The Traitor's Wife

by Kathleen Kent

  Instead Martha asked, “Are you Thomas Morgan?”

  There was the slightest pause, his hesitation not one of deception, but rather of a man careful in handing over a thing of staggering weight. She felt the falling away of fear and in its place flared the dreadful excitement of the battlefield harridan, the woman who follows after soldiers, hopeful of gain at the end of a desperate fight. In her mind there was a quick succession of images: the embattled waves of tramping men, the sounds of iron on leather, the trumpeting of dying horse’s and men. The poetry of blood.

  And then he answered, “Aye.”

  Robert turned and walked the way he had come with no goodbyes until he had swept up the path twenty paces or so. Turning briefly, he called out, “I’ll be about, missus. Rest easy on that.”

  Later, Martha would halve the apple, twisting it in her hands, and hand the largest part to Thomas, who ate it in two bites, skin and core, swallowing whole the bitter pips, the seeds that would always endure beyond the fruit’s demise, the hard and reluctant carriers of secrets.

  FOR DAYS AFTERWARDS Martha rarely spoke to Thomas yet often found ways of standing close to him, the air between them discouraging even the simplest intrusive demands of others. John laid off his teasing banter, quietly leaving the common room or barn whenever they were near. Patience, worried over the impending birth, stayed close to her bed, saying nothing to Martha about her solitary time spent with Thomas, giving out only a succession of peevish requests for food or to move her pillow this way or that.

  On the eighteenth of July, the true pains of labor started for Patience. Her water broke in a thin stream while she was at the wash, and John was quickly sent in the wagon for Mary, who would help with the birthing. In a scrap of note, Martha wrote for her sister to bring black cohosh, as the cramping had begun sluggish and weak. She knew that Patience would never willingly take the cohosh—“squaws root,” the pregnant woman had dismissively called it—but Martha would sneak it into her broth if her cousin didn’t have the strength to bear down through the final stages.

  Patience, greatly relieved that the pains were so light, was full of high resolve and friendly chatter as Martha walked her about the yard, through the common room, around the bed. Patience speculated aloud when Daniel would return and what he might bring back for her. She questioned Martha endlessly about what name she should give the child if it should be another boy, dismissing every name Martha suggested, finally deciding on the name Daniel; if it should be a girl, she would name it Rebecca. Will, agitated by the sudden tension and nervous vulnerability of his mother, marched back and forth through the yard, a stick over his shoulder like a rifle, challenging hordes of invisible attackers. Wave after wave of invading bands were subdued, until he knocked Joanna down, making her scream, and Martha used the stick on the back of his legs.

  At four in the afternoon, Martha laid Patience down on the bed and examined the crown of the birth channel. The pains had begun to come more frequently, less than every half hour, but the crown was not opening sufficiently for the infant’s head. The plug had not been completely dispelled and Martha was loath to puncture it as she had known other midwives to do. Often, it nicked the tender part of the babe’s skull, or allowed a pustulance to start in the womb, causing fever and death. She decided to wait and heaved Patience up again to walk her around the garden once more.

  For six hours the women walked and rested and walked again. Martha brought a pan of warm water and helped her cousin squat over it, her shift pulled up around her breasts, allowing the steam to open up the womb. Finally, close to midnight, the pains stopped altogether and Patience fell into an exhausted sleep. Martha lay down next to her, prodding Patience’s belly gently with her fingers, but felt no answering kick; an hour later Martha closed her eyes and slept.

  Martha dreamt of the wolves trapped in the pen and jerked into consciousness at hearing the high-pitched scream of a struggling animal. She woke to a blackened room, Patience writhing in agonized spasms next to her. Martha quickly rose, feeling her way to the hearth to light a few candles. When she returned to the bedroom with the guttering light, she saw a dark stain of liquid on the mattress, her cousin’s face open-mouthed in the extremes of fear and pain.

