The Winthrop Woman

by Anya Seton

  "God—" she whispered. Her numbness broke, she ran to the wall pegs and jerked at the big carbine. It caught on the pegs, nor was it loaded. As she stood there tugging futilely at the carbine, Lisbet rushed in wearing her night shift. "Mother, Mother, what's ado?"

  "Take the fire shovel!" cried Elizabeth. She rushed to the hearth and grabbed the long iron peel. She had no sooner grasped the peel than the front door burst open. Jumping and leaping in orgiastic triumph, a dozen Indians hurtled through the door and filled the kitchen. One knocked the fire shovel out of Lisbet's hands, and hooting crazily grabbed her by her long flowing flaxen hair. He jerked her to her knees, and yanked her head back and forth by her hair. Lisbet screamed, then fell to sobbing.

  Elizabeth raised the peel to strike down the Indian who was tormenting Lisbet. Another Indian by the door took aim and shot at Elizabeth. His shot went slightly wild, for he was drunk with brandy he had stolen in the city. Elizabeth felt a dull, thudding pain in her upper left arm. The heavy peel clattered on the floor. It was Nawthorne who had shot her, but she did not know it. She heard stamping feet and cries and shouts upstairs where several of the Indians had swarmed when they came in. Upstairs where the boys were bedded. "Sammy!" she cried. "Let me have my baby!" and she stumbled towards the stairs.

  Nawthorne gave a whinny of laughter. "Let me have my baby—" he mimicked, in a high squealing voice, and he rushed for Elizabeth with his musket butt upraised. She ran—the Indian who was now binding Lisbet with buckskin thongs stuck his foot out, and Elizabeth fell.

  She saw an Indian bending over her, and thought it was the man who shot her. But this Indian had an English hatchet in his hand, she saw the edge of gleaming steel. The Indian grabbed her hair and jerked her head up, so that he might see her face. It was not Nawthorne but another—who had knocked Nawthorne to one side.

  Elizabeth stared up from glazed eyes at the face above her; tattooed and painted with the red of war, a mask of furious vengeance, but she recognized it.

  "Keofferam..." she whispered. "Keofferam..."

  The Siwanoy chief stood rigid, poised, his left hand gripping her hair, his right drawn back with the gleaming English hatchet. The other Indians all turned to watch, knowing how long Keofferam had waited for this revenge on the white woman who had betrayed the Siwanoy, from whose home the soldiers had marched that day for the destruction of Petuquapan.

  "Keofferam ... have mercy!" she cried as though he could understand her. "I didn't do it—Telaka knew I didn't do it..."

  He heard his sister's name and his eyelids flickered, while still he gazed down into her hopeless eyes. He gave a sudden shiver, and his hatchet arm went slack. He released her hair.

  Nawthorne protested violently. Keofferam answered in tones of sharp command. The Tomac chieftain's eyes began to glint, seeing the moment come at last when he could rid him of his Siwanoy overlord. An apt moment since the other Indians would not think of this as treachery. "Look how soft and womanlike the once great Siwanoy has grown!" he cried to the Corchaugs. "Look how he weakly spares the life of her who killed his people. Did I not tell you that he has a rabbit heart?" The Corchaugs moved uneasily, watching, uncertain.

  "Now!" cried Nawthorne with exultance. "Let him now join the dead white men he so loves!" He lurched around with his long hunting knife and leaped at Keofferam. Keofferam stepped sideways, and as Nawthorne stumbled past him, brought the English hatchet down across the Tomac's head.

  Nawthorne's brains spurted on Elizabeth's gown and on the polished floorboards. Keofferam picked up one of her dishcloths and wiped his hatchet. He spoke to the other Indians, giving orders which they obeyed at once. If Nawthorne were dead, Keofferam's authority over this particular band was undisputed. The expedition had been undertaken at Keofferam's request.

  The Indian who had gone upstairs had rounded up Elizabeth's sons, and bound their wrists for captives—as Lisbet was bound. Gray-faced and trembling the boys stood in the passage. One Indian had the shrieking baby slung across his shoulder.

