A Roll of the Bones

by Trudy J. Morgan-Cole

  “You think I won’t let you go,” Percy said. “You’re afraid I’m going to kill you, too.”

  “The thought did cross my mind.”

  “I never want to kill a man again,” Percy said. Then he looked around at the storehouse, at Ned, at the door. “But I won’t have you tattling to the governor. I can’t have it known. If you want to live, and spare me from being a murderer twice over, you have to swear to keep my secret.”

  “I do. I swear.”

  “On your life?”

  “On my life, my family’s lives, in the eyes of God—get Master Guy’s Bible and I’ll swear on it if you please. Your secret is safe with me.”

  Tom Percy’s tense body eased, and he let the knife loosen in his grip. “Fine then. Go your way. I thought I could come to this land and no one would ever need to know what I’d done, but in a way I am glad someone knows. You share a part of my burden now.”

  It was a burden Ned wanted no share of, and he lay awake for a second night, this time troubled not by storm outside but by conscience within. Somehow, he had to let John Guy know the truth, but what would Percy do if Ned broke his vow? Did a vow to a madman count in the eyes of God?

  The king had named John Guy governor of the Cupids Cove colony, and if there was justice to be dispensed, the governor must do it. Tom Percy would have to hang. If Ned broke his vow and told Guy, he would have the weight of a man’s death on his conscience.

  And what if he kept the vow? Said nothing? If the man who called himself Tom Percy quarrelled with one of the other settlers and killed again, Ned would have that death on his conscience.

  The next day, as the men tried to get back to what work they could do with the heavy snow outside, Tom Percy skulked near the edges of every group, speaking to no one but occasionally shooting dark glances at Ned. The two men passed each other that night on the path to the privy, and Percy grabbed Ned’s shoulder. “You’ve told no one?” he said in Ned’s ear.

  “I have not. I gave my word.” Ned wondered if Percy still had the knife on him.

  “Maybe ’tis better if you do tell. So Master Guy can go ahead and hang me.”

  “If that’s what you think, ’tis best you do it yourself,” Ned said.

  “You think so?” Percy looked almost eager.

  “Yes. Make your confession to the governor, if you think he ought to know.”

  “Oh—that. No. I’ll not confess again—not to any man.” And with those words Tom Percy trudged back towards the dwelling-house.

  Ned wished he could put the whole business from his mind and have nothing more serious to worry about than how to go to the privy in this icy cold without fearing his cock would freeze and break off in his hand.

  As the final days of December melted away, so did the snow. The temperature rose, and the pure white drifts turned to a muddy slush under the men’s boots as they trudged through it. Six days after Christmas, another fall of snow made everything white again, but this one came more gently, falling softly through the morning hours. The men shovelled away the snow from the palisade; work continued on the boats being built in the large workhouse they had enclosed for the purpose. Back home in England, there might be twelve days of feasting, but the colonists could ill afford so many days of celebration. Nevertheless, those charged with the task of cooking dipped into the stores for extra lard and spices to make the familiar stews and pies taste richer, and John Guy increased every man’s ration of ale and spirits until Twelfth Night.

  After a day’s work in the new-fallen snow they ate pork pies: one of the pigs had been slaughtered just after Christmas. As the men were enjoying the meal, Master Philip struck up a carol tune and several voices joined in. Looking around the room, Ned noticed that Tom Percy was missing yet again.

  He was inclined to ignore the man’s absence. But Percy’s secret and his own promise weighed on Ned’s spirits. He still had not decided whether to tell John Guy about Percy’s crime. By the time the men rolled into their sleeping bundles that night, Percy had still not reappeared, though no one but Ned seemed to have noticed.

  John Guy was not yet abed; he often met with the rest of the masters for a few moments at the end of the day. Other times, he sat up writing letters. Ned waited until he saw the governor make his way back towards the sleeping quarters. Then he quietly got up, picking his way through the bodies of the other men and the sleeping animals, to intercept the governor.

  “What is it, Perry?”

  “You’ll remember I spoke to you about Tom Percy?”

