Chapter Excerpt

Chapter 1

May 6^th 1769

Jane Clarke stood in the sedge growth on the lip of the dune and looked out over the half-drained bay, the ribbons of sand rising up through the retreating water. Her cousin's sloop, the Betsey, had slipped in ahead of the falling tide and lay canted sideways in the channel, keel nestled in the mud. Already, the ox carts rumbled over the sand loaded with barrels and crates full of salt, rum, molasses, and other more worldly goods— most of them legal — come to Satucket from Boston, but Jane wasn't there for goods. Jane was there for letters. Even at her distance Jane could identify the mail sack in the foremost ox-cart, but she stayed where she was, half-camouflaged by the sedge, because Joseph Woollen was the one driving it shoreward. Was it worth facing Woollen's unblinking fish-eyes just to get to the letters first?

Yes, she decided. She slid down the bluff and saw Woollen's head lift at the sight of her, saw him dive at the sack; by the time she'd reached the cart he had her letters sorted and ready. He thrust them at her with a formal, "Good-day, miss," as if he didn't know her name, as if at his cousin's wedding he hadn't pressed lips like cold chicken livers up and down her neck. Jane gave one nod to cover both greeting and goodbye, took the handful of letters, and hurried off toward the landing road as if she were in a great rush to get them to her father, which she should have been, of course, as most of them were his. She proceeded along the landing road onto the King's road at an even pace, but at the cartway that led from the road to her father's house she walked faster, keeping one eye on alert for family or servants. She should go straight home — her father's letters aside, the day's work sat waiting— but two of the letters were for Jane, and the minute she stepped inside the house she would lose all chance of reading them in peace. The plan was to take the path along the mill stream to her favorite rock above the mill pond, where she might, for a time, keep her news to herself.

Such was the plan, but as Jane rounded the bend she came up against a knot of men standing in front of Thacher's tavern, their voices hot and sharp, the words flying back and forth like training day musket shot.

"The ears?"

"Lopped off!"

"The devil! When?"

"Last night. Bangs Inn. Winslow paid a call after supper, tied his horse out front, left around ten and found the creature cut up."

"Bloody hell! Who did it?"

"Who did it! God's breath, man, who do you think? Name me another who'd carry an argument to a man's horse. Name me—" Whatever the speaker had in mind, it was cut short when he spied Jane. He snapped his jaw shut; the rest of the group turned, saw Jane, and likewise fell silent.

The talk had been bad enough, but the silence was worse. Jane might have pretended their silence had nothing to do with her, that the talk had cut short at her approach out of nothing but a gentleman's desire to shield a lady from an unpleasant subject, but the looks back and forth, the shifting feet, the sharp edge to the silence itself told her what she'd already guessed the minute the speaker had closed his mouth.

They blamed her father for the horse.

Griffith, her father's neighbor, braved the silence first. "Good-day, Jane."

"Good-day, sir."

The other men touched their hats or dipped their heads; Jane cricked her neck in response; but after she'd walked past she heard the steady pock-pock-pock of their lowered voices at her back. What cowards they were! Her rage began to pump her feet, but once she felt the ground rushing by underneath she checked her stride — they would not catch her in flight. She waited till she'd left the road and was out of sight before she picked up her skirts and bolted, following the mill stream black with fish, past Winslow's fulling mill, all the way up to the mill dam. Beyond the dam the mill pond lay sleek and calm; below it the alewives pooled, resting for their final thrust through the turbulent floodgate into the pond to spawn; there Jane decided to rest as well, letting her heart catch up with her legs.

While Jane rested she peered down into the vortex of circling fish. The annual spring migration of the alewives had long puzzled Jane— what was it that convinced generation upon generation of fish to fight their way through so many rocks against such a powerful current to the mill pond to shed their eggs? What did that particular pond offer over the bays and inlets and tide pools below that could be worth such injury and exhaustion, even death? Jane could not, would not ever, understand it.

After she had collected her breath Jane pulled her skirt tight and continued along the wilder portion of path, used now only by a handful of children or the few remaining Indians who camped beyond the mill pond. A large rock lay ahead, the water lipping at three sides of it, creating the illusion of a fortress; Jane hitched up her skirt and climbed on top of it. The dark rock had already stored up some of the fleeting May sun and now that the clouds had returned Jane was glad enough for the heat of it; she settled as comfortably as she could on the warm stone and crossed her legs, spreading the letters in the basket her skirt had formed between her knees.

Of the two letters addressed to Jane she recognized both hands; she also noted that one of the writers had included a letter to her father. She picked up the other letter — the letter from her brother — already away from Satucket five years now, four at Harvard College and one clerking for the lawyer John Adams at Boston. She ran her finger under the fold and cracked the seal; the letter was short, but so were all her brother's letters.

10 April 1769

My Dear Sister,

I am in hopes this finds you well and should like to report the same, although yesterday I took a fall off a horse that should have been shot before it was ever put out to let. Of course if father had seen fit to set me up with my own horse I'd not be confined to this bed, but if the fool who fired the musket that shied the horse had aimed lower I'd not be confined to this life.

