“Such gloom,” Prudence said. “Keep faith, the both of you.”
“I see no way out of this predicament,” Cooper said. “I only pray that death comes quick.”
Prudence wore a curious sort of smile that James found comforting. After that little trick escaping Knapp and his brutes, he was more than happy to trust that she had a plan.
“Only Englishmen freeze in the woods,” Prudence said.
“That is hardly a comfort,” Cooper said. “Being English, and not Indian.”
But James understood. “So perhaps we should follow the ways of the Indian. Prudie?”
She gave the two men a smile and a bold wink, before setting off again without another word. The two men gaped at each other for a long moment, then rushed to catch up.
James was relieved when Prudence took charge and cut down any objections Cooper voiced.
Since entering the woods, James had felt jangled, helpless. For the first time since entering New England, he had no plan. The cold, the loss of their horses, and above all, the wilderness itself left him feeling not unlike how he’d felt in those terrible days at sea, when the storms hit and immense waves smashed brutally over the deck.
The forest was alive. Noises in the trees and brush, the way the upper branches shook from some unseen, unfelt breeze. It was as if the trees were moving of their own accord, passing whispers about interlopers. Every twig snap or bird song sounded like an Indian, Nipmuks watching, waiting to take their revenge.
He thought of all the times he’d scoffed at tales of faeries in the woods, or witches holding their black masses deep in some hidden cove. Those stories didn’t seem so implausible now.
Prudence found a hollow between a pair of giant, knobby boulders that appeared to have been dragged from some great distance and then dropped. She told the two men to break off the dead lower branches of pine trees and set them on one of the rocks where they’d stay dry. She asked for James to lend her his dagger. When she had it, she set off back the way they’d come.
“Where has she gone?” Cooper asked, his voice tight, nervous. “’Twill be dark soon.”
There was some comfort in knowing that James wasn’t alone in his fears. “Lucifer only knows.”
“Shh, don’t speak that name.” Cooper glanced around, frightened.
Aloud, the man’s fears sounded ridiculous. And that made James feel better. “What, are you afraid you’ll draw Old Scratch?”
“I don’t know,” Cooper said, defensively. “Maybe.”
Prudence returned, James’s dagger in one hand and a small bundle of what looked like broken thatch in the other.
“One day the Sachusett warriors got hold of a cask of spirits in one of their raids,” she said. “They got roaring drunk that night. Strange Indians came into camp, and they started drinking too. One of these strangers pulled me aside. He stank of alcohol. I thought he was going to—well, you understand.”
As she spoke, she handed Cooper the bundle, which turned out to be shredded bark, and returned the dagger to James. Then she took out his pistol and slapped the barrel against her palm to dislodge the wad of powder and ball inside. She gave James the ball and collected the powder into the palm of her hand. At last he understood what she was about.
“He spoke excellent English,” she continued. “Claimed he was a Wampanoag. ‘When you English came here, you were babes,’ he told me. ‘Sick and starving. We showed you how to gather clams and oysters, how to plant corn, how to net alewives from the streams. Now that you are settled, your cattle multiply across the land. Your settlers kill the game and clear the forests. You are like a child who has grown up and throws his father out of his house.’”
“That’s hardly true,” Cooper grumbled. “The settlers at Plymouth had scarcely landed when they came under attack by those brutes.”
Now that he could see what Prudence intended, James helped her use the broken sticks to make a good nesting spot for a flame. There, they placed most of the shredded bark. James kept the rest aside. Prudence added a pinch of black powder to what was already primed in the pan, drew back the cock, and struck it with the flint. At the flare, James held a bit of bark to the pan. When it caught, he shielded it from the wind with his other hand, blowing on it gently as he tucked the flaming end into the nest of sticks and bark.
Prudence protected the small fire with her body while she fed it sticks. “A few weeks later,” she continued, “they said that the Wampanoag warrior had been killed.”
“Who was he?” James asked.
“He said his name was Metacomet.”
