The Traitor's Wife

by Kathleen Kent

  There was a moment of confusion when Martha simply stared, wondering that there should be a twin to her own singular journal. But Daniel’s face was stricken with something beyond grief. A crimped mask of fear had compressed his lips into two white slashes, and he asked, “Is this your doing?”

  “Patience gave it me,” she answered quickly. “The book is for the house accounts.” She heard from her cousin an ugly exhalation of air, and when Martha met her eyes, a prickling band of sweat sprang up around her neck.

  “I will ask you again, Martha, is this your doing?” He anxiously palmed the stubble at his chin, and Martha frantically searched his face, trying to gauge the depth of his knowledge. How far beyond the beginning entries, the notations of supplies and homely expenditures, had he read of a regicide’s life?

  “It was given to me by your wife, Daniel. It is mine.” Martha dropped her chin, clenching her hands together. “I thought my property to be inviolable.”

  “Your property. Your property.” Patience rapped fiercely on the back of the chair, making Daniel wince. “Everything in this house by rights is ours. The food you eat, the bed you shared with our children. The cloth that came from the sale of our pigs…” She stopped for a moment, collecting herself. “I went to lie down on my son’s bed and found that…accounting book sewn into your pillow, next to where my own child laid his head. In truth it is an accounting book, but not such a one that is to our prosperity. Indeed, I think it is to our ruin.”

  More than the pity Martha felt for her cousin in that moment—the thought of Patience trying desperately to breathe in the remaining scent of a dead child impressed onto a pillow—she awakened to an overarching terror that she had, through her own playing at secrets, betrayed Thomas.

  She met Daniel’s gaze and held out her hand to receive back the book. He looked away from her, gripping the book’s binding tighter, turning it end over end in his hands. He said, “You will leave today for your father’s house until such time as I have reflected on this. I will keep the book and you will not return until—”

  “She will not return to this house, and as for the Welshman —” Patience began.

  “Silence!” Daniel roared. “Enough.” Wounded and shaken, Patience gathered up the folds of her skirt and left the room, weeping.

  “Martha,” Daniel said, “John will take you in the wagon today.” He laid the diary on the table, his palms splayed over the binding as if seeking to hide it. Martha could see the lines entrenched in his face, and she knew his sadness would never find release pinioned against his wife’s towering, extravagant grief.

  “Daniel,” she began. “Cousin, I have never asked you for anything, and have done all I could for your family. But I ask you, I beg you, to burn this book rather than read it more. I would you call me thief and have me arrested rather than harm come to another through my indiscretion.” She took a few steps closer to the table. “Cousin, the teller of these words has no knowledge of this book. Think what may come from revealing these pages to others. I, myself, have not told another soul. Please.”

  “No,” he said, taking the book from the table. “You must promise me you will never again speak of this. I will reason with Patience. She is—” He paused for a moment before continuing. “She has faults enough, but she is my wife and will be silent on this if I demand it. You must understand…she had no knowledge…” He stood abruptly, dragging a hand through the tufts of his hair. He stepped closer, saying, “You have put us all in grave danger with this book, cousin.”

  Martha looked at his red-rimmed eyes and knew in the instant that he had read the whole of the book. “It was recklessness that led me to write it. I see that now.”

  He clasped her firmly by the elbow and walked with her out of the house, leading her into the garden, dotted with swelling gourds. He stood scanning the surrounding fields, cropped bare through autumn harvesting, and said, “Martha, if Thomas ever knew of this book, it could be the end of the trust he has placed in you.” When she tried to speak, to tell him of the bounty men, he held up a hand and said harshly, “Not another word. You must leave now. Speak to no one else about this. I will think on what is best to be done.”

  Martha searched his face, which seemed to reflect only the flushed and open visage of a simple carter. A kind and generous man who had coddled and spoiled his wife and children alike; a man who could not, though it save his very life, hit the broadside of a barn with a primed and ready flintlock. But she also sensed a forcefulness that he had, until that moment, hidden from her. Or perhaps it was that she had not looked closely enough to find the greater substance in him.

