Crow Hollow Page 9

  Peter’s eyes moved slowly to James’s face. “I shall soon see my savior.”

  James gave a hard, visible swallow. “Thou art brave and strong, friend.”

  “Search for the inward light. Both of you. That is the way.”

  There was too much blood seeping through the kerchief and into Prudence’s hands. Again, she felt lightheaded. The blood, the violence—suddenly she was back in Winton, on that awful day when the Indians overran the town. A child screaming, the smell of fire.

  Not now. Please, not now.

  With effort, she fought down her panic.

  Peter’s eyes rolled back in his head. His breathing turned shallow and rapid. “Mother, please. I am here,” he muttered in his native tongue.

  During the night, when he’d been struggling with his fever (or poison, as James claimed), he’d spoken in his sleep. It was nothing—something about digging for clams—but she’d been shocked by how well she’d understood. Not just Nipmuk, but the same dialect spoken by the tribe that had taken Prudence hostage.

  “Peace, friend,” Prudence told him in Nipmuk.

  “Mother. Are you there?”

  “What is he saying?” James asked.

  “He is asking for his mother.”

  Peter shuddered and fell still. A final sigh leaked through his lips, and his body went limp. James set Peter’s head down in the snow, then buried his face in his hands. She reached out a hand of comfort, but James seemed to regain mastery of his emotions before she could touch him, and he lifted his face from his hands.

  “I don’t even know if his mother is still alive,” he said. “I know nothing of his family, of his tribe.”

  “You never spoke of such things?”

  “He told me very little,” James said. “I know little of his life before he came to England.”

  James got up to inspect their attackers, and she followed. She felt weak, the blood drained from her face, but refused to hide in the carriage while he sorted things out.

  Of the four injured enemies, the first—the man with the face half-destroyed from James’s initial shot—was also near death and wouldn’t last more than another minute or two. The other three were in some stage of dying.

  “We should try to get them help,” she said. “These three, at least.”

  “Two of them won’t live out the hour. This wretch,” James said, pointing to the man Prudence had shot in the back, who was groaning piteously, “might survive, but you hit him right on the spine. If he does, he’ll never walk again.”

  “We have to try.”

  “And this is the man who murdered Peter Church,” he said. “I should put a ball in his head and count the world rid of another filthy vermin.”

  “And a court of law will see him hanged.” She was surprised at the edge in her own voice. “Meanwhile, we’ll do our Christian duty.”

  “All right. I suppose it would be better if he survived, anyway. Then I can question him.”

  James collected the horses of the fallen and roped them to the team before tying the bodies of the injured men onto the animals’ backs. One man groaned, the other cried out in pain. The final man James wrapped in Peter’s blankets and carried back to the coach. He put Peter’s body in next to him.

  James looked at Prudence and frowned. “I need to drive the team. I can’t be back here with you.”

  “I want to sit up front, not back there.”

  “It’s bitter cold.”

  “Better than sitting alone with a murderer.” And a dead man, she thought, though this uncharitable thought filled her with shame. Poor Peter. To travel all the way across the ocean only to die almost the moment he reached his native soil.

  While James checked the team of horses, Prudence climbed to the perch and drew her cloak against the cold. One of the men tied to the horses groaned. She pulled her hood closer around her face so she couldn’t see him out of the corner of her eye.

  Panic still swam below the surface like a monster of the deep, all teeth and grasping tentacles. Memories.

  For a moment she was not here, she was there.

  A woman screams while men cut her throat. An old man holds his granddaughter in his arms and runs. A gunshot puts him down, then men bash the infant with the butts of their muskets.

  Prudence is running with her daughter in her arms. They see her, they are coming.

  “Hold still, you,” James said.

  The words jolted Prudence from the horror of her memories. She drew back her hood to look. James stood over a groaning man tied to a horse. He pulled back the man’s head.

  “Leave him be!” she cried. “He’s dying already.”

  James came up holding an empty vial, which he tucked back into a pocket in his cloak. The man was no longer struggling.

  “I gave him a taste of soporific dwale.”

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Meant to render a man unconscious—a prisoner, or an enemy. In this case, ’twill ease the man’s suffering. He’ll die shortly, but I’d as soon not seem him die in agony.”

  “Pray, pardon me. For a moment I thought . . .”

  When he climbed next to her on the perch, James brought a cloak bundled with goods pilfered from their attackers. It took some coaxing of the horses before they were traveling back down the highway and leaving behind the scene of the violence.

  “The second gun was unloaded,” James said. “You were bluffing.”

  “Aye. I’d not time to load it, but thought it might still serve a purpose.”

  “When did you reload the first pistol?”

  “The attackers paid me no mind—their attention was fixed elsewhere. I saw the spilled powder horn and it gave me the idea. I searched the man you’d killed and found a pouch with lead balls.”

  “Resourceful.”

  “It isn’t the first time I’ve handled arms.”

  “Reload the guns.” He gestured to the bundle at his feet. “Do it now, before your hands get too numb.”

  She opened up the bundle, but found only a little canister with powder for priming the pan, not a full powder horn. No balls, either. Only small paper-wrapped packages.

