The Sea Hath Spoken

by Stephen Lewis

  “We have just had a very special visitor,” she said.

  “That I know,” Catherine replied.

  Abigail gestured with her shoulder toward her mother.

  “You can ask her about it,” she said, “I have nothing to say.”

  Miriam looked down, and Catherine saw that she was unwilling to meet her glance. She waited. The babe continued sucking. He pulled back its head and screwed up its face. Abigail, though, was staring at her mother. The babe tried the breast again, and then howled.

  “You had better give him the other,” Catherine said.

  Abigail started, and then nodded. She switched her babe to her other breast and he grabbed it between his tiny fingers. He fastened his lips to the nipple, sucked once hard, his cheeks extended like a squirrel carrying nuts, and then drooped his head and was asleep.

  Something clunked onto the floor. Catherine turned to see Miriam stooping, her hands groping beneath the door which still stood open. She dropped fully to her knees and ran her hand along the floor until she found the little sack. She stood up and dropped the sack into the pouch she wore around her waist.

  “How much did he give you?” Catherine asked.

  “Enough,” Miriam said, “and that is all I intend to tell you.”

  Ordinarily, Catherine’s sympathies would be engaged by the obviously desperate plight Miriam King, her daughter, and now grandson, faced. As a widow with no male relatives to provide assistance, Miriam scraped out her sustenance any way she could, mending garments of the rich although she was not gifted with a needle, or begging when all else failed. As a servant in the governor’s house, Abigail was paid with room and board and an occasional coin, the main economic benefit to the arrangement for her mother being removing the daughter from the mother’s daily responsibility. But now daughter and new babe were back where there was little food or money, and little hope for improvement.

  Catherine understood all of this, but she knew that Miriam had just sold not only her self respect but that of her daughter for the coins in that pouch. And moreover, it was likely that she had traded away any chance of the child having its father, or her daughter a husband. But if she were honest with herself, what probably rankled her most was the untenable thought that Jonathan Peters would escape any responsibility.

  “You have made your bargain,” she said, “and well I can understand why you have,” Catherine declared.

  “Can you indeed?” Miriam replied, her tone edged with the weight of the eternal contempt of the poor when faced with someone of better circumstances who claimed to understand their misery. “I think not.

  “But yet I can,” Catherine insisted. “I was not born rich.”

  “Well, then, remember when you were not and you will have nothing further to chastise me with,” Miriam said.

  “The governor called your daughter a ‘whore,’ and her child a ‘bastard.’ In your pouch you have coins that perhaps have bought your silence on this matter. But not mine.”

  “What then do you intend to do, Mistress Williams?” Abigail asked. There was hope in her eyes.

  “What I can, child, what I can,” Catherine replied, and then she left.

  * * * *

  The thought took Massaquoit by surprise. For that matter, it was less a thought than an image, one that caused a stirring in him that had been an everyday occurrence when his wife was alive, but which he had now almost forgotten. He had seen her years before in a clearing not far from where he now was as he approached Niantic. At that time, he saw her as the mother of two angry young sons, who would not accept the English god as the others in the village had. However, his history with her went further back to a time neither wanted to remember, and so they had parted. He had thought of her from time to time when some news from the village reached Newbury, but he had resisted the urge to renew their acquaintance.

  Now, though, he felt anticipation rise in him. He had begun to tire after his walk, but his feet regained their spring, and he quickened his pace along the path that led from the clearing to the outskirts of the village. He saw smoke curling up between the trees, and he heard dogs barking. The path circled around a small rise, and then straightened again. He paused at the point where it emerged from between two tall pines and gave onto a flat field of brown weeds. A scrawny dog lifted its head and growled. The smoke was rising above the wigwam that sat on the far edge of the field. It was one of a dozen or so that ringed a central structure, constructed in the English fashion of frame and planks with a thatched roof. Massaquoit recognized that building as the meetinghouse, provided after years of acrimonious debate, by the English of Newbury to house Christian Indians.

