A Company of Rogues, page 5
“No little ones, only me and Will!” Jonathan insisted, and Nicholas laughed. Though the lad was only four years old, he and Bess’s son Will strutted about the place like lords of the manor, enjoying their superiority over the younger children.
Kathryn’s fervent desire was to never see Thomas Willoughby again, but she knew that was unlikely. They had few neighbours along the coast; most of the settlers who remained in the New Found Land year-round were at Cupids Cove. The only other English people in this part of Conception Bay were the Pike family further north at Carbonear, but they could not be counted as friends. Kathryn believed that Sheila and Gilbert Pike had known of the pirates’ attack on the Guy plantation, and Mistress Pike had told Kathryn plainly that they did not want other settlers nearby, and that the Guys should go back to Cupids Cove, if not back to England.
Now that Thomas Willoughby was building at Harbour Grace, Kathryn had resigned herself to the fact that Nicholas would meet with and talk to her former lover. If only she could trust that Thomas would keep her secret! But he was an unpredictable man. If he took it into his head to say a few ill-placed words to Nicholas, Kathryn’s whole life could crumble.
She had little time to fret about what might happen; a working day was too busy to allow for much worry. Nicholas and Frank going over to Harbour Grace meant that there were fewer hands to make the fish; when Bess and Daisy went to work on the flakes, Kathryn was in charge of all the household chores and all five children.
Summer was ending; the planation’s success for the year would be determined by the price their stores of salt fish could command when the merchants’ ships were ready to make the journey to markets in Europe. It would soon be time, too, to harvest the garden, providing them with vegetables for the winter. Tomorrow, perhaps, Kathryn thought she might leave the children with Bess so that she and Daisy could go berry-picking; wild berries were the only fruits the settlers had so far found growing in the New Found Land, and they could be made into preserves. As the air grew cooler and the days shorter, her thoughts turned to what had to be done to prepare for the cold, lean months to come.
The shallop returned as she was ready to put the evening meal on the table. Frank and Bess and their children joined them in the big house. With children and servants all crowded around the great board, Kathryn searched her husband’s eyes to see if there was anything there that ought to concern her. But he smiled as he and Frank told the servants, Rafe and Isaac, about how much ground Willoughby had cleared and how his house was coming along.
Only later, when the meal was finished and the children in bed, did Nicholas come sit on a bench beside Kathryn. He was still then, and she thought he might have something troubling to say, but all he did was pull some papers out of a satchel. “Willoughby was down to Cupids Cove a fortnight ago,” he said. “There was a ship there—out of Plymouth, but a Bristol merchant was aboard, carrying letters. There were some for you and me.”
“Letters!” Kathryn had been surprised not to receive a letter from home in spring; her father usually sent a long missive bringing her up to date on all the family’s news. Now she saw his familiar hand, and reached for the letter. “Have you read your own letters?”
“Yes; mine concerned mainly business,” Nicholas said. He still owned a house in Bristol, in which his unmarried sister lived; his shoemaking business had been bought out by his former journeyman. “But I think yours may contain some heavier news.”
“Did you read it?”
“No, but…Joanna’s letter said there was plague in Bristol back in the spring, and that many families were hard hit. She said she thought the sickness had come to your house, but that you had better wait to hear news from your own people.”
“How kind of her to spare my feelings,” Kathryn said drily; Joanna had never liked her.
She held her father’s letter in her hand. If he had written it, then he was still alive. Could her mother be dead? Or one of the children? Kathryn’s three younger siblings, Lily, John and Edward, were all growing up, and she knew she would likely never see them again. But it was a comfort to hear news from home, to think of them all well and going about their lives.
She unfolded the letter, looked for a moment at the heading—My deere daughter Katheryne—and then handed in back to her husband. “Read it to me, please,” she said.
Kathryn had learned her alphabet as a child, and could read a bit, but making her way through a letter was always a slow business. Nicholas usually read her letters aloud. Now his quick eyes scanned the lines before he began to read. “My darling girl,” he said, “it is heavy news indeed.”
