He paused, inhaling deeply as though the air had thinned, settling his chin more heavily on the crown of her head. His fingers dug into her, and she held her own breath, willing herself not to flinch under his hands so that he would go on.

“My wife, Palestine…” His voice thickened for a moment. “My wife died for a man named Lilburne, leader of the Leveller cause, put in the Tower for preaching the rights of men. Petitioning for his release, she challenged Cromwell himself in front of the Hall of Commons. She caught his cloak, calling him to task for killing the king and jailing people of goodwill. Can you imagine it? A man who was like a king himself, called to task by a girl. There was not a man living who dared put hands on the Protector, but my wife dared. By Christ she did.” A brief exhalation of air, coarser than a laugh and more prideful, passed through his lips. She felt a lightning stab of something close to jealousy but willed it gone before he could feel it through the crown of her head like a fever.

“It was Cromwell’s men who jailed them, taking my wife and son to the Tower. The bastards had waited till I was shipped for Ireland. They meant only to frighten her, to stop her from calling Cromwell to task for becoming a tyrant himself, but the Black Dog had come breathing contagion, and she and the boy died in the filth of their cell.”

She tried to push herself away out of the hollow of his arms so that she could see his face, but he held her tightly to his chest. Her forehead rested against his neck and she could feel the working tendons and muscles of his throat constricting, his jaw hinging wordlessly up and down, up and down, as though testing the air for further grief. She reached up and felt the slick of tears in the hollow of his cheek. Placing the flat of her palm over one eye, she gently stroked with her fingers the place where the scar on his brow lay, and waited for him to speak.

“I broke the back of the jailer who had locked my family away, and spent a month in Newgate Prison. From my cell, I heard the outcry of men and women, confined and tortured, attesting to the thing Cromwell had become: a man of treachery who schemed to claim kingship in all but name.

“The Protector himself paid for my release, but I took off the red coat of my rank then and put it in a wooden chest. The Irish dirk, the wooden stake that committed me to being an executioner, and even a parchment note written in Cromwell’s own hand were all put away from the prying eyes of men. I took up shop on Fetter Lane as an ironsmith and never again saw the living Cromwell.”

He pulled away, encircling her face with his two hands, tracing with his thumbs the swollen lids beneath her eyes. She met his gaze reluctantly, thinking of the time she had plundered the great oaken chest. But she now had a history for everything inside it: the faded red coat, the curious dirk, and the rolled parchment, within which the little wooden stake had been wrapped. She shivered, suddenly cold.

He said, “I yet think on my son as he could have been, were he to have lived. He was tall for a boy and had his mother’s love for music. But he is gone from me forever, and though I grieve for him, I cannot wish myself to be in that place where he is. Not yet, not yet.” He clasped the back of her neck and brought his forehead to rest against hers. “Children may die, Martha, as will we all. No one knows when that end-time may be. But for this day, we live. So bide with me. Bide with me and take from me what you can, as I will from you. And however long it is that we walk this earth, we can stand for one another and leave off grieving until one of us is gone. I’ll not ask you to be mine, for you were mine at the moment my eyes opened to you, fuming and roaring into the mouth of a wolf. I will never seek to blunt the fury in you, never, and will honor your will as my own. What say you? Can you be a soldier’s wife?”

She looked at him wonderingly and at length, remembering other women’s acquiescence to an awkward suitor’s prologue to marriage: girlish smiles and laughter following some artless boy’s long-limbed shuffling and shy proposals. In all her imaginings of a sober and practical union, the breeding of children, and the laboring drudgery of a woman’s sphere, she had never dared hope for the promise of this; that a man would take her knowingly for all her mannish, off-putting certitudes and canny will, her prickly refusals to adhere to womanly scrapings, her ferocious and ill-tempered nature. But how could it be other? To be a soldier’s wife would suit her well.

She kissed him in answer, pressing her body for a while into his, and, after a time, he gathered her up and led her home.


IT WAS THREE days afterwards that Patience found the red diary.

Martha had been finishing the hem of her cloak made from the English woolen for which she had traded the piglets at market, the blue-green cloth that Thomas had said was the color of the Irish Sea before a storm. She gathered it into folds around her neck, placing Thomas’s antler clasp first at one shoulder, and then the other, before moving to the small bedroom window to better see her work. It had stormed earlier in the day, but the rain had slackened and turned to a rolling fog, settling into dells like ponds of lambs’ wool. She caught herself humming a snatch of song before remembering the words: The song of winter becomes like sleep and drowns the air with a gentle roar; and limbs like fingers grasp the fruit, into which time doth pour.

The tune was mournful—it made her think of the inevitability, the nearness, of death—but she stopped her humming, guilty that Patience might have overheard her. Patience had barely spoken to her since Will, placed in a small coffin hastily provided by a neighboring carpenter, was laid into the ground. Martha had spent most of her time while indoors confined to her room, sewing or furtively writing in the diary, at times overcome with tears for the boy. Blessedly, no one else in the family had become ill, and John would soon be sent to bring back Joanna.

