The Sea Hath Spoken

by Stephen Lewis

  “It is quiet,” she said. “Is it not possible?”

  Catherine shook her head.

  “I do not think so.” She pointed to the glass, which contained the chamomile tea. “That it is that has brought you relief. But it was too late. It was not to be.”

  “Because I so bled?” she asked.

  Again, Catherine shook her head.

  “The blood was the consequence, not the cause.”

  Grace’s eyes flashed.

  “As for that the cause was mine and Roger’s.”

  “I would not judge so harshly,” Catherine replied.

  “Aye,” Grace responded, “but I do believe the Lord has.” She looked about her distractedly. “Where is my uncle?” she asked.

  “Asleep,” Phyllis answered. “Charity told me this past hour.”

  “I fear for Roger, though mine uncle is in his bed. Those he pays are up and about.”

  “Hush,” Catherine said, although she too feared for the young man’s safety, “try to sleep. I am quite sure Roger is even now in his bed at my house, and I will send for him, straight, in the morning.”

  “Will you indeed?” Grace asked. “But my uncle...”

  “I will send for him, nonetheless,” Catherine said, “for he should be here with you.”

  Grace smiled, and Catherine grimaced behind her own fixed expression. She did not know where Roger was, but she was quite sure he was not at that moment safe in his bed. When she did arrive home, she found neither Roger nor Jane, only a shipping crate in her front hall.

  “I forgot, in all the excitement,” Phyllis said. “A sailor brought it over. He said it was for Jane.”

  “Indeed,” Catherine said.

  “From the ship what just arrived from England,” Edward added. He had opened the door for them, and now stood next to the crate. “He gave me this letter with it,” he added.

  Catherine looked at the letter and recognized the hand of Jane and Roger’s mother. The letter was addressed to Jane. Catherine placed it on top of the crate.

  “If you please,” she said. “Take it up to their room.”

  Phyllis lifted one end, and Edward the other, and together they carried the crate, with the letter perched atop it, up the stairs.

  * * * *

  Magistrate Joseph Woolsey, now approaching seventy, often found his thoughts alternating between contemplation of his death, which he did not fear, and his youth back in Alford, old England. This morning, he sat by the window in the front room of his house, sipping a glass of tea, which calmed his stomach. As the warm liquid slid down his throat his memory slipped back forty years when he was a lawyer trying to keep Catherine’s father out of prison, and Catherine was a young girl who did not blame him for his failure to save her father who had abandoned his textile business to become the lay preacher of a dissenting congregation of Puritans. Woolsey would take Catherine to visit her father as he wasted away in Newgate prison, one of the many swept up in Archbishop Laud’s net and left with the choice of conforming to the official church or languishing for indefinite periods of imprisonment. His cell was comfortable enough, and Woolsey saw that he had enough to eat, but as was fairly common he caught a chill from the pestilent prison air and died one day, his head in Catherine’s lap. Before he died, he secured a vow from Woolsey that he would look after his daughter, now orphaned as his wife had died shortly after giving birth to Catherine’s brother.

  Woolsey had taken both children into his household, only to see the brother fall sick and die within six months of his father. Woolsey, himself, a childless widower, raised Catherine. He tried, gently but persistently, to steer her away from the adamant and aggressive nonconformity of her father, but she had inherited his spirit as well as she had imbibed his instruction, and so it was she who led Woolsey to become a Puritan. He was a sensible man whose religious convictions did not run as deep as his affection for the wild young woman he had sworn to protect. When some years later, she and her young husband announced their intentions to come to the New World, he agreed to accompany them, for they were his only family. He prospered in the new colony, and never regretted his decision.

  But this morning, he reminded himself that the woman the young girl had grown into still presented him with problems he otherwise would never have confronted. And he was never more sure of that thought then now as he watched Matthew walk toward his house, leading, bound, Jonathan Peters. He felt himself recoil. Unlike Catherine, he had never become comfortable with the Indians, and he remembered well this one’s fierce demeanor on that unhappy day when his companions were drowned by order of Governor Peters.

