The Wolves of Andover by Kent Kathleen

Author:Kent, Kathleen [Kent, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: FIC014000
Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books
Published: 2010-11-07T22:00:00+00:00

“I was commanded by the Water Bailey,

To see the rivers cleansed both night and daily.

Dead hogs, dogs, cats and well-flayed horses,

Their noisome corpses soiling the water’s courses.”

Both the children and the women squealed in delighted protest.

Patience had been good as her word, giving Martha two of her piglets for trade, and Martha regarded them, their snouts straining wetly through the wicker cage, thinking they would bring enough for a new winter cape and a mirrored candle holder. She had spent most evenings stealing a few moments to write in the red book before bed. It had begun with entries of so much wheat kept in the cellar, so much corn, so many seeds, all matters of the Taylor house. But more and more of her musings had turned to Thomas, recording not only the things he said to her, which were more often like the riddles she had told the children, but how he looked at her, much like a starving man looking at a pasty, as though he would devour it whole. Or, she mused, like a man on campaign, long used to depriving himself, warily wakening to the knowledge of his own hunger.

Within the half hour, they had entered the town green, the meetinghouse of Billerica situated on the northern end, its gray boards neatly patchworked with darker, newer planes of wood. The cemetery, already spilling from the front of the yard, spread like a stone curtain, first to its western edge and then to the back of the meetinghouse. To the eastern side sat the Reverend Hastings’s home, the minister she had turned away from Daniel’s table with her combative words. The house was small but with a wooden fence fortifying a generous house garden. A girl, perhaps seventeen, gracefully tended the garden, and Martha’s mouth twisted with the half-resentful thought that, though she was no doubt aptly servile as the minister’s likely wife, she was also quite young and lovely.

There were a dozen women on the green sitting close together, some with their willow-shoot baskets of early sprouts from their gardens, others with brooms or herbals. Apart from them sat or stood the men, coopers and potters, mostly idle as the harvest of summer grain had not yet begun but talking as noisily as the women. As John pulled the wagon up close, all talking ceased. The clump of villagers seemed to Martha like a hive of stinging insects, each contending for the highest position in the honeycomb, each with a stinger for a tongue. But unlike bees, which could sting only once and then died, these goodmen and goodwives could inflict the poison from their tongues again and again, like wasps. The buzzing ceased only so long as it took to scrutinize the new arrivals, and then the hissing was taken up again, no doubt, Martha thought, to the detriment of every visitor’s moral constitution.

Helping Patience from the wagon, Martha situated her cousin among the townswomen and went directly to the weaver, a stout man with bowl-cut hair.

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