Crow Hollow

by Michael Wallace

  Mary buried her head in her mother’s shoulder. She wouldn’t yet talk to James, but she had succumbed to Prudence’s patience and tender caresses. Her English was improving day by day. He guessed she would forget her Abenaki and Nipmuk just as quickly, which was a shame.

  “You’re sure the General Court will be in session?” he asked Prudence. “It is still Christmastide.”

  “Popery and pagan festivals do not put aside the General Court. The committee of land and deeds meets on the final Friday of the month, whether the governor is present or not.”

  “With good fortune, Governor Leverett will have returned from Hartford. If not, if the deputy governor is holding court in his stead, it will be a good sight more difficult. Fitz-Simmons will not surrender without a fight.”

  “Be careful, James.”

  “I am a very careful man.”

  “You won’t confront them alone. You must not.”

  “I will do my duty to my sovereign. If Cooper has fallen, or is false, I’ll have no other choice.”

  She opened her mouth as if she were going to argue, but then she nodded. “You do your duty, and I shall do mine.”

  They looked at each other for a long moment, then Prudence glanced around, as if afraid of prying eyes, before leaning in to kiss him quickly on the mouth. When she came away, she was blushing in a way that was all the more endearing.

  Holding Mary in her cloak, Prudence made her way swiftly up the dirt alleyway into Boston Town, toward her home. When she was out of sight, James gathered himself and moved down the muddy alley that led to the shanties, fishmongers, and alehouses along the waterfront. Now that the coast had thawed with the shift in the weather, it smelled damp, of rotting piers and fish guts.

  The Windlass and Anchor was a disreputable-looking place, the green paint on the door battered and flaking, the windows few and tiny. Greasy smoke trailed up from the chimney, and two bearded fellows with bad teeth stood out front with tankards of grog in hand. They eyed him through narrowed eyes, as if sizing him up for a quick knockdown and purse grab.

  James returned a steely gaze and swept back his cloak to show his dagger, now at his belt. The men stepped aside and let him in.

  The interior was dark, smoky, and cramped. It smelled of cheap pipe smoke and stale body odor. There were furtive glances from the sailors and stevedores crowding around tables, but as soon as they got a good look at him they turned back to their business, which seemed to be dice and cards. Those men out front, he realized, had not been considering robbing him. They were lookouts, ready to give the warning should the city watch of Boston come aiming to crack down on gambling.

  You couldn’t turn seafaring types into good Puritans—that much was universally true. Although James noted, looking around, that other constant of such places—women showing too much skin and too much interest in strange men—was notably absent from the Windlass and Anchor.

  “You have a sharp look about you, friend,” a man said in a low voice.

  James turned, resisting the urge to snatch out his dagger. A short man with a piercing gaze and blackened teeth grinned up at him from the rough chair in which he slouched.

  “Perhaps you are searching for something,” the man continued. “Company, perchance, in this dark place. The winter nights are long and cold.”

  Ah, here it was. They kept the women in the back rooms, out of sight of the enforcers of morality. You could sweep cards into your cloak quickly enough, palm your dice and coins, but hiding women was another matter. That men still managed to smuggle in and hide strumpets in this dangerous corner of Christendom must have taken imagination. But he supposed the rewards equaled the risks.

  “No. I come for ale and a pipe. Nothing more.”

  “I see.” The man sounded disappointed.

  James was fighting his own disappointment. There was no sign of Cooper, or of Joseph McMurdle, the Scotsman who was head of His Majesty’s service in New York. Assuming James could recognize the man—it had been several years now.

  That meant he was alone. He grabbed an empty chair and dragged it into the corner farthest from the hearth. There, he hoped to stay unnoticed for a stretch while he turned over matters in his head. Better to save his last few precious coins than waste them in a place such as this. But the barman found him at once, and shortly he ended up changing one of his last two shillings for small coins and ended up with a tankard of beer.

  The weaselly fellow with the bad teeth hadn’t stopped watching him. A few minutes later, the man came up, grinning, and stood there while James stared off in the other direction.

