“I ask you, Injun, do you sip any of the beer?”
“No. That crime for Injun.”
“Indeed.” Bigelow smiled, though his cheeks remained hollow. “How came you by the gash on your forehead?”
“I hit him with me fryin’ pan when he come late with the firewood,” said Goody Daggett.
“Hear, hear,” said Worthington.
Serenity felt little Ned stirring in her arms. He was awakening, and he managed to get out a cranky little squawk before she could get her breast into his mouth.
“What was that?” asked Ezekiel Bigelow.
“What?” said Goody Daggett.
“Who else lives here?”
Goody Daggett pointed across the dune to a shack on Grampus Bay. “The Hatch brothers, but they be fishin’.”
Then came a louder squawk from the back of the house.
The king’s men looked at one another, and Johnny gripped the knife beneath his blanket.
Serenity held the baby tight. If they found Sam Bellamy’s woman here, it would mean the end of freedom for Johnny the pirate and for those who had hidden him.
There was another squawk and old Goody Daggett laughed. “That’s Lucinda.”
“Lucinda?”
“Talkin’ to Josh again.”
“Josh Daggett? Your husband?” said Bigelow.
She shifted her eyes onto Worthington and gave him a little wink. “Dead he is. Five year now.”
Worthington stepped back. “Then who’s Lucinda?”
The old woman went inside. There were more squawks and the tinkling of a little bell, and she returned, cradling her cat in her arms. It was, of course, as black as pitch.
“Lucinda, say hello.” Surreptitiously, she scratched a fingernail on the cat’s asshole and made it squawk.
Worthington took another step back. “They
said
you were a witch.”
The old lady offered the cat to Worthington. “Stroke her fur and she’ll bring you luck. A cat who can see the afterlife’s a rare thing.”
Worthington raised his hands. “I’ve seen enough. Let us leave this old crone and her Indian… and her black cat.”
Ezekiel Bigelow looked hard at Goody Daggett. “Do not play at witchcraft, marm. ’Tis still a capital crime.”
Goody Daggett gave the cat’s bell a tinkle. “Who can know what a cat sees?”
When they were gone, she broke out the beer and served Johnny first. “Thou be safe now, son. Haul me firewood and water, and stay as long’s thou likes.”
Johnny reached into the bucket of oysters he had harvested that dawn. He opened one for Goody Daggett.
“The pirate’s whore, the Indian, and the old witch of Billingsgate. That’s what they’ll call us.” Goody Daggett sucked in the oyster. “I say piss on ’em all.”
Little Ned began to fuss, and Serenity shifted him from one shoulder to the other. “My father has softened some, now that Sam’s dead.”
“Thou can’t stay there, darlin’. He’ll smother thee. Him and all the holy faces of Eastham.” The old woman slurped in another oyster and wiped the juice off her chin. “That’s why I lives out here, with no company but the wind and Lucinda.”
The baby continued to fuss. Serenity shifted again, but he would not quiet.
“Give him.” John took the baby and laid it on his knees. Then he reached under his stool and brought out the whales’-tooth necklace. Miraculously the crying stopped, the tiny eyes focused, the hands reached for something new. John teased the fingers a bit, then slipped the toy into them.
“As skillful with him as with the shoals,” said Serenity.
John smiled. “He can have it.”
“But, John—”
“I’ll never wear it again, not with king’s men huntin’ me.”
“And Ezekiel Bigelow leadin’ ’em.” Goody Daggett spat. “Him and his people are hard ones. Always has been.”
“It’s said Simeon was a good man,” offered Serenity.
John nodded. “He told me I was good’s any white man. But he had strange parts, too. Old Keweenut, from Jack’s Island, he told me once him and Simeon buried a box at Cornhill by the light of a full moon.”
“What was in it?”
“He never said. Just big magic, that’s all.”
“Big magic.” Serenity looked at Goody Daggett. “Sounds like somethin’ for a witch.”
She cackled. “Ain’t no such thing as a witch.”
Serenity came regularly to the island after that. She might beg a ride on a fishing boat at the Herring River or make the long walk over the dunes. Naturally her father objected to her wanderings. He feared that she was studying witchcraft and would one day be hanged for it. He would have greeted that fate more warmly than the truth—that she was falling in love with the Indian Johnny Autumn.
