A Roll of the Bones

by Trudy J. Morgan-Cole

  “A merry little sermon to keep all our spirits up, was it not?” came a mocking voice from behind her. Thomas Willoughby lifted his long legs over the bench and laid down his trencher on the table, taking the seat next to Kathryn. “‘Among the Locrensians the adulterers have both their eyes thrust out.’ Who are these unfortunate Locrensians, I wonder, and is half their population wandering about blind?”

  Matt Grigg and Tom Taylor bobbed their heads respectfully as young Willloughby sat down. He was, in strict order of precedence, the highest-ranking man in Cupids Cove, for his father was a knight. Here in the colony he was supposed to be subject to his elders, and when Master Henry Crout, his father’s agent, was in residence, Thomas was held in check to some degree. But with Crout gone off exploring, Thomas paid little heed to any instructions Philip Guy gave him. When he was ordered to harvest crops or cut firewood, he was as likely to be found playing a game of dice, or making idle talk with Nicholas Guy’s wife.

  Kathryn knew that other people saw Thomas flirt with her; if she hadn’t noticed it of her own accord, Nancy told her flat out only a few days ago. “You cannot let him go on like that; everyone is talking of it. You can be sure Master Philip will speak of it to Master Nicholas when he returns.”

  Now Kathryn felt the slow blush that crept up her throat and into her cheeks as Thomas sat beside her. She dared not reply to his sally about the unhappy blind Locrensians, so he went on, prodding at his pie. “Is anyone else as sick of pork as I am?” he said now. “I’d sell my soul for a good chine of beef.”

  There was some laughter around the table, and Kathryn smiled as she said, “Hush now, no talk of selling souls.” And Matt added, “Only wait till Christmastide — they’ll slaughter one of the cows then.”

  “Christmas! Lord-a-mercy, I’d not even thought of Christmas in this place!” Thomas said. “A merry twelve nights we’ll have here, no doubt.”

  Matt Grigg was the only one at the table who had been there for the past two Christmases. He was a pleasant young fellow who always tried to put the best face on things—the very opposite of Thomas Willoughby. Kathryn wondered at herself: how could she find Thomas so charming when he made no effort to charm? “’Twill be the merriest Christmas yet in the New World,” Matt said, “for we’ve the women here with us now, and men will be able to kiss their wives and sweethearts, and we’ll have some higher voices to sing parts in the carols, and someone to dance with besides one another.”

  Thomas rolled his eyes up into his head. “You lot are the most determined to find good cheer that ever I saw, I’ll grant you that much.”

  Nancy leaned forward. “One must be so, to be a colonist. Anyone who expects ease and comfort is far better to stay back in England.”

  “And that is exactly where I would be, had my father not packed me off to the ends of the earth.” Willoughby reminded them often enough that coming to the New World was no plan of his. Very different from Nancy, who had had such misgivings about coming, but who never spoke them aloud now.

  “Perhaps your father will relent and take you back in the spring, Master Willoughby,” Kathryn said now. “Until then, we must all make the best of it. Matt has lived through two winters in this colony and can tell us what to expect.”

  Matt Grigg laughed. “Plenty of cold—colder than an English winter, I’d say. It seeps in through the cracks in the walls and gets right under your skin, till you huddle by the fire wrapped in furs and blankets and think you’ll never be warm.”

  “All the more reason you’ll be glad to have the women here this winter,” Thomas Willoughby said. “At least, you lucky fellows with wives and sweethearts—for a woman is warmer than any fire, is that not right, Mistress Guy?” He nudged Kathryn’s shoulder and she shifted further along the bench.

  “You must needs ask my husband about that, Master Willoughby, once he returns.”

  “Oh, I hope they are all back soon,” Bess said. “I cannot bear to think of poor Frank—ah, and Master Nicholas and Ned and all the rest of them. God willing, they’ll be safe home soon.”

  Her little outburst sobered the mood at the table again. Kathryn went on eating her dinner, though she felt Thomas’s eyes on her.

  “You must not say such things,” she told him afterwards. He had managed to find her alone on her way to feed the chickens.

  “What things, Mistress, must I not say?”