  “Well, then?” James asked sharply at last, without turning. “What do you want, man?”

  “She’s a pretty half-breed lady from Martinique. Good teeth and a nice bottom.”

  “I don’t want your confounded, poxy whore. Now leave me alone.”

  The man’s grin spread. “Why, Master Bailey, I’d heard you were a man of healthy appetites.”

  The fellow had put him off his guard, and James whipped his head around at the sound of his name before he recognized the feint for what it was. He smoothed over his face, but too late.

  “I don’t know that name. My name is Clyde.”

  “I thought it was you. Quickly, now. Your friends are waiting in the back room.”

  “Friends?”

  “From New York. Come, there are others watching this place.”

  James rose to his feet and followed the man toward the back door. The man winked at one of the tables of dice players, and the men sneered at James with knowing looks and lewd suggestions. One man cupped a hand and thrust his index finger in and out. Laughter.

  James didn’t trust the shifty man who led him out of the room, so he kept his hand inside his cloak as he followed him down a hallway and then up a set of rotting, half-broken stairs. If this was a trap, if they’d tortured Cooper and now meant to murder James in a back room, he swore he’d sell his life dearly. First the pistols, then the knife.

  The man threw open the door. There, to James’s surprise, was a comely young mulatto woman. She wore kohl around her eyes and a beeswax lipstick so scarlet that it gave her mouth a wide, obscene appearance.

  “What the devil?” he started to say, turning toward the shifty fellow to demand he be let back downstairs.

  Laughter came from the far corner of the room. Two men sat on a long sea trunk holding pistols, which they were swabbing out and cleaning. One was Cooper. The other, he recognized after a moment, was McMurdle.

  “Why, you ruddy scoundrels,” James said, but he was delighted.

  The two men shook his hand heartily, and Cooper slapped him on the back. James glanced again at the woman.

  “That is Marianne,” Cooper said.

  “Pleased to meet you, monsieur,” she said in a French-tinged accent and held her hand out in the dainty fashion of a fine lady.

  “She isn’t a whore,” McMurdle added quickly.

  “Not when I can help matters, no,” she said.

  McMurdle explained. Marianne was a spy in the West Indies, where England had long cast a covetous eye on rich colonies like Guadelupe and Martinique. They were more valuable, in their way, than the whole of New England. And the French were notoriously loose-lipped when it came to boasting to beautiful women, which Marianne most assuredly was.

  The shorter man with the bad teeth was named Vandermeer, a Dutchman with an English mother, who worked carrying goods up the Hudson River between Manhattan and Fort Frederick and spying on the Dutch towns along the way. Now that New York was firmly in English control yet again, his was a sleepy post.

  Cooper told of his own adventures. After escaping the woods, he’d nearly been ensnared on the road south from Springfield. Only a warning from a friend when he reached Windsor told him that riders were searching for him on the road ahead. His friend loaned him a horse, and Cooper bypassed the highway and arrived in Hartford, where he made contact with their other spy. This was an old man named Patterson, w
ho provided resupply and information but nothing more. Cooper was almost to New York when two men tried to ride him down. They’d chased him for nearly twenty miles before he came into Dutch country, and here the two men giving pursuit had turned around. From there, it was a simple matter of making contact with McMurdle in Manhattan and arranging for a return to Boston.

  As Cooper told his story, and James in turn relayed his own tale of time among the Abenaki, Marianne scooted the men from the sea trunk and changed her clothing, seemingly unashamed to be doing so in front of four men. She stripped out of her petticoats until she stood in her small clothes, then took a long linen strip and used it to bind her breasts flat. She pulled on a man’s shirt, a jerkin, breeches, and a cloak. She pinned her hair up and pulled a cap over it. Finally, she used a rag to wipe the face paint away, and with a change to her posture she had somehow transitioned from a beautiful woman to a dusky, smooth-faced young man.

  If one got too close, or spotted her in daylight, one would see through the ruse. But at night, she could pass for a fifth man.