  Of a sudden, he felt a weariness that had nothing to do with his journey to the village. Rather he seemed to breathing in the settled apathy of the village’s residents. As he looked about, there were few signs of activity. Here a man sat in front of a wigwam, his eyes vacant; there a woman mashed corn in a pestle and mortar. Behind the wigwams were gardens, most overgrown by weeds and offering corn and beans no more than half their usual size. As he walked among the wigwams, children looked at him with bright and curious eyes, but the adults either looked away, or stared at him with suspicion. He had heard that Rawandag, an old warrior, recently returned from a distant village, still had his heart hardened against the English and had gathered a few of the younger men to his cause, but Massaquoit saw no sign of either them or their energy in the lifeless atmosphere he now entered.

  In front of the meetinghouse, he saw someone he thought he recognized. He walked closer and confirmed that the young man in his early twenties was the same individual he had seen years before in the clearing in the company of his mother and his younger brother. The young man smiled.

  “Matthew, have you come to join us? Meeting is tomorrow.”

  Massaquoit studied the confident face, searching his memory for a name to attach to it. He could not remember.

  “I saw you last in the woods, when your younger brother wanted to put an arrow into my chest. But I do not recall your name,” Massaquoit said.

  “It is no matter, for that name no longer exists. I am Peter, as you are Matthew.”

  “Only in Newbury,” Massaquoit replied.

  “I do not want to quarrel,” Peter said.

  Massaquoit nodded.

  “I have not seen your brother in many years.”

  Peter hesitated, sadness in his eyes, but then with an internal shrug that manifested itself in an audible exhalation, he answered.

  “After he helped you, he lived with your mother for some time. He was confused. He did not know if he was an Indian or a white man, and so he was neither. He has come back, and I think he is still uncertain. He says he has something to sell to the English that will buy him an English woman.”

  Massaquoit remembered the figured that dashed onto the beach to retrieve whatever the gull had dropped.

  “Do you know what he is selling?”

  Peter shrugged.

  “As I said, he is confused. You did not come to seek him, did you?”

  “No,” Massaquoit replied. “I am looking for an English,” he said, looking toward the closed door of the meetinghouse.

  Peter’s face darkened.

  “Then you will not find him inside there.”

  “Is he not a minister.”

  “He wears the clothing of one. I was preaching here before he arrived.”

  “So you are angry that he has replaced you?”

  Peter shook his head.

  “I would be happy to have one better informed open God’s holy word with more skill than I can with my own poor abilities. If he did that, I would be more than content.”

  The idea struck Massaquoit, just a variation on a story that was now very stale.

  “He has found other interests, then, away from his uncle’s eyes.”

  “Yes,” Peter said, “and we are powerless to control him.”

  “But I am not,” Massaquoit declared. “Where might I
now find him?”

  Peter turned around as though looking through the closed door.

  “There is a wigwam on the other side. Its owner went away, and is not coming back. A girl plays in there sometimes. The English minister...”

  Massaquoit heard what Peter did not want to say.

  “And you did nothing?”

  Peter hung his head like a beaten dog.

  “What could I?” he asked, his voice plaintive. “He is the governor’s nephew, and the governor raised the money for our meetinghouse.”

  “A child who plays in a deserted wigwam,” Massaquoit snapped. He started to trot in the direction of the wigwam. Peter put his hand on Massaquoit’s arm as though to stop him.

  “Do not make trouble for us,” he said.

  Massaquoit stared at him until Peter relaxed his grip.

  “I have a message to him from Mistress Williams. That is my business here. I intend no trouble for you more than you have already created for yourselves by abandoning our ways and pretending that you have become as the English.”

  “We do not pretend,” Peter said, “and the old ways failed us. Nobody should know that better than you.”

  The remark stung, because it was right.

  “That may be,” he said, “but I must be about my business.”

