Weston slammed his beer mug down. He had been a master of high dudgeon, but after all his reverses, there was little of it left, and he was saving it for someone else. So he shrugged. “Business be business. Should the elders stake me, I’ll find them sixty beggars and the
Swan
and turn ’em all ’round smartly.”
“With what in return?”
“I’ve hope of another ship and good supply. If the elders help me, they’ll have anythin’ they stand in need of.”
“But thou lost their trust. Once ’tis lost, ’tis bloody hard to get it back, ’specially Ezra Bigelow’s.”
“This Bigelow, was he a friend of Dorothy Bradford?”
“The Saints be all friends.”
“How did Dorothy Bradford die?” asked Weston.
“Fell from the ship, she did.”
“Accident, then?” For the first time since he stepped inside the house, Weston had stopped eating.
“Aye.”
“Did Bradford hold anyone to blame?”
Jack shook his head. He had stopped eating, too. Only Christopher continued to gnaw duck bones.
“Bradford never spake ’gainst Bigelow?”
Jack shook his head again. “They be fast friends.”
“Show me Bigelow’s house after the meal,” said Weston, “that I may talk with him in private… about business.”
iii.
Ezra Bigelow lived a simple life. In the eyes of the Saints, it was one of exemplary virtue. Most of his time he spent as a governor’s assistant, helping to fashion the foundation of a church-state that one day would reach from Cape Cod to Narragansett Bay. He also did a share in the cornfields, and he hunted, though he was not the best man with a musket. Words were his weapon, and he believed his words were inspired by God.
Inspiration came to him each day from his Bible, and he spread it to the colony whenever Elder Brewster did not wish to preach the Sabbath. There were no official ministers in Plymouth, none who could baptize or give the Lord’s Supper, but Ezra always reminded the people, when he stood before them of a Sunday, that they were the body, head, and heart of the church, and God’s Word was its soul.
He and his brother Simeon had raised a two-room house near the foot of Leyden Street. They had agreed that when one married, the other would move out. But few women had come to the colony, and none for the Bigelows.
Ezra prayed that God would send him a helpmate, but he had not dwelt upon his loneliness since the terrible night when Dorothy Bradford died. Instead, he dwelt upon the Bible. And he had little sympathy for those who could not do likewise when the flesh tempted them.
For the church-state to survive, order had to be preserved in the public things and the private as well. People could not go wandering off at their own whim, nor could the natural members between their legs.
Ezra knew that Jack Hilyard had violated both of these tenets. He had no qualms about the punishments he urged, either when they fetched Christopher back from Nauseiput or after the birth of Jack’s new babe. Ezra knew the infant to be undersized, an eight-month infant at best, but he was certain that Jack Hilyard had committed the act of uncleanness with Elizabeth before marriage, just as he had sneaked off to Nauseiput himself, six months before his son went alone, and so deserved what punishment he got.
With his brother gone visiting, Ezra he would relax with Leviticus, which encouraged the lawgivers.
The dark came earlier in August, but Ezra considered it a high calling to make his own candles, because the candle illuminated the Word and the Word illuminated the world. Whenever he cooked goose or swine, he went into the marsh and cut rushes. These he trimmed to twelve-inch lengths and soaked in animal fat, which congealed around the rush, and there was his candle. The holder was a simple clip attached to a dish of pewter or brass. The flame burned small but intensely bright.
“Good evenin’.”
Ezra looked up from Chapter Twelve, The Purification of Women after Childbirth. “Yes?”
“Your door be open. May I come in?”
“I spake my mind at the governor’s house,” Ezra said impatiently. “Lest you wish to discuss Leviticus—”
“Ain’t that the one what gives all the punishments for when we bung hole horses and goats and such?”
“Death.”
Weston had not toyed with a man in some time. He was not certain of his ability or of his size, which, before his time in the wilderness, had been so dominating that he had seldom needed to toy. “Aye, death. And death to the man that have another man’s wife?”
“The punishment for adultery is so stated. From Leviticus comes also ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ And as you deserted us, so have we deserted you. Good night.” Ezra looked down at the book.
Weston came closer. “I know of another book, more recent. It tell of the first months here, and—if I be wrong, strike me dead—it tell of adultery… and murder.”