  Keofferam nudged Elizabeth with his foot. "Go!" he said and pointed to the door. She tried to rise and fell back, panting. Keofferam looked at the blood which was soaking down her arm from Nawthorne's bullet hole. Keofferam picked her up and carried her outside, where he dumped her on the far side of the lawn near Will who lay bound and gagged in the tall grass, and near the dead watchdog who was transfixed by an arrow. The Indians herded out Lisbet and the boys, they put the unhurt Sammy down carefully by his mother's skirts. Then they went into tbe house and lit faggots at the fire. They ran quickly through the rooms touching their flaming brands to the curtains and the furniture, they threw firesticks upon the roof shingles.

  They set the bam alight, the pigsty, dairy and the henhouses. They tossed a burning brand into the rye field. But they set no fires near to the Hallet family, and they cut the bonds on Lisbet and the boys before they left.

  High flames were bursting from the house and barn when the Indians filed down the path that led off the cliff to Hallet's Cove. They boarded the two war canoes and paddled up the river towards Hell Gate. In three days they would be back in the wild Corchaug country.

  Elizabeth lay on the lawn where Keofferam had dumped her. She saw the red reflection on the sky, and she saw the quiet stars glimmer in the arc of sky that was still black and deep. She had no thoughts. She felt a dreamy peace. The grass was cool and moist against her cheek.

  The boys recovered first. Will made a convulsive motion, and they saw it by the flames' light. They both rushed to him, and cut his bonds with their knives. They pulled the gag of bearskin from his mouth. "Are ye hurt, sir?" cried Johnny. "Did they hurt you?"

  Will shook his head, flexing his cramped muscles, chafing his swollen hands which throbbed and tingled as the blood flowed back in them.

  "Where's Bess?" he said. "Where's my wife?"

  "There—" said Robin in a stifled voice.

  Will staggered to his feet, and went over to her. He crouched down and his hand slipped in the dark clotted blood on her sleeve.

  "Hinnie love—" he whispered in anguish. "Hinnie—!"

  She turned her head towards him. "I'm all right," she said faintly.

  He did not dare to touch her. He looked down from her dim white face to the burning house and barns and the rye field. A great sob clotted in his chest and burst out through his lips. He had laid his head down beside hers on the grass.

  "There's someone coming!" Johnny cried. "Men with lanterns on the lane!"

  In Maspeth they had seen the flames. At Johnny's guiding shout a score of men came running over the lawn with cries of pity, and horror.

  From New Amsterdam they sent a desperate summons to Stuyvesant, and he returned at once. He found the Fort jammed with terrified citizens. They had built a wooden curtain wall around the Fort, and at long last repaired the bastions which had always been neglected.

  The Indian fury by now was spent. Many of the tribes had vanished into the wildernesses they had come from. Those remaining near Manhattan, once Stuyvesant was back with all his army, were willing to negotiate for ransom of the captives they had taken.

  But in those three mid-September days of the attack, a hundred Dutch folk had been slaughtered, twice that taken prisoner, and countless bouweries and crops destroyed.

  The Director-General found that his rapid bloodless victory over the Swedes scarcely won him the acclaim he had expected, and he set angrily but conscientiously to the handling of home affairs. The panic passed. New Netherland began to breathe again.

  On October 17 when the sachem of the Hackensacks came sheepishly to New Amsterdam to return the first white captives, Elizabeth set out from Flushing with Will in a small sailing shallop. They had hired it in Flushing Harbor. Toby, at his grumpiest, was handling the tiller. Of all the voyages Elizabeth had persuaded or bribed him to undertake in her behalf, he thought this one the silliest. So, to some extent, did Will. But he could deny her nothing now.

  After the Indian ra
id they had taken her to the Bownes at Flushing, where Hannah's devoted nursing pulled her mother through the festering and fever from the bullet wound in her arm. The wound healed well, it had not involved the bone, and Elizabeth had shown amazing fortitude; far more, Will knew, than he had shown himself.

  For days he had not been able to throw off a sullen silence, while in his locked inner self he raved and stormed. It was Elizabeth this time who tried to comfort, as he had in Greenwich five years ago. "We can buy again," she said gently. "And build again."

  "I've not the heart for it," he said, and would not answer otherwise to her efforts at encouragement. The buildings were destroyed, and all the beasts, the rye field was blackened to a crisp, and much of the corn as well. But they still had some money. Their cash had been bidden deep in a brick-lined cubbyhole in the great chimney, and was untouched by the fire.