Cooper drew in his breath. “King Philip. The villain himself.”
“That wasn’t in your narrative,” James said.
“The Indians destroyed Winton, slaughtering men, women, children. They tortured my husband to death. They took me and my daughter into captivity. At the end, they tore Mary from my arms. How does it sound if I report the enemy’s perspective with such obvious sympathy?”
James saw her point. And yet. “If neutrally told . . .”
“There is no neutrality in the telling,” Prudence said firmly. “The words themselves shape the truth of the matter.”
That was the end of the discussion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It wasn’t long before the three companions were sitting with their backs against the adjacent boulder, which absorbed and reflected heat. The yellowed ice encrusting the edges had first dripped and now trailed a steady stream of water, but they’d channeled it to run away from their makeshift camp. Broken pine boughs enclosed the two boulders, sheltering them against both the wind and prying eyes who might spot the campfire from a distance.
As he warmed back to near alertness in front of Prudence’s fire, James’s wits began to thaw as well. A plan coalesced in his mind. He found a flat stone and took out Prudence’s diary pages and his quill. The plume was bent after the adventures of the past few days, but not broken. He removed a vial of amber liquid from a cloak pocket, unscrewed the top, then blew in his fist to warm it before beginning to write between the lines of Prudence’s fine, even script. He scrawled by feel, rather than by sight, since he couldn’t see the words.
Prudence saw what he was doing and tried to snatch away her pages. “Don’t deface that!”
He held them out of reach. “Don’t worry, I’m not harming it.” When she’d calmed, he showed her.
“There’s nothing there. I don’t understand.”
“He’s writing an invisible message,” Cooper explained. “The ink is a tincture of onion juices, which gives its message only when heated over a candle. If James is intercepted, it will only appear that he’s carrying the missing chapter from your narrative. He won’t be hanged as a spy.”
That was mostly true, except that James wasn’t going to be the one carrying the papers. But he wouldn’t explain this until later, as he still had a few details to consider.
When he finished, they used the failing light to construct a few snares of bent saplings and twisted loops of birch bark to catch a hare or squirrel while they slept. Prudence searched the hillside for likely places to set them. Meanwhile, it would be a hungry night—nobody had grabbed food from the saddlebags before Knapp and his men drove them into the woods.
By the time they returned to the fire, James had put the final pieces of his plan together. He sketched out the bones of it for Cooper, who listened with a deepening scowl when he heard how James would send him off alone to summon help from New York.
“They’ll kill me,” Cooper said when James had finished.
“Only if you’re caught.” James slapped his old friend on the shoulder to give him courage. “This is no worse than that time at Versailles, when the pope’s assassin tried to knife you in the spleen. You took that for an adventure, remember?”
“I didn’t have a wife and children then,” he said gloomily.
“You’d rather forge into the wilderness with Prudence?”
Cooper grunted. “I’ll need supplies.
I can’t set off for Hartford like this. I’d better return to Springfield, first.”
“They’ll be watching your house,” James said. “And you obviously cannot trust your shifty fellow.”
“Nay, I won’t trust Burrows,” Cooper said. “But I know Springfield, the back roads and country lanes. I know unguarded homes where I might pilfer a meal or two.” He glanced at Prudence. “A shame that it’s necessary.”
“I made an unforgivable error,” Prudence said. “Why did I write that letter? What madness took hold of me?”
“Set it aside,” James said. “Anyway, we can’t be certain that is what caused our troubles. Knapp may have discovered our ruse in Hartford, then doubled back, guessing correctly we’d be riding to Winton.”
“The biggest difficulty isn’t Springfield,” Cooper said. “It’s what happens when I ride south into Connecticut. I’ll have to pass through the breadth of the colony to reach New York.”
“There’s a man in Hartford. Another fellow taking the king’s money. Ten pounds, six, these seven years. He won’t accompany you to New York, but he’ll hire the men who will.”