Ezra Bigelow put down his Bible and studied the face dancing in the shadow of the rush candle. “What murder?”
“Dorothy Bradford.”
Ezra Bigelow wore only black and white, yet even in the dimness, what color there was seemed to drain from his face. “An accident, as stated in our records.”
“That’s not what Master Jones wrote in his sea book.”
“What did he write? Where is the book?”
Weston shrugged. His purpose was better suited without the book, as only
he
could interpret what Jones had written of that night. And he could ignore the good things written later of Bigelow. “I cannot tell thee where the book be, but it damn thee, Master Bigelow. It damn thee for certain.”
Bigelow jumped to his feet and slammed his hands on the table. “I am a godly man, sir. No adulterer… and no murderer!”
“As a godly man the world sees thee”—Weston stroked his beard—“but the words of that book could bring terrible scandal on a godly man, and a godly plantation.”
“Bring forth the book, that I may read it.”
Weston pulled out a chair and sat at Bigelow’s table. “In good time, master. In good time.”
iv.
At suncoming, Ezra Bigelow stepped over the ruts in Leyden Street and hurried to Governor Bradford’s house. The cocks crowed in their pens, the dogs barked at the black-cloaked figure, and Ezra stopped to study the stream of smoke rising from Bradford’s chimney.
The young governor had taken himself a new wife, Alice Carpenter Southworth by name, and Ezra wished not to disturb them. If the smoke rose in healthy billows, they were up and about. If it was only a wisp, it meant the fire was still banked and the house quiet.
Ezra saw no smoke. As he considered whether he would wait or return later, when others might interrupt private conversation, he heard Alice’s voice come sleepily through the open window.
“Ooh, la, good master, such greetin’ to wake me.”
“My rod and my staff, they comfort thee.”
There came a sound of laughter, more intimate and personal than anything Ezra Bigelow had ever heard, at least from his friend Bradford. There then came the sounds of man and woman taking their pleasure. The ropes beneath the mattress creaked and the headboard thumped against the wall of the house. And out of respect, Ezra moved off.
After all, it was sin to dwell on thoughts of the flesh, and listening to such sounds could only torment a man who had no woman. Ezra looked out at the blue sea and tried to drive from his mind the vision the sounds conjured. Between husband and wife, it was an act of holiness. Between others, or played out in the mind, it was merely lust.
And now—especially now, after the untoward appearance of Thomas Weston—Ezra Bigelow had to avoid giving any appearance of lust. For he was a godly man.
“Good morrow, Master Bigelow!” A few minutes later, Bradford came to his window and looked into the clear sky. “ ’Tis a fine day the Lord hath made.”
“Good morrow, Master Bradford. May I enter?”
“Aye. And break thy fast.”
“Good day to thee, master. How fare thee?” Alice gave Ezra a small curtsy, like a well-bred goodwife. She had already drawn the coverlet over the bed in the corner and was now at the hearth, stirring porridge. How he longed for such a sight in his own house, for a bed tight-slept and well used.
“Care thee for porridge?” Bradford seemed in bright spirits.
Ezra shook his head. “My thoughts did wake me… on Thomas Weston.”
Bradford sat at his table. “I’ve thought on him myself. Given his necessity and past favors, it may be our Christian duty to help him.”
Ezra slipped his hands beneath his cloak to still them. “He deserves eye for eye, but Christ taught charity.”
“Fifty beaver skins, then, and begone with him.” Bradford tested his grainy gray meal and found it too hot.
“He did ask for a hundred.”
“Come, Ezra, he’s a monger. He barters. Ask for the heavens but settle for the earth, ask for the earth but settle for a colony, ask for the colony but settle for a plot.” Bradford blew on the porridge, tested it again, and slipped the spoonful into his mouth.
“Fifty pelts will not provision the
Swan.”
“Aye, should ever he find it.”
Ezra came close and spoke the words he had memorized. “I oppose unwarranted gifts, but I have prayed hard on this and do change my thinkin’. Weston favored us formerly, and fair treatment of him now will bring favor from him in future. Treat him ill, and count on his enmity forever.”
And William Bradford agreed. They were simple men, given to prayer and honest work and sound sleep each night. In complicated matters, they listened to the counsel of their friends. In the responsibility he had carried for near three years, Bradford listened to his assistants. “A hundred skins, then, done with discretion. We’ll tell the other assistants, but the general population must not know, for we’ll be hard put to explain such charity.”
