cock fell, the flint struc
k. Fire and smoke belched from the end of Knapp’s musket, followed a split second later by the audible thump of ignited gunpowder.
Fear sucked at James’s intestines. He had time to see Prudence’s eyes widen slightly.
No, please. God, no.
But a hundred yards was a long shot to take from the back of a horse. The ball whizzed past with an audible whoosh of air. Knapp had missed. Prudence was unharmed. James let out his breath in a gasp. He hadn’t even realized he’d been holding it.
Triumph rose in his breast. “Now we have him!”
“Look!” Cooper cried, before James could order a charge.
Two more riders burst from the edge of the lane and came charging across the field. Behind them, two more men on foot slogged into the snow with muskets in hand. And the first two footmen continued to doggedly wade toward them. There were now seven enemies in all.
James had no choice. It was flee or be killed. He shouted for Prudence and Cooper to follow, and they galloped recklessly across the snowy pasture toward the woods on the far side.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
They were still a hundred yards from the trees when Cooper’s horse stumbled and fell. The man flew over the horse’s head with a cry. He almost disappeared into the snow before he came up, covered in white. His horse screamed in pain as it tried to regain its feet and failed.
James grabbed Cooper’s arm and helped him onto the back of his own horse. It took precious time. By the time he was ready to go again, Prudence had reached the woods. James turned in the saddle, expecting to find the enemy almost on top of them.
But to his relief, the distance between the two groups had grown. Knapp had waited for the other two riders, and the three men now forged slowly across the snow, directly behind them. The three footmen, on the other hand, cut northeast at an angle.
The reason revealed itself as James studied their approach. If James had hoped to simply disappear into the woods, it was apparent this would never work. The ground had begun to slope up already; by the time he reached the trees, he’d be on the side of a hill and climbing steeply. The snow was heavier there, caught in great drifts, and various snags, rocky outcrops, and other obstacles would make foot travel difficult enough. On horseback it would be impossible. The steepest ground was to the north and west. The enemy expected their quarry to lose the horses at the woods, then cut east on foot, where they’d be intercepted.
James saw no other choice. Here in the open, two men with pistols against a half-dozen enemies with muskets, he wouldn’t stand a chance. And they were now so far outside Winton that there would be no witnesses to see how they’d been gunned down in cold blood.
Cooper had apparently come to the same conclusion. “Maybe we should surrender.”
“I won’t surrender to those murderers.”
They reached Prudence, who had already dismounted. “Hurry. This way. Into the woods.”
“We’ll never make it,” Cooper insisted. “They’ll follow our tracks.”
James wasn’t going to argue the point. “Over there,” he said, pointing to a fallen tree, its broad roots torn up and presenting a shelter of sorts. “If we hide there—”
“That won’t work,” Cooper insisted. “Listen, they won’t hurt a woman.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” James said.
“So they can hardly murder us if we surrender, not with her as a witness.”
“For the love of God,” Prudence cried. “Will you trust me? Please.”
She’d already waded a good twenty feet into the woods and was gesturing violently for them to follow. The two men glanced at each other, and James saw Cooper come to the same conclusion at the same time. Without another word of complaint, they abandoned the horses and charged after her. In a moment they’d reached her side, and the three continued together.
James was the younger and stronger of the two men, so he got in front to forge a trail for the others to follow. It left a fine trail for their enemies to follow. Already, he heard shouts from behind and knew that Knapp and his men had gained the trees.
The forest closed around them. It was a mixed woods of pine and hardwood, with the thick branches of the former shielding them from the men below. It sounded like they were perhaps a hundred yards back. And, James reminded himself, there were more men who would be cutting into the forest to the east.
The largest drifts reached almost to James’s thighs, and he was soon tiring. Every time he bumped a pine tree, it sent a shower of snow cascading onto his head and shoulders. The hill grew steeper and steeper, their progress slowing by the minute.
“Let me up front,” Prudence urged a few minutes later.
“I’m stronger. If I go first”—he stopped to catch his breath—“we’ll all move faster.”
“It’s not a question of speed.” She drew in a ragged gasp. “James, please.”