  For his part, Massaquoit was aware that he was approaching the house of a man who did not trust him, even though Catherine stood as a nexus between them, with strong relationships extending to the Pequot sachem on one side and the English magistrate on the other. Her strength, however, was inadequate to bring them together. Rather, they orbited, like two contrary planets, about her fixed center, each always wary of the other.

  Jonathan tried to hang back.

  “A moment, please,” he pleaded, “to gather my thoughts.”

  “You have more than enough time to do that,” Massaquoit replied. “And I find my present responsibility as unpleasant as you find it difficult. I am tired of your company.” He gave a hard yank on the rope and Jonathan stumbled behind him to Woolsey’s door. The magistrate’s servant, Dorothy, opened it, and without a word pointed to the front room where Woolsey awaited them, seated behind his desk with a look of pained exasperation on his face.

  “Matthew,” Woolsey said, “what do you here towing the good reverend like a recalcitrant mule.”

  “Delivering him to your governance,” Massaquoit replied, “as I am sure you know Mistress Williams has asked me to do.”

  “But he is a man of God, to be treated with proper respect. Unbind him.”

  Massaquoit did not respond at once. As Woolsey spoke, he remembered how he had come upon this minister on top of the Indian girl. He could tell this English magistrate about that, but he did not think he would be believed. A time would come, he figured, when he could teach this minister some respect, but that time was not now. Jonathan held out his bound hands, and with one quick motion, Massaquoit’s knife sliced through the rope. He offered Woolsey a slight nod of his head.

  “I have delivered him into your hands,” he said.

  “On what authority, might I now inquire,” demanded Jonathan.

  Woolsey frowned hard at him.

  “Mine,” he said.

  “To what purpose, then?” asked Jonathan.

  “You know a young woman named Abigail King, do you not? She...” Woolsey stopped himself as Dorothy now stood at the door.

  “The governor,” she said simply, and turned aside as Peters’ tall figure strode into the room. He crossed the room in two steps and stood between Woolsey’s desk and Jonathan.

  “Nephew,” he said, “come with me.”

  Woolsey looked hard at the governor. He placed his palms flat on his desk top and levered himself up. He waited a moment to catch his breath.

  “Your nephew is before me at my request, and I am not finished with him.”

  “Ah, but you are,” Peters said. “You had no authority to summon him.” He glanced at Massaquoit. “I suppose you hired this savage to fetch him.”

  Massaquoit shook his head.

  “I am not for hire,” he said.

  “He treated me most offensively,” Jonathan said, his voice tinged with a whining quality that caused Massaquoit to look away in disgust.

  “Never you mind, Matthew,” Woolsey said. “You have done what you should have done, right and proper, and I will so report to Mistress Williams.”

  “I should have known,” the governor sneered, “that I would hear that name in connection with this affront to my family.”

  “Indeed,” Woolsey replied, “and you can add my name to hers, if it please you.”

  “It does not,” Peters
said. He yanked Jonathan’s arm to turn the young man toward the door. Massaquoit looked at Woolsey. The magistrate shook his head.

  “In time, and in a proper fashion,” he said, “we will have opportunity to hear what Jonathan has to say about Abigail King’s bastard child.”

  Peters who was now at the door with his nephew still firmly in his grasp looked back at Woolsey, opened his mouth, sputtered an inarticulate syllable and left pulling Jonathan along behind him.

  Chapter Eight

  Later, Massaquoit would conclude that he must have been unusually distracted. How else could he explain that he almost tripped over the young English woman as she was trying to drag the body off the road. He had left Magistrate Woolsey’s house feeling more rage welling in him than he had experienced in years, and he did not understand why. His mind was on the insolence of the English magistrates as his feet found the river road north out of Newbury Center. The road followed the river bank and paralleled the main artery that took a more direct route toward Catherine’s house. Today, though, he was not interested in making haste to his wigwam beneath the ancient maple. His anger had almost boiled over as he found himself caught between the dueling English magistrates, the arrogant governor and the well intentioned but still subtly condescending Woolsey. And all of this effort to protect was expended to protect the English man of god whom he had pulled off an Indian girl, and who seemed to be in possession of something that all the English wanted.