No man could have been gentler with Ned, and none had ever been gentler with her. Johnny and Ned would play for hours, and when it came time to leave, the baby would always cry. While the baby slept, Johnny and Serenity would talk. And what he told her sometimes made her cry.
Yes, Sam Bellamy had been coming back for her. He loved her so much that he endangered riches and crew for her. He talked of her so much that hardened pirates yearned to see her eyes change from green to blue like the sea on a bright windy day.
Serenity did not entirely believe him, but she listened for hours to the stories. And soon, it was
his
admiration that she heard, not Sam Bellamy’s.
Johnny said that most pirates were like Serenity, rebels against a world that put every person in a place above which he could not aspire. He took his lesson from Bellamy, who had proclaimed he would not “pin his faith upon a pimp of a parson who neither practices nor believes what he puts upon the chuckleheaded fools he preaches to.” Bellamy called himself a free prince. And there was a girl on Cape Cod he sought to make his princess.
Some days, Serenity and Johnny would not talk, but simply sit beneath the sailcloth awning beside the house and stare at the blue distance. Or watch in silence as the gulls circled and swooped.
And some days they would be filled with anger at the injustice of life. What crime, Johnny once asked, was there in stealing the
Whydah?
She had been built as a slaver and named for an African port where the slaves were sold. Every ounce of gold she carried had been tarnished by the tears of black-skinned men now gone into chains. “We punished them slavers as sure as the storm punished us. And for that they’d hang me.”
Serenity put her arms around him. “They’ll never find you, John. I promise.”
“I can’t stay here forever. And if I leave, I can never be seen with you.”
“Do you wish that? To be seen with me?”
“I dream of it, like Sam did.”
He wore only a breechclout, and she did not deny that the sight of his flesh excited her as much as his words. In the bedroom, Goody Daggett snored beside the baby. On the bay, the fishermen worked their nets. And Serenity slid her hands down his flanks and untied the leather around his waist.
Then she lay back on the cool sand beneath the awning and drew him onto her. Against her clothes, his nakedness felt all the more sinful. But this was not sin or rebellion. It was need. And no baby could fulfill it, nor any father’s psalm. She undid her bodice and pressed his face to her breasts. Then she raised her skirt.
There was no other preliminary, because all had been preliminary to this. He entered her and she clung.
She moved to the island soon after and set herself up in an abandoned shack. Her father objected, but she gave her solemn promise that she would study no witchcraft. The few who lived year-round on Billingsgate Island paid her no mind. Most of them had run away from something as well. But the fishermen and whalers who came for the warm months were mostly family men and churchgoers, and so Serenity and John remained circumspect in their affections.
And never did they sail together to Billingsgate town, which now was growing three miles north, within the harbor that Great Island, Jeremy Island, and Billingsgate Island itself created. Together, Serenity and Johnny showed their faces only on the lonely dunes.
One late August eve, at Goody Daggett’s, they ate the corn that Johnny had coaxed from the sand with a dressing of bluefish heads, seaweed, and crushed shells. When they were done, Goody Daggett said that nights were growing shorter and winter would soon be upon them, so they had best think about leaving. “For there be no place bleaker, and I’ll not have bleak faces when the world’s too bleak for words. I’d rather have nothin’.”
But Serenity and John could not leave together. And if they stayed, the fishermen’s wives might finally come to gossip. And what if the gossip brought back the king’s men?
“Thou hast a bit of gold, hasn’t thee?” asked Goody Daggett. “What thee picked up from the beach?”
“ ’Twould let us live a few months, somewhere,” answered Serenity, “were there a place Black Bellamy’s woman and an Indian could live without suspicion, or a place we could spend Spanish pieces of eight without gettin’ the attention of the colony.”
Johnny poured more beer for the women and took some for himself. “Even at Smith’s, they say the king’s men keep a sharp eye for such coins.”
“ ’Tis true enough, that.” Goody Daggett sipped her beer. “I did forget.”
Serenity put her hand on John’s. “So, we need a miracle.”
Johnny placed his hand on hers. “Or big magic.”
vi.