  He glanced at the house, the door still open and beckoning, and Martha could see the rings of black under his eyes and the stubble of beard that proved the cost of hiding her secret.

  Martha quickly bundled her few things together and, wearing the new cloak, climbed into the waiting wagon. Thomas had gone hunting hours before, or so he had said, but she wondered if his going had been a kind of self-protection. She craned her neck again and again for some glimpse of him, but the wagon was quickly engulfed by spiraling wisps of fog dissipating with the rising heat. John sat next to her on the driving board, his face anxious, his eyes, wide and blinking, fixed on the road ahead.

  Midway through the journey John said to her, “Do not worry about the Taylors. I will see to them, no matter what…” He paused, his voice trailing away.

  She sat shivering with the cloak drawn tightly around her shoulders, even after the sun broke free, shining hotly on their necks, and a pounding like the threshing of grain began in her ears. She suddenly pressed her hands over her face, her breath exhaling raggedly against her palms, and she felt John’s hand go to her shoulder briefly before she turned her head away.

  “Thomas will never break faith with you,” he said. “Never.”

  She shook her head, voiceless, searching the familiar pathways of burled oak and elm already washed with russet brown and yellow. She smelled the honeysuckle, made heavy and overripe by the rains, remembering that its scent could foretell weddings. On the day of the summer harvest, Thomas had proudly pointed out to her his plot of land at the bend of the Concord. A place of sandy shale and gray rock pressed firm and flat by rushing seasonal tides, facing the rolling furze of Broad Meadow on its westerly side. Wood and stone, he’d once said, about his house that was to be. It was to stand on the banks above the glistening boulders, settled in sheltering birch and ash, the great common fields at its back, the gold and amber of the setting sun at its front.

  Now, in all probability, through the determination or spite of her cousin, the house that stood at the bend would be shackled to a miller’s wheel, and the man dispossessed of it perhaps manacled to a prison ship bound for England. There would be no marriage now, in any event, if Thomas believed that she had betrayed him.

  John stopped the cart some distance away from the Allen house at Martha’s insistence. She climbed weakly from the wagon and stood mute in the shifting dust of the path, unable to say the simplest of good-byes.

  She turned and walked across the yard to the house. Standing silently at the open door, without greeting or explanation, she took in the surprised looks on the faces of her father and his two hired men. They had been eating supper and they sat with their spoons poised over their laps as though she had appeared like a nymph, come from the woods to haunt them. Andrew Allen slowly lowered his spoon to the table, his surprise quickly turning to dismay, and then to suspicion, and motioned abruptly for the men to leave.

  When he and Martha were alone together, he wiped his mouth carefully with the back of his hand and asked, “Are ye in the family way?”

  Setting the empty bowl from her bundle on the table, the bowl she had taken to the Taylors’ to fill by her own labors, she shook her head, and without a word, she crept to the attic, to her old bed, and lay down to sleep.

  When Martha woke, it was daylight but on which day, she wasn’t sure. She had fallen asleep on her bel
ly, her arms curled under her chest, and her eyelids felt swollen shut with crying. She had woken and slept in so many fragmented, half-aware snatches, she was uncertain which recollections were dreams and which were taken from actual events. She pushed herself upright, seeing that someone had covered her with one of her mother’s quilts, and she rasped her fingers across her papery mouth, needing desperately to drink.

  Holding her shoes in one hand, she walked carefully down the stairs, only to see her father sitting alone at the table, observing closely her unlaced bodice and wild, unbound hair knitted over her shoulders. He tapped at the table with his forefinger, his bird’s-nest brows rising with alarm, as if to say, “Here. Here is a thing which needs be attended.” But when she didn’t speak, staring at him with red-veined, purposeless eyes, he shifted his gaze away to the window and sighed noisily. She walked to the rain barrel and drank deeply, letting the dipper spill water over her skirt, and taking a piece of corn bread from the hearth, she went to sit at the table.