Earlier, she had heard the unmistakable sounds of an argument between Patience and Daniel coming from the common room. There were suppressed, passionate exchanges punctuated by the sounds of her cousin’s angry weeping, and Martha had waited until silence had returned, making her think that Daniel had led her cousin into their bedroom. Placing the cloak aside on the bed, she walked into the common room to build up the fire for the noon meal. She was startled to see Patience standing behind a chair, her fingers tightly gripping the ladder back, and in the chair in front of her sat Daniel, holding in his hands a red leather-bound book.

There was a moment of confusion when Martha simply stared, wondering that there should be a twin to her own singular journal. But Daniel’s face was stricken with something beyond grief. A crimped mask of fear had compressed his lips into two white slashes, and he asked, “Is this your doing?”

“Patience gave it me,” she answered quickly. “The book is for the house accounts.” She heard from her cousin an ugly exhalation of air, and when Martha met her eyes, a prickling band of sweat sprang up around her neck.

“I will ask you again, Martha, is this your doing?” He anxiously palmed the stubble at his chin, and Martha frantically searched his face, trying to gauge the depth of his knowledge. How far beyond the beginning entries, the notations of supplies and homely expenditures, had he read of a regicide’s life?

“It was given to me by your wife, Daniel. It is mine.” Martha dropped her chin, clenching her hands together. “I thought my property to be inviolable.”

“Your property. Your property.” Patience rapped fiercely on the back of the chair, making Daniel wince. “Everything in this house by rights is ours. The food you eat, the bed you shared with our children. The cloth that came from the sale of our pigs…” She stopped for a moment, collecting herself. “I went to lie down on my son’s bed and found that… accounting book sewn into your pillow, next to where my own child laid his head. In truth it is an accounting book, but not such a one that is to our prosperity. Indeed, I think it is to our ruin.”

More than the pity Martha felt for her cousin in that moment—the thought of Patience trying desperately to breathe in the remaining scent of a dead child impressed onto a pillow—she awakened to an overarching terror that she had, through her own playing at secrets, betrayed Thomas.

She met Daniel’s gaze and held out her hand to receive back the book. He looked away from her, gripping the book’s binding tighter, turning it end over end in his hands. He said, “You will leave today for your father’s house until such time as I have reflected on this. I will keep the book and you will not return until—”

“She will not return to this house, and as for the Welshman—” Patience began.

“Silence!” Daniel roared. “Enough.” Wounded and shaken, Patience gathered up the folds of her skirt and left the room, weeping.

“Martha,” Daniel said, “John will take you in the wagon today.” He laid the diary on the table, his palms splayed over the binding as if seeking to hide it. Martha could see the lines entrenched in his face, and she knew his sadness would never find release pinioned against his wife’s towering, extravagant grief.

“Daniel,” she began. “Cousin, I have never asked you for anything, and have done all I could for your family. But I ask you, I beg you, to burn this book rather than read it more. I would you call me thief and have me arrested rather than harm come to another through my indiscretion.” She took a few steps closer to the table. “Cousin, the teller of these words has no knowledge of this book. Think what may come from revealing these pages to others. I, myself, have not told another soul. Please.”

“No,” he said, taking the book from the table. “You must promise me you will never again speak of this. I will reason with Patience. She is—” He paused for a moment before continuing. “She has faults enough, but she is my wife and will be silent on this if I demand it. You must understand… she had no knowledge…” He stood abruptly, dragging a hand through the tufts of his hair. He stepped closer, saying, “You have put us all in grave danger with this book, cousin.”

Martha looked at his red-rimmed eyes and knew in the instant that he had read the whole of the book. “It was recklessness that led me to write it. I see that now.”

He clasped her firmly by the elbow and walked with her out of the house, leading her into the garden, dotted with swelling gourds. He stood scanning the surrounding fields, cropped bare through autumn harvesting, and said, “Martha, if Thomas ever knew of this book, it could be the end of the trust he has placed in you.” When she tried to speak, to tell him of the bounty men, he held up a hand and said harshly, “Not another word. You must leave now. Speak to no one else about this. I will think on what is best to be done.”

Martha searched his face, which seemed to reflect only the flushed and open visage of a simple carter. A kind and generous man who had coddled and spoiled his wife and children alike; a man who could not, though it save his very life, hit the broadside of a barn with a primed and ready flintlock. But she also sensed a forcefulness that he had, until that moment, hidden from her. Or perhaps it was that she had not looked closely enough to find the greater substance in him.

He glanced at the house, the door still open and beckoning, and Martha could see the rings of black under his eyes and the stubble of beard that proved the cost of hiding her secret.

Martha quickly bundled her few things together and, wearing the new cloak, climbed into the waiting wagon. Thomas had gone hunting hours before, or so he had said, but she wondered if his going had been a kind of self-protection. She craned her neck again and again for some glimpse of him, but the wagon was quickly engulfed by spiraling wisps of fog dissipating with the rising heat. John sat next to her on the driving board, his face anxious, his eyes, wide and blinking, fixed on the road ahead.

Midway through the journey John said to her, “Do not worry about the Taylors. I will see to them, no matter what…” He paused, his voice trailing away.

She sat shivering with the cloak drawn tightly around her shoulders, even after the sun broke free, shining hotly on their necks, and a pounding like the threshing of grain began in her ears. She suddenly pressed her hands over her face, her breath exhaling raggedly against her palms, and she felt John’s hand go to her shoulder briefly before she turned her head away.