  None of it had anything to do with him, he had decided, as he walked along, his eyes on the lengthening shadows of trees riding the slow moving current of the river. The black of the shadows and the deep blue of the water co-mingled in places to form one ebon blotch of color, and somehow that merger soothed him as though he too could somehow merge his troubled spirit with the waters of the river.

  It was the English woman’s grunt that brought his eyes back to the side of the road away from the river. She looked up, perspiration beading her forehead, her hands around the ankles of the man.

  “Matthew, canst thou help me?” she asked. She looked down at the body and then over her shoulder to the thick undergrowth between two pines at the edge of the road.

  He did not respond immediately as he stared at the body which was lying on its back. Its face was covered by a dark blue piece of fabric. The man was tall, and although he could not see the face, the thick black hair was not covered by the cloth, and he recognized it. He had seen it close up in the meetinghouse some weeks before. If he could turn the body over, he knew he would find its back scarred from the whips of the English. He closed his eyes for a moment and felt another presence. When he opened them, he sensed only the woman.

  “Do I have to call thee Massaquoit, then?” Jane asked. She rose to her feet and looked at Roger. A piece of her blue gown had been crudely torn off below her knee, and he could see the flesh of her lower leg between the jagged edges of the torn material. Her gaze followed his eyes as they moved from the fabric over the dead man’s face to her torn gown. “I want to put him there in the shade.”

  “I do not think he can feel the sun on his face,” Massaquoit said.

  “I covered it because it was a beautiful face, once, not now, and although he was untrue I do not want to be unkind.”

  Something in her eyes bespoke a passion as confused as the thoughts she expressed. He knelt behind the body, and lifted the fabric from the face. The eye sockets, nostrils, and mouth had been attacked by maggots, leaving ragged flesh in those orifices. The flesh on his cheeks was bruised as though he had been struck there repeatedly. An artery in his throat had been cut and his blood had spilled over his white shirt so that its entire front was one rust colored stain. Massaquoit paused, waiting to feel the dead man’s spirit. He sensed nothing, but out of the corner of his eye he detected a slight movement behind a tree, and he knew that they were being watched by someone who was very much alive. He was fairly certain who that was, and so he turned back to Jane.

  “His spirit is nowhere about. Perhaps it seeks his killer.”

  “I saw him only a little while ago,” she said.

  “Who?” Massaquoit asked.

  “Why the man who slit his throat. He ran away when I came upon them, but I have seen him before.”

  Massaquoit looked again at Roger’s face. He thought he saw the white head of a maggot in a nostril, but he was not sure. He wondered how so much damage could have been done to the man’s flesh in so short a time, but he said nothing. Jane, too, now leaned forward to examine the ruined face. He noted that she did not seem moved by what she saw.

  “Dost understand, now, dost thou not? About his poor face?” She leaned over and ran her fingers over each of the ruined eyes, and then down over the nose to the mouth. She let her fingers linger on the ragged lips. She placed the cloth again over his face, and smoothed it down over the ruined flesh. She stared up at the sun. “They say, do they not, that the sun breeds these worms that have so feasted on him?”

  “I do not know,” Massaquoit replied, keeping his voice gentle. He thought she must be mad with grief, although something in her manner did not strike him as absolutely sincere. She returned to her position at Roger’s feet and again grasped his ankles. Her face was now set in granite determination.

  “We must move him,” she said. “It is not only the worms, I fear, but he must be hidden for the sake of your friend, the savage, the one with the beaver hat.”

  “I would not think so.”

  She threw up her hands and then shook her head as though to clear it of confusion.