  “You know quite well. ’Tis unseemly for you to make jests about another man’s wife, or to show familiarity. I am a married woman, and soon to be a mother.”

  “And well I know it—I weep over it every night,” he assured her with a grin that belied all talk of weeping. “As if being banished to this desolate place were not enough—to come here and meet the fairest lady in all creation at the very ends of it. And then to find she’s another man’s wife, and already bearing his brat! Was fate ever so unkind to anyone as it is to Thomas Willoughby?”

  Kathryn tried not to laugh. “I’m sure there are thousands of poor wretches who would say fate has been far less kind to them. If you must be here, do something useful.”

  Willoughby took a handful of grain and tossed it off into the yard quite a distance from where any chickens were—though, being resourceful little creatures, they made their way over to it and began pecking. Kathryn took a few handfuls herself and coopied down low to spread it around for them.

  “I was not raised to chores such as this,” he said. “Nor to splitting and gutting fish and covering them with salt. I took it amiss when my father’s apprentices tried to make me do it down in Renews. Master Crout took their part, and the whoresons tossed me in an ice-cold river to teach me better manners.”

  “Perhaps you need to be tossed in again. Then perhaps you would learn to leave off courting another man’s wife.”

  “I would, if that man’s wife were not such a flirt-gill.” He looked sidelong at her out of those blue, blue eyes. Kathryn found herself without words and took her leave as quickly as she could.

  Days passed. Neither the Indeavour nor the shallop sailed into the harbour of Cupids Cove. Nor did any other ship: the fishing vessels had all departed for the winter. The fishermen who had taken shelter in the cove after being attacked by Easton’s pirates had returned to England. Philip Guy had also sent six of the new men from Renews packing, all apprentices who had been sent out by Sir Percival Willoughby and proved troublesome and discontented. “It hardly seems fair,” Thomas Willoughby complained to Kathryn, “that the punishment for men who displease the masters is to send them home. Yet I, who displease everyone, am punished by being forced to stay the winter here.”

  “Because they know how much you long to return, and so will not grant it.” Privately she wondered what crime or misdemeanour had sent the son of a nobleman to the New World as a chastisement. Gossip about the colony only said that young Willoughby was inclined to wild ways and disobedient to his father, and that Sir Percival had hoped a time in the colony would settle and sober him. It was apparent Thomas had not thought his exile from England would last through a whole year: he had not even brought suitable clothes for the winter. As the weather grew colder, Kathryn took a badly worn cloak of her husband’s and began mending it, lining it with strips of wool from a similarly worn blanket.

  “I should look like a fool in motley if I wore that,” Thomas said when he came upon her sewing on it, and she confessed it was for him. He had come to her house with Tom and Matt, but quickly left their company to join Kathryn by the hearth.

  “You’d not survive even a Bristol winter, much less a New Found Land one, in what you have with you. You mock this cloak now, but you’ll be glad for it come Christmastide.”

  “And buried in it by Eastertide, no doubt,” he said, sitting down beside her. The day’s chores done and supper eaten, the women used the last hour of daylight for the endless mending and sewing. Thomas rubbed the fabric between his fingers; the original cloak, at least, was of good cloth, though the new lining made it rough as homespun
. “Still, ’tis sweet you’d make it for me. Any woman who would turn over her husband’s old cloak for another man must care for that man at least a little, must she not?”

  “Hush, you patched fool! I take it on only because I need a task to busy my fingers and my mind, to stop me fretting over my husband.”

  From a stool by the other end of the hearth, Nancy shot her a warning glance. Nancy had not approved of the plan to make over the cloak.

  “If you need to keep hands and mind busy, as you said, you would be better employed knitting more baby clothes, instead of mending a cloak for that one,” Nancy chided when they were in bed that night, the curtains drawn for privacy. Since the Indeavour had gone, Nancy had returned to her accustomed spot at Kathryn’s side. Daisy and Matt had a bed, as did Molly and Tom, leaving Bess in a bed to herself for the first time in her life. She complained of loneliness, but Nancy would not take pity; her place was with her mistress. The young men who had slept in the loft above were away with the master at sea, and the dwelling-house felt oddly empty with only seven people living in it.