“Read it to me, please.”
“My dear daughter Kathryn,” Nicholas began, “It has been long since I have written you and we have known hard times since the plague came to Bristol.”
“Is there a date on it? When did he write it?”
“The thirtieth of June, this year.”
More than two months, the letter had been making its slow way to her, across the ocean, then waiting at Cupids Cove until someone—Thomas Willoughby, as it chanced—would take his own letters back up the shore. Whatever had happened to her family had happened long ago.
“Some months gone now we all fell sick of the plague. Your mother had the worst of it and I am grieved to tell you she is dead,” Nicholas read. He put his free arm around Kathryn’s shoulders as he read on. “She loved you and I know that she would have wished you to be with her. Then fell sick all the children, John, Edward and Lily, and I myself ailing many weeks. When recovered I learned that only Lily was left to me. Both your brothers are gone to God.”
“Oh, dear Lord!” The cry burst from Kathryn’s lips, and she buried her face in her husband’s shoulder. In her mind’s eye she saw the little boys she had bid goodbye to five years go—the round faces and sturdy limbs she remembered. But those were not, of course, the boys who had died. They would have been young men now, apprenticing with their father, learning his trade. She had never seen John with the stonemason’s hammer in his hand, never seen Edward tall enough to look down at her. She had missed their boyhood, and now they were both dead.
And her mother! It was hard for any woman to raise children without her own mother nearby to offer help and advice. Her mother could not write, so messages between them were appended to John Gale’s letters. Last year his letter had contained a package of rosemary seeds with the note that “yore mother saies you will knowe well what ailments it is goode for,” words Kathryn had sounded out for herself as if she could hear her mother saying them. Now her mother’s voice was silent, her busy hands stilled at last.
“Poor papa—how lonely he must be! Just himself and Lily and Tibby in the house!”
“There is more to the letter,” Nicholas said. “Shall I read on?”
“If it is more bad news, I do not think I can bear it. Read it over first, and warn me if there are more hard tidings to bear.”
He was silent a moment, and then he said, “There is some news that will make you glad.”
“Read on, then.”
“It has been hard to bear, but we carry on,” Nicholas read out. “Walter, who was my journeyman, has come back to work for me, and he and Lily will marry later in the summer. They will live here with me and I will be glad not to lose the one child still remaining to me.”
“Walter and Lily?” Kathryn could barely remember Walter’s face, but the match made sense, she supposed. Though if her brothers had been alive to inherit the business, her father would have looked for a better match for Lily. “If he is kind to her, then I am happy for them.” A wedding should be glad news, but any joy that could be wrung from it was overshadowed by tragedy.
“There is more.” Nicholas looked back down at the paper. “We have had another wedding of one we had not thought to see again. Nancy is returned with my old apprentice Ned. I am glad to tell you they were wedded at St. Stephen’s a fortnight ago and will soon return to the New Found Land.”
Kathryn sat up straight, tears still blurring her eyes. “Nancy? Nancy has come back—to Bristol?”
“It seems she has. Alive, and well, and married to Ned Perry,” Nicholas said, a trace of wonder in his voice.
“And coming back here! When, I wonder?”
She did not know if Nicholas answered her, or if there was anything more in her father’s letter. She got up from the bench by the hearth. In the chamber above, the children slept. The menservants were outside, having a drink of ale and talking at the end of a long day; Daisy was at her sister Bess’s house. In that rare still moment, Kathryn walked outside.
Once there had been only a step leading up to the door there, but in the spring Nicholas had built a porch with a rail, like the deck of a ship, out in front of the house. She stood there now looking out to sea, out to the rolling waves that separated her from her dead loved ones, from her grieving father and sister. The waves that had taken Nancy away from her, and now, it seemed, would bring her back.