  Even so, five people did not seem enough to confront Knapp and Fitz-Simmons as they met with the General Court. James had hoped for eight, maybe even a dozen men in total, but according to McMurdle, the old New Amsterdam spy apparatus had been almost completely dismantled. The Dutch were more concerned with their profits than with resuming control of the colony, and England had proven happy to continue the existing trade. As a result, the other men in His Majesty’s service had been sent to Quebec, Florida, the West Indies, even Mexico. They’d been fortunate in their timing as Marianne’s ship was in port, resupplied and ready to sail. Otherwise, they’d have been only four.

  “It took little persuading for Captain Dupont to stop in Boston instead of sailing back to France,” Marianne said. “The justification to his crew is to add furs to the indigo we’re smuggling from Martinique back to England, but really it was because I wanted to see Boston on a whim. Or so Dupont believes.”

  Marianne had a charming accent, and McMurdle seemed enamored of her. Indeed, James had caught his old confederate stealing glances at the young woman while she dressed. Something Cooper had said about the operation in Manhattan caught James’s attention.

  “Then there were only the two of you in the whole of New York?” he asked.

  “Soon to be only one,” McMurdle said. “Vandermeer will stay. Marianne and I will continue north to Quebec. The Crown has designs on Canada.”

  James had his doubts about McMurdle’s motives. It took so long for information to pass back and forth across the ocean that agents of the Crown had a certain autonomy, following their own instincts until called on for specific purposes. Yet how much of this Quebec scheme was in service of the Crown, and how much in service of a beautiful woman? Rather more of the latter than the former, James suspected.

  “I am glad to hear it,” James said, “but there are other reasons to maintain strength in New York besides the Dutch. It’s a den of smuggling. Ships of every nation pass through her port. And a good deal of information comes with it.”

  “Aye, if you care for that sort of tedious business. No adventure, no excitement.”

  A little less excitement sounded like a welcome change at the moment, James thought. Still, he was captain of these men until given instructions to the contrary, and he wanted McMurdle in Manhattan until he had a chance to return to London to clarify. The man wouldn’t like the orders; James determined to wait until this business was finished before delivering them.

  “It must be nigh on sunset,” James said. “You have a sword for me too? Good. Let’s get prepared.”

  “Clarify your intentions,” Cooper said.

  “The moment it’s dark, we move on the General Court.”

  A worried look passed over the man’s face. “And then?”

  “And then I intend to arrest the seditious government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Prudence came quietly up the side street to the Stone household. She kept her head low, her daughter against her breast. It was dusk, the light failing, but she was cautious nonetheless. She couldn’t risk getting recognized by Goody Brockett or one of the other gossips of the Third Church. Word would spread, alerting the enemies already searching for her.

  She slipped down the alley between the Stone house and Goodman Upton’s home to its north. The passage was barely wide enough to pull a handcart loaded with firewood, and she took comfort in the deep shadows between the two houses.

  Prudence slipped through the gate and into the backyard, where the woodshed and snow-covered vegetable garden lay. It was quiet except for the sound of softly clucking chickens roosting inside their coop, safe for the evening against raccoons and weasels.

  The back side of the house had no windows, and when she came up to the door she could hear nothing. Who was inside? The reverend, his family, and their servants? Or Knapp’s men, waiting to seize her? Her heart quickened.

  Prudence thought briefly about trying a ruse, perhaps letting the door bang open, as if left ajar and caught by the wind. Then she could see who came to latch it up tight. If it was her sister, Prudence could test the situation, voice her suspicions, see if Anne dismissed them. Could this all be a fantasy spun in her own head?

  No, she wouldn’t do it.

  She’d hid herself too long under this roof. Writing her narrative, begging her sister and the reverend for aid while they soothed her with meaningless assurances. She’d convinced herself there was no alternative. What more could she have done? She couldn’t venture into the wilderness alone, and she lacked the strength to compel others to assist her.

