“Sweetheart,” he said, kissing the hollow of her throat.

By measures her tears dried, and after lifting her from the rock, he took her hand and led her to the grove where she set to work with her curve-bladed knife, gathering the sap from the slippery elm. The insides of the trunks were still soft, the hidden bark light-colored and strong-smelling, and she scraped at it vigorously, the sweat from her face burning her eyes like lye. After a time, she gathered the shavings into a small bag and watched Thomas scanning the path and the woods for movement, his form grown restless and agitated.

After a while he said, “When you take up a man’s name, you take on his history. I’m nigh on fifty years. D’ye know that?” She nodded for him to go on. “I’ve had a wife before. In England.”

Her grip on the knife handle tightened, but she kept her eyes on the bark and the rhythmic scraping of the blade.

“She died when I was a soldier fightin’ for Cromwell in Ireland. I were his man in all things, Martha, and you should know it before you tie yourself to me.”

His eyes searched the length of the path from the opposite direction they had come, as though he expected someone to appear. She anxiously peered into the woods, looking for something hidden in the shadows, but saw nothing alarming. He glanced up at the sky, the sun at midpoint, and then, nodding, turned to her. “I’d tell you all, here and now, but for the others.”

Others? she thought, wiping away a limp strand of hair with the back of her sleeve. She saw him look sharp to the road and she stood up, following the direction of his gaze. A man walked towards them, his arms swinging easily in counterpoint to his rapid stride. He was dressed in a leather jerkin and full breeches like any farmer, but with the confidence of a man used to certainty of action. Lacing her fingers around her eyes against the noon glare, she looked up at Thomas and with a jolt realized that he knew the man, that he had been waiting for him. As he walked nearer, she saw that the man was tall, only a head shorter than Thomas, with a few days’ growth of heavy beard, as though he had been living hard on the ground. His footfalls made explosions of dust as his heels struck the path, and the long barrel of a flintlock, strapped with leather to his back, gleamed dully over one shoulder.

He came to stand in front of them, placing a familiar hand on Thomas’s shoulder. There was nothing said between them, merely the nodding of heads in casual greeting.

“Here is my friend Robert Russell.” There was weight in the word “friend,” but Thomas offered nothing further.

Martha looked at the man, unsure how to place his name or face. He was a stranger to her; she had never heard Thomas speak of him before today. Robert regarded her closely, scrutinizing her face, and she wondered if her eyes were still red and swollen from weeping. She self-consciously wiped her slick palms on her apron and waited.

Suddenly he grinned, displaying an alarming array of strong white teeth, and said, “You look confounded, missus. But that is to be expected, as you know little of me, and I know so much of yourself.”

His speech was not like Thomas’s, but neither was it accented as it would have been with a whole life spent in the colonies. She crossed her arms and said, “I know nothing of you.” Uncertainty had made the sound of her voice strident but, rather than taking offense, he smiled wider at her and cut a look to Thomas.

“That is why I am here, missus.” Robert reached into a bag at his waist and pulled from it an apple, a perfect globe of pale red and green, and extended it out to her like an offering. “It is from General Gookin’s orchard.”

“I don’t know General Gookin either,” she said. She paused a moment before reaching out and taking the apple.

“Walk with me, then,” he said, “and I will tell you.” He gestured off the path, towards the stand of trees. Thomas took her arm and they walked the short distance to the shaded places. Standing, she propped her back against a slender trunk and held the apple briefly up to her nose, breathing in its rolling perfume, roselike and tart. She looked to Thomas for some guiding word, but he stood apart from her, staring down at his feet, lost in his own thoughts. She clasped her hands under her apron, tense and expectant, knowing that good news never would need such a courtship of words.

“General Gookin is known to both of us, Thomas and me, from the Great War. He fought like us for Parliament. He is now here, in the colonies, and has great tracts of land: orchards, fields, and men, of which I am but one. Thomas and I made the passage on a ship with the general.” He paused and looked expectantly at her, as though he had run a great distance ahead and waited for her to follow.

Unaccountably, she remembered the instant of fear when the tinsmith blew out the candle, the blackness, the scrambling to find the lock. And the name he had given her when she crossed the threshold to leave. “Prudent Mary,” she said. “The ship on which you crossed over was the Prudent Mary.”

Robert dipped his head in assent.

“And there were others,” she said, using Thomas’s word. “Others who came with you, because to stay in England would bring… danger.”

Robert laughed, throwing his head back. “That’s putting it prettily, missus.”

Thomas held up a cautioning hand and said, “Martha.” When she looked into his face, she saw that he was afraid for her. “It was General Gookin who found us shelter, and he watches over those who made the crossing with him, as best he can. All our fates are tied together. So one goes, the others may follow. I would not burden you with a name that’d mean prison, or death, if you didn’t know the truth.”

He moved in closer, grasping a branch above her head. “Robert an’ me, we sleep with our backs to the wall. One loose word about any one of us, and some village newcomer, and all his grandchildren, would have coin enough to live like princes.”

Her hands, hidden beneath the apron, squeezed tighter together, her nails piercing the skin of the apple. She turned her back to Robert so that Thomas alone would see her face, and asked, “Why could you not tell me this, Thomas? Do you not trust me?”

“It’s not for lack of trust, Martha. It’s our way. It’s for our safekeeping, and for yours. If I should be taken, Robert would do his best to protect you.”

