“He came openly to see me,” Ned protested. “Boot’s on t’other foot. He took me to spy on them.”
“Well, you can go on up,” she said, silencing him. “They’re all three together upstairs.”
Ned made an awkward little nod to her and went out of the kitchen and up the staircase. As he climbed, he called: “It’s Ned Ferryman!” and the door at the head of the stairs opened and the minister looked out.
“Good to see you!” he said. “All well with you?”
“Aye, I came to see that all was well with you?”
“Praise God, yes. Come in.”
John Russell opened the door and Ned edged into the room. The three men were sitting on hard high-backed chairs with the single bed pushed back against the wall to give them more room. A mean fire burned in the grate, there were frost flowers on the inside of the window. A Bible was on the table, open at the Psalms.
“Ned!” William said warmly. “Good man!”
“Good to see you, Ned Ferryman,” said Edward.
Ned smiled at them. “I’m sure you need no guarding,” he said. “The weather will keep everyone indoors. But I thought I would visit, and I brought you some fresh meat for your dinner, venison from my neighbors over the river.”
“You’ve never crossed the river?”
“John Sassamon led me across. I don’t mind admitting I was fearful.”
“Is he this far north again?” John Russell asked.
“Yes,” Ned said. “Again. I’ve come to speak with you about him, and the Pokanoket. Indeed, he asked me to speak with you, and with these gentlemen.”
“What’s the matter?” The minister took his seat, and waved Ned into a stool by the fire. “What does he want?”
Ned squatted on the stool. “Thing is,” he started. “He trusts you, sir, as a man of God, a minister far superior to him, and a man who has risked his own safety for his friends.”
“Rightly,” William said.
“And he trusts you two,” Ned said, turning to his former commanders, “after taking you out and bringing you back to Hadley last summer. He knows you have the ear of some of the great men of the Council, he knows that you know the governor, and the great men: Josiah Winslow and that Mr. Daniel Gookin keeps your cattle, and that you have friends throughout the land.”
“How does he know all this?” Mr. Russell asked, surprised.
William nodded, not taking his level gaze from Ned’s face. “We are blessed with good friends,” he said. “What of it?”
“John Sassamon says that the settlers aren’t staying within their agreed bounds,” Ned said earnestly. “They’re buying land, though the Council forbade them to buy. The Indians are selling to them, though the Sachems forbade them to sell. The country is driven by buying land and no law seems to be able to stop it.”
“Amen. It’s true,” William said seriously.
“Amen,” Edward said. “The Indians are right to complain if we bring them not to God but to Mammon.”
“The Massasoit has all but lost his kingdom,” Ned said. “They say he can see a roof and a chimney from every side of Mount Hope where once there was nothing but forest. He can’t even get to the sea without crossing settler farms. That’s very bitter for them—his prayers in the morning are to be said facing the rising sun over the sea.”
“He’ll have sold it himself,” Mr. Russell pointed out.
“Not freely,” Ned went on. “They say that we get them into debt, and then we suddenly foreclose.”
“That is illegal, the Council are firmly opposed to it. All deeds have to be good, and signed in good faith. They should make a formal complaint and we will prosecute the settlers,” John Russell said firmly.
Ned looked away, embarrassed. “Yes, but it’s the old governor’s son,” he said miserably. “He’s suing an Indian for a ten-pound debt. Says he’ll take twenty pounds’ worth of land for it!”
“Says who?” William asked indignantly.
“They say,” Ned admitted. “The debtor is the nephew of the Massasoit—King Philip. The father, who is Sachem of his tribe, is handing over a hundred acres of land to the trader to forgive the debt.”
“Josiah Winslow is doing this?” Edward asked.
“It’s worse than that—he’s got a debt on King Philip himself.” Ned looked from one grave face to another. “If they force the Massasoit to sell land, when he has sworn he will not—”
“It makes him look bad,” John Russell said. “It makes him break his own word. It humiliates him.”
“They say that when they were all-powerful and the English newly arrived and starving, they were good to us. They were generous. They say that now we have guns and cannon and a militia and we are stronger than them, they say we should be generous to them.”
“Are we stronger than them?” Edward the old commander demanded. “If it came to war?”
Ned looked at him, unable to lie. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve not been to Mount Hope—Montaup, the sacred home of the Pokanoket—and I’ve never seen one of their gatherings. But I know they’re having big gatherings and that other tribes are attending.”
“To make alliances? To go to war?” John Russell asked.
“They say it is to dance. John Sassamon came just to warn me, he told me to warn you. He showed me a village that’s arming and building defenses, a Norwottuck village, just over the river, as close as Hatfield, and they are arming and building a palisade that would withstand cannon. I swear they’re stockpiling weapons, perhaps even muskets. He showed me, so that I should tell you what I’ve seen with my own eyes. He asked that you pass it on to the men you know on the Council. I’ve seen him many times this autumn and winter; and he’s clearly traveling for the Massasoit. He’s talking to kinsmen and tribes, it certainly looks like they’re mustering. If the governors don’t meet with him and make a treaty about leaving the Indian lands alone, I’m afraid it will be war.”
The two older men, who had made war on their own people up and down England, and even in Ireland, looked bleak. “A war of the Pokanoket and their allies against us would be deadly,” Edward judged.
“It would undo all our work,” John Russell said. “We’ve told Boston, we’ve told Plymouth before. But we’ll have to warn them again. We’ll have to make them understand. They might survive a war with the Pokanoket in the cities; but we would not!”
“And which side would you take, Ned?” William challenged him. “You and your Indian friend? Aren’t you and he both in the same boat? Warning both sides against the other? You can’t spend your life crossing from one side of the river to the other. You’re going to have to choose.”
DECEMBER 1670, VENICE
Sarah woke after strange haunted dreams of her aunt Livia as a monster of stone, as a sculpted sea serpent, as a white marble widow, as a disinterred goddess, and came downstairs, pale and dark-eyed, to have breakfast in the salon served by Mamma Russo, who was not as charming as she had been the night before. The marble-floored salon was cold, the whole house was chilled stone built on icy water.