  “Patience, your water has fully come. This is good news, cousin. Hush now or you’ll wake your children.” Martha heard padding footfalls behind her and saw Will and Joanna standing, staring wide-eyed and frightened, at the bedroom door. Behind them loomed Thomas, his body in the helpless stance of useless men, and she waved him out of the house, into the barn. She led the children back to bed, giving them each a piece of bread to suck on, and quickly built up the fire, adjusting the iron pot to boil water. She shredded into the pot lavender and chamomile, and carried back into the bedroom the slippery elm paste covered in a wet cloth. She sat on the bed with a candle, positioning herself to examine Patience, satisfying herself that the womb was beginning to open, expelling the child.

  Within a few hours, though, Martha was dismayed to see her cousin beginning to tire, unwilling to bear down with the cramping pains that left her scrambling up the wall behind the bed, her arms and legs flailing, as though she could leave her distended belly behind to do its own work.

  With much coaxing, Martha roused her and set Patience on her lap in a chair. She encircled Patience’s belly with her arms, pushing down whenever the pains came, whispering encouraging words over her cousin’s frantic protests that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, bear down anymore.

  Dawn had fully come before Martha heard John returning with the wagon. She rushed into the yard, anxious to greet her sister, but was dismayed to see Roger climbing from the wagon as well. His eyes were veined with red and he scowled, on the back end of being in his cups, and she knew he was the reason for the delay in her sister’s arrival. Saying he had long been with a patient and needed sleep, he quickly found his way into the barn, and Martha hoped he would sleep through until Patience had been delivered.

  Mary followed quickly into the bedroom and, with only the briefest of examinations, whispered for Martha to begin feeding Patience the cohosh. They dosed Patience every hour for three hours and Mary was soon satisfied that the roof of the womb was finally opening sufficiently for the head. With the birth pains coming every few minutes, Patience shrieked and cried, and Martha knew that she herself would be coming undone without the soothing presence of her sister. She watched Mary’s assured movements, admiring her calm, but Patience’s face had taken on the color of old ivory, with black bands underlying her swollen lower lids, and when Martha caught Mary’s eye, she saw the press of wary concern on her sister’s face.

  Mary took up the slippery elm and applied it with gentle fingers into the birth channel, all the while encouraging Patience with how fine her son would be, how proud would be his father. Martha crawled onto the bed behind Patience, raising her up into a sitting position while Patience thrashed her head from side to side with increasing violence screaming, “No more, no more, no more…”

  Mary said quietly, “Martha, we need to dose her again.”

  Patience went suddenly limp and still, a look of renewed panic growing on her face. Through cracked lips, she croaked, “What’s that you say? What’s that?” She looked first at Mary and then up at Martha bending over her shoulder, and whispered with rising hysteria, “You’re poisoning me. You’re killing me! Murder! Murder!” Her eyes rolled towards the door and she pleaded, “Help me, they’re poisoning me!”

  Martha followed Patience’s gaze and she saw Roger standing at the door. He said, “Christ on the cross, but you can hear her out to the barn.” He paused, regarding the women unsteadily, and offered, “She needs to be bled and heartily.”

  Patience reached out to him with grasping fingers and shrilled, “Yes, let him take it. Open my veins and take this pain from my head.”

  “Husband,” Mary said quietly, “you are tired. Rest more and let us do our work.”

  He paused for a moment, assessing the preg
nant woman on the bed, observing her pallor, her swollen limbs. He asked Martha, “How long has she labored?”

  “Since yesterday morning late.” Martha wiped at her cousin’s face with a cool cloth, clenching her teeth. Roger’s answer to everything—every bruise, every pustule, every boil—was to aggressively bleed the patient until the sufferer was as white as lambs’ wool.

  “She is phlegmatic…,” he began.

  Martha clapped her hands over her cousin’s ears and snapped, “She is not phlegmatic, she is exhausted.”

  He shrugged, but before walking away, he said to Mary, “I have brought castor oil, if it comes to that.”

