Saturnalia Page 5

  A window to his right had suddenly brightened. William played on a few moments, then softened his flute, then silenced it altogether. The light came from a dilapidated shed. Its single window was missing most of its panes of glass, through which opening he clearly made out the outline of a face.

  He approached, braced to flee should he need to. The flickering within revealed to him that the figure’s forehead was high. Then that the ears and chin were long. Then that the face belonged to a male, who commenced to hum the rest of the tune that William had broken off. In astonishment, the apprentice listened. He came closer. And found himself staring, amazed, at his own father’s uncle.

  He felt unsteady, like the light within. “Michamauk,” he called out, too loudly he realized.

  The man’s eyes grew huge, glowing like a cat’s. “Who are you?” he asked in Narraganset.

  The words were both foreign and familiar to William.

  For an instant, his spinning brain was unable to remember his former name.

  “Weetasket!” he burst out at last.

  His great-uncle’s eyes narrowed, as if in disbelief, then expanded again. Then he turned and drew away from the window. William made out a sound nearby. Circling the building, he caught sight of a hand reaching out through a gap between boards, and inserting a key into the heavy padlock that secured the shed’s door. The lock sprang open and was lifted from the latch by the disembodied hand. Stepping forward, the apprentice slowly opened the squealing door— and gawked. The hand wasn’t Michamauk’s but a girl’s.

  “Who is this?” he asked in English, then put the words into Narraganset, surprised that his memory supplied them so quickly.

  “Ninnomi,” his great-uncle replied. He adjusted the guttering wick in his lamp and held it beside her. “Your cousin.”

  In the suddenly stronger light, William studied the old man, tall but unstooped, white-haired, wrinkled, missing several more teeth than he remembered. Then he turned to the young girl beside him and picked her up in his arms. She’d been a wailing infant the last time he’d seen her. Grasping for words, he told her who he was. Then he broke off suddenly and faced his great-uncle.

  “Where is Cancasset?”

  The man’s long, lined face stiffened. “That is not a name to be spoken, Weetasket.”

  William lowered Ninnomi to the floor, puzzling over the reply. He comprehended the words but not their meaning. Then he understood. It was forbidden to utter the names of the dead.

  “Your brother was sent to Barbados, as a slave.” Michamauk hung the lamp near the window. “For stealing an Englishman’s gun.”

  William stood stiffly, as if he were one of the company of the dead himself. Dazed, he thought back to the days when he and Gancasset had hidden from the English in the woods, and recalled his brother’s pride at snatching the musket from a sleeping soldier.

  “Soon after he landed he tried to escape from the sugar fields, from the men with the whips. He was caught, and shot dead. I learned of this during the past year’s fruit moon.”

  William stood, unspeaking, while the impossible fact unfolded in his mind. Each time he’d

  gazed into a looking glass and believed he was viewing Cancasset, he’d been wrong. He’d deluded himself, willingly, for six years. When the thought had sprung up that Cancasset might be dead, he’d dismissed it, picturing him in Plymouth, or Canada, or somewhere in the lands west of the English. Each time he’d wondered about Cancasset, he’d imagined Cancasset wondering about him. And each time he’d been wrong. The looking glass had held no one but himself.

  “He lives with our forefathers,” said Micha-mauk. Slowly, he bent his long legs and sat down on some straw, Ninnomi beside him. “In the house of Cautantowwit, the creator. To the southwest, where the air is always mild.”

  William sat upon the dirt floor, only half listening to the old man’s account of his snatching up tiny Ninnomi and escaping the village, set afire by the English, of their six years serving a brutish Plymouth gunsmith, his sudden death, and their purchase by Mr. Rudd.

  The apprentice emerged from his trance with a start. “Mr. Rudd? The maker of eyeglasses?” He thought of their meeting that morning and prayed that the town held another man by that name.

  His great-uncle nodded and William jumped up. Glancing outside, it dawned on him that he had indeed been walking down Middle Street and that Mr. Rudd’s shop must be next door. He surveyed the room, bare except for two scatterings of straw to sleep upon, the room that so many apprentices had fled. “The man is a tyrant.” He’d had to search for the word, knew he was making mistakes in his former language, but plunged ahead. “Has he beaten you?”