She tried, in the days that followed, to cling to that joyful news. Nancy alive! And Ned too, and the two of them married—and coming back to the New Found Land. She wanted to believe she would see Nancy again, but holding on to even that much hope seemed impossible.
The round of duties that accompanied summer’s end continued, but Kathryn no longer felt busy and purposeful. Each day felt as if she were pushing forward against a headwind, making little progress. Even the tasks that normally brought her pleasure—playing with the children, compounding medicines in her little still-room—felt joyless.
“I know I would not have seen my mother again in this life,” she confessed to Daisy one day as they harvested carrots and parsnips from the garden. “Why does it seem so hard, then, to know that she is gone?”
“Ah, while there’s life, there’s hope,” Daisy said. “’Tis hard when life and hope are both gone.” And then Kathryn felt ashamed for telling her sorrows to Daisy, who had lost two husbands in the span of a year. I will school my tongue, she thought, and not speak of this to anyone. And in time, it will grow easier.
But it did not. Even her husband, not generally the most insightful of men when it came to the moods of women, knew she was not herself. Three weeks after the news had come from England, he ventured to say, “Jonathan asked me today, ‘Why is mama so sad?’ He thought he had been naughty, that you were not singing and laughing with him as you usually do.”
“I am sorry,” Kathryn said. “I will try…”
“I know you have had a great loss,” he said. To her ears it almost sounded like an accusation. “But I have never seen you so weighed down, not in all the years we have been married, though you have had so many hardships.”
It was true—even when their plantation had been attacked, and Nancy taken captive, Kathryn had not felt this blanket of bleak despair. Her anger and sorrow then had spurred her to action. Now she felt no emotion at all, only this deadly dullness.
In truth, she had felt this way once before, but Nicholas had not been there to see it. In the first year of their marriage, he had left her in Bristol and gone off to the New Found Land. She had been carrying his child then, and when the baby was stillborn, she had plummeted into despair as if she had fallen into a pit. It had lasted weeks, perhaps months; only the prospect of coming out to the colony to join her husband had dispelled that gloom.
Now there was no great adventure ahead, only the hard work of preparing for winter. She felt like a puppet in a puppet show, such as they used to put on in the town square in Bristol. Saying the words, miming the actions, but without any true thought or feeling behind it.
So it was that she barely stirred on that crisp morning in early October when she sat by the fire spinning wool, the children playing nearby. Daisy, who had gone to feed the animals, came in to announce that a shallop was sailing into Musketto Cove. “I wonder is it that fellow Willoughby, come over from Harbour Grace? Or perhaps the pirate Pike and his Irish wife? One of the people aboard looked like a woman.”
Kathryn rose, the children following her like a flock of ducklings. She had not, of course, forgotten the good news that came along with the bad. But she had not been able to hold on to it. It did not seem that it could be real.
The shallop’s passengers were not yet close enough to see, but Kathryn strained her eyes as if she could make out the face of the figure in the grey gown and white coif. Her heart beat faster. Perhaps, after all, one good thing might happen.
The sail was down; the oars dipped; the boat drew nearer. Then Kathryn saw one of the men in the boat point, and the woman looked up at Kathryn.
Four years now since Nancy had been taken, and everyone had tried to tell Kathryn that she must be dead. Kathryn had stubbornly refused to believe it. She and Nancy were bound by a tie of friendship stronger than any blood-tie; she was convinced that if Nancy had died, she would have felt or heard or seen something, some token of her passing. She had kept hope alive far longer than was sensible, until Sheila Pike had told her that the ship that captured Nancy had sunk off the Bermudas, and the captive maid had gone down with the wreck.
Now the boat was tying up, and Jem Holworthy climbed out, followed by Ned Perry. Young Ned, whom Kathryn had sent off with a tiny purse of coins in hopes that he would somehow find and save the woman he loved. He looked older, broader of shoulder and chest, his beard fully grown in and his skin sun-darkened, as though he had spent a long time at sea. Now he was helping Nancy out of the shallop, and she too looked different, though Kathryn could not have said exactly how. And I must look different to her as well, Kathryn thought.