  Guy’s brow wrinkled. “I recall something of it, yes. You said the man was in low spirits.”

  “That’s right sir. His troubles have seemed...worse, not better, since we began celebrating Christmas-tide. I’ve not seen him tonight.”

  “You’re sure he’s not here somewhere about the fire?”

  “He is not, sir. I’ve looked.”

  Guy’s eyes travelled up from the sleeping area around the fire to the rest of the large room. Some men had gone back to sleeping in their beds. Others, more troubled by the cold, stayed near the fire. “We will have to search for him, I suppose. Do you think he might really have gone off into the woods? Has he confided further in you?”

  Ned opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated. “I...I do not know what might be in his mind, sir. He is greatly troubled. I found him alone in the storehouse one day, brooding. He might have gone there again.”

  Without further discussion John Guy turned towards the storehouse. Ned followed him, thinking of Percy with a knife in his hand, Percy desperate and ready to lash out. I ought to have told Master Guy the whole truth at once, he thought. Better he knows that he’s going to confront a murderer.

  But there was no hurry, no need to prepare for attack. When they opened the door of the storehouse they blinked for a moment, taking in the shapes that appeared in the dim glow of Guy’s rushlight. John Guy moved his hand as if to cross himself in the papist way, then laid the hand on his breast instead. “God preserve us!” His voice cracked as if he were choking.

  Ned remembered his last conversation with Tom Percy. ’Tis better you do it yourself. Confess your crime to John Guy, Ned had meant. But Tom Percy had meant something else.

  He had done it hours ago, from the look of the body that swayed and dangled from the storehouse rafter. Tom Percy, whatever his true name was, had found his hangman’s noose.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Small Flame is Extinguished

  Poor little I, that from earth have my birth,

  Am but a clod, compared to the Earth.

  How little now, how great shall I be then,

  When I in Heaven, like to a Star shall shine?

  BRISTOL

  FEBRUARY–MARCH, 1611

  WITH NICHOLAS GUY FAR ACROSS THE SEA, NANCY was back to sleeping in her old spot next to Kathryn. These days, with Kathryn’s belly big with child, it was well-nigh impossible to sleep soundly beside her. She tossed and turned, got up half a dozen times to use the pot, snored and moaned in her sleep. Nancy found herself thinking wistfully of the narrow pallet bed where she had, for those few short months, slept alone.

  “This might be the day,” Kathryn said. Nancy hadn’t even realized she was awake. “I hope it is. I don’t know if I can go through another night like this one.”

  “No more can I, with your tossing and moaning.”

  “Just be glad ’tis I’ve got this beast in my belly, and not you.”

  “It never will be me, if I’ve got any say in it. Here, turn on your side and I’ll rub your back a bit. I know ’tis hurting you.”

  “Like someone’s been kicking it all night,” Kathryn agreed, heaving over onto her left side. “As I suppose they have been, only from the inside not the outside.”

  Little feet inside, kicking at the walls of their prison. It was hard to imagine. Nancy had lived in the Gale house while all of the younger children were born, but she and Kathryn had been only children themselves. Too young, then, to be i
nitiated into the mysteries of the birthing bed. Now, the more Nancy saw of pregnancy, the less she wanted to do with it.

  Helping Kathryn dress was a fussy business these days as well. Months ago, Nancy had sewn extra panels into Kathryn’s gowns and petticoats to make them roomier. Both girls had laughed while she did it, and laughed again when Kathryn first put the billowy gowns on, never imagining her belly would swell to the point where she’d need such a vast garment. But in these last weeks she found even those expanded gowns tight and uncomfortable, and Nancy had had to alter them yet again. “Everything looks terrible,” Kathryn pouted when Nancy finally had the gown draped over her body. “I’m swollen up like a great ugly sow.”

  “Nonsense. A sow’s got eight or nine farrow inside her, easy, and you’ve only got the one as far as we know. Here, put on this white collar—’twill draw attention to your face.”