  “Yer mother’s gone with a shroud to Goodman Abbot’s.” He cut his eyes to her briefly and she realized it had been her father who had covered her in the night.

  She toyed with the dry corn bread on the table for a time and, resting her forehead in her hands, bit the tender inside of her lip to keep the tears from coming. She heard the sound of a chair being scraped back and her father saying, “Come with me now.” It was the commanding way she had always heard her father speak and, reflexively, she pushed up from the table, following his gesture to cover herself with one of her mother’s shawls.

  She followed him through the yard, the eyes of the workmen on her, questioning, curious, and quickly she realized her father was leading her to Sunset Rock to the north of the house. They climbed the rock slowly, pausing at times for her father to favor his weak leg, and stood looking over Boston Way Road, empty of all carts or wagons, the air silent except for the distant sound of a pick on a rock somewhere beyond Ballard’s Pond.

  Her father crossed his arms and asked, “Are ye still…? I mean to say, d’ye still have yer…?” He paused and sucked at his teeth for a moment.

  Martha looked at him, her mouth downturned. “If you mean, am I still intact, the answer is yes.” She exhaled sharply, muttering, “Much good may it do me.”

  The wooden sign above Chandler’s Inn, a rough-hewn board with the mark of a horse’shoe, squealed once in an errant breeze and then hung motionless.

  He shook his head and gestured. “Ye look like a madwoman.” He shifted his weight from his ulcered hip, taking in the view of harvested fields. “Thirty years I’ve made this my home.” He looked at her as though she’d dispute the fact. “The spring of ’forty-three I came. There were scarce twenty of us between the Cochichawick and the Shawshin. And here, right here on this rock is where I stood to spy my holdings.” He coughed loosely and spat off the ledge. “I had a brother lost in the Great War. My brother James.”

  She looked at him in surprise. He’d never before mentioned a brother in England.

  “He took for soldiering with the Solemn League and Covenant for Cromwell,” he said. “He died on Marston Moor and I didna’ know of it for five years. But I know why he fought. So that a Scotsman wouldna’ have to bend his knee to tricked-up vessels and rich cloths thrown up over the altar of Christ like a whore’s skirt.”

  In all her years she had never heard him speak at length about anything other than the determined acquisition of that which increased the holdings of Goodman Allen.

  He pressed his arms tightly around his chest and said, “There’s been talk. About you and the Welshman.”

  Martha crossed her own arms and waited. The anxiety she had felt in the wagon on the way to Andover had begun to build again, making the jellied parts of her eyes feel pierced with gun-metal shards. She pulled the shawl tighter around her chest with unsteady hands and stared at her feet, two steps from open air.

  She felt the restraining grasp of her father’s hand over her arm. “Oh, fer Christ’s bloody sake, Martha, I didna’ raise ye to be well regarded. To be liked. Any puny, weak-waisted slut can be liked. I raised ye to be reckoned with. To be fierce in the face of others’ pridefulness. T’say to those who would be puffed up in their own cleverness, ‘Kiss ma backside and the Devil take the rest.’ D’ye hear me? I don’t know this…slack-kneed girl in front of me.” He softened his grip on her.

  “I’d rather ye be wed to a wanted man with principle than to a magistrate with the balls of a seahorse.”

  He took from his pocket a small gold coin and bounced it in his palm. “A coin has two faces, but it’s forged from the same metal. That’s you and I.” He tapped twice at his brow. “We’re the same.” He reached out for her hand and closed her fingers over the coin. Martha looked at him amazed; she didn’t know whether to be more surprised at his holding her hand or the giving up of a gold coin. He turned abruptly and began his descent down the rock.

  He threw over his shoulder, “Ye have to ask yerself, daughter. Is he worth a fight?” He stumbled, cursing, then righted himself and shouted, “It’s a fair way to Billerica on foot. Best start now.”