  “I’ve plenty of baby clothes packed from…from before.” Kathryn felt tears rising to her eyes. “Every time I pick up my needle, if I try to sew a little smock, I can only think of….”

  Nancy threw an arm around Kathryn, pulled her closer. “I know. But you must put it from you. Your mother lost babies and still bore four healthy children. So many women have a difficult birthing, lose a child, and go on to have more fine babes. And you will be one of them. I am sure of it.”

  “Are you?” Kathryn felt like she had been keeping back tears for—how long? She had tried so hard to be brave, as a settler’s wife should be. But her husband had been gone a month, there was no word of the ship, and winter was closing in like a fist. “The first time was at home in Bristol, with my mother and a good midwife, in my own comfortable bed. Here—at the end of the world, no midwife, in a rough-timbered house where the wind howls through every crack — how can I hope to bear a child safely here when I could not at home?”

  “Now, now, Kat, you know all that’s for naught. A child will be born live and healthy if God wills it, whether the house be made of wood or stone. Your first babe was not fated to live: ’tis as simple as that. If this one is meant to live, it will be born healthy and hale in this very bed. Mistress Elizabeth will help you—she’s borne two, and Sal Butler says she has helped at a good many birthing beds. And you know I will be here to hold your hand through it all.”

  “As you were before.” Kathryn gripped Nancy’s hand. It was all in God’s will. But what if God were to punish her by taking the child away? Could flirting with Thomas be a sin severe enough to put her out of favour with God? There was a story somewhere in Scripture, wasn’t there, of a baby dying because of its parents’ sin? She was almost sure there was.

  And so Kathryn privately vowed to stop it, this light talk with Thomas, the images of him that danced behind her eyelids when she tried to sleep. She had had dreams of such a romance, of such a man, when she was a girl, but she was a woman now. A wife, and a colonist. Her dreams must be of motherhood and making a home for her good, kindly husband. She would put aside thoughts of Thomas. She would stop herself from imagining what she and her husband did in bed at night, but with Thomas Willoughby beside her instead. That was lust, pure and simple, just what the sermon warned against. For the sake of her child, as well as her own soul, she must give it up.

  Still, she would finish Thomas’s cloak; there was no reason he should freeze this winter just because Kathryn was a light and faithless woman.

  By the twenty-third of November, everyone in Cupids Cove looked grim, and the possibility that the boats had been lost at sea was in everyone’s mind, though never spoken aloud. Early that morning, before everyone turned to the day’s tasks, a shout went up from the men on watch.

  Kathryn sat up in bed. “’Tis the Indeavour! It must be!” she said, shaking Nancy awake. The other members of the household, too, were waking, putting on boots and cloaks over nightclothes and stumbling out into the grey dawn.

  It was indeed a boat, but it was neither the Indeavour nor their own shallop that had gone along with it. It was a small boat carrying five ragged figures. First to step ashore was Sam Butler, whose wife Sally broke out of the knot of women and ran to him.

  The other men climbed up onto the wharf: Rowley, Vaughan, Crowder, Hatton. The crew of men who had set sail in the shallop. Were all the rest lost at sea?

  “What? The Indeavour not back yet?” John Crowder said when he heard the news. “We all left Trinity Bay over a fortnight ago, after we met with the natives. But our shallop was wrecked on the rocks, and we walked overland from there to Carbonear, where we found this boat and rowed the rest of the way. We thought to see the Indeavour safely back in port long before us.”

  “We fear her lost,” Philip Guy said, framing the words aloud for the first time. “But we thought you all lost too, so perhaps the governor and his crew will likewise be returned to us by God. We can only hope and pray.”

  The five men were brought into the large dwelling-house and given warm food, spirits, and a chance to change their clothes before telling their story in full. All the community gathered to hear it, to marvel that the natives had indeed been found and seemed friendly and open to trade. Such a hopeful encounter—only to be followed by the wreck of the shallop and the disappearance of the governor’s barque.

  Listening to the story, Kathryn did not even notice Thomas Willoughby slip onto the bench beside her. His mouth was close to her ear. “God willing, the barque and its men will come back to us, too,” he said, the most reverent and respectful thing Kathryn had heard him say yet. “But if it does not, and Master Crout, the governor, and your own master are all lost, do you know what this will mean?”