  “That looks dreadful too,” said Kathryn, peering in the mirror. Her cheeks were a little rounded from the extra weight she carried, but, as always, she looked anything but dreadful. Nancy was about to tell her so, but she had spent so much of her life cosseting Kathryn’s vanity that the thought of doing it again suddenly made her peevish.

  “Do you think you can eat now?” she said instead. “I’ll bring you something if you feel you can.” Sickness in the morning had made it nearly impossible for Kathryn to eat at all in the early months of her pregnancy. After she’d passed what they reckoned was the six-month mark, she had been able to eat again, but only lightly in the mornings. She was ravenous later in the evening, and Nancy often had to search the larder before bed to bring up some fruit and cheese. With Kathryn carrying Nicholas Guy’s child in her belly, even Mistress Joanna dared not pass any comment about these late night meals in bed. Joanna still did not allow her sister-in-law to take any real hand in the running of the household, but now it was because she must sit and be waited on, never lift a hand, lest she do damage to the baby.

  “I will try to eat something,” Kathryn said with little enthusiasm. “Pass me my work bag, will you—what a cow I am, I can’t even get up to cross the room and pick it up. Ugh. And I am so sick of sewing baby clothes—is that terrible of me? ’Tis not that I don’t want to have a baby, or to have clothes for it—only I care not right now if I never see another tiny white shift again as long as I live.”

  Nancy, too, had done her fair share of sewing for the upcoming child, and she was thoroughly tired of it as well, but of course she could not say so. “You’ll enjoy the change of scene today, anyway,” she said, in a cajoling tone. Perhaps all the caprices and whims of childbearing women were the Almighty’s way of preparing those around them to deal with the coming child. Surely no infant could be harder to appease than Kathryn herself was these days.

  They were off to the Gale household after breakfast, with a trunk packed so they could stay until the child was born and a few months thereafter. Mistress Gale had wanted Kathryn to come back home last summer, as soon as her husband sailed for the New Found Land. Kathryn had refused, but only a few weeks later she had announced she was expecting a child—news she had not yet known when her husband left Bristol. Then her mother began pleading again for Kathryn to move back home.

  Kathryn had agreed she would come home before the baby was due to arrive, so that she might give birth with her mother nearby and have her help for those first months of motherhood. The midwife thought the child likely to be born in March. With Candlemas gone a fortnight ago, it was high time, Nancy thought, to make the move back to the Gale household. Babies often came early, and the midwife’s guess that it would be “sometime before Lady Day” was the vaguest of estimates.

  So it was with relief that she stepped over the threshold of the house she had grown up in, carrying Kathryn’s bag of clothes. Kathryn’s brother John had come with them to carry the larger trunk, and as they came into the house, Mistress Gale bustled forward, Lily and Edward at her skirts, to collect Kathryn, while Aunt Tib came to help Nancy bring in the bundles. Behind the two women came Master Gale and the apprentices, all welcoming Kathryn home as if she were the prodigal son in the parable.

  “What a sight you are for sore eyes!” Aunt Tib said to Nancy later, when Kathryn was settled up in the bedchamber with her mother and everyone else gone about their chores. Aunt Tib was laying out clothes to dry on the bushes in the yard, and Nancy fell to work beside her, glad to be doing familiar jobs in the place she had done them for so long, with no need to prove herself to supercilious strangers. “We miss yourself and the young mistress sorely about this place, let me tell you. With her and you gone, and now young Ned gone, sure ’tis like the life has gone out of the house.”

  The house still seemed to Nancy to have plenty of life in it—there were the three younger Gale children, Walter the journeyman, and the ’prentice boys. But she nodded and said, “No doubt we’ll hear some word of Ned now, once the ships can cross. I know Mistress Kathryn is anxious for news of her husband.”

  John Guy’s ship had left Bristol last summer, and for long months the folks back home had known nothing of their fate. Sailors newly arrived in port spread rumours of storms at sea, and everyone who had a man on board Guy’s ship lived in fear that she might have sunk. Kathryn had sent a letter on a ship later in the summer telling her husband she was expecting his child, but they had no way of knowing if Nicholas Guy had received it. Finally, when the fishing vessels returned in autumn, the Fleming had brought back news that John Guy and his men had landed safely in the place Guy had called Cupids Cove.

