Kathleen Kent - The Wolves of Andover

Asa Rogers, as Buyer, hereby agrees to make said purchase for Four Pounds Sterling upon execution of this Document.

Witness my hand the day and year above

Written, together with Buyer and Seller

Gen. D. Gookin

Daniel Taylor

Asa Rogers

Copied by Town Clerk: Tho. Adams

Post Script to Mr. James Davids, New Haven, Connecticut:

Dear friend James,

Forgive these hasty scratchings as I have much withal to concern me: meetings of the governor and General Council and, more important I believe to the immediate welfare of these wilderness settlements, the visitation of Indian villages. There has been of late much unease regarding relations between the colonists and the natives, and I have endeavored to begin a work which I hope to publish for the benefit of peace: “The Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indian.”

More to the point of this missive, I have sent the above copy of a court transcript for your enlightenment as it concerns the carter Daniel Taylor, also your agent in the surrounds of Boston. Goodman Taylor solicited me to help settle a land dispute between Asa Rogers and a hired man, one Thomas Morgan, a rumored regicide.

It will please you to know that Morgan is popularly believed to have been executed by bounty men, his head struck from his body (the head of which I, being responsible in part for His Majesty’s Will and Charters in the colonies, have myself witnessed). This disjointed head, I must add, is most decidedly small for such a reputedly large man, the forehead cross-hatched with a multitude of scars. The skull is to be conveyed back to England on the ship The Swallow with a captain of our very close acquaintance, Captain Koogin, for the satisfaction of the Crown. On the shipping barrel will be writ, no doubt by some wayward scoundrel: “Here lies the head of Thomas Morgan, regicide; to which state every head of state must someday find.” His Majesty will want to know, through endless correspondences, I am certain, how we, the colonists, hold in regard the Royal Court to make such rustic jokes and bite our thumbs at Consequence and Ceremony.

Once Thomas Morgan had proven to be officially dead, and therefore unable to make a claim upon the Taylor land—a cunning well-ordered spot on the Concord—Asa Rogers stepped forward most vigorously to claim it for his mill (bringing poignantly to mind that “the mills of the gods grind slow, but exceeding fine”). Rogers paid in full, and hurriedly, for his plot of land. He, upon some reflection, has taken my word as a magistrate that Thomas Morgan is gone from this earth. The more so after describing to him, in most painstaking detail, the attendant hackings, burnings, and dismemberments by Indians that may take place upon a settler without the protection of the militia, under my command.

To more felicitous duties. I had, upon completion of the sale of land, the satisfaction of officiating in the marriage of one Thomas Carrier of Billerica to a Martha Allen, late of Andover, and cousin to the wife of Goodman Taylor. As they stood, still and solemn before me, making their vows—he as exceptionally tall a man as I have ever seen, and she wearing a fine green-gray cloak—they brought to my mind stone carvings I had seen in a great abbey in London. There, resting in a shadowed, forgotten nave, were likenesses of some long-absent king and queen, both alike in dignity, their brows crimped in imponderable thoughts. And though their eyes were closed, their heads inclined together, speaking to the onlooker, “We have endured.”

Goodman Taylor was witness to the ceremony and discreetly presented the bride afterwards a fine down quilt, such as is rarely seen in the colonies. In a peculiar aside, I overheard him say quietly to her that there was, within, an accounting book, a red one, if such extravagances can be believed.

“Keep it well, cousin,” he told her, “until such time as it can be brought forward to illuminate a world more equal to its subject.”

The couple being poor, and they being of remarkable fortitude for work, I have offered them, along with Carrier’s man, John Levistone, a good plot of land from my own holdings, in return for some period of labor and a gold coin given to Goodwife Carrier by her father.

Thomas Carrier accompanied me to Boston to deliver Morgan’s head, kept from corruption in a salt barrel, to the ship at Boston Harbor. Along with us came my new aide, George Afton, who is an able lad (formerly an eel boy in London, such is the greatness of opportunities in the colonies for inventive men). Along with Morgan’s head was found a scroll wrapped around a small wooden stake. After gaining my permission to open the scroll, Georgie began to read aloud to us the words inscribed by the hand of the great Lord Protector of England, whose orders of battles, instructions to Parliament, and writs of execution I have seen with my own eyes. This scroll will be sent to England along with Morgan’s remains.

The words are from Revelation, the meaning, and signature, of which may serve to confound and torment His Majesty everlastingly:

“You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals… and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom.

Oliver Cromwell”

In God’s trust, I remain,

Gen. Daniel Gookin

ONCE THE HEAD, as it came to be known, had been presented to Charles Stuart in his private chambers, accompanied only by an examining audience of the Earl of Arlington, the Duke of Buckingham, and Sir Joseph Williamson, nothing was ever again right for the sovereign.