  It was a feeble effort, and it had cost her dearly. The injured child in her arms attested to that: torn between two mothers, two peoples. Only gradually would those wounds heal.

  “Find your courage,” she whispered. “Do it now.”

  Mary lifted her head from where it was buried against Prudence’s breast. “What, Mama?”

  “Shh. You must keep very still.”

  Prudence climbed the three steps, her boots loud on the wood. She swung open the door and entered the back pantry. Old John Porter was there, back turned, latching the oatmeal bin and checking the other barrels and boxes containing the dry foodstuffs to make sure they were sealed against mice. The smell of the room—the flour, the corn, the dried sage and thyme on the shelf—sent a wave of longing washing through her. This was her home. Her family, her people. Yet she had come to denounce them.

  She tried to sneak past Old John, but he must have caught her movement from the side of his vision, for he turned before she could get through the door.

  “Bless, what is this?” he said. “Prudence?” His eyes opened wide when he spotted Mary, and they began to fill with tears as a wide smile broke his face. “Can it be? Praise the Lord, it is!”

  As of yet there was no stirring from the rest of the house. Prudence put her hand against Old John’s wrinkled cheek.

  “Bless you, John. I always knew you were true.”

  “GOODY STONE, REVEREND!” he boomed. “OUR PRUDIE HAS RETURNED! AND SHE CARRIES A MIRACLE!”

  Prudence didn’t wait to hear what this shouted pronouncement would bring, instead pushing into the keeping room. A fire crackled in the hearth, where Alice Branch slid a loaf of dough into the brick oven while Anne tended to the soup kettle. The reverend sat at the table, writing, his fingers stained with ink. Several of the children read their primers or mended socks.

  For a moment, nobody moved, even as Prudence stood in front of them, holding her daughter, and Old John burst into the room behind her, waving his hands and shouting in excitement.

  Anne dropped the ladle into the soup and came running. Her eyes were shining, her face aglow. Yet her tone was disapproving. “Oh, Prudie. What trouble you have caused. What trouble! Is this—is it . . . ?”

  “Mary. My daughter. Sit down. Hold her. I have matters to attend to.”

  Anne seeme
d taken aback by Prudence’s hard tone. But she obeyed at once. She stared at Mary, who barely squirmed but looked back with her wide, innocent expression.

  By now, the rest of the Stone children had come racing down the stairs to stand gawking. Lucy Branch was there too, her mouth forming a surprised little circle. The reverend rose from the table, blinking, as if still unable to understand what he was looking at. His quill dropped on the paper, where a blotch of ink spread over his letters.

  “Children, servants,” he said. “Leave us now.”

  “The children, yes,” Prudence said. “But not the servants. They stay.”

  Stone’s face darkened. “Hold your tongue, woman. I am the master of this house, not you.”

  Prudence hardened her heart, forced herself to stand upright. “You have surrendered your moral authority, Reverend. A terrible and wicked sin has taken place under your roof, and as God is my witness, I will have it out.”

  “How dare you?” His voice shook.

  “Henry,” Anne said in a quiet voice. “They said Prudie was dead, yet here she is. And she brings her daughter. Something momentous has come to pass. I want to know what.”

  Stone opened his mouth, then closed it abruptly. He turned to the others, who were still gawking. “Children, go. Servants, remain.”

  Prudence waited until the children had left, then said, “Everyone sit down.”

  The Branch sisters took seats at the table, together with Old John Porter, who looked confused. He cupped his hands to his ears. The reverend came past Prudence, studied her face, and sat in the double-wide bench next to his wife, who still held Mary. Only Prudence remained standing.

  “Anne, who said I was dead?”

  “Samuel Knapp.” Anne licked her lips. “Truth, it was Goodman Walker, but Knapp sent him.”

  “Walker, hmm? Of the General Court?”

  “Aye.” Anne frowned. “What is this about? What happened? And why did you leave with those men? Where are they now?”

  Prudence ignored the questions. She turned to the reverend. “Where is my money?”