“ ’Tis wisdom before charity, done in anticipation of what Weston may do for us.”
v.
At midnight, Ezra Bigelow met Weston, Jack Hilyard, and Christopher near the mouth of Town Brook. He had brought a tipcart covered in straw beneath which were a hundred beaver pelts. He pointed a bony finger at Hilyard. “Reveal any of this, and I’ll find reason to stock you for a month.”
“I give Tom me word.”
While Jack and his son loaded the pelts onto a canoe, Ezra drew Weston up the path. It was a moonless night. But for the torches flickering at the corners of the stockade, Plymouth was in blackness. Jack could see nothing of Bigelow and no more than Weston’s outline. But his mates used to say that he could hear a whale breach before anyone else saw it. So he listened hard, for, considering the men, there had to be dirty dealing somewhere in this.
“… the book.”
“This is the truth…”
“… what you promised.”
Weston spoke of leaving before the tide turned.
“Thou hast not brought the book? But our bargain?”
A book and a bargain. Jack was right. Dirty dealing.
“The Indians did strip me. ’Tis gone, in truth.”
Bigelow’s voice rose. “This is
not
what was promised.”
There came the sound of hawking. “… my spat-on palm means truth. I’ll speak none of this…”
And Jack could hear no more. Soon after, he and his son and Thomas Weston pushed off, leaving the black figure of Ezra Bigelow standing like death on the shore.
All that night, they held close to the coast, so that they could wade ashore if the sea overturned their canoe. But the night was calm, and by dawn, they reached the mouth of the Scusset, the place where they had first seen Indians.
Christopher gazed east, along the upper arm of the Cape. “We could follow the beach, Pa, be at our island by nightfall.”
“Our
island.” Jack laughed at that, more in anger than amusement. “Our island be no more than a dream to wake thyself from, lad, thanks to thy wanderin’ ways.”
And there was no further talk of their island. They rested until the tide turned, then pointed their canoe upstream and, like the Indians, let the current take them through the valley. When the water grew too shallow, they carried the canoe over the mile-long path and down to the headwaters of the Manomet. That night, they camped near the mouth of the Manomet, a place the Indians called Aptucxet, “at the little trap river.”
Word had come that a Dutch trading pinnace was on the south coast, and might stop here, as here was the only place on Cape Cod where canoes could pass from one side to the other without facing open ocean or dangerous shoals. Thus it was the best place for traders to deal with Indians or with a white man who owned a hundred pelts of beaver.
Thomas Weston slipped off his boots and put his feet by the fire. A big toe poked from his hose like a shrew poking its nose from a burrow. “It might be that a canal could be dug over that portage we took today.”
“Canal? We’re lucky we has shelters.” Jack put another log on the fire.
“You could sail straight on to Plymouth without ever seein’ the shoals that did trouble you so in the
Mayflower.
”
“Sail right up to Ezra Bigelow”—Jack leaned back and threw his words after the sparks rising into the night—“ask for a hundred pelt, beaver or otter, no matter.”
Weston gave a growling laugh. “It be a grand world.”
Jack smoothed a pelt and placed it on the feet of his sleeping son. “I hear thou gets all the pelts thou wants, if thou knows ’bout a certain… book.”
The grease in Weston’s beard glistened in the firelight. “I did forget tales of thy sharp ears. Well, there be no book, nor anythin’ else to use ’gainst Master Bigelow, ’cept this.” He tapped his temple.
“Bigelow’s not one for bluff or bluster.”
“I be the best bluffin’ blusterer what ever there was.”
“Thou asked last night about Dorothy Bradford…. This book of thine, does it talk of her?”
Though there was not an Englishman for twenty miles, Weston slid closer to Hilyard and lowered his voice. “Jack, hear the counsel of one who was born poor, got rich, got poor, and who’ll get rich again. Forget books that be lost forever. Think of trade.”
“Don’t be changin’ the talk, Tom.”
“I be tellin’ thee why I come here. To get started again, in trade. Trade’s the thing. Trade whale oil, trade pelts, trade the land if you can.” Weston strode to the edge of the river. “Start here.”