  “He has a whip,” said Michamauk. “With three cords. We have both felt it once.”

  “And the awl,” spoke Ninnomi.

  “The awl?” The apprentice cocked his head, then recalled that Mr. Rudd had brandished one in the shop that morning.

  “It hangs by a cord from his neck,” said Michamauk. “He uses it to scratch the proper age of wearer into the glass of each pair of spectacles.”

  “And to jab us when he believes we’re idle.” The girl displayed two wounds on her arm.

  William seethed. “What work has he given you?”

  “Ninnomi keeps his house. I stand and grind glass.”

  “Does he feed you?”

  “One hard roll at noontime.” Michamauk grunted. “A wormy apple perhaps. The dogs in the street find more to eat.”

  William searched his pockets and offered a potato skin and two scraps of cheese rind, intended for those same street dogs.

  “I can bring you more,” he said. “Much more.” He saw how quickly they snapped up the food, how thoroughly they licked their fingers, and he cursed the eyeglass maker.

  “How did you get the rogue’s key?” he asked.

  “Ninnomi found it under the straw. Carved from wood and left for us. Perhaps by the man’s last apprentice.”

  “And why don’t you leave in the night?” asked William.

  Michamauk filled a stone pipe with tobacco. “How I would like to do just that. To find myself back among the budding trees during this year’s green moon.” He lit his pipe from the lamp and inhaled deeply, the scent of tobacco mixing with lamp’s odor of burning deer fat. “But Mr. Rudd says that we’ll never escape him. That he has eyeglasses that allow a man to see for fifty miles.”

  William had heard of Tut’s telescope. “The man lies,” he stated nevertheless. “He wishes to hold you with fear.” Then he noticed that the lamp was hanging near the window. “Will he not see us?” He looked fearful himself.

  Michamauk shook his, head. “He sleeps above the shop, in the rear. And it’s he himself who gave us the lamp, to study the Bible by. We’ve put it to use the past two nights, not for reading, but so that I could begin to teach Ninnomi to weave. As best as I’m able to teach such things.”

  William spied a small pile of weed stems on the ground and an unfinished basket beside them, then looked up at his great-uncle. Though dressed in the Englishmen’s breeches and shirt

  and shoes, the man within seemed unchanged. He still spoke Narraganset, still reckoned time by the Narraganset moons, still sucked on a stone pipe in the evening. With no mother to instruct Ninnomi, he was teaching her basket-weaving— women’s work—so that she should make a good Narraganset wife. The girl got up to watch the snow through the window, and suddenly the apprentice realized that Michamauk had been studying him as well.

  “I see, Weetasket, that you wear false hair on your head,” he said. “Like the other coatmen.”

  It had been many years since he’d heard the Narragansets’ word for the English settlers. William’s eyes fell. “Yes, Great-uncle.”

  “And that your tongue stumbles in speaking your own language.”

  William felt shamed. “Yes, Great-uncle. Six yea
rs now I’ve lived among the English.”

  “As has Ninnomi,” Michamauk added curtly. “She has learned the language of the coatmen without forgetting a word of her own.”

  William paused to show respect. “She’s been fortunate to have you to speak with.”

  Michamauk sucked on his pipe, ruminating. “I see too that your clothes are very fine. Your master must be a man of importance.”

  “Yes!” spoke up William. “Mr. Currie, the printer.” Grateful for a chance to defend himself, he launched into a description of the Currie family, the life of the printer’s shop, the praise he’d received for his typesetting and his studies. Lest Michamauk think he’d abandoned his own kind, he produced the flute whose music they’d heard, played his three tunes, and recounted his countless night wanderings in search of Cancasset.

  His great-uncle puffed on his pipe while he spoke. Ninnomi, stationed in front of the window, turned her head from the falling snow to listen to her cousin’s account. While, outside in the street, a passerby halted abruptly and stood transfixed, staring at the window as if he too were enthralled by William’s tale.

  Spellbound, Mr. Speke peered before him. He couldn’t make out the apprentice’s words, nor could he glimpse him within. What he saw was an illuminated window, a tiny land of light, the sole sign of life, it seemed, in all of Boston. And within that window he saw a head turned in profile, the head of a girl, clearly visible through the missing panes. A girl whose features struck him at once as Indian, perhaps Narraganset.

