The Wolves of Andover: A Novel by Kathleen Kent

Author:Kathleen Kent [Kent, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: FIC014000
Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books
Published: 2010-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

THE FIRST WEEK of June, Daniel returned to his carting, the gelding plodding slowly past the burgeoning fields, shaking his tufted head against the heavy leads to the wagon. Martha stood with Patience at the door as Daniel waved cheerfully, exuberantly, to his wife and children. She passed her arm supportively around her cousin’s broadening waist, whispering to her all of the choice things Daniel would bring back to them—a bit of lace, a brace of pewter bowls—but five days would pass before Patience stopped sulking and soaking her pillow at night with tears. Martha could often hear her cousin’s indulgent weeping as she lay in bed trying to find sleep, and most nights Will would creep into Martha’s room, poking her with a finger until she relented by making room for him within the hollow of her arms. Daniel had promised to be home by the middle of July to see Patience through her birthing. Martha never spoke to him of her nagging fears about an early and difficult lying-in, thinking that to speak of such things would give substance to unhappy possibilities.

On the sixth day, Martha looked at her cousin sitting mournfully at the table, eyes glazed with tears and frowning into the palm of her hand, and said abruptly, “Right, then. I’ve never seen a woman more in need of a potted cheese.”

Patience furrowed her brows. “What?” she asked, dropping the hand from her chin.

“To market, cousin,” Martha said, smiling, wrapping a cloak around her shoulders. “And I’ll give you a quarter hour to comb your hair and wash your face or you’ll disgrace us all.”

Within the half hour, the cart rattled from the yard, Patience sitting next to John, her face for the first time bright and hopeful, while Martha sat in the back with Will and Joanna. Thomas had come out from the barn to watch them go, his eyes settling on her at the last. She at first averted her eyes, jerking her chin away, but then, pressing her lips together, she met his gaze full-on. She knew he would think her turning away a kind of modesty, a maidenly recoiling from the memory of the night before. She had come upon him in the barn, scraping the hide from the crippled calf he had slaughtered that afternoon; the animal’s malformed legs jutted out at odd angles, wobbling in a kind of ghastly dance with every jerk of the skinning knife against the dangling carcass.

His back and shoulders were bared and she had stood in the shadows watching the cording of the muscles under his skin, damp from sweat and pale as death, as white as lime dust next to the reddish brown of his forearms working to strip away the hide from the twisted flesh of the calf. Sensing her, he turned around, but before he could speak, she had spun away, rushing back to the house, hiding the flush of her neck with her hands. More disquieting than this, though, and

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