  “Mayhap thou are right. He is such a strange old man, wearing that heavy hat in the sun, is he not?” Massaquoit did not answer and the smile disappeared. “It is the sailor I meant to say. The one that was on the ship I came on.”

  Massaquoit wrapped his mind around her disjointed words, and finding them incoherent, he nodded and seized the body underneath the armpits, while she lifted its feet. They walked unsteadily the few feet to the undergrowth. Massaquoit, moving backwards squeezed his shoulders between the pines. He let his end of the body drop to the ground. Jane remained holding the feet.

  “Turn him over, if thou please,” she said. She looked up through the pines where a ray of sun found its way down to Roger’s face. Massaquoit shrugged and then grabbed Roger by the waist, above the purse he wore around his middle. He pushed the purse aside to grasp the shirt and saw that the purse had been cut open. He felt Jane’s eyes on him all this time, but she said nothing. He pulled hard on the shirt and the body flopped onto its face. By the time he stood up, Jane was already back on the road.

  As they walked in silence toward Catherine’s house, he felt the unseen eyes on his back. When they reached the path that ran from the river road to the main way, Massaquoit turned off onto it. Jane stayed on the river road. She looked in the direction of Catherine’s house.

  “When thou get there, tell Mistress Williams I could not return. It is because of him that lies back where we left him, and if that does not satisfy her curiosity, why then she can open that crate and see if she finds an answer there.” She smiled brightly, curtsied like a little girl, and half skipped up the road. Massaquoit watched until she almost disappeared. When she was not much more than a dark spot in the lengthening shadows, it seemed as though another figure emerged from the side of the road and accompanied her into the distance. Yet, he still felt that he was being observed. He knelt down and waited. After a few moments, there was a movement coming toward him from the shadow of the trees, and Wequashcook emerged.

  “Did the English woman say I killed her brother?” he asked.

  “She did, and then she did not.”

  Wequashcook squatted next to Massaquoit.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I do not believe you would be so foolhardy. And I am not sure you are yet strong enough, for the dead English was a big man, and it looks like he fought hard for his life.”

  “I imagine he did. But not with me. She might
have seen me, for I came upon her as you did. I was behind the trees, and she was staring at the body.” He shrugged. “My business with the dead English was done with. I was about to leave when you came along, and so I watched.”

  “She said something about a sailor, too,” Massaquoit said.

  Wequashcook smiled, showing his still white teeth against the deep wrinkles of his face.

  “Yes. He has helped me in my dealings with the dead English.” He stood up. “Come and visit me in the belly of the ship, and you can see him there yourself. I do not think you will find blood on his hands.” Wequashcook slid back into the woods.

  Massaquoit stood and his eyes shifted to the river, now almost black as the sun set behind the trees on the opposite bank. It was full dark by the time his slow pace brought him to the path leading up the slope to Catherine’s house. Candles were lit in the front windows, and the door opened as he reached it. Phyllis stood in the doorway and beckoned him in.

  “Mistress has been waiting for you.”

  “I bring unhappy news.”

  Catherine, sitting on the ornately embroidered settee in her front room, still stained with Roger’s blood, could not hear the words of this conversation but she could detect the hushed tones in which it was conducted, and she knew that her fears had been realized. She took a breath and squared her shoulders as though in preparation to receive the grim news. When Massaquoit appeared before her, she did not wait for him to speak.

  “Where did you find him?” she asked.

  For his part, Massaquoit was not surprised at the question, for he had long ago stopped being surprised by the intuitive sagacity of this English woman.

  “On the river road, just a little way above the harbor,” he replied.

  Catherine recalled the shipping crate that had just arrived, and the body that had been floating in the shallow waters shortly after Roger and Jane arrived, and she imagined the breeze lifting from the waters of the harbor now carrying miasmic fumes. The place, she realized, was the center from which radiated the troubles of the brother and sister. She gave this notion voice.