  She tried to ignore him, but his breath was warm on her face. When she turned to answer him, she could feel the heat of his skin, and his hair tickled her cheek. “Hush,” she whispered. “’Twill mean a great loss for all this colony, and a great many broken hearts.”

  “Yes,” he whispered, “and it means I will be out of the authority of my father’s agent, and you of your husband. Neither of us will have a governor, no more than the colony itself will. What would any of us here do, with no one to rule us?”

  Misrule and madness, Kathryn thought. Her belly fluttered at the thought: half fear; half excitement. Or was it her child quickening in the womb? She whispered into the curve of Thomas Willoughby’s ear, “I pray we would do God’s will, whether we have masters or no.”

  He stayed beside her, so close on the bench that she could feel the hard muscle of his thigh through the heavy wool of her skirt and petticoat. He was wearing the cloak she had mended for him, and when she shivered, he spread it out to cover both of them, so she was wrapped in her husband’s old cloak, snuggled against Thomas Willoughby.

  Two days later, the Indeavour limped into port. Blown off course by the November gales, she had sailed past the fishing station at St. John’s, abandoned now for the winter. She had sailed south almost as far as the Renews station, before adjusting her heading and returning to Cupids Cove. All aboard her were safe and well and full of tales of their voyage.

  The day the Indeavour made land, the first snow fell.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Cold Hand is Laid Upon the Colony

  Those that live here, how young, or old so-ever,

  Were never vexed with Cough, nor Aguish Fever,

  Nor ever was the Plague, nor small Pox here;

  The Air is so salubrious, constant, clear:

  Yet scurvy Death stalks here with thievish pace,

  Knocks one down here, two in another place.

  CUPIDS COVE

  JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1613

  WHEN SHE FORCED HERSELF TO CRAWL OUT FROM under the covers, the first thing Nancy saw was the snow on the floor. The men had done all they could to prepare the house for winter, with the result that being inside
the house often felt like being sealed in a coffin, so closed and gloomy was it. But the storm that had raged through the last two days and nights was too fierce to be kept out of doors. Every crack between boards and through the window shutters had been ruthlessly searched out by the wind, which seemed almost a sentient force, determined to drive snow into each corner of the settlement. Last night’s gale had left a skirl of snow half an inch deep over the floorboards, soaking into the mats, drifting over the beds where the sleepers snored under piles of furs and blankets that weighed heavily without ever being truly warm.

  In the bed she had just left, Bess stirred but did not wake. Nancy pulled on her boots before she used the chamber pot. When she was done, she reached for the broom. None of the household lessons she’d been taught by Aunt Tibby or Mistress Gale had prepared her for the task of clearing a snow-covered floor. Turn your hand to the task at hand, she thought with a wry smile: what would Aunt Tibby, with her sensible maxims and superstitious charms, make of life in this place?

  She swept the snow as if it were dust, intending to open the door and sweep it back outside where it belonged. But when she went to the door, bracing herself for the assault of icy wind, she found she could not push it open. Stupidly, she checked the bar again, as if she had not just lifted it out of place herself, before she realized the barrier was not their own lock but the snow outside.

  She went instead to the fire and began to build it up. The woodbox was getting low, and the larger woodpile outside the house would have to be dug out to refill it. How much work everything is in this thrice-damned country, Nancy thought. Opening a door. Putting wood on the fire. Carrying and birthing a child.

  She worried about Kathryn, now six months along. She tired so easily, and except for her belly, she was so thin that Nancy wondered could the babe be growing properly. During Christmastide Kathryn had made an effort to be merry, but in the fortnight since Twelfth Night, the life seemed to have been sapped out of her. She spent much of the day huddled under her mound of blankets, reluctant to stir from the warmth of the bed. Mistress Butler had trudged her way up the snow-covered path a few days ago to visit and clucked her tongue, saying the child would grow amiss if Kathryn did not get up and move about a bit every day. But it was hard to force her out into the cold. Hard, too, to forget the months of lethargy Kathryn had suffered after losing her first child. Was she slipping back into the grip of despair?