  “What’s this?” she asked, picking up one of the packages. “Cartridges? How do I—”

  “Ah, yes. It’s so I can measure precisely. Thirty-five grains of powder. Bite off the end, pour the powder and ball down, then use the paper as a wad at the end when you ram it. Then prime the pan like you would otherwise. Understand?”

  “I see, yes.”

  He watched as she bit off the end of the paper. A bit of the powder got in her mouth, bitter and peppery, and she couldn’t help but turn and spit it out at once.

  “Pardon!” Prudence said, aghast that he’d seen her spit.

  “How dainty.” He grinned. “Good, now the other one. Tap the cartridge this time to get the powder to the bottom before you bite.”

  When she finished, he reached back to the roof of the carriage and scraped off a bit of snow, which he used to wipe at the corner of her mouth where she’d stained it with black powder. She returned the favor, using a handful of snow to scrub at the dried blood from when he’d buried his face in his hands after Peter’s death.

  “Do you know any of the dead men?” James asked as they continued down the road.

  “The one I shot in the back is William Webb, from Andover. He has a wife and children. I don’t know how he fell in with such bad characters.”

  “And the other three?”

  “I don’t know any of them,” she said. “One of them might be from Springfield—he looks familiar. I’m not certain, though.”

  “Woory started to identify another man. I think that’s why they shot him. Goodman Wal—something or other.”

  Prudence thought about it. “I know a man named Waltham. Another named Walker. They’re both from Boston, and Woory might have known them.”

  “A man whose business is coach and transport knows men from all over,” James said. “Even murderer
s posing as thieves.”

  “Then you don’t think they’re highwaymen?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “I don’t know. I have never heard of such an attack. Maybe in New York, but this is New England. But they did command Woory to stand and deliver. He didn’t obey—he recognized them. So they killed him.”

  “Except Peter didn’t recognize them, wasn’t in any way a threat, and they killed him too,” James said. “They would have killed me too. Perhaps even you.”

  “Once men start killing they don’t know when to stop.”

  He studied her face, and she turned away, uncomfortable under his sharp gaze. “If there’s one thing I know,” she said, “it’s that my sister’s husband didn’t send them.”

  “You might know that, but I don’t.”

  “He’s not a murderer, James. You must believe me.”

  “Perhaps.” He looked thoughtful. “Here’s what I do know. They came for killing, not robbery. I’ve faced robbers before. They are almost always in ones and twos. Nervous young men with shaking hands, as often as not. They aren’t older, well fed, with families. And they don’t typically come six at a time.

  “And here’s another thing,” he added. “That last swordsman could have bested me. He didn’t. Why?”

  Prudence finished loading the last gun, drew her cloak tighter, and put her hands between her thighs to thaw them.

  “Maybe he couldn’t,” she said. “You looked to be holding your own to me.”

  “When you saw me, yes. He was older than me, and tiring. But that man was a better swordsman than I. Early in the fight, he could have killed me. I’m sure of it.”

  “I thought you said they would have killed us all. Anyway,” she added, “they killed poor Peter without a second thought.”

  “That might be it exactly.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Their stratagem might have been to lure us out, meaning only to kill Peter,” James said. “Then Woory recognized one man, so they killed him too. I fought back. Some of the men tried to kill me, others kept their heads. Dangerous to kill an agent of the king. But an Indian . . .” James raised an eyebrow.

  She understood. “If an Indian dies on the road, it draws scarcely more attention than when he dies of disease.”

  “Or dies from poison made to look like disease.” He turned this over. “Yes, you’re right. Indians die in New England all the time. Nobody cares except other Indians.”

  “I care,” Prudence protested.

  “And so do I. Peter was an odd fellow, a honking goose in the chicken coop, if you will. I can’t say we were ever friends—except maybe in the Quaker use of the word—but I’d developed a soft spot for him. And he may not have been an agent of the Crown, but he was my agent. Attack my man and I get very angry.”

  They weren’t just words; James looked truly upset. And she had seen real pain in his eyes during Peter’s last struggles for breath. She was beginning to rethink her assessment of this man as nothing more than a cunning spy for King Charles. That gave her hope for finding her daughter.

  “You can kill an Indian on the road and nobody notices,” she said. “And maybe a driver can fall and nothing much happens.” Prudence chose her next words carefully. How to make James see what she needed him to see? “But after what happened to my husband, anyone can see what happens when an agent of the Crown dies in New England.”

  He gave her a sidelong glance. “And what is that?”

  “Another agent arrives. And he wants to know what happened to the first. At least that’s what happens the first time. Maybe you can tell me what happens when two different agents die in suspicious circumstances.”

  “Prudence Cotton, you are much smarter than I gave you credit for.”

  “Why do I think that by ‘smart,’ you really mean ‘devious’?”

  James laughed, and she smiled back.

  The coach entered a clearing of several hundred acres where slumping walls of fieldstone divided a pair of farms. Both houses had been reduced to piles of rubble almost entirely covered in snow. A double hill rose behind them.