Jane read on in a fine alarm. Who was firing muskets so near a horse and rider? How badly was her brother hurt? He mentioned a sprained knee, a wrist— she continued reading in hopes of finding plans for her brother's recuperating in Satucket, but found no hint of it. She put the letter aside and picked up the next.

May 1^st, 1769

My Dearest Jane,

I hope this letter finds you in all your usual glowing health. I write to inform you that I expect to have completed all my town business by the 16^th and have written to your father acquainting him with my dual intention, the one being to stop at Satucket on my return trip to Wellfleet on the 19^th or 20^th of this month. You know the second intention. Or perhaps I should say the first?

Having spent overlong on your father's epistle I now have time for but a few lines to you, but suffice it to say that since I left you at your father's you have been behind my every thought. I see your face each time I blink and yet I could not describe it to a stranger — 'tis all sum over parts.

If it makes up in any way for the insufficiency of this letter, allow me to assure you that I believe I have spent the time on your father's letter to good effect, and that I am,

Ever your,

P. Paine

Jane folded up both letters and pushed the pair into her pocket out of sight, feeling suddenly, explosively, out of sorts. That her brother's letter should disturb she understood well enough— he made no mention of nurse or doctor, which meant any one of his sprains might indeed be a break; he seemed more interested in blaming her father for the horse than the stranger for the shot that had pitched him off it in the first place. But what of Phinnie's letter? Halfway through the reading she'd developed a painful bubble in her chest that felt sure to erupt through her ribs at any moment and she had no idea what might have caused it.

Jane took the letters out of her pocket, opened Phinnie's, and read it through again. At the second reading she could pick out a few trouble spots; for instance, she might ask: Was she first or was she second on his list of intents? She might also like to know why she should be behind all his thoughts and not once out front. She might wonder too if she was expected to take sum over parts as compliment.

Jane put the letters away again, threw her legs over the edge of the rock, and dropped to the earth. She headed off without remembering to haul in her skirt, and the grass and bull briars pulled at it as she went; when she'd reached the mill dam, in a quarter of the time it had taken her to walk up, the bubble in her chest had pushed into her lungs, making them feel like the overworked gills of the fish that swam in exhausted circles at her feet. She stopped, put her hands on her hips, breathed in and out, and looked out over the mill valley.

The village of Satucket stretched east another six miles, encompassing a busy stretch around the meetinghouse that most villagers would have considered Satucket's heart, but Jane saw this part of it, her part of it, as the true source of village life. There was Winslow's fulling mill below her to the left; across the road were the herring men, their nets dipping and swaying under the usual cloud of gulls; below them was her father's tannery, the tanner just setting down his scraping blade to take up his paddle and stir his vats; across the mill stream from the tannery was the big wooden wheel of her father's grist mill, rumbling around under the fall of water like the village pulse. Beyond all of that lay the greening, snaking, salt marsh, and the ocean that forever pushed and pulled at the village's edge, filling the air with the piquant smell of life and death. Just so the mill valley had spread out before Jane all twenty-two years her life, and yet this time as she looked she saw something different. Two mills. One stream. Too many lawsuits.

For that was, of course, what lay behind the horse.

Jane couldn't say how many years the Clarkes and Winslows had been feuding over the mill stream privilege, but she knew it dated back to a time before her birth, to the day Jane's grandfather sold his mill to the Winslows, built a new one on the other side of the stream, and dug the gutter that drew the water to the new site. The Winslows had accused Jane's grandfather of drawing off so much water that it hampered the operation of the old mill; Jane's grandfather, and her father as time advanced, claimed there was plenty of water for both. The Winslows took the Clarkes to court over the diversion of the water and won their case, although the settlement was insultingly small, or so Winslow said. He sued again, accusing Jane's father of failure to maintain his half of the mill dam, blaming him for the flood that caused the fulling mill three hundred pounds in damage. The court again found for Winslow, but Jane's father appealed and received a considerable reduction in the damages. One might think that two judgments in his favor would put Winslow to rest, but it had not; only the week before another summons had arrived, a qui tam as Jane's father called it, two words Jane didn't understand and didn't dare ask to be translated, considering her father's state when he'd received it.

Those were the legal actions to date, but the legal actions were only half her father's troubles— the rest swarmed out of the busy hive of village rumor: Jane's father had got Winslow cast out of the church for evil-speaking; he'd gone out in the dead of night and ripped up Winslow's mill dam; he'd set the fire that burned the old fulling mill to the ground; and now, supposedly, he'd cut off the ears of Winslow's horse.

There, again, the bubble rose upward in Jane's chest, now disrupting her swallowing, finally revealing its true source— not Phinnie Paine's letter, but the outrageous rumor that her father — her father — had cut off the ears of another man's horse. Yes, the other rumors had stung, but this was separate from all the rest. What kind of man could accuse another of such an act? What kind of man, on hearing it, could believe it and repeat it publicly, in the middle of the King's road, to anyone who happened to wander past?

Jane pulled her eyes back from the distant valley to the alewives at her feet; some of them had completed their rest and were beginning to fling themselves into the final wall of water that was all that lay between them and peace. Jane watched several dozen fish through the floodgate, but she'd already been too long at her errand; she turned and worked her way back down the stream until she'd reached the steps that led up the hill to her father's house.

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