His mouth twisted for a moment bitterly. “If I may use such a common phrase. There has been offered a generous bounty for the capture of these accused men. As you are not native to this town, you may not know that Thomas Carrier has long been suspected of being Thomas Morgan, the man who, for love of Cromwell’s cause, swung the ax, taking the life of an anointed king. It is said that after the blade came down, he held up the royal gourd for all to see.”

He waited for her to speak, and when she didn’t respond, he extended one arm over his head to demonstrate, adding, “He was chosen because he was so tall, you understand, so that when he reached out his hand, holding the still-dripping head, even those pressed to the very front of the platform could gaze upon it.” He dropped his arm and shrugged. “But this is only rumor. Perhaps, as you are a woman, I should speak no more on this…” One side of his mouth curled up, his voice trailing into silence.

A sudden recollection of the flat wooden piece in Thomas’s oak trunk was followed with the vision she had had of his shirt, stained and running with blood, and she felt a panic building in her head like mercury rising. She sensed the tinsmith listening to her quickened breaths, perhaps waiting for her to press him into revealing more about the regicides, questioning him about rumors that must have wafted through the workroom like smoke from the fire pot.

From her childhood she had heard stories, told as frequently as the coming of tides, from her father, and his cronies, that Cromwell’s cousin and son-in-law had long been hidden and fed by local Massachusetts farmers. The glories of the civil war, and Cromwell’s decadelong reign between the executed Charles the father and the restored Charles the son, were often burnished and constructed anew at night in secret when the fire was banked and the doors locked. It was a source of deep-seated pride to the New Englanders that not one man, woman, or child had taken the king’s bounty in arresting Edward Whalley and William Goffe, Cromwell’s kin and fellow regicides, and others besides, who had fought against the first Charles. The colonists were a thorny, resourceful, and resistant lot when it came to betraying one of their own to the Royalists, and they held a perverse pride that common men, for the sake of common rights, had had the temerity, and nerve, to pull down a king.

“Gossip is like a poisoned soup,” she said, the tension in her voice making her sound waspish and scolding. “Delicious at first but deadly over time.”

He had started reassembling the pieces of the lantern, but he put the tools aside and said, “Well, then, we will not drink of the poisoned cup. We will speak only of cordial things. To my mind, it is a winning trait when a woman does not sup on gossip. It means she can keep an intimate confidence.” He leaned forward on his elbows, his nostrils widening, breathing in some scent that inhabited the place where she sat. “You have a deep voice for a woman, but for all that, it is pleasing. You are not yet married, I believe.” She dropped her gaze away from his sightless stare, drawn again to the play of his fingers, searching the air like the eye stalks of an insect.

Repressing the longing to jerk the stool farther away from the bench, she gathered the cloth closer to her chest and said, “I must leave now.”

His tongue flicked absently at the corner of his mouth. “But I am not yet finished.”

“Then I will come back another day.” She rose, scraping the stool against the floorboards, and walked swiftly towards the door. Before she could grasp the latch, the tinsmith blew out the candle. She stood for a moment in complete darkness, trying to calm her unreasoning fear that he would come upon her from behind. She groped to find the handle, taking first one step and then another, until she touched what she hoped was the door. She ran her hands searchingly over the wood, feeling for the latch, and when she found it, she tugged hard. The door would not open and she realized he had bolted the lock when she first entered.

She slipped her hands up along the frame, frantically searching for the lock, listening for the sounds of approaching footsteps but hearing nothing. When her fingers touched metal, she slipped the bolt and fiercely tugged open the door.

As she rushed over the threshold, he called to her sharply, “Missus.” Reflexively, she paused, and he said, calmly and clearly from his place at the bench, “Ask him about the Prudent Mary.”

Leaving the door ajar, she hurried past the rectory and, looking up once, saw the minister’s face at the window, starkly assessing her panicked flight towards the green. She willfully slowed her pace, matching her breathing to the reflective chanting of the unfamiliar name given to her by the tinsmith: “Prudent Mary, Prudent Mary.” John beckoned to her from the wagon, and Martha could see Patience and the children waiting restlessly for her to join them.

She was flushed and shaken, but Patience was too satisfied with her afternoon of trading and preoccupied with a crying Joanna to take note. As John pulled away from the green, Will slipped his hands, tightly closed into two fists, onto her lap and asked, “Butter or cream?” He tapped at her legs until she faced him, and he asked again, “Butter or cream?” It was a guessing game they often played where a treat was hidden in one of the asker’s hands; left was “butter,” right was “cream.” If the guesser picked the correct hand, the asker must give over the treat. Martha studied the boy’s dirty face, stricken with childish concern for her inexplicable distress, and she smiled, tugging roughly at his hair with her fingers.

“Butter,” she said, tapping his left hand. He grinned with relief and opened an empty palm to her. “Go on,” she prompted, and he quickly shoved into his mouth the bit of damp sugar that had been clenched in his right hand.

As they rolled past the now-silent figure in the stocks, the woman craned her neck to the side and stared up at Martha with accusing eyes. Rage had replaced the shame of being pilloried, and her piercing look came like a mother’s slap, and a mother’s warning. The woman’s eyes, the palest of blue and clouded with the beginnings of elder blindness, craned and looked at the wagon until it had pulled out beyond the town marker.