“You needed to see my face, and I yours,” Robert said, pushing himself away from the tree where he had been leaning. “Though it is better truth to say I am more the advantaged by having seen yours.”

Thomas led her back to the path and she followed him haltingly, her head filled with the knowledge, and half-knowledge, of his life before coming to Billerica; that he had had a wife and had fought across two countries with the Great Protector, Cromwell, now proclaimed a criminal throughout England and its colonies. Yet the one question she burned to ask had not been uttered.

Thomas waited for her in the sandy loam of the path, Robert at his side, the afternoon light filtering in columns through the dust of a midsummer’s drought. They looked at her solemnly, waiting for her to step from the lip of the meadow’s edge onto the road. If she turned away now, she could walk through Fitch’s settlement, following Bent Stream all the way to the Taylors’. There she could take up the hoe and hack away at the vines overtaking the corn until she had worked herself through the choking runners, clearing neat channels of earth, row upon row upon row, in endless successions of soil and rock and sand, until she in turn was planted in the dirt.

Instead Martha asked, “Are you Thomas Morgan?”

There was the slightest pause, his hesitation not one of deception, but rather of a man careful in handing over a thing of staggering weight. She felt the falling away of fear and in its place flared the dreadful excitement of the battlefield harridan, the woman who follows after soldiers, hopeful of gain at the end of a desperate fight. In her mind there was a quick succession of images: the embattled waves of tramping men, the sounds of iron on leather, the trumpeting of dying horses and men. The poetry of blood.

And then he answered, “Aye.”

Robert turned and walked the way he had come with no good-byes until he had swept up the path twenty paces or so. Turning briefly, he called out, “I’ll be about, missus. Rest easy on that.”

Later, Martha would halve the apple, twisting it in her hands, and hand the largest part to Thomas, who ate it in two bites, skin and core, swallowing whole the bitter pips, the seeds that would always endure beyond the fruit’s demise, the hard and reluctant carriers of secrets.

* * *

FOR DAYS AFTERWARDS Martha rarely spoke to Thomas yet often found ways of standing close to him, the air between them discouraging even the simplest intrusive demands of others. John laid off his teasing banter, quietly leaving the common room or barn whenever they were near. Patience, worried over the impending birth, stayed close to her bed, saying nothing to Martha about her solitary time spent with Thomas, giving out only a succession of peevish requests for food or to move her pillow this way or that.

On the eighteenth of July, the true pains of labor started for Patience. Her water broke in a thin stream while she was at the wash, and John was quickly sent in the wagon for Mary, who would help with the birthing. In a scrap of note, Martha wrote for her sister to bring black cohosh, as the cramping had begun sluggish and weak. She knew that Patience would never willingly take the cohosh—“squaw’s root,” the pregnant woman had dismissively called it—but Martha would sneak it into her broth if her cousin didn’t have the strength to bear down through the final stages.

Patience, greatly relieved that the pains were so light, was full of high resolve and friendly chatter as Martha walked her about the yard, through the common room, around the bed. Patience speculated aloud when Daniel would return and what he might bring back for her. She questioned Martha endlessly about what name she should give the child if it should be another boy, dismissing every name Martha suggested, finally deciding on the name Daniel; if it should be a girl, she would name it Rebecca. Will, agitated by the sudden tension and nervous vulnerability of his mother, marched back and forth through the yard, a stick over his shoulder like a rifle, challenging hordes of invisible attackers. Wave after wave of invading bands were subdued, until he knocked Joanna down, making her scream, and Martha used the stick on the back of his legs.

At four in the afternoon, Martha laid Patience down on the bed and examined the crown of the birth channel. The pains had begun to come more frequently, less than every half hour, but the crown was not opening sufficiently for the infant’s head. The plug had not been completely dispelled and Martha was loath to puncture it as she had known other midwives to do. Often, it nicked the tender part of the babe’s skull, or allowed a pustulance to start in the womb, causing fever and death. She decided to wait and heaved Patience up again to walk her around the garden once more.

For six hours the women walked and rested and walked again. Martha brought a pan of warm water and helped her cousin squat over it, her shift pulled up around her breasts, allowing the steam to open up the womb. Finally, close to midnight, the pains stopped altogether and Patience fell into an exhausted sleep. Martha lay down next to her, prodding Patience’s belly gently with her fingers, but felt no answering kick; an hour later Martha closed her eyes and slept.

Martha dreamt of the wolves trapped in the pen and jerked into consciousness at hearing the high-pitched scream of a struggling animal. She woke to a blackened room, Patience writhing in agonized spasms next to her. Martha quickly rose, feeling her way to the hearth to light a few candles. When she returned to the bedroom with the guttering light, she saw a dark stain of liquid on the mattress, her cousin’s face open-mouthed in the extremes of fear and pain.

“Patience, your water has fully come. This is good news, cousin. Hush now or you’ll wake your children.” Martha heard padding footfalls behind her and saw Will and Joanna standing, staring wide-eyed and frightened, at the bedroom door. Behind them loomed Thomas, his body in the helpless stance of useless men, and she waved him out of the house, into the barn. She led the children back to bed, giving them each a piece of bread to suck on, and quickly built up the fire, adjusting the iron pot to boil water. She shredded into the pot lavender and chamomile, and carried back into the bedroom the slippery elm paste covered in a wet cloth. She sat on the bed with a candle, positioning herself to examine Patience, satisfying herself that the womb was beginning to open, expelling the child.