He was nigh exhausted from the climb and the slog, so he slowed while she pushed first past Cooper, then James. She struggled another twenty feet or so, so slow that he wanted to shout at her to move aside. She reached another fallen log, jumped over the top, took several steps forward, then backed up slowly. She climbed on top of the log.
“Up here, quick.”
They joined her on top of the log. It had fallen over a rocky ledge and was now propped against the rock like a ladder at an angle. The ledge was covered with huge, icicle-like protrusions, each one stacked on top of the next from cycles of freezing and thawing, and yellowish brown from the minerals leached from the soil.
To James’s astonishment, she started to scale the ledge instead of going around it and looking for a gentler way up. The two men followed. The rock and ice numbed James’s hands, and climbing the seven or eight feet up took so long he was afraid the enemy would catch them before they made it.
Once they were all up top, Prudence snapped off a pine branch and used it to sweep snow over the edge.
“Go deeper in,” she urged. “Quickly, out of sight.”
James glanced down before obeying and was shocked to see that it appeared that they’d climbed over the log and then disappeared. Yes, you could see that someone had shoved a bunch of new snow over the top of the log, but it looked like it must have fallen from the top of the surrounding pine trees. So unless someone had climbed into those trees . . .
Voices sounded below. So very close now. He shrank away from the edge.
“Now where have they gone?” Knapp said, his voice ripe with irritation.
“The devil take me!” a worried voice said. “They’ve disappeared. It’s witchcraft.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Knapp snarled back. “Spread out. They must be near.”
Meanwhile, the three companions kept going in, deeper and deeper. Prudence waved to get James’s attention, then clarified with hand gestures. He picked up her meaning: You take the lead, cut this way.
Her gestures were smooth and practiced. It must be a sort of hand language she’d learned from the Nipmuk. And that clever bit with the log and the ledge and the pine branch—that must have been a trick picked up from her captors as well.
He shouldn’t have been surprised. It was known even in London that the only way to track natives through the woods was by using other natives. The English were helpless in the wilderness.
James felt some of that helplessness now as he kept going, always steeper and deeper. The cold and wet crawled up his legs, and exhaustion settled into his bones. Prudence insisted they keep going. He began to shiver, and not just with cold.
The woods themselves were almost more frightening than the enemies they’d left behind. The nearest to these woods he’d experienced had been the estates at Fontainebleau, south of Paris, where King Louis had hunted stag and wild boar. But that was a forest where old stone walls and ruined cottages marked human habitation, where if you kept going for a few minutes you’d soon enough come across a trail used by gamekeepers or illegal woodcutters.
This was the edge of the great North Ameri
can wilderness, scarcely a mile or two beyond the last town on the frontier, but already vast and wild and dangerous. Here he saw bear tracks, later a pile of droppings from some deer-like creature, except the pellets were much larger.
Cooper had been taking a turn at cutting a trail and suddenly drew short. “Sweet heavens.”
An enormous creature stood watching them from a dozen feet away. It was shaped like a deer, only six feet high at the shoulder, with an enormous, horse-like head. Its antlers spread wider than a man’s reach, with vast, paddle-like ends that looked like they could pick up a man and toss him twenty feet. It must weigh a hundred stone. Maybe more.
He’d heard of these monsters. A moose.
“Stand still,” Prudence said. “Make no movements.”
The moose stared at them for several tense seconds before turning and strolling casually away. Its legs lifted so high with each step that the deep snow presented it no trouble. It crashed through the pines and was gone. James’s heart was thumping in his ears.
They continued another twenty minutes until they reached a meadow that stretched along the top of the hill. An animal path cut over the ridgeline to the opposite side. From the clearing they could see back toward Winton and the surrounding countryside. At this distance, the village was a tiny, huddled mass of houses in the midst of a vast wilderness. To the north and west, hills and valleys and more hills, all the way to the horizon. Unbroken by any settlement or clearing.
It would take the English a thousand years to settle this continent, James thought, if they ever managed.
To get his mind off his cold, wet feet, he examined the contents of his cloak. He still had his pistols, his coin purse, and his other effects, so far as they would help. What he needed was a satchel of food or some dry socks.
“So we’ve escaped,” James said. “Now what?”
“Let’s say two hours to dusk,” Cooper said glumly. “After that, we freeze and die. My poor wife and kids.”
Crow Hollow Page 18