When he saw Johnny Autumn appear at Jack’s Island, Keweenut laughed and cried. He was old and his left arm was a useless hook and he said his mind lived in days that would never come back. They talked of Autumnsquam and Amapoo. They talked of Jeremiah Hilyard, who let Indians live on Jack’s Island, of Jack himself, whose axe had crippled Keweenut so long ago. And they talked of Simeon Bigelow, who had reminded them of their dignity. Then Johnny asked about the big medicine that Simeon and Keweenut had buried many years before.
The next night, beneath flickering torches, Johnny, Keweenut, and Serenity dug into the sand near the base of Cornhill. After several tries, they found an old rush basket filled with rotted seed corn. Inside it was an iron box.
“Simeon say he bury it in the place where they first take Indian corn,” explained Keweenut. “He give back big magic of truth.”
“Truth?” asked Serenity.
“In that box.”
Serenity peeled away the wax seal and found a book, preserved almost perfectly in dry sand. “ ‘The Journal of Christopher Jones, Master of the
Mayflower
, July 1620 to May 1621.’ We must take this back to Billingsgate.” “No,” said Keweenut.
“But—”
“I say I show it. I do not say you take it.”
Johnny held a torch over it. “Read. Then we argue.”
Serenity pushed back her shawl and sat on the sand. For three hours she read aloud. For the first time in months, she stopped thinking about her little Ned—watched over that night by Goody Daggett—and the hard future that faced them. When she was finished, she was convinced that they should take the book because it could change that future.
“No,” said old Keweenut. “I promise Simeon I keep the story and pass it down. Now I old, so I pass it to Johnny. He pass it down to the next Nauset, if any left. Pass the story of big medicine in Cornhill. But the book must stay in Cornhill.”
“But can you not see what this is?” Serenity begged.
Keweenut shook his head.
“It tells the story of the First Comers, the ones what took the Cape away from you. It’s a big truth that would be worth much money to a learned man.”
Keweenut shook his head again and squared his English hat on his head. He had done all that he would.
Serenity looked at Johnny, whose eyes were sunken shadows in the torchlight. “This book could save you, Johnny. A certain king’s man might wish to keep its truth hidden. He might even pay.”
Then Keweenut spat in the sand. “How this hurt king’s man?”
“It says there were villains among the First Comers. And their name was the name of a king’s man.”
Johnny pulled his blanket around his shoulders and told her to quiet herself. The dancing of the torchlight made his face look even more skeletal, as if he had surrendered, right there on Cornhill, to the extinction of his race.
Well, Serenity would never quiet herself or let him surrender. “You know the name of the villains, Johnny. ’Tis
Bigelow.”
And Keweenut snatched the book from her hands. “You will not say bad of the Bigelows.”
“A Bigelow may have pushed a woman off the First Comers’ ship,” said Serenity. “And his son sold Indians into slavery. And his
grandson
would hang Johnny. Villains.”
But Keweenut would not waver. He said he could not see what good the book would do for the children of enslaved Wampanoags or for Johnny. He said the best man he had ever known was the Bigelow who buried the book. Now a Hilyard wished to take it. So he shook his crippled arm at Serenity. “Your great-grandfather did this. Do not tell me of bad Bigelows. And do not steal the book, or Habbamock will curse you.”
So they resealed and buried the box, and Serenity resolved that she would come back before long, damn the threats of the evil spirit Habbamock.
When they returned to the beach, their whaleboat was gone, lifted off by the spring tide. After searching up the beach and down, they huddled together in the cold September night, wondering what had become of the greatness of their people, and how they would get home.
They decided that walking the King’s Road would be better than staying there until the tide returned their drifting boat. If they were lucky, they could reach Chequesset Neck by suncoming, Goody Daggett’s by breakfast.
However, luck was no more with them than it had been with Black Bellamy. They did not make it through Truro. A farmer tending a sick cow saw them and took his suspicions over the hill to Constable Freeman, who was waiting with a blunderbuss when the remnant of a great people straggled into the village.
He might have let them go, except for the white woman. No decent woman was about in the middle of the night with Indians, unless she was up to “witchly doings,” and so they were arrested.
vii.
The silver oar, symbol of the Admiralty Court, glimmered like pirate’s treasure in the sunlight. From her cell window, which looked down a narrow alley toward North Street, Serenity could see nothing else but backs and raised fists and children peering through their parents’ legs as the procession of pirates went past.