  Along with those tidings came, finally, some letters. One for Kathryn from her husband, which she had read out first to Nancy, then to Mistress Joanna, old Master Guy, and the rest of her husband’s household, and finally to her own family back home. It said that the cooler weather of autumn found them all hard at work on a storehouse and dwelling-house for the winter, that their supplies were good, and that he missed his wife greatly. He spoke in grand terms of the beauty of the land and how abundant all its resources were.

  Anyone could see that Nicholas Guy was laying the ground to ask, when he was able to write again in spring, if she would consider coming out there. For surely, if it was meant to be a permanent settlement, the very next thing would be to get the wives and maidservants to cross the sea. But Kathryn persisted in believing that an up-and-coming young craftsman with a good Bristol business, such as Nicholas Guy had, would not choose to stay permanently in the colonies. “Once he’s lived through a winter there, surely he’ll want to return home,” Nancy said now, hashing it all out again with Aunt Tib.

  “I’d say our Ned is wondering what he’s got himself into,” Aunt Tib said.

  “That’s who will never come back—fellows like Ned,” Nancy said. “Rich merchants like Master John and Philip Guy can cross the oceans—sure, they can sail over and back as often as they want, supposing only they’re not lost at sea. But I’d allow we’ll never see Ned Perry on this side of the sea again. He’ll live out his days in that Cupids Cove place.”

  “Well, that’s a shame, a fine young man like that,” Aunt Tib said. “Master Gale thought he had the makings of a good stonemason.”

  Nancy laughed. “’Tis not as if he’s dead over there! He may never finish his apprenticeship, but I’m sure he can do a stonemason’s work in the colony as well as here in Bristol.”

  “Oh, I suppose, but—’tis no life, is it? Savages and wild beasts, no town and no people about—what kind of life would that be for a fine fellow like our Ned, who always liked company and a good laugh?”

  “Ned will do fine.” Nancy could not really imagine the kind of life he must be living in that strange land, but Ned Perry had always seemed to her like the cat that would land on its feet no matter how far it fell. Nancy was concerned with more practical thoughts. She sorted through all Kathryn’s baby clothes, helped wash the cradle and its linens, which had been sitting unused since Edward was a baby. All that in addition to caring for Kathryn herself, who gr
ew harder to please as the days passed.

  “’Twas wrong of him,” Kathryn said clearly in the middle of one night, when Nancy was almost asleep and thought Kathryn had been so long since.

  “What? What was wrong? Who?”

  “Nicholas. My husband.”

  “Wrong of him to go away?”

  “To leave me, yes. Me and his child.”

  “He didn’t know the child was on the way, when he left.”

  “He knew there was a chance. Any time after we were married, I might have been carrying his child.”

  “By that reckoning, he should never have gone away. He would have had to stay in Bristol forever, on the off-chance you might be with child.”

  “Don’t be unkind, Nan. Once we’d had a babe, our first, then, very well. He could go out to the colonies if he had to. But I don’t want a husband who is far from home when our first child is born.”

  “And you’ve no wish to go out to the colony with him?”

  Nancy expected an instant response. She was surprised at the little well of silence. “You wouldn’t, would you?” she pressed. “Any woman would have to be mad to go out there.”

  “I’d not wish to,” Kathryn said. “But what if...what if he says he wants to stay out there? What if Master John goes away and names my Nicholas the governor in his place? How could a man who wants to advance himself turn down a chance like that?”

  Now Nancy was silent. She had always believed that Kathryn found the idea of the New Found Land as mad as she herself did—a foolish venture that had lured good Bristol men away from their homes. “So... if he were to stay, and ask you to come out with him, you would go?”

  “I would have to consider it, at least. He is my husband, after all. Whither thou goest, I will go, as Scripture says.”

  “Ruth said that to her mother-in-law, not to her husband,” said Nancy, who knew the story and liked it. Ruth the outsider, the foreign woman taken into the fold of Israel.