Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  “So much for Praise God and his theories on mistaken identities,” Oliver muttered.

  “What?”

  Oliver waved the question aside. Williams folded up the paper. “Everything is in order,” he said. “May you prosper here in ways that will please the Lord.”

  “One always hopes to do so,” Oliver said. “Thank you very much. What is the condition of the estate?”

  “That,” Williams said, “is a matter you must judge and manage for yourself on your arrival. There is one complication of which you may not be aware.”

  “Complication?” Oliver said. “What complication?”

  “It concerns Captain Pennock’s lost daughter, Thoughtful. It appears that she is no longer lost. One year ago she was discovered among the Abenaki Indians in Canada. A ransom was paid—Captain Pennock had provided for this by leaving a sum of money in my care—and she returned to Alamoth. She lives there now, in her father’s house.”

  Sitting in his chair in his sweat-soaked suit, legs apart in plum-colored stockings, Oliver could think of nothing to say for the moment. He was glad that his cousin Thoughtful had been rescued from the Indians, but he realized that not even an American Christian would be likely to believe that.

  “Thoughtful is what age now?” he asked.

  “She appears to be the correct age—about fourteen.” “There is no doubt?”

  “None. She resembles her father very strongly—red hair that frizzes, eyes, freckles, long jaw. Everyone remarks that the expression is remarkably like the parent’s. Also, there is a birthmark on the scalp at the back of the head. Thoughtful Pennock’s rescuer, a man named Gustavus Hawkes, shaved her head in order to examine it.”

  Oliver’s head itched furiously. “Then everything belongs to her,” he said. Then he took off his wig, gave Williams an apologetic smile, and scratched his scalp furiously.

  “Ah!” Williams said, astonished but alert. He waited until Oliver was done scratching before he spoke again. Then he said, “In terms of the law, you understand, the discovery that she is alive alters nothing. A disinherited child, especially a female, has no claim on a parent’s estate. You remain the heir.”

  “Still, she is her father’s daughter and my cousin.”

  “Exactly. And you will, of course, remember that Captain Pennock specifically charges you in his will to provide for his daughter in case she returns to British territory alive and of her own free will.”

  “I shall do so with pleasure.”

  “Of course you will, Mr. Barebones. But there are peculiar facts about your cousin. She is not an English Christian. She does not wish to live among her own people.”

  Oliver was startled. A picture of Thoughtful had already begun to form in his mind, and in the picture she was overjoyed to be at home, with Oliver for a benefactor and Fanny for a friend. He said, “What do you mean, she doesn’t want to live among her own people?”

  “She thinks of herself as an Abenaki Indian. She misses the … license of savage life.”

  “The license, you say? Then why did she come back?”

  Williams was no longer smiling, but there was amusement in his expression; he knew things that no Englishman freshly in America could possibly guess. “She was rescued by force,” Williams said.

  “Rescued by what?” said Oliver.

  “By force. She did not wish to leave the Indians. It is often the case with captives. Her rescuer bound her with thongs and carried her on his back through the forest.”

  “But why, if she didn’t want to come?”

  “A reward was involved, a considerable reward, in fact, one hundred pounds. It was Gustavus Hawkes who brought Thoughtful Pennock back to us. I paid him the reward, as Captain Pennock had provided. For me, the matter ends there.”

  The curly wig dangled from Oliver’s hand. He shifted his weight and the chair squeaked beneath him.

  “How can you ransom somebody who doesn’t want to be ransomed?” he asked.

  “An excellent question,” said Williams, “and one that you may, or may not, seek to answer as Thoughtful Pennock’s guardian. There is one more thing.”

  Oliver waited. Williams lifted his eyebrows.

  “Hawkes wishes to marry the Pennock girl. In such a case, he would control the property as he controlled the wife.”

  “What does Thoughtful have to say about that?”

  “She is ignorant of his passion. ‘She ain’t used to me yet,’ Hawkes says. You will soon see why.”