  "You must start again, dear love," she said at another time. "What else is there to do? We can buy here in Flushing near the Bownes. Hannah tells me that Edward Griffin has a small house and bam he'll sell. 'Twould be a place for us to live, until you can build as you like somewhere."

  "I'm sick of starting over. I've not the heart for it," he repeated angrily, and stalked out of the bedroom where she lay convalescing. The Bownes tried to rally his spirits, but to no avail. So did little Wickenden.

  "Naow then, Mr. Hallet," said the cobbler, giving Will a compassionate smile. "Rouse tha'self, 'twas a fearful happening, but the Sweet Lord sent protection too—the children come through unscathed an' tha poor missis almost well ... Christ gives thee comfort."

  "Aye—?" said Will grim-faced, and he continued to brood, thinking of life's injustices. The mistaken hanging of his father, the arbitrary rulings of the Digbys, while they blew hot and cold; the miseries of the persecution he and Bess had suffered; and of how each time he'd thought to get ahead on his own land—in Virginia, in Greenwich, in Pequot, and finally achieved it all as he wished, at Hallet's Point—only to have his every work destroyed again.

  Two things finally forced him from the black and bitter mood.

  One was a talk with Hannah about Elizabeth, a scolding it was, which was so startling from Hannah, and what she said so disquieting, that Will was upset afterwards and remorseful. Though he did not let himself believe what she had said about her mother's health.

  The second spur to prick his lagging courage came from Elizabeth herself. She told him one day with diffidence, transparently afraid he might be angry, that she had bought the Griffin house and land. "It need only be for a little while, if you don't like it," she said anxiously. "But we musn't trespass on the Bownes much longer and they all say this is a fine bargain."

  For a moment he was very angry, until he saw how dark her eyes were with pleading and the wish to help. Shamefaced, he muttered something noncommittal, and went to inspect her purchase. It was indeed a bargain—fine soil, good meadows both sweet and salt, the homestall already fenced, and a tight snug little house which might be easily enlarged. And there was an apple orchard, well grown and bearing. He had never been settled long enough for his own apple seedlings to mature. Tears came to his eyes as he stared at the apple trees.

  He went back to Elizabeth, and kneeling by the bed, gathered her in his arms, gently so as not to hurt her wound. He kissed her as he always used to do. She kissed him warmly in return, but there was no demand or clinging about her now. He realized as he held her how thin and frail she was, but he refused to recognize anxiety. The wound had healed, the memories of terror would recede, and she'd be well and strong again.

  In a few days she was much stronger, and she awakened him one morning, and spoke with her old intensity.

  "Will, listen—I have had a dream. There's something that I want to do. I must."

  "What, Bess?" he said sleepily.

  "In my dream I heard a voice," she said in a breathless wondering tone. "It was in the wind, a chant, a song, I hear it yet—it went like this—" She raised her head and gazed into the distance: "'Mo-na-ke-way-y-y-go,' it called me like that, beautiful it was. Mo-na-ke-way-y-y-go,'" she sang again, three soft plaintive notes, rising on the fourth, then dropping in a sigh.

  He swallowed, disturbed by tbe haunting sound, and more so by her intent listening look.

  "Just a dream, Bess," he said. "One hears and sees strange things in dreams."

  She did not heed him. "I've got to go back there. Go back today."

  "Go back? You don't mean to that neck of land you used to own in Greenwich? Why, 'tis sold long ago to Jeffrey Ferris, don't you remember?" He spoke with patient calmness, for he thought the fever had returned.

  "Of course I remember," she said, looking down at him with a smile. "My wits aren't wandering. 'Tis just to see it once again, that I must go. We'll hire a boat, make Toby take me since he's ashore. Tell him. Will. Tell him I'll pay him what he asks."

  "You're not strong enough yet. Wait, dear—if indeed you wish so much to go."

  "Today!" she said. "I'll find the strength."

  He started to protest again but something stopped him. He jumped out of bed, and began to pull on his clothes. "Be ready then when I come back," lie said. "We must sail at once to get there before dark for sure."

  "We?" she said. "I didn't mean to trouble you, Will."

