The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,88

for someone to devour. . .”

Hannah soon became impossible to hold, so I tried tethering her with my hand round her wrist, but she pulled and protested, so I dragged her outside, and as the day was hot, I sat with her under the nearest wagon. I kept her content, letting her dig in the dirt, not scolding her for making piles of it in her apron. She looked every inch an orphan, unwashed and unkempt. Since Mother had left, we had all grown dirtier and shabbier, and I looked at the grime packed under my nails and thought with a twinge of Margaret’s smooth, clean hands.

We had stayed under the wagon for most of an hour when I heard the doors open and two men walked to the wagon carrying a third man, who was coughing and wheezing in the extremis of old age. They had left the service early to give the old man some air. As they approached, they began speaking, and before I could make my way from under the wagon, they had lifted the grandfather into the straw at the back. I could not then, without terrible embarrassment, show myself to them, and the longer they talked, the more difficult it became to come out like some lizard crawling from under a stone. I could only see their lower legs but I could hear their voices clearly and I hoped Hannah would be still and not give us away.

The first man said as he clapped the old man on the back, “What think you of them coming bold as ever to the meetinghouse?” He had recently switched his square-toed boots around left to right but they had not had time to form themselves to their new occupants, so his feet looked put on crossways.

The other man, shorter and stouter and with the lingering burr of a childhood spent in Scotland, said, “The children are fey, no doubt about it. But it’s him that makes my blood thicken.” He put a great weight on “him” and I knew he was speaking of Father. He continued conspiratorially, as one would tell a ghost story to a child. “What kind of a man hunts alone? In these woods. Filled with Indians. A dead shot that one. He felled a bear as big as a house with one shot to the neck. I saw the carcass, passing up the road. Biggest I’d ever seen. They say the Indians are even afraid of him.”

Then Goodman Crossways said, “I was told a few years back, in Boston he killed a man with one blow to the head.”

“No,” said Goodman Stout, “it was fifteen year ago if it was a day, and he knocked the man down in Billerica. Near killed him. But didn’t. He was fined for it, though.”

The old man had stopped coughing, and I heard the wagon creak as he lay back on the straw to rest. The two pairs of legs came closer together and their voices lowered to near whispers.

Said Crossways, “Don’t worry. You can speak. The old man’s as deaf as a post. They fined Carrier because who would have the bones to put chains on that giant? He was a trained soldier in the royal guards, you know. Some say bodyguard to the King, until he switched sides to Cromwell. It’s not many men who could have a witch to wife and still remain at liberty. Have you heard the worst, though?”

Said Stout, “Aye. Between us two, and God grant the second Charles a long life, being a Scot I have some fond remembrance of Old Oliver. But killing a king is something else entirely.”

Crossways shushed him and said apprehensively, “It’ll never be known for sure but that rumor of taking an axe to the first Charles has followed him for near thirty years as closely as hide on a dog. The man must be charmed to have escaped the King’s justice for so long.”

Then Stout spat on the dirt and said, “Charmed? An executioner’s always masked, so who’s to say? Besides, even if it could be proved he killed the King, who’s going to serve the warrant on him? You? Robert Russell, who has his ear to the ground, has put about that there is a secret society of Cromwell’s old army living as plain as a tit out of an ol’ bawd’s blouse. Here, right here in Andover. They look after one another and are sworn to avenge any of their own that