  6

  While they waited for Gustavus Hawkes, Thoughtful Pennock’s rescuer, to come for them through the forest that separated Boston from the Connecticut River, Fanny and the Bareboneses and the Ashes moved ashore, into Lebbaeus Williams’ house. The charge for room and board for all five of them, including ale twice a day but no wine or spirits, was a pound a week. Williams moved his own family into the attic to make room for them, but still the house was crowded. Once again Fanny shared a bedchamber with Rose.

  “It is more convenient,” Rose said to Oliver. “Fanny can hardly sleep alone in a strange house, or with one of these American girls with their cow eyes and their big feet. I’m sure they must kick people in their sleep.”

  Rose found the Williams females comical. She found all the Americans comical: everything they did was so unfashionable. She liked to dress up in her most splendid afternoon clothes and take walks up and down the twisting Boston streets—cow paths, really—with the drab Williamses scurrying along behind and a hired boy or two going before to drive the pigs away. Boston was full of loose pigs; they ate the gardens and the crops and fought with the dogs for the garbage that the Bostonians threw out the windows into their dooryards. The pigs chased down chickens and ducks and ate them, feathers and all. The Williams girls, who never joked because they had never heard a joke, said that pigs sometimes ate the smaller children of the poor when their parents were too drunk to drive the animals away.

  Faces looked out the windows at Rose as she passed. She suspected that everyone in Boston thought that she was a member of the English nobility who had come to America incognito in order to have an adventure.

  “I wonder what they think you are, Fanny,” she would say. “Or Oliver; even they would suppose that he can’t possibly be my real husband.”

  At supper in the Williamses’ plain dining room, Rose wore low-cut gowns and pasted beauty spots on the swell of her left breast one night and on the swell of the right the next. Williams looked on the wrong side. “Mr. Williams is confused again,” she would whisper to Fanny.

  Edward Ash never looked at Rose’s bosom; he was always gazing sadly at Fanny, as if he knew that her shipboard illness was not really cured and she was going to die.

  Although she herself had first eaten with a fork and a round-ended knife while staying at the Hardings’, Rose lectured the Williamses at table on the technique of spearing food with a fork held in the left hand, cutting the food with the edge of the knife held in the right hand, and then pushing the severed morsel securely onto the tines with the tip of the knife and lifting the fork bearing the food to the mouth, still with the left hand.

  “That,” she would explain, “is how it is done nowadays in England—not everywhere, you understand, but in the better houses, such as Lockwood Hall in Buckinghamshire, the home of my late first husband, the Honorable Robert Pomeroy.”

  After hacking off a bit of mutton or beef from the trencher and eating it from her hand, Rose would give a tiny shudder and hold her greasy fingers suspended limply in the air. Antoinette had packed a few Italian forks into Fanny’s baggage, but when Rose got them out to give the Williams girls lessons, the experiment failed because the Williamses only had old-fashioned pointed knives. It was impossible to push the food onto the forks with these implements, so the Williams girls would spear their food, cut it, then put down the knife, transfer the fork to the right hand, lift the morsel to their mouths, and chew. By the time knives with round ends finally reached America, this roundabout st
yle of eating had become good manners in the New World. It made Rose laugh out loud.

  Fanny’s musical instruments, brought down from London with Rose’s things, had been carried ashore. In the evening at the Williamses’, she played and sang, but never in French. Because Lebbaeus Williams was even more reluctant to see candles burning than Sir Cecil Lockwood, she often played in the dark. This added to the conviviality: the bashful Williams girls would only sing if no one could see them. The songs they knew were like their manners and their speech, nearly a hundred years old, but by singing in the dark they learned new airs from Fanny: “Lady if you so spite me,” “Awake, sweet love,” “Now, oh now I needs must part,” and a song from the works of Philip Evans, “I had imagined this place.”

  To the Protestant ear, this Jesuit dirge, so full of secret meanings—every member of the Society of Jesus sent into England was required to imagine, as a spiritual exercise, the gory details of his own torture and execution at the hands of the Protestants—sounded like a love song.