  Patience covered her face, sobbing into her hands, saying she would surely die, and Martha held her in a rocking embrace. Castor oil was tricky and vile; it was certain to bring on powerful labor, but too much of a surgeon’s distillation, the castor beans having been soaked in the oil for months, and the laboring woman would indeed be poisoned. Mary put her ear to Patience’s belly, listening for the sounds of life within, and when she raised her head, she said urgently to Martha, “Help me get her up.”

  It took the two of them to lift Patience out of bed and they eased her down squatting onto the floor, both of them holding her arms, pleading, exhorting, bullying Patience to push and push and push again. After another few hours, Patience began a shuddering fever, her body lathered in sweat. When Patience began to rave incoherently, she was eased back onto the bed with pillows propped under her head. Beckoning for Martha to follow, Mary walked into the common room. They found the men eating a cold midday dinner of day-old porridge and meat, their faces strained from the sounds of a woman’s agony. The children sat on a bench, their hands interlocked in terrified silence.

  Mary beckoned to Roger and, when he stood in front her, whispered, “She has no more strength left to labor. If the babe is not pushed out of her womb very soon, they both will die.”

  He walked to his saddlebag and sorted through some bottles until he pulled out a small brown vial. Lifting the stopper out, he carefully poured a tiny measure of the syrupy oil into a cup of ale. Pausing a moment, he added a drop more. Swirling the mixture in the cup, he said, “She must drink it all at once.”

  “She’ll not do it willingly,” Martha warned, wondering how they would pry open her cousin’s jaws to swallow the oily drink.

  Carrying the cup, Roger followed them back to the bedroom where Patience lay panting, her hands gripping at the torn sheets, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Advising the two women to hold Patience down, he leaned over the bed, saying, “You must swallow this down, Goodwife Taylor. It will help you in your labors.” He said it pleasantly, matter-of-factly, but when she began to shake her head wildly in refusal, clamping her lips more tightly together, Roger reached out, pinching his fingers over her nose, and waited. She soon gasped for air and he poured the liquid over her tongue, quickly palming his hand over her mouth, forcing her to swallow or be drowned.

  Before he left to resume his dinner, he gently stroked Patience’s hair, cooing to her that all would be well, that the babe would now soon come. Patience smiled up at him and Martha marveled that for all of Roger’s weaknesses, his passion for drink, his carelessness with his wife, he could at times show kindness. She admonished herself to have more charity where her brother-in-law’s shortcomings were concerned.

  The action of the oil worked quickly and within a few hours, Patience, howling and bucking, had been delivered of a boy, his forceful passage soaked in a spill of blood and water running in rivulets over the mattress onto the floor. While Mary worked to clean up the afterbirth, washing Patience with practiced hands while she slept, Martha swaddled the infant and held him close to her breast. He was the most perfect infant Martha had ever seen, each finger, every toe creased and rounded in rosy flesh, the nails crescented and silvery. His head was gently domed, neither flattened nor marred, despite the many long hours of the labor. She examined the infant skin, looking like cream and marigolds, stroking the cheeks, full and dimpled, the lashes still dark and segmented with the fluid from his mother’s womb, the lashes that would never crimp or dampen with crying, the curved and protruding lips that would never part with laughing, for he had been born without a breath to waken him, and with never a breath he would be lowered into the ground.

  CHAPTER 16

  From the Private Journal of John Dixwell

  Catalogue XXIII

  New Haven, Connecticut, Anno 1673, 28th day of July

  In primis: the following code, dated 19 July, was received this morning by courier from my agent in Boston and is hereby re-created from the original:

  3012272622271022253016272218

  312135211522181030161433211113101121272334

  3121192710181228131024192310112110131614342313

  27222319271116111410242113232111

  121832161322101211181027223035103119111813

  The cipher translates as follows:

  Parker expired. Followed pigeons north 4 days but no sightings. Returning Boston. Advise and replenish funds.