  The wood-carver quietly moved two paces closer through the snow. Utterly rapt, he studied her face. Her forehead was high, and most handsome, he thought. Her chin was short. Her hair was braided. She looked seven or eight years old, about the same age as the girl whose shriek haunted him. And though he stood as stiffly as if turned to granite, he felt, to the contrary, brought to life, felt raised from the grave that had been his spirit’s home for the past several months. In the midst of winter, his own and the world’s, he thought that he scented spring.

  Absolutely still, oblivious of the snow, he gazed upon her face for a quarter hour. Then she moved out of view. The carver kept his place. He didn’t wish to walk directly up to the window and possibly frighten her. And he’d seen all that he needed to see. She was a providence, sent to fill his need. Trembling, though not with the cold, he backed away from the shed.

  He’d return, he vowed. The first thing in the morning! He would place his proposition to her master!

  Glowing inside, as if the girl had kindled a fire within him, Mr. Speke struck out down Middle Street, light-footed, light-headed, his mind racing. And thus unlikely to have noticed, across the street and tucked into an alleyway, the all-but-invisible outline of a man. A young man watching Mr. Rudd’s shop and shed, his mind likewise busy, and his mouth as well, occupied with humming a lively tune.

  FIVE

  SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT the snow stopped falling, at an hour known only to the watchmen. At nine the next morning a coach-and-four snorted and jangled through the whitened town, scattering pigs and persons alike, and halted abruptly before Mr. Currie’s, an event by contrast, known to nearly all of upper King Street.

  Giles, Madam Phipp’s footman, hopped from the back of the coach and opened her door. A towering woman, dressed in mourning black from hood to shawl to shoes, she missed the coach’s bottom step, plunged her left foot into the snow, and proceeded to curse her footman, then the coach’s maker, then Mr. Rudd, who’d sold her on the previous day the brass-rimmed glasses affixed to her face, aids to sight that rendered the world a good deal blurrier than she recalled it.

  “This way, Madam.” Giles guided her. Short, portly, ablaze in red livery, the footman opened the printer’s door for her. Though she preferred to make her own purchases, he decided to follow his mistress inside, thinking that she might need his assistance, and was informed to the contrary by means of a sharp crack on his knuckles from her brass-ribbed fan, an article she carried in all seasons for that purpose.

  Upon hearing the shop’s bell, William entered and found the woman squinting about at the walls as if she weren’t sure where she was.

  “I shall be giving a dinner a few days hence,” Madam Phipp mumbled hazily. She turned toward the boy, then wondered whether she wasn’t facing a stepladder instead. “To mark the end of my mourning time.”

  “I see,” the apprentice replied.

  Wishing she could make the same claim, the woman turned to her right toward his voice. “On the twenty-second, to be exact.”

  “Yes, Madam.” William noted that the Curries’ Saturnalia would take place that same day.

  Straining to determine precisely where he was, Madam Phipp suddenly suspected that the apprentice was staring at her, then was struck by the sight of a hen on a shelf. Emptied of patience with her spectacles, she angrily ridded her eyes of them, found she’d been viewing a mug filled with quills, and vowed to wear the lying, vile lenses no more than an hour a day—some other hour than this one.

  “I’ll need ink for invitations!” she declared. “I’ll require paper! And more sealing wax!” As if the fog had suddenly lifted from her mind as well as her eyes, she directed a volley of orders toward William, paid for her purchases, strode out the door, and struck Giles smartly on the ear for not listening for her steps and opening it for her.

  William watched her coach depart, then sold one copy of an apprenticeship contract to a humming young man whose low-brimmed black hat nearly obscured his eyes, sea-green eyes that lit in sudden surprise at the sight of William.

  Returning to the printing room, the apprentice resumed receiving instruction from Mr. Currie on the craft of binding books. Mrs. Currie, behind them, was busy at setting type, Gwenne at trimming lamp wicks, and Amos at singing and inking the press. Having finished his quizzing of the Currie children, Mr. Baggot joined the company.

