The men finishing the roof of the dwelling-house were fitting boards into place and hammering. Tom Percy was in the saw-pit with Frank Tipton all afternoon, preparing timber for the endless building projects. Other men filled other jobs: Marmaduke, a slight fellow even before his illness, was cooking over a stew pot, while another man took loaves of bread from an oven nestled in the coals of the newly built hearth. Still others were mending boots and clothes so they could still be used, or sharpening and repairing tools that were wearing out from overuse. All these tasks had to be done in the afternoon, for this time of year the dark of night dropped down early and there were too few candles to waste on trying to work after dark.
When night fell they ate the stew, sopping the bread in it, washing it all down with ale. The day’s work done, the enormity of this vast, cold land seemed to press in on all the men, force them to sit closer together, talk louder, laugh at rowdier stories. The noise within might ward off the dangers outside.
Tonight the talk was bawdy, with further speculation on George Whittington’s need for a woman and the various ways he might relieve his urges. Then the masters—John and Philip Guy, William Colston, and William Catchmaid—joined the labouring men around the hearth. That put an end to the loose talk. Now they spoke of practical things, of the boats they would build in the workhouse during the winter months.
A few of the men wrote letters home in the flickering firelight. No ship would cross to England now until spring, but some men were so devoted in writing to their wives or sweethearts that they penned a few lines every night. Others, who could not write, got the learned men to write down their letters for them. If everyone kept putting down messages at this rate, they would have the equivalent of a small library to send back to England by the time a ship went back that way. Or, more like, they would run through their small supply of paper before Christmas.
Ned could write a little, as much as a mason would ever need to. Not enough to attempt a letter. In spring he would send greetings by Nicholas Guy’s letters to the Gale household, and ask that someone there tell his parents he was well. What more was there to say, other than to tell them he was alive and well, that despite the hardships of this life he liked the colony and was glad he had come?
He thought sometimes of Kathryn Gale’s face, the face that had occupied his dreams for so many years. Without her daily presence, the picture in his mind was fading. He remembered other things, other people, more clearly than he remembered her. One of his mother’s housecats, the friendly one that would curl up at his feet to sleep. Playing pranks at the Gale house with Walter and Billy. A particular pork pie Mistress Tibby baked, and the way she had of cross-hatching the pastry on top. Nancy Ellis’s face when she mocked him, then how she would, almost against her will, burst into laughter at something he said.
He lingered on that last image, Nancy’s face alight with mirth, before he fell to sleep. It seemed wrong to dwell too long on thoughts of Kathryn, now that she was another man’s wife and that man was sleeping just a few snoring bodies away. But her tart-tongued maid, far away on the other side of the ocean—Ned dreamed of Nancy, more than once, in the long nights when fresh air and hard work dropped him into deep sleep.
He woke from that sleep to another day of hard work; one day led into another, and as the weeks passed, the crisp, cool autumn slipped towards a chilly winter. Cupids Cove took shape around them. A dwelling-house, a handful of outbuildings, thirty-nine men and their beasts contained within a palisade fence: it was not a town, nor even a village, yet Ned was beginning to think of it as his home.
Ned believed, generally, that every man should look to his own business and not trouble about what other men did or thought. Yet he found himself, a few nights before the feast of Christmas, drawing Governor Guy aside after the evening meal to say, “Sir, I’m not easy in my mind about Tom Percy.”
John Guy gave him a sharp look. He was a good master; he knew all the men under him, even if he might hesitate over the names of some, and he treated them all fairly. “What’s the trouble with your friend Percy?” “’Tis not that we’re friends, sir—I don’t know that he has a friend.
He talks of going off into the forest alone, to live apart from the rest of us. He says he can’t be with the rest of mankind.” Tom had mentioned this several more times in Ned’s hearing, after that first occasion. “I’m afraid the hardship of the journey, or maybe just the change from England, is turning his mind.”