James took out his purse and removed three gold guineas, which he placed in Cooper’s palm. “This should be sufficient to pay your expenses.”
“Knapp will have spread word,” Cooper said. “No doubt offered a reward. Do you suppose ten pounds, six is enough to compel this man of yours?”
“Ten pounds, six, and an oath of loyalty. The same oath you and I took in all good faith.”
“I see. And do you intend to share his name or will you have me knocking on every door in Hartford until I find the man?”
“I wrote his name and street on the last page of Prudence’s chapter. Candle flame will give up the secret.”
Cooper stared at the coins, still sitting in his palm. They glowed a ruddy yellow in the light of the fire.
With every moment of hesitation, James’s concern deepened. Cooper had lived six years in New England, married a handsome Puritan woman, and fathered her children. He’d survived the war, had voiced strong opinions during the previous two days about the natives, had even let slip once or twice criticism of the mother country.
Only one thing kept Richard Cooper from being a New Englander in every sense of the word: twenty pounds a year from the treasury of King Charles. Those were meager wages to buy a man’s loyalty, oath or no.
But swear the oath, he had. Take the money, he did. He’d have known, even as he sired children by Sarah Cooper, prospered his business, and cut new notches in his belt to match his swelling affluence, that someday the Crown would come knocking, demanding that he do his duty.
Prudence must have been chewing over the same worries. “James,” she said. “Are you certain?”
“Have faith. Master Cooper will do the honorable thing.”
Cooper let out a long sigh. At last he tucked away the gold coins. “Aye, I’ll do it.” He looked up. “It may well be safer than your path. Are you still set on entering Indian territory?”
“That I am,” James said. “If there are survivors from Sachusett and Crow Hollow, I intend to question them.”
“Tell me your suspicions.”
“We know there is a deep conspiracy. We struck down three men on the highway, yet Knapp was able to raise several more to beset us in Winton.”
“Motivation?” Cooper asked.
“At first I suspected hostility toward the Crown. I’d hoped it, in fact. No greater justification would I need for seizing the charter of the colony than open sedition.”
Prudence’s face fell at his bald declaration of intent, but she didn’t say anything.
“But no longer?” Cooper asked.
“No longer,” James confirmed. “According to Widow Hull, Samuel Knapp and William Fitz-Simmons now own vast tracts of land on the frontier. Some belonged to Sir Benjamin, the rest to the unfortunate Indians whose bones lie moldering amongst the desolation of their villages.”
“The Indians brought that vengeance down upon their own heads,” Cooper said. “They made the first attack.”
“Perhaps.” James was still unsettled on that score. “But as for the conspirators, I suspect each and every one of the men we have faced would be found in possession of land that had once belonged to another.”
“The beneficiaries of the war,” Cooper said. “I suppose someone must profit thereby.”
“If it were only that, then why so anxious to stop us? Why attack us on the road and risk massacring us not a hundred paces from the Winton commons? Why murder Peter Church, if not because he spoke Nipmuk and Abenaki?”
“And the reverend?” Cooper asked. “Where does he figure in this scheme?”
“He figures nowhere,” Prudence said, firmly. “That much I know for certain.”
“He was quick to offer lodging to two strangers,” James said.
“That was simple hospitality!”
“And he held court with the others when they seized us in Boston. Knapp and Fitz-Simmons trusted his counsel. Why, if they are thieves and murderers and he is not?”
“They trusted him because he’s our minister, and it was his congregation Peter disrupted. Please, James. I assure you he is innocent.”
James admired her loyalty toward her sister’s husband, but with every passing day he was more convinced she was wrong. Stone had sold Sir Benjamin’s land to these men, had no doubt pocketed most of the wealth instead of keeping it in trust for the widow.
There were no other suspects in the Stone house. He could rule out Prudence and the children, and he couldn’t see a way to implicate Prudence’s sister, either. Of the servants, Old John Porter had proven himself with decades of service and was deaf as a stump. Lucy and Alice Branch, buxom and delicious as they were in appearance, seemed mentally incapable of concocting such a scheme, no matter how one looked at it. That left only the reverend.