She stretched out her arms to her friend. Nancy, who never cried, was crying, and Kathryn thought, All will be well. It must be well, now that they are home.
Seven A Newcomer Arrives
Musketto Cove, November 1617
Then took they feast, and did in parts divide
The sev’ral dishes, fill’d out wine…
—Homer’s Odysseys, Book 8, 631–32
“If you mean to make bread, you ought to double that. Are you accounting for the new men?”
Nancy paused to count up on her fingers. “Master and mistress, the children, myself and Ned, you, Isaac and Rafe, Stephen and Hal. There’s enough bread here for a dozen of us.”
“But you’ll have to bake again tomorrow,” Daisy said. “I’ve been in the habit of making bread every second day in the cooler weather—it keeps.”
Then perhaps you ought to still be making the bread, Nancy thought, but kept silent.
For more than three years, the Guy family had lived in this house and Daisy More had been the maid of all work, helping Kathryn with inside and outside duties as well as caring for the children. Nancy still thought of her as Daisy More, the name she had borne when she came out from England. Other people, on the rare occasion when anyone needed to use a surname, did the same; Daisy’s two marriages had both been of such short duration that they did not seem to have left even the permanence of a surname. She had briefly been Daisy Griggs and Daisy Taylor, but she was forever Daisy More: small, worried, hard-working, and born to ill-luck.
When Nancy and Ned returned to Musketto Cove, they brought two of the new settlers who had come over on the ship with them. Musketto Cove now had four more mouths to feed. Having Nancy’s help eased the burden on Kathryn and Daisy, but it led to a dozen tiny skirmishes like this one every day.
Nancy had no wish to quarrel with Daisy; they gotten on well back in Cupids Cove, years ago. But tackling the task at hand was Nancy’s way of dealing with any new circumstances, and after nearly a month in Musketto Cove, she was still working out exactly what her task here was.
Ned and Master Nicholas had agreed that in spring, a newly cleared section of the land on the south side of the cove would be set aside for Ned and Nancy to build themselves a small house just as Bess and Frank had done. In the meantime, Nancy was a servant in Kathryn’s household, as Daisy was, and she thought keeping the peace was surely the best policy.
“True enough; bread will keep for two days in this weather,” Nancy conceded. “But now that I am here to help, I can bake every day and leave you more time for your other duties. There’s scarce room in the hearth to bake a double batch, and I know having more of us here puts a greater burden on you.”
“That it does,” Daisy admitted, moving to the fire to stir the pottage. “Very well then, you go on with the bread.” The women spoke in low voices; the room was lit only by the fire and a few tallow candles, as the sun would not rise for an hour or more. Upstairs, the master and mistress slept with their children. There was a bed up there, too, for Nancy and Ned, and one for Daisy. The four unmarried menservants—Isaac and Rafe, Stephen and Hal—had rigged themselves up a space in the storeroom attached to the main hall. They would sleep closer to the hearth when the winter grew colder.
“Why could Stephen and Hal not have stayed down in Cupids Cove?” Daisy said, her voice low. “We need men in the summer for the fishing—in winter they’re more trouble than help.”
Nancy shrugged. She turned the loaves of bread into iron pots and then moved those into the niches in the hearth where they would finish rising. “’Tis something to do with this quarrel between the London men and the Bristol men. Master Slany sent out two men, and the company in Bristol sent four more. To make peace, Governor Mason divided them—Master Slany’s two London men down in Cupids Cove, and the four Bristol men divided between here and Harbour Grace. ’Tis all to do with this dividing up the colony into two, with the Bristol merchants taking Harbour Grace for their own new settlement.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what difference it makes, except more work for us women.”
“No more do I, but Ned says ’tis a bad thing for the masters to be quarreling, and all must pull together and do our part.”