  Faciendum: a courier should be sent to the constable in Boston with funds for the Boston agent in the amount of fifty shillings, to include remuneration for Mrs. Parker’s burial, along with directives to friends in Woburn and Haverhill to observe and report, taking no tumultuous action against Brudloe and Cornwall, pro tempore. It may be our English pigeons have misled us about their going north up the coastal roads.

  However, the courier from Boston has informed me that, as there is plague in Springfield, the post road towards Boston is now barred, as well as ships coming into Boston Harbor, to keep contagion and death from entering the city. My agent must make his way home from Boston as best he can, with no word soon from me. I fear the foul wind of sickness may have already settled in New Haven, as my wife has been downed with a troubling fever. I have bled her three times, but the fever rises with the hours.

  Further to this difficulty there are Indian raids to the west. Seven people have been murdered, their bodies hacked into suet, at a settlement in Danbury thirty miles from here and we are left for only God to defend us, as our stores of powder have been neglected, our garrison only basely built.

  It may be weeks before we can alert our Massachusetts friends who have for so many years lived in our care and under our watchful eye. It is for me only a little thing, sitting and watching and cawing like an alarming parrot, repeating and passing on those communications uttered by careless and odious Royalists—some of whom have meant to do harm, others who’ve merely loved the sounds of their own voices—when those I seek to warn have sacrificed so much for the sake of common good: they who have given up land, family, and the most modest of pleasures to keep on living; they who are now only a few and who have, from the first instant of the Struggle, done what others were not willing to do. And though I may count myself a part of that struggle, it is doubtless not so great a sacrifice having affixed my name, one name out of many, to a king’s death writ, when others have taken up the mask, the rope, and the ax.

  If any in our care are captured and brought back to England as traitors alive, here is what awaits them upon judgment from the king, this purveyor of ancient justices and charitable acts: they will be taken from their place of imprisonment, bound and dragged on hurdles, to the place of execution at Tyburn or Charing Cross. There they will be hanged by a short rope for only a little while, just shy of death. Then will they be cut down and dragged again to a long table where the executioners will saw off their privy parts and throw them to dogs to be eaten. A long cut will be made in the bellies of the newly hanged; the entrails spooled out slowly upon a rolling pin. This in full sight of the sufferer who screams in agony to a crowd of leering subjects fed by oranges and sweetmeats provided by the king’s men. Each organ in turn will be pulled out and burned and, if the executioner is practiced and skilled, the dying man will not go to his end until he has smelled the charring of his own tender flesh.

  I have lost close to a dozen
confederates in just such a manner, myself escaping the noose of betrayal and capture solely by God’s Grace and the advantage, at times, of only an hour’s head start.

  Those in our care have damned themselves to their native country, and have given up their own unfettered liberties for the right to go on breathing; a few even now hide in cellars and attics as though they were thieves. But a new country, and a new people, baking in the slow fire of brutish energy and stirred with the infant zealotry of practical idealism and independence, have claimed them.

  In these late days, I am often reminded of the lament of Dante in his sublime Paradiso, who knew full well the torment of the exiled: Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta più caramente; è questo è quello strale che l ’arco de lo essilio pria saetta.

  You shall leave everything you love most; this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first.

  CHAPTER 17

  MARTHA SAT ON the threshold, fanning her face with a dampened apron. The heat had become burdensome even at that early hour, but there was an eastward breeze which would last until midmorning, and she watched the men moving through the fields, testing the grain heads with their fingers and teeth, preparing for the summer harvest. She had come outside to escape the Reverend Hastings, who had been with Patience, still confined to her bed weeks after the burial of her infant, praying for hours. His visit had started gently enough with a passage from Romans: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” But then he moved on to the book of James and the sick, who should “call upon the elders of the church night and day until evil is cast out.” And finally, he raked her over the coals of Deuteronomy, wherein “sinful, unrepentant men, women, and children perish and are cast into the sulfurous pit.”