Guy nodded slowly. “They say it can happen, though we’ve been fortunate so far in the whole lot of you—men of sound mind. Has he a sweetheart back home he’s pining over, something like that?”
“No, sir, he’s spoken of no woman. I know every man has his private troubles, sir. But his talk about living alone in the woods—well, it don’t seem right to me.”
“You’re quite right—we can’t have men getting on like that. The success of the colony depends on everyone keeping in good spirits and working together.” John Guy looked out over the harbour of Cupids Cove, where the sky was already darkening, barely four hours past noon.
“We have a long stretch ahead of us till spring,” Guy said aloud. “From all I’ve heard tell of this New World, the weather only gets harsher after midwinter and stays cold for months on end. We cannot have men taking leave of their senses. Keep an eye to Percy; tell me if his spirits take a turn for the worse.” He frowned. “I wish I had found a minister able to come out with us. There’s a heaviness that comes over men’s spirits in a place like this.”
Ned doubted that Tom Percy was a man to find comfort in talking to a minister or reciting prayers. The man’s gloomy mood had noticeably darkened as the long winter nights drew in and the snow thickened. When the other men spoke of things they longed for back home—wives and sweethearts, familiar meals, pubs and shops and friends—Percy huddled into himself and said nothing.
On Christmas Day, the men feasted on one of their goats, sacrificed for the occasion. They made the best of the holy day, laughing and telling stories of Christmases past, speculating on what their families were doing. Back home, there would have been division between those who thought, in the old papist way, that Christmas was a day of feasting and celebration, and the more reformed folk who believed a holy day was best spent entirely on your knees. But here in the colony, such differences mattered little. They would have their church service in the morning and feast as best they could for dinner, wringing whatever pleasure they might out of the day.
“They all want to go home, but this country is the only bloody place for a man like me,” muttered Tom Percy, creeping up behind Ned.
“’Tis a fine place indeed,” Ned said, trying for hearty good spirits. “A man can make a grand life for himself here.”
“Not this place, not Cupids Cove.” Percy looked around at his fellow colonists, huddled in twos and threes around the hearth. “I told you, I must get away. Build a little tilt where I can fish and hunt. I’m not fit to be around my fellow man.”
“Now that’s no way to talk at Christmas-tide. Peace on earth, to men goodwill.”
“No man here would have goodwill towards me if he knew the truth.”
“Come now, have a drink and put your troubles behind you. The governor has given us all an extra ration of aquavit for the holy day.” Another of the shortcomings of a settler’s life was that Guy had brought just enough liquor to keep forty men going till supplies arrived from England in the spring, but no more. They had built a brewhouse down by the saltwater pond and brewed their own small ale, but it was weak stuff, and there was little chance of the men getting good and drunk even on a feast day—which, no doubt, suited the governor’s ideas of an orderly colony just fine.
No salvation for Percy in spirits, then, any more than there was in prayer. Heavy snow fell on St. Stephen’s Day, the first real howling storm they had seen in the New Found Land. Gusts of icy wind battered at the shutters of the dwelling-house as the swirling fingers of snow reached in through
tiny gaps in the window frames and walls. It had been cold for weeks, but this kind of cold was another creature altogether. Wind shook the building that had seemed so secure just days ago. The fire was a pathetic attempt to warm the place, and men and livestock alike huddled as near to it as they could, the men wrapped in layers of blankets and furs. They gave up sleeping in their ice-rimed beds in the sleeping loft, and slept beside the fire, though in that hollow cold the flames gave off no more heat than a candle.
The storm went on all day and into the night. Most of the men lay sleepless in the howling wind. There was talk and storytelling again, but they were far less cheerful than they had been on Christmas Day. The Bristol men had rarely seen such storms as this, but a few of those who had lived in the north of England told tales of wind and snow fierce enough to freeze a man to death.