  She gave him time to return to the house and, slipping the coin into her apron, descended the rock on steadied legs. She walked Boston Way Road for a short distance before cutting west at Preston Bridge over the Shawshin and followed Blanchard’s Plain southward. The paths were still boggy from rain, veined through with muddy rivulets and carpeted with mottled leaves that clung fast and clammy to her legs. At Strongwater Brook she peeled off her shoes and stockings and picked her way across the sucking black clay, mired up to her knees. On the other side she sat on a stone wall, rubbing hard at her blackened legs with leaves, scraping away the sodden dirt, only just remembering that all her few belongings were still in Andover. She laughed aloud, the sound harsh and challenging, thinking she didn’t even have the cloak for a blanket.

  The path descended into rows of pines, banked and half-buried by a recent mud slide, and when she came upon Long Pond, she realized she had walked too far west. She floundered through a backwash of branches and fallen trees, losing the path for a time until she came upon Alewife Creek, getting her bearings again. In another hour she passed Nuttings Pond and saw her cousin’s house, a thin column of smoke coming from the chimney.

  Behind it stood the barn, and she watched it for a while until she was certain Thomas was there. She crept along the shadowed side of the barn, slipping in through the door. She stood quietly for a moment, listening to the sounds of Thomas and John mucking out a stall.

  She stepped forward into the light of a hooded lantern and said, “Thomas.”

  They both startled at her voice, and she could imagine what they were seeing; her dress was torn and muddied, her shoes two stumps of clay embedded with leaves and the bristling eruptions of twigs.

  She said again, “Thomas.”

  Thomas set down the pitchfork and, turning to John, said, “Leave now. Stay gone a good while.”

  John propped his pitchfork against the stall and walked quickly past her, closing and latching the door.

  She stepped out of her shoes, leaving them behind like a chrysalis shedding its casing, searching Thomas’s face for any sense of betrayal. But there were no bitter looks, only an alarmed concern as one might give a sleepwalker. She stepped closer, staggering through the straw, and he was there, holding her up briefly, then setting her on a stool. He turned away, filling a bucket of water from the trough, and knelt in front of her. Peeling off her stockings, he dipped his hands into the bucket and began to wash her legs with long, kneading strokes. The water was surprisingly tepid on her skin, as though the huffed, steaming breath of the cows had warmed it first.

  He set aside her shawl and carefully washed her face and neck, cupping one palm around the back of her head, running his other hand across the birdlike bones at the base of her throat and the darker skin above her bodice. The water ran in droplets between her breasts, collecting on her ribs like
animate things, and she recalled she must breathe. Her hands, lying useless at her sides, were collected and rinsed with water until the pads of her fingers were pale again.

  While he washed her he spoke to her calmly, beseechingly, in Welsh and then in English, telling her, “Daniel spoke only that you and the missus had quarreled, and that he sent you for a time to your father’s.”

  “Thomas,” she whispered, “through my own carelessness I have revealed to Daniel…”

  He held her chin so that she faced him. “Martha, Daniel knows who and what I am. He always has. He is but one of many who has chosen to give safe harbor to men such as myself.” Startled, she reflexively pulled back, but he held her fast. “Pots are not the only things he carries in his wagon. His work goes to the heart of his commitments to keep those in hiding from harm. He carts letters and dispatches from here to Boston and back again for a man named James Davids who, to the best of his abilities, watches over those of us wanted by the king for treason.” He craned his face closer to hers, his voice low and urgent. “Daniel carries the greatest treasure in the colonies: intelligences, warnings, instructions. Without such knowledge we would be like blind men pursued by dogs.”

  That Daniel had put himself, and his family, at risk of imprisonment or death made her ashamed she had ever thought him weak. “Has he said more?” she asked. “Why he sent me away?”

  He shook his head. “Beyond crossing words with his good wife? Only that he would give you time to reflect on the life you may be choosing.” He traced a lingering finger across the prominence of her collarbone.

  Relief that Daniel had not spoken of the red book overwhelmed her, and she lowered her chin. She held up her empty palms, like a supplicant, to show him she had brought nothing with her on her arriving, for she had nothing. He pulled her head roughly to his chest, and then he lifted her up, carrying her into the recesses of a far stall.