THE MOWING OF the common fields began upon the cresting of the sun. The entire town of Billerica had come out to harvest the green and fibrous grasses, sawing at the wind in nodding waves. Each settlement would share in its deserved portion, the largest homesteads getting the largest share of fodder for their farm stock. Well before dawn, men and women on foot and in carts, carrying scythes and rakes and pitchforks, had joined the road winding north beyond Loes Plain. They came together in banded groups, families by blood or marriage, or in camps of common-minded neighbors, eager to give or receive news and gossip of the recent births and deaths in a neighboring village, or the vagaries of trade in a marketplace that lived or died much as the people did. They spoke in quiet undertones, calling to one another in hoarse whispers, as though the sun were a living thing that could be frightened away by the sudden remonstrations and shouts of people.

Martha had chosen to walk the few miles rather than ride in the wagon with Patience and the children, her pace joyfully rapid, keeping time with Thomas’s loping stride. The air was cool on her ankles, bare from lack of stockings, and she could have walked barefoot if not for the presence of men. Will got down and ran for a time back and forth between them, teasing and chanting, “Catch me, catch me, catch me,” until Thomas grabbed him up and tossed him shrieking over one shoulder. He was carried aloft for a while, dizzy and excited to be able to see ahead to the main group of villagers moving inexorably forward. Well beyond Fox Brook on a hillock, Thomas tossed Will back into the wagon and let it roll ahead, motioning for Martha to stand for a moment alone with him. As the wagon descended the far side of the hill, Patience turned her head around to watch them thoughtfully, her eyes guarded and questioning.

Thomas pointed west to a crooked bend at the Concord River where a deep pool formed, bowered over thickly with cattails and river fronds. He said to her, “In a year’s time, that’s to be our land. Mine and John’s.”

Her throat tightened at the beauty, the possibilities, of such a place, and a desire as strong as despair twisted in her chest. The rising sun flared off an eddy on the river, and she turned to watch Thomas, the flat planes of her face catching the biased light. She had never seen a man at rest who could stand so resolutely still; the absence of movement fooled the eye into believing the tall, angular Welshman at his ease was somehow less threatening than he truly was.

He had an economy and a surety of movement to everything he accomplished, never giving more energy to a task than was required, allowing the impetus of a tool’s own forward momentum and the pull of gravity to move rock and earth. And yet, at the behest of a neighbor who had no gun for butchering, she had seen Thomas fell an ox with a hammer so forcefully that the brains of the beast had been found in its throat. For all his native strength, though, he had yet to be proclaimed best man at the reaping.

Every man in Billerica with hair on his face worked a scythe to harvest the feed grass, hoping to be the last villager standing in the newly cleared field. Most times, completed within the span of a day and half a night, the scything would have a tinge of desperate zeal to it, a kind of battle. The men would attack the grass, mowing it in ever-expanding patterns, never stopping, except for a brief swallow of water or pocket bread, until exhaustion overtook them. One by one they would drop out until one man remained alone, a corn king, a prince of reeds, upright on the ground littered with broken stalks. Made much over by women and men alike, he would be fed the best meat, given the best ale, deferred to, listened to, sought after. For three years running a townsman named Ezra Black had been proclaimed the winner. Looking at Thomas in the strengthening light, she instinctively knew that he never took the honors as he had nothing to prove to these farmers of Billerica. He simply worked to fulfill his needed allotment of grass, leaving the contest to those yeomen whose reputations, and pride, depended upon such a small and circumscribed ritual.

Within the half hour they had joined the encampment of townspeople at the edge of the field, and upon the completion of the blessing by the Reverend Hastings, the men commenced the reaping. Moving in a northwesterly direction, their long-handled blades swinging in wide arcs, they opened up swaths between the long grasses. The stalks, still wet and clinging from the morning dew, lay crossed together in disordered patterns, turning hour by hour from dark green to yellowish brown. The women and children, some as young as Joanna, followed behind the men spreading and turning the grasses with rakes, gathering them into windrows to dry under the sun. Forty-odd men worked the fields, and they had cleared almost five acres when the drum rolled, calling them to pause for the noon meal of meat and bread and cold water drawn from the river.

Earlier, Patience had pushed a sharp elbow into Martha’s side, pointing out Ezra Black with her chin, remarking, “He is not yet married, cousin, and must marry soon or be thought a scandal.” She raised her eyebrows significantly, and Martha turned away before she betrayed her impatience. There had been a lustful buzzing around Ezra from the outset as first one young woman and then another found reason to drift close to him, to bring him water or to pull her cap aside to show off a small but immoderately straying curl. He was powerfully built with immense arms, thighs, and calves, but with bandy legs and a head full of dark ringlets that looked suspiciously oiled. Martha could have guessed without being shown who the cock of the hour was.

Patience pressed into Martha’s hands a large joint of meat and gave her a push in Ezra’s direction. As she approached him, he grinned widely, his squinting eyes disappearing behind the high mounds of his cheeks.

“You are Martha. Your cousin has told me of you,” he said, wiping at the sweat on his face. He crossed his arms and looked her over like a mare. “She told me you have been saving something for me.” He grinned even wider and winked his eye at her.

She blinked twice and felt the small of her back go rigid. At the setting of her face, there was a slight faltering of confidence in Ezra’s eyes, but he pointed to the joint of meat and winked again. Martha could sense the men and women watching them, waiting for an exchange of words. She handed him the meat, wiping her hands on her apron, and glanced at Thomas, who was drinking from a dipper of water, his eyes thoughtfully on Ezra.