  “That’s what they call Camel Hill,” she said. “A few more miles and we’ll reach the town of Sudbury.”

  “Where we may very well find those men waiting for us. They might have fetched reinforcements.”

  “There’s a fork in another mile or two, where the Connecticut Path cuts southwest. It’s an old Indian trail that Thomas Hooker expanded when he led the settlers to Hartford. If we take it, we can go through Natick.”

  “That sounds like an Indian village,” James said.

  “Praying Indians, yes. But abandoned. The General Court shipped them to Deer Island last winter.” She frowned. “Most of them died of hunger and disease, from what I understand. The rest haven’t returned.”

  “And if we go that way, what do we find after Natick?”

  “Next is Danforth’s Farms—it’s a small settlement next to the Connecticut Path.” She hesitated. “You don’t suppose they’d search for us in that direction, do you?”

  “They might,” he said. “But I’ll still take my chances off the main highway.”

  When they reached the fork in the road and found it deserted, she put a hand on his wrist. “Now stop the coach and let me drive.” When he seemed reluctant, she added, “That way you can be ready with the guns.”

  Minutes later, when they’d swapped positions and he had his pistols across his lap, she turned to him with a sweet smile. “Oh, and this will give you plenty of time to read my story while I watch the road.”

  To his credit, this time he did not look nearly so skeptical when he took out the pages and began to read.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They traveled in silence while Prudence drove the team and James read. He finished quickly, then hushed her questions and reread it, this time more slowly. She could barely stand the wait.

  A frozen brook lay to their right, marked with solitary boulders that broke the surface. The land on that side of the coach had been cleared for pastures and farms all the way to the opposite hills, while the forest still crowded the road to their left.

  Here and there stood farmhouses, some burned, but others intact, smoke curling from their chimneys. A woman stepped out of a house set a hundred yards or so from the road. She shielded her eyes against the sun to study them as they passed.

  They were only around the next bend when a woodcutter emerged from the forest leading a mule. The mule pulled a sleigh loaded with lumber. The man waved for their attention, no doubt hoping for news, but they didn’t want to get close enough for him to see the extra horses and the bodies draped across their backs.

  James put away Prudence’s narrative and scanned their surroundings.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “We’re close, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, about two miles to Danforth’s Farms. Maybe three. But what about my story? Do you understand now?”

  He continued to ignore her questions and instead pointed. “See that burned house? If we pulled the coach around the back, do you think it would be hidden from the road?”

  “I suppose, but—”

  “Do that, first. I need time to think.”

  Fighting her impatience, Prudence took the coach across the hard, flat surface and around the house in question. The front wall had collapsed, but the back stood, held up in part by a brick chimney and its stone hearth. It must have been a year since it was burned, but nobody had touched the farmhouse since—not even, it would seem, to pick through the rubble. There were clothing, old chests, even iron kettles and ladles hanging from hooks on the mantle above the hearth.

  When they were hidden around the back, they climbed down from the perch to check the injured men. Perhaps two hours had passed since the brutal encounter on the road. Prudence’s nerves could stay jangled only so long, and she now felt more exhausted than anything. The poor night of sleep hadn’t helped any. Also, it must be noon, and she hadn
’t eaten for twenty-four hours.

  The first of the two injured men was dead, as they’d expected. They couldn’t tell with the second. He hadn’t stiffened, and he still felt warm to the touch beneath the blanket, but he wasn’t moving, and they couldn’t feel any breath with their numb fingers.

  “Nothing to be done for it,” James said. “If he’s not gone already, he will be soon, and it makes matters simpler for us.”

  He didn’t sound smug about it, but it was calculating enough that Prudence winced at the implications. “We should carry him with us, just in case.”

  “We’ll never save his life.”

  “That’s in God’s hands, not ours.”

  “He stays.” His voice hardened. “No surgeon in the world could close up that wound. He’s lost too much blood already.”

  She clenched her hands. “Very well.”

  James’s expression softened, and he turned to untying the man’s body. “We’ll put them both in the coach with the others to keep the wolves off them until something can be done.”

  She helped him carry the bodies to the coach, where they draped them across Peter and the final dead highwayman. It was a horrible mess, and again it brought her back to the war, to stacking bodies. First at Winton, then among the Nipmuk in her captivity, when children, the elderly, and the ill would fall by the roadside during the long forced marches.

  The effort got her sluggish blood flowing again. The sun helped too. It was low in the sky, its light lacking the heat of gentler months, but it warmed her dark cloak and her body with it. When they’d finished unharnessing the horses from the team, her appetite was roaring. The perch box carried Woory’s breakfast: a hard block of cheese, a flask of buttermilk, and two boiled eggs still in their shells. James and Prudence shared the food.

  James stepped into the ruins and kicked aside snow. He found a fallen wardrobe and tossed open the doors.

  “Don’t do that,” she said sharply.

  “Why not? They won’t be missing it.” He came up with a pair of gloves, a couple of linen shirts, and several pairs of socks. “Most of my possessions are back at your house. I couldn’t very well haul out my sea chests without arousing suspicion. Why don’t you see what you can find? There must have been a woman of the house as well.”