  Ash sang nothing but hymns, and when he sang, nobody else could be heard above him. After the first week or so, Fanny stopped playing hymns. She began to hear a fine contralto among the voices. It was Betsy Ash. She would come close to the spinet in the dark and sing counterpoint. Betsy made mistakes because she had no musical education, but she had perfect pitch and a sweet and limpid voice. One night, at the end of some lighthearted country song, she suddenly sang a whole-note scale of such purity that Fanny’s hand froze on the keyboard. This brilliant singing was the only sound Fanny had ever heard come out of Betsy, who never looked at Fanny in daylight and never spoke to anyone at any time.

  7

  Joshua Peters, in his search for a cargo to take back to England, had made the acquaintance of half of Boston. The Americans amused him, too, but for different reasons.

  He said, “They tell you some tale of American wonders and then they look you in the eye and say, ‘Of course, you haven’t seen whatever-it-is, and so you may not think I’m telling you the truth, but it is the real truth.’ And usually it is.”

  Among the wonders Joshua had heard about was the teeming shore of Cape Cod—the transparent shallow water crowded with cod and haddock that swam among enormous oysters, huge clam beds, and whole nations of lobsters rolling in the tide.

  “I don’t believe it, nobody could,” Joshua said, “but if it’s half what they say it is, then it’s worth looking at. Besides, we’ve got to have a partners’ meeting somewhere away from all these strangers.”

  Oliver and Fanny and Joshua left Boston harbor at first light in the Pamela’s boat with one old sailor as crew. By late morning they were ashore in their bare feet on a curving white beach. Coarse grass and stunted pine trees grew thickly on the dunes. There were countless thousands of birds. Gulls had followed the boat down the coast in large numbers, but the canopy of bleached northern sky above the beach contained more birds, all calling and flapping, than Fanny had seen in her whole life up till that day. Birds snatched shellfish from the combers, climbed upward, and dropped their prey, diving after it to eat the meat after the impact smashed the shell. Ospreys crashed into the water and emerged with fish in their talons. Some birds seemed to exist by stealing from others.

  “By God, these birds seem to know how lucky they are,” Oliver said, watching the thousands of gulls and terns, falcons and herons, as they dove on the millions of other creatures that waited, as dumb and helpless as plants, to be eaten.

  The sailor from the Pamela, a stumpy man from Kilkenny named Dick Condon, was as excited as the birds. He pulled off his boots and ran over the sand. There were so many squirting clams under the surface that it was like running through a mechanical water joke, and he came back soaked, with twenty or thirty big sandy shells cradled in his arms. Condon grinned a sideways grin and shuffled sidewise over the sand, bent over in a posture of submission. He had learned manners as a prisoner of the French; captured off a sinking British frigate in the Mediterranean, he had spent five years as one of 462 galley slaves in Louis XIV’s great rowing ship La Reale. Now, bowing and moaning like a slave, he opened the biggest clam with his knife and handed it to Fanny. The meat, pink and yellow, was as large as a plum. Condon touched the quivery frilled edge with the point of his knife.

  “It’s alive, girl,” he said with a wink, and watched her like a monkey while she chewed, all his obsequiousness gone.

  The old sailor handed her another opened clam and then trotted away toward the dunes, looking for a suitable spot for a fire. Fanny followed and helped him dig a pit in the sand. Condon gathered the dead lower branches of pitch pine, breaking the twigs over his knee and lying on his belly to reach into the pit as he arranged them into an inverted cone. On top of this wood he arranged larger driftwood, looking up at Fanny and grunting after each step to see if she understood what he was doing. When the fire was laid, he opened six more clams and arranged them on the sand for Fanny, and then ran down to the boat.

  He came back with a musket and a powder horn. He sprinkled a little powder onto the pitch pine at the bottom of his stack of wood, cocked the musket, and fired it into the wood. The fire started with a whoosh.

  “Now for the food,” Condon said. He had a hoarse Irish voice, burnt by brandy, arrack, whisky, and anything else that had alcohol in it.