  "Do you think I'd let you go alone, hinnie?" lie said.

  It was foggy as they started out of Flushing harbor, but soon the west wind blew the mists away. Gold sparkled on the white-flecked water and stained the sharp blue October sky, where the long white mare's-tails were streaming.

  Elizabeth lay in the cockpit, propped on the cushions Will had brought. She was snugly wrapped in a brown cloak of Dorothy Farrington's. Her clothes were burned, all her personal possessions gone. And she seemed not to mind. He had known her in many moods—in apathy, despair, and anger, he had known her spirit crushed as it had been at Pequot, and seen her mute with bewildered resignation. Yet now the night of terror, her injury and losses seemed not to touch her. In her eyes there was quiet expectancy. He couldn't understand it, and he asked her what she was thinking.

  "I was thinking of Mrs. Hutchinson," she said. "And that the horror of her death is gone. I was spared and she was not, but I came to the brink in the same way, and it is not as one imagines."

  "Don't talk about it!" he said sharply.

  She smiled a little and was silent, still thinking of Anne Hutchinson. Of words Anne had spoken in her parlor that day nearly twenty years ago. The personal words that Elizabeth had long put from her mind, repudiating them with all the other teachings which had seemed to be Anne's pitiful delusion. She could not quite recapture them, those words, and yet surely they had begun. "You will have much shame—much shame and tribulation, you will forget what you have felt this day..." and then what...?

  There had been more. And another prophecy about her life, long long ago, at the beginning—who had made it?

  "There's Byram Neck," said Toby brusquely. "Never did the trip so fast. Soon be at Greenwich and that blasted neck you used to own, Aunt, and which was never any good that I could see." Toby fished a fat sausage from his pocket and munched on it.

  Will glanced at Elizabeth and saw that she had not heard. Her eyes were closed and against the lids she saw a cluttered attic, and the little shivering gypsy peering at her hand. Beneath them in the attic there had been the muffled noises of the great Manor House, the sound of voices long since mute. John Winthrop—the harsh stem voice of disapproval, but had it really always been that way? Had it not held many softer notes to which she would not listen? And he had suffered often, she knew that now. She sighed and thought again of all the silenced voices. Harry's laugh as he stumbled up the chimney stairs that night. Martha and Margaret, Mary too—below in the Manor House. And Jack. Jack for whom she'd eaten her heart out. Dear brother ... she thought tenderly, and then came remembrance of what Peyto had said as he huddled over her palm.

  She opened her eyes, and gazed down at her palm. Th
e veins showed through now, the mesh of lines had deepened in the pinkish skin, yet she could hear Peyto's whisper: "Striving ever striving for what ye can't have—hankering after freedom—ye'll get what ye want in the end, but ye won't know it at first, for it'll not be what ye thought to be seeking all the long years..."

  What had it meant? Or nothing. Hankering, yearning—ever striving. And what was this trip today? What was the dream last night? What drove her on to this, and bore the two reluctant men along with her?

  Her tranquillity was shattered. She looked up at Will, and dared not say "Ah—let's turn back. I was mistaken." But he turned and met her eyes, and read what she was thinking.

  "Cold feet, Bess?" he said.

  "I think I've been a fool again," she answered, very low. "An obstinate fool."

  He reached over and squeezed her knee. "I don't believe so." He had been thinking of the day he had discovered her here, and of the strange effect the place had on her. "A pleasant sail it is, anyway," he said lightly. "Put in there to the cove side, Toby, we'll beach her there. Not over by the sands." For Will knew that the spot he suggested was the nearest by land to the pool where he was certain Elizabeth wished to go.

  'To be sure," said Toby crossly. "Ye didn't think I was going to sail all the way t'other side o' the neck, did ye?"

  They all three glanced up the Great Cove, and saw the rooftops of the houses where they had lived. There was smoke coming from the chimneys. Nobody said anything. Toby ran the little shallop onto the shingle. Will helped Elizabeth out. "Can you walk so far?" he asked. "I think you want to be alone."

  "Aye," she said. She looked at him with swift gratitude. At last again there was no barrier between their thoughts.

  "Hurry up!" said Toby. "'Tis midafternoon. I've no mind to dawdle here for long."