  He cleared his throat. “Young Timothy, sir, is neglecting his Bible,” he addressed the printer. “The rod of correction is sorely needed.”

  Mr. Currie glanced up, then returned to drawing his needle and thread through the pages he was stitching.

  “While Sarah’s bearing has grown most saucy. I fear she has put on Satan’s jeweled crown.”

  The room’s other occupants continued at their tasks, Amos refusing to give up his song. The tithingman tightened his grip on his staff.

  “Further, my ears receive grave reports. Tales of a pagan celebration in which master and servant exchange their stations and all authority is mocked. A heathenish outrage, depraved and unchristian.”

  “Most Christian, in fact,” answered Mr. Currie. “A brief bringing to earth of the kingdom of Heaven. Where, as you know, the last shall be first.”

  Stung speechless, the tithingman hunted a reply. Then he cast his eyes upon William.

  “I’ve a word to speak on your apprentice as well.” He crossed the room and stood staring at William. “A dutiful scholar. Ever prepared. Possessed of a powerful memory for Scripture.” He paused until all heads had lifted in curiosity at these compliments. “But don’t think that his memory doesn’t hold more. Such as the art of hacking Christians to death while they sleep—as my grandsons were slain!”

  Before William’s defenders could speak, Mr. Baggot strode briskly out of the room. He slammed the front door and turned up King Street, bringing his boot heels down on the snow as if on the throat of an enemy. He would snare the boy, just as he’d vowed. Tomorrow he’d pay an Indian wench to approach the apprentice and beg him to slip her one of the printer’s silver tankards, that she might buy food for her sore-stomached young. He smiled at his own cleverness. Fervently, he prayed to God to deliver the tawny into his hand, and promised in return that the knave would be chastised in this world as well as the next. Picturing with pleasure the overeducated Indian being flogged, then pelted in the stocks, then hanged, the tithingman neared Mr. Hogwood�
��s shop, glared at the ungodly wigs in the window, and appended his prayer with the wish that the wigmaker, and all his ilk, might be destroyed as well.

  This request was countered by Mr. Hogwood’s own, that the Lord might empty the vials of his wrath on the wig-hating tithingman passing his window. Confident that the Almighty stood with him on the wig-wearing controversy, and most likely sported one Himself, Mr. Hogwood peered hopefully through the glass, waiting for his petition to be answered.

  “Uncle! The cat’s left another mouse head!”

  Mr. Hogwood whirled toward his nephew, Dan, proudly displaying the trophy in his hand. “And don’t you possess a head of your own? Away with it! Now! Ere a customer comes!”

  The wigmaker turned back to the window and found he could no longer see Mr. Baggot. Had he walked out of view or been felled by the Lord? Cursing Dan, he stepped over to the hearth and stared at the flames, pondering his troubles. His exasperating nephew had no more sense than a head of cabbage. Mr. Weems, the judge, his most prominent patron, had yesterday morning found fault with his wigs and informed Mr. Hogwood that he would have them dressed elsewhere. That afternoon he’d set eyes on a pamphlet claiming the Indian attacks six years back were God’s punishment for putting on wigs. And then there was Malcolm, his manservant. One of the kegs of beer he was brewing had burst in the cellar that morning, making a mess he’d refused to clean up, insisting that the task was beneath him. Next, he’d declined to clear the snow from before the shop, declaring that his domain did not reach beyond the front door. Finally, and most worrisome, the scamp had chanced to mention that Madam Phipp was soon to come out of mourning—and that the suitors would then be thick as flies.

  How did his manservant come by this news? God alone knew all, yet Malcolm seemed to be apprised of scarcely less. The wigmaker turned and surveyed his shop. Apprentices and journeymen were busy snipping, combing, curling. Mr. Hogwood’s vexed mind, however, was fixed not upon hair, but the heart.

  “Malcolm!” he shouted with sudden resolution. Knowing that his servant never appeared until summoned no less than four times, he put the interval to use by taking out quill, ink, and paper, called him several more times while writing, fetched a tiny ivory box, beckoned him again, at greater volume, took up one of Madam Phipp’s servant’s wigs, and finally shrieked his name one more time, unaware that Malcolm was now at his side.