  While the fire burned, they gathered food from the surf. Fanny took off her stockings and waded into the bubbly water. Green lobsters rolled in the combers. Condon threw a dozen of them up on shore, losing them to the birds as soon as they hit the sand. The same thing happened with oysters and mussels, until finally Condon stationed Oliver as a guard and used Fanny as a runner to carry the shellfish to him. Oliver stood over the growing heap, waving his arms and crying “Shoo!” at the whirling birds while he opened oysters that were so large that he had to tear them in fourths in order to chew them.

  The driftwood fire in the sand pit burned down to a bed of coals. Condon laid a dozen big clacking lobsters on the coals, covered them with seaweed, and then dumped a mixture of oysters and mussels and clams on top of these. While the shellfish cooked, he crawled under a pitch pine, chosen to be out of earshot, and went to sleep.

  “We must talk business,” Joshua said.

  Oliver’s expectations of a rich American trade had not materialized. Joshua had sold the wines and spirits for more than a thousand pounds and could have sold more. He thought that coffee and chocolate could be sold in Boston.

  “These people may be prayerful, but they like stimulants as much as the rest of the English,” Joshua said. “But they’ve little to trade back. Even in Boston, the Americans aren’t artisans, they’re farmers. That’s what they were before they came, and that’s what they’ve remained. Look at their houses—there’s no upper class, no one who knows how things ought to be, no one to demand good work. They make very little beyond what they need in order to live, and what they do make, no European would want. The harvest isn’t in, and even if it were, they might not have anything left over beyond what they need to get through the winter. It’s the wrong time for salting fish, it’s too late or too early for furs, and if what Lebbaeus Williams says can be relied upon, there’s no prospect of taking back a cargo of wood as you had hoped, Oliver.”

  Fanny had never heard Joshua make such a long statement. His brown face was expressionless. “You’re saying that the Pamela can’t trade in America?” she asked.

  “I don’t know if she can or if she can’t in the future,” Joshua replied. “But all I’ve managed to lay hands on this time is a hundred barrels of molasses. Other than that, it looks like we’ll have to sail her home empty.”

  “That can’t be,” Oliver said.

  “No? Well, all suggestions are welcome.”

  Condon woke up and raked the seaweed off the cooked shellfish with a piece of driftwood. Fanny thought constantly of her father. What a story this would make: the giant oysters, the clams nearly as large, the plump orange mussels, the lobsters as b
ig as sea monsters that turned from green to red when cooked and had claws full of delicious rubbery meat.

  “Why not oysters and clams?” Oliver said. “Or lobsters, at least—how long will a lobster live out of the sea if you keep him in seawater?”

  “Forever, I suppose,” Joshua said. “But we don’t know how to keep them alive.”

  “I’ll talk to Ash,” Oliver said. “He’ll know.”

  “As long as he doesn’t want to pray over them,” Joshua said.

  When Oliver explained his plan—to transport Cape Cod lobsters across three thousand miles of ocean and sell them in London—Ash did not dismiss it as impractical. He asked to be taken to Cape Cod. He studied lobsters in the wild, kept them alive in tubs in darkness and in light, dissected half a dozen, and delivered an opinion.

  “It can be done—possibly,” he said. “But we must build an apparatus that will cost a great deal of money.”

  Ash’s idea was a simple one—build tanks in the hold of the Pamela, fill them with seawater, and pump the water out so as to replace it constantly with new water all the way across the Atlantic. He proposed to do this by attaching the pump to a windmill on the stern of the ship.

  “She will not steer with a windmill on her stern,” Joshua objected.

  “Then the plan will not work,” Ash said. “The lobsters must live for eight weeks in an artificial sea.”

  “Four weeks,” Joshua said. “Less. We have wind and current with us on the return voyage.”

  “Can the men pump by hand, then? The lobsters require seawater that moves like the waves, they require water that is alive.”

  “The men won’t like it, but they’ll prefer it to a windmill.”

  Ash studied the problem of feeding. He kept different lobsters in different tubs, feeding them meat and fish, salted and fresh, newly caught and rotted. In the end he had a fair idea of what the creatures would eat—fish, oysters, mussels. These things, too, would be put into the tubs.