  He walked around the meetinghouse, and at its rear he saw a wigwam with an untended garden some fifty feet straight ahead. He approached it. As he did, his eyes caught a movement beneath a tree to the right of the wigwam. He made out the shape of a woman. She put up her hand as though to stop his approach. He continued, although his pulse quickened at seeing Willeweenaw again. He considered for a moment, and then he veered away from the wigwam toward her.

  “I have just spoken with your son,” he said.

  “He told you about this,” she said, pointing to the wigwam.

  “He did.”

  “And you came anyway. You have a nose for trouble.”

  “I have a commission.

  “From the English woman?”

  “Yes, to bring back the English inside there.”

  She shrugged.

  “I cannot stop you.”

  “Do you want me to?” he asked.

  She did not hesitate.

  “No.”

  He nodded and turned to the wigwam. He heard a loud slap, and a muffled moan. He hastened his step. He pulled open the flap and saw the white buttocks of Jonathan Peters, who was crouched above a girl no more than twelve or thirteen. His hand was over her mouth, and her eyes were wide and starting. Jonathan was about to descend onto and into her, when Massaquoit reached him, and with one blow to the back of his neck rendered him unconscious. He rolled off the girl, who jumped to her feet, and pulled down her dress. She stared wildly at Massaquoit for a moment. He expected her to flee, but she dropped to her knees and reached under the mat on which she had been lying. She pulled something out, and fled through the flap. As she did, she caromed off of Willeweenaw.

  Willeweenaw watched the departing back of the girl and then turned to Massaquoit.

  “You see how it is,” she said.

  Massaquoit began to nod, but Willeweenaw put her palms on his cheeks.

  “No, that is not all,” she said. “She is Minnehaha, my sister’s daughter. She runs now to her cousin, my son, Ninigret.”

  Jonathan moaned from inside the wigwam, and Massaquoit looked in that direction.

  “I must take this English back. I need to know what the girl carried with her.”

  Willeweenaw shrugged.

  “I am sure your old friend can tell you that.”

  “Wequashcook?”

  “Of course.”

  Jonathan now crawled out of the wigwam. Massaquoit took a step toward him, and he cowered.

  “I will offer you no resistance,” he said.

  “That is very wise,” Massaquoit replied.

  Chapter Five

  Minister Davis stood in Catherine’s front room. He was accompanied by his niece, Grace. Catherine saw the fearful expression in the young woman’s eyes. She could not give voice to her assurance that she would not reveal Grace’s secret, but she took her hand and gave it a warm squeeze. Grace returned the pressure and her countenance almost audibly relaxed.

  “I hope you will permit me to talk to the young people,” Minister Davis said.

  “To what purpose?” Catherine asked, although she well knew the answer.

  “Why, to see if they have been lessoned by their punishment.”

  “You believe the whip opens the mind?”

  “Surely, it is well known.”

  “How do they mend?” Grace asked, and then blushed as her uncle frowned at her. “I did witness their correction,” she added. “The young man’s back, as he was on the ground, all I could see was the blood, and I had to avert my eyes.”

  “Please excuse my niece’s impudence,” Minister Davis said. “She would accompany me here to see for herself that he and his sister do not suffer overmuch. She has a too tender heart.”

  Catherine knew that Grace’s interest in Roger had nothing to do with her uncle’s concern for the young man’s soul. For a moment, she was back in Alford, a young girl captivated by the dark eyes and broad shoulders of a clerk who worked in her father’s textile business. Her father had frowned upon a romance that promised no material gain, as the young man was poor with no prospects of becoming rich, and Catherine had dutifully turned her eyes elsewhere. That memory flickered before her mind’s eye, and she felt, so many years later, a pang of regret.

  “My servant is dressing their wounds now,” Catherine said. “Perhaps Grace can assist.”

  Minister Davis looked at her for a moment, and she thought she saw there an expression not unlike that which she had seen in her father’s eyes when she had announced that the young clerk might seek permission to court her.