The viewing of the barrel’s contents had begun before it had even left the dock. Advance news spread across the city that the remains of the executioner that took the head of the first Charles had landed aboard the ship The Swallow, and carriages of nobles, titled ladies, and serving orderlies mingled with curious, rude ’prentices and common people, who all gawked, for a fee, inside the barrel. After all, the dock courier reasoned, its lid had not been secured, there being no royal seal, and the captain of the escorting guard was amenable to retaining an accommodation fee for himself. Very quickly, the joke had been had; the shrunken, tarred head with its ridiculous topknot and the scribbling on the barrel itself, alluding to the inevitable fate of kings, brought first knowing smiles and then waterfalls of derisive laughter. Tiernan Blood, cloaked and hooded within the crowd, drew near for a peek and, recognizing the cross-hatching scars, laughed the loudest.

An old poem by a court wit was resurrected and circulated:

After a search so painful and so long,

That all his life he has been in the wrong;

Huddled in the dirt the reasoning engine lies,

Who was so proud, so witty and so wise.

Artists made sketches of the relic to be engraved onto pamphlets, which were circulated within hours to a wider populace whose dissatisfaction grew daily, pinched as they were by the taxes for the third Dutch war and the outrageous expenses of keeping the king’s whores and bastards fed and housed. The secret, dishonorable pacts by the second Charles Stuart with the Catholic French, the betrayal of a morally upright Protestant Dutch king, and the lack of legitimate successors to the throne had all brought disenchantment to the English people for their bonny wayward boy-king who was now an aging reprobate: a cynic and a secret heretic to the Anglican Church.

Charles replaced the lid on the barrel, his lips curled into the public show of insouciance. Throwing the accompanying scroll of parchment, along with the little wooden stake, into the fire grate, he gestured for Arlington to dispose of the barrel. The king would now visit his mistress Louise de Keroualle and their infant son. As he left, the dozens of timepieces in his chamber struck to twelve, the sound of their gongings and tinklings following the king’s footsteps, along with the clattering of the royal spaniels, roused to partner his stride. Arlington bowed as the king departed and then directed Williamson, who in turn directed Chiffinch, to remove the offending object. Buckingham had left the chamber even before the parchment had finished burning.

Chiffinch, Keeper of the Privy Closet, gestured for a guard, who in response clambered down the stairs, calling to a passing chamber orderly. The orderly opened the outward privy stairs door and called to a porter to come right quick. The porter and his mate retrieved the barrel, bumping it down the stairs, and boarded it onto a wherry, where it was directed to be thrown into the Thames farther downstream. The wherryman rowed with the current towards the docklands, discharging his cargo into the dark waters there.

After days and weeks, the rotting wood of the barrel expanded and broke apart, expelling the head like a birth into the tidal wash. By measures the skull, its prominences of brow and jawbone catching in the tumultuous mud, came to rest on the shores near Wapping, where it lay until at length it came to be found by a boy scouring the shores for eels.

From Martha Carrier’s Diary: Andover, Massachusetts,

Thursday, January 28th, 1692

My dearest and most beloved daughter Sarah,

If ever you are to read this, you will surely wonder at the tenderness of these opening words, as we have, so many times, been set at odds with each other. It has been said that when the daughter draws her nature from the mother, rather than from the father, there will be disharmony between them. And certainly discord has been in the house in which we have lived since the time you took your first steps. But you must know that as I have many times harshly tended to my children, scolded them, beaten and brayed at them, so, too, have I always loved them.

You would say a painful thing is this my love after you have felt the tender ministering of your aunt Mary. Sending you away to my sister’s house as I did was a hard thing, and yet I hoped to save you from the pox that threatened to take the life of your brothers, and which killed my own mother. But taking you back home again, away from a gentler house, was perhaps the cruelest thing that ever I could have done, for next to my sister’s sweet and exemplary nature, I must have seemed unyielding beyond bearing.

But you must believe that I know the workings of the world, and I would tell you that I did you a greater service in hardening you to the uncertainties of life, as well as strengthening you to its certainties of Age, Loss, Illness, and Death.

Some have said it is a sin to feel a greater measure of affinity for one child over another, but I have always seen in you the best, and most forward, parts of myself. I cannot say in truth that you are wholly the mirrored image of me, for where I am importune in my emotions, you are studied and cautious, like your father. Where I am quick to berate, you are more tempered in finding fault. You are brave and loyal and steadfast.

It may be that you and I will never come to a place of greater felicity, or even understanding. Perhaps it will be that the best we can hope for is a more charitable patience between us. It has been many years since I made entry to this diary, and if you have found these end pages, you will now know the history of the ones you called Mother and Father, he who has been to me, and above all else, Friend; and perhaps it may be that, in reading these words, you will come to understand, and forgive.

I have wondered countless times over the years since I began this work why I continued to keep it, dangerous as it is. Many times I have held the book over a fire, meaning to drop it into the flames. But it is a true accounting book, and the best kind; an accounting of your family, and your past. Perhaps it is only pride which keeps me from destroying these pages, an action which would keep us safer from those who would gain in status and wealth in its ransom. But, dear Sarah, once the storyteller is gone, so, too, is the story, unless it is committed to the written word, and I would have you know the whole of us; knowing, too, the sacrifices we have made.