“Come men, we must keep our spirits up, we must not be daunted!” bawled Master Philip. In the absence of a clergyman, either Philip or John Guy led Sunday worship, reading the service from the prayer book and then a sermon from the Book of Homilies. Philip Guy relished this duty more than his brother did; he was often the one heard chiding the men, but to give him credit, he was just as likely to use divine authority to encourage, as he was doing now. “Let us sing a psalm tune, and commend our safety to God above!”
The men joined Master Philip in a weak version of the hundredth psalm, though it could not be said they were exactly singing to the Lord with cheerful voice. Turning the musical efforts towards drinking songs, as George did soon afterwards, helped a little. Eventually most of the men managed some kind of sleep. Ned rolled himself as tight in his blanket as he could and slept next to two of the goats, enjoying the warmth of their animal bodies despite the smell. They didn’t complain, as men did. Surely somewhere deep in their dumb beast nature they must have wondered why they were in this cold place, so unlike the Bristol farmyards they had been born in. But lacking words to utter their complaint, they gave a fair imitation of being content.
It was the lack of wind that woke Ned, the strange silence after twenty-four hours of howling gale and cracking timbers. He lay still, needing to get up for a piss but not wanting to move from the warmth of his blanket huddle. Though the storm had stilled, the bitter cold air stung his face. The fire had died to embers. He heard one man, then another, get up and use the buckets they had set aside for pisspots.
Finally he heard Nicholas Guy’s voice. “What a sight!” He was standing at one of the windows, having scraped the frost clear of a small circle of glass that allowed him to peer out between the shutters.
The scene outside, once a larger square of window was cleared, looked both eerie and enchanting. Everything lay cold and still under heavy drifts of white snow. “I doubt we’ll be able to get the door open,” said Master Nicholas, looking at the mounds of snow piled against it. “Perhaps some of you smaller lads can squeeze out if we take out one of the windows. Then you can clear it away from the door with spades.”
In the end, that was what they did—the glass window was taken out and the shutters removed so that Ned and Duke Whittington, the two youngest and slenderest of the men, climbed out through a window and tossed piles of the snow away from the door until they were able to push it open. Then all the men spilled out, and the animals too, marvelling at the transformed world the snow had left behind. The drifts piled nearly to the top of the palisade wall.
The snow lifted the men’s moods. They were almost playful as they shovelled paths through it. Everyone save the two sick men, Morris and Stone—the one still feverish and uneasy since his injury, the other complaining of the pain in his joints—spent the better part of the day out of doors. They let the goats and pigs out, hauled in more firewood, brought buckets of snow to melt for drinking water. More than once Ned was slapped in the side of the head by a snowball hurled by one of his comrades. Their clothing was wet and everyone was tired by late afternoon, when they again gathered around the fire as daylight died.
After helping to clear the snow from the door, Duke Whittington had taken little part in the afternoon’s work and play; he was huddled by the fire shivering as if the effort of shovelling had worn him out. Ned thought again how frail and young Duke seemed, how different from his bluff and hearty older brother. “Eat up, Duke,” he encouraged the boy.
It was while they ate that Ned noticed Tom Percy was missing. He asked Frank Tipton if he’d seen Percy, but Frank only said, “I never noticed him gone. He’s an odd fish, that one. This winter would get anyone’s spirits down, but he don’t even seem to try to keep his up.”
After they ate, Ned was charged with the task of refilling the flour bucket and bringing a wheel of cheese from the storehouse. He found Tom Percy perched on a stack of bundles and barrels, staring off into space, fiddling aimlessly with a stick he held in his hands.
“What are you at, man? Come in by the fire, you’ll freeze here. You might as well be outside; ’tis cold as the grave.”
“Yes, I might as well be outside,” echoed Percy.
“Aye, I know, your hermitage in the woods. Well, you’ll have to wait till the weather breaks to build it. Till spring you’ll have to put up with the rest of us or freeze to death. Come on back in.”
“I can’t put it out of my mind, Perry. ’Tis before me all the time, in my mind’s eye.”