  “I have come to pray with them, Mistress Williams, not to play the surgeon. And if they are able, perhaps to dispute with them, so as to show them their errors.”

  The stairs creaked under a heavy tread, and they turned to see Phyllis coming downstairs. She was holding an empty jar in one hand, and a rag in the other. She offered a quick, almost imperceptible bow toward the minister and a suspicious glance toward Grace.

  “I need more poultice,” she said to Catherine. “I have dressed Jane’s wounds, and she is resting comfortably. Roger waits.”

  “I see that this is not a good time for my visit,” Minister Davis said to Catherine. “When might you advise me to return?”

  “In a day or two,” Catherine replied. She did not want to encourage the minister’s attention, and she also felt he should recognize the severity of the wounds inflicted on her young charges. “I can send for you when they are better able to profit from your counsel.”

  “Then we must take our leave,” Minister Davis said. He took a step toward the door. He paused when his niece, whose eyes were fixed on the stairs, did not follow him.

  “Come along, then, Grace,” he said.

  She turned to him and nodded.

  “Yes, uncle,” she said.

  * * * *

  Catherine was sitting at her desk going over accounts later that afternoon when she was aware that Phyllis was greeting somebody at the front door. A moment later, Phyllis entered the room.

  “It is that young woman,” Phyllis said. “She is here again.”

  Catherine knew immediately which woman it must be.

  “Send Grace in, if you please,” she said.

  Grace appeared in the doorway, eyes downcast, her pale face warmed by a blush.

  “Does your uncle know you are here?” Catherine asked. “Or that you have been here without him more than once?”

  The young woman lifted her head, and Catherine noted the spark of defiance in her eyes.

  “I see,” Catherine said. “What am I to do? Countenance your deceit and anger your uncle, or send you away to satisfy him and deny you what your heart seeks?”<
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  Grace did not respond, but hope shone in her eyes, and Catherine was forced again to remember her father’s clerk, and her lost opportunity. Her head and heart argued, fiercely, and silently.

  “I will call him down to you,” she said. “I will not have you visit him in his bed.”

  But before she could, the stairs creaked, and there stood Roger, towering over Catherine, his eyes fastened on Jane’s. Catherine raised herself on her toes until Roger noticed the movement and looked at her. Catherine motioned to the front room where she had been sitting at her desk, but where guests were also entertained.

  “You may talk in there,” she said, “but after today I must seek, and obtain, Grace’s uncle’s permission.”

  She stood in the hall as the two young people walked into the front room. She heard the scraping of wood against wood, and she knew that Roger was moving the two heavy side chairs closer together. There was silence for a few moments, and then the low murmur of voices. Catherine sensed Phyllis now standing behind her. She turned to face her servant.

  “Do not say it,” she said. “It is foolishness.”

  “And worse,” Phyllis replied.

  “Perhaps, but to save me from further embarrassment, stand you near the door, where they cannot see you, and wait no more than ten minutes before coughing loudly.”

  “I am well,” Phyllis said.

  “But you will cough, nonetheless, as though your very life depended on it, and then you will enter the room and tell them that I require my desk to finish overlooking my accounts.”

  “Ten minutes?” Phyllis asked.

  “Indeed, and no more.”

  Catherine sat at the table in the dining room across from the front room. She busied herself trying to remember the particulars of the account page she had been examining when Grace arrived. It listed the various items unloaded from The Good Hope, amounts of trading goods, supplies, prices, and so forth. The numbers swam. She closed her eyes. She snapped them open with a start, not sure whether she had dozed or not. She heard the stairs creak again, this time under a rapid and much lighter tread. A moment later and she heard Jane’s sharp voice answered by Phyllis’s gruffer tones. She could not make out the words. She rose and went out into the hall to find them jaw to jaw. Roger was approaching, while still in the room Grace remained seated.