“If he is innocent,” James said, “I’ll testify on his behalf, I assure you. If not, he must pay for his crimes.”
“If you are so certain,” Cooper said, “then why set into the wilderness to look for the Indians?”
“They have valuable information. Why did the Nipmuk attack when they did? Why did Knapp slaughter them at Crow Hollow?”
“You won’t get answers. You may as well trust the devil himself as those savages.”
“If the devil held the truth of the matter,” James said, “then I would question him, too, and without hesitation.”
Cooper smiled at this. “Very well, I see you’re determined. But promise me one thing, Bailey. It’s not for love of a woman, is it?”
Prudence stiffened next to James.
“No,” James said, perhaps a little too quickly. “But make no mistake. If Prudence’s daughter is still alive, I intend to see her returned to her mother’s arms.”
She reached for his hand in the dark and squeezed it.
“I don’t believe it,” Cooper said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “I don’t believe either of you.”
The fire died in the night, and the wind gathered its strength until it shrieked through the branches of their shelter. The three of them slept huddled together, shivering, turning, mumbling in and out of sleep. The awful night seemed endless, and it was with relief that James finally woke from one of a dozen fitful dozes to see the gray seeping through the bare branches. One by one they groaned and climbed to their feet.
James inspected the feet and toes of all present for frostbite. Prudence’s chilblains had returned, but other than that, all seemed to be in order. He was relieved. It was a wretched thing to be caught out on a winter night in the woods. Without Prudence’s clever thinking, they’d have suffered much worse.
Only one of the traps had done its duty, catching a gray squirrel with huge eyes. At least he thought it was a squirrel. When he held it up it had long membranes between its legs, giving it an almost bat-like appearance. The others called it a sugar squirrel and said that they glided from
tree to tree and in the spring lapped the sweet sap from maples. It sounded fanciful, but there was no denying the creature’s strange appearance.
“Enjoy your meal,” Cooper said as he stomped his boots and slapped his hands together to warm them. “I’m not so hungry I’ll eat a furry rat. Anyway, I should have food by afternoon.”
By the time Prudence had stoked the fire, and James had the creature gutted, spitted, and cooking over the flames, Cooper was setting off over the hill through the snow. A few moments later, he was out of sight. Moments after that, James could no longer hear him, either.
“Will he be all right?” Prudence asked.
“I hope so. But it’s dangerous business, there’s no denying.”
“And you trust him not to betray us?”
James turned the squirrel, whose skin had begun to sizzle. “As much as I trust anything in New England. Which is to say I’m hopeful, but not certain.”
“That’s hardly comforting. Anyway, you can trust me, James.”
“I know.” He gave the squirrel another turn. So little meat. “Cooper was trustworthy enough in France. After Sir Benjamin, he was the man most responsible for teaching me what I know about the craft. At his hand, I learned how to pick locks, how to formulate coded messages, even how to fight with the rapier and saber. But something has changed.”
“He’s older. That settles a man.”
“Older, maybe. And he’s a father, with responsibilities that distract from his duty to his king.” James considered. “Or maybe it’s the wilderness, the frontier. The war with the Indians. New England seems to change a man. The English I meet here are different, somehow, from even the Puritans back home. More earnest, perhaps. Even more devout.”
He glanced up from his work cooking the squirrel, expecting her to argue, but instead she looked thoughtful.
“I was born in Boston,” she said, “and have never been to England, so I don’t know. But it does seem to me that the English arrive in the New World—how shall I voice it?—cynical and hardened. And yet overconfident at the same time. They’ve never seen a gale howling off the Atlantic, capsizing boats and washing away coastal villages. They’ve never set off for the next town not knowing if they would be attacked by wolves or murdered by angry natives. They don’t live on the edge of an unknown wilderness.”
Crow Hollow Page 19