“What is?”
“Hell. The flames of Hell.”
Oh, Lord. Was the man some kind of puritan fanatic? “Marry, I’d say flames of any kind sound all right just now,” Ned said, filling his bucket from a barrel of barley flour. “Here, make yourself useful and hand me down that cheese, there.”
He gestured at the shelf but Percy, still turning the stick in his hands, did not move. “Don’t mock Hell’s flames, Ned. They’re real enough. The pain of burning but no warmth, no comfort. I see them over and over, and his face in the middle of them.”
“Who—the Devil?” Ned spoke lightly, suppressing a shudder. He hated this kind of talk.
“No, Dick Hanlon.”
“Who on God’s earth is Dick Hanlon, and what is he doing in Hell?”
“Ah, that’s just it.” Tom Percy’s hollow laugh reminded Ned of last night’s storm winds. “He’s not on God’s earth. He may well be in Hell. But I’ve no doubts about where I’m going. None at all.”
Ned laid down the flour bucket. “Look man, I’ve had about enough of your hints and riddles. Something’s on your mind: you’re not fit to live among us, and now you say you’re going to Hell because of a man called Dick Hanlon.” The thought of buggery flitted through his brain, but it failed to alight. The pieces were falling into place, and the real answer was so much starker than unnatural vice. “Oh, Lord in Heaven, Percy. Did you murder this fellow Hanlon?”
Tom Percy closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the wall. He flipped the stick in his hands, and as the light glinted, Ned realized it was not a stick; it was a knife. The kind of knife every man in the settlement carried, for doing all kinds of odd jobs. Ned had one, but not with him at the moment. “I did. That I did. I killed him outside a pub in Rochester, on the fourteenth of April. Then I fled and came to Bristol, and signed myself on with Master Guy. As far as I could get from England and the king’s justice.” He looked up, opened his eyes for a moment. “I hardly need to tell you Tom Percy is not my real name.”
“No...no, I suppose ’tis not.” Ned eased down onto a chest of tools, not taking his eyes from Percy. He wasn’t easy in his mind about sitting down side by side with a murderer, especially one who was armed. But then, if the story were true, he’d been sitting down next to a murderer, working alongside him, even sleeping next to him, since they left Bristol.
“Were you defending yourself?” He chose his words with care. “Did this Hanlon attack you? There’s no sin in striking a man who’s bent on killing you.”
“I started it. I was drinking, yes, but not so drunk I didn’t know my own mind. It was a quarrel over a woman—a faithless jade wh
o promised herself to me and then ran around with Hanlon behind my back. When I found out, I beat her, and then I went looking for Hanlon. Found him in a pub, pretended friendship over a few pints of ale, and then I drew him outside and stuck my knife in between his ribs.”
“Do you know for certain he died? You might have only wounded him.”
“I heard later that night, people saying he was dead. I sent a friend to find out for sure. I killed the man, and I deserved the hangman’s noose, but instead I ran away. I thought I could leave guilt behind in England with justice, but it follows me like a dog at my heels.”
“You need to tell one of the masters. Governor Guy must know you signed on under a false name and that there are charges against you in England. But Master Philip might be the more sympathetic to tell your tale to first.”
“Are you mad? I can’t tell them. I don’t even know why I told you—you’ll run to them as soon as we’re out of here, and then every man in the colony will know I’m a murderer.” Percy, who had looked half asleep for most of the conversation, now hopped off the barrel where he perched and stood on his feet, holding the knife out before him like a warning. “What are we, Ned Perry? Two score men in the wilderness with not another Christian soul around on this whole island. We’re here with no magistrate, no lord over us but John Guy. If the masters know what I am, they won’t suffer me to live among them. They’ll string me up.”
A wildfire burned in the eyes of the man whose name was not Tom Percy. How long before he worked out that if he killed Ned here and now, the story need never get out? Ned began backing up slowly, step by step.
A Roll of the Bones Page 5
