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Betty looked at him blankly, apprehension gathering in her startled blue eyes. “You worry me when you speak like that, John. I simply don’t know what you mean, except that your poor father would have been much grieved. As for Governor Haynes - I shudder to guess what he thinks of you.”

“I know very well what he thinks of me,” said John dryly, having received several secret and outraged missives, “but ‘twill blow over now. All the same, I confess I’m restless, the climate of the Bay under Endecott, and of Connecticut under Haynes, I find both harsh and stifling. I’m strongly urged by Stuyvesant and Baxter to join with them... and I wonder -”

Betty rose abruptly, and her well-bred voice had lost control as she cried, “John! You are mad! I never gainsay your moves and sojourns. I have gone with you to Ipswich, to Salem, and Ten Hills! I uttered no complaint when we moved to Fishers Island and then to here. But I will not tolerate your going to the Dutch, not for any reason you could give. And in my turn I wonder -”

She stopped and laced her large white hands tightly together. “Is it possible that the strength of your attachment to your
‘sister’
Elizabeth is more binding than I suspected, or than you are willing to admit?”

Jack’s mouth tightened as he looked up at his indignant wife. Aye, he thought, it is possible, and also very undesirable. How useless and cumbersome were trailing emotional attachments, once the main trunk had been cleanly cut. This past year he had certainly given too much thought to Bess, and Betty, though mostly unaware of this, had real basis for her anger. More than anger, he saw now, for proudly as she was trying to conceal it, there was hurt in the quivering of her lips and the moisture in her eyes.

“Then stop wondering, my dear,” he said, rising and kissing her on the forehead. “You’re an excellent wife to me, and I wish you to be content. We’ll not refer to this again and I’ll make my peace with Haynes.”

Betty’s face softened and her fair skin flushed. “John -” she whispered and leaned near as though to kiss him too, but she saw Kaboonder shuffling through the courtyard towards the stable, and she drew back.

“Are the Plymouth commissioners to arrive tonight?” she asked, smiling and in her usual calm voice. “Do you wish to do them special honour, and if so, I had better direct the maids to bake your favourite blueberry pie?”

“That’ll be splendid,” said her husband. “You make me very comfortable, Betty.”

He went back into his study, laid Elizabeth’s letter in a chest with other family papers, locked the chest, and walked out to the creek to see how the building of the gristmill was progressing. He ignored a sense of blankness and loss, and gradually as the days went by it receded, so that he could put his whole heart into family and business matters again.

In Greenwich, Elizabeth thought herself settled at last. Their house welcomed them, it was a joy to be surrounded with their own furnishings. The great silver salt, and ladle, the pewter dishes, all twinkled once more on the dresser. The Turkey carpet glowed upon the newly polished parlour floor. They replaced items which had been left behind at Stamford and at Pequot. Will rounded up the livestock, which neighbours had been tending. Several had died but he started again. He mended the outhouses and fences, and in the spring ploughed the neglected fields, and planted crops. Anneke and the other Greenwich folk had fervently greeted the Hallets. No awkward questions were raised, only Anneke knew the exact date of the marriage, the others did not care to know. The Hallet reinstatement at New Amsterdam confirmed their land titles, and that was enough.

One day shortly after Elizabeth’s return she set out for Stamford to see Joan, whom Anneke told her had been delivered of a daughter named Mary. Elizabeth, anxious to see her grandchild, and though still detesting Thomas, never dreaming that he might still be dangerous, asked Will to saddle the horse, and she set out along the shore trail towards Stamford.

She had not reached the boundary creek near Will’s old cabin when she heard him shouting for her. He came running through the trees, Richard Crab stumbling after him.

“Halt, Bess!” Will called. “You mustn’t cross the frontier! Fool that I was not to think of it!”

Astonished, she reined the horse in, and waited until the men came up to her. “I mayn’t see Joan?” she asked half-laughing. “Why, that’s ridiculous now.”

“Nay - Mrs. Hallet,” said Richard Crab, his weatherbeaten face all twisted with concern. “They’d grab ye fast’s a cat can wink his eye if ye go into Stamford. Haul ye to New Haven, very like.”

“They couldn’t!” she cried. “That’s all finished.”

“Not in New England, Bess,” said Will. “There you’re not divorced, nor are we married. Crab tells me Thomas hasn’t given up at all, still claims your property.”

“The whole of Stamford thirsts for Greenwich land,” said Crab. “The bastards. That’s what we wrote to Governor Stuyvesant - Husted, Sherwood, John Coe, and me. We’re clear for the nonce, but I sometimes fear they’ll be too strong for us yet.”

Elizabeth angrily turned the horse around and as it walked back home, her resentment against Thomas Lyon revived with added strength and now included Joan.

The awed joy and gratitude of Elizabeth’s marriage day had inevitably faded, as indeed had the corroding memories of shame and persecution which preceded it. Both the anguish and the ecstasy now seemed to her hysterically exaggerated and even embarrassing. Her one desire was to wipe out all the past and to live in secure wedded love with Will. That there should be any continuing frustrations or thwarting infuriated her.

She sent her daughter a curt message by Angell Husted, and one day the girl came to see her with the baby. It was a miserable meeting. Joan looked wan and peevish. She had a sore on her breast which Elizabeth silently poulticed for her, but there was no warmth between them. The baby resembled Thomas, and Elizabeth scarce looked at it, Joan whined a good deal, complaining of poverty and a dismal lot. Once she picked up the great silver salt and said, “This’ll be mine when you die, won’t it, Mother? Since you got it from my great-grandfather, Adam Winthrop. My Feake sisters and brothers have no right to it.”

“I see that you’ve acquired your husband’s greed,” said Elizabeth. “And I regret to tell you that I’ll never give you anything that he may enjoy. You had your jointure, and not one farthing, not one tin spoon of my property shall Thomas Lyon inherit!”

“You’re hard, Mother,” said the young woman, gulping. “You usen’t to be hard. It isn’t fair. I’m not getting my rights. And I’m not well, you see that I’m not well. Now that you’re rich again, I thought you’d do something for me.”

“What?” said Elizabeth. “And why? - If your husband had had his way I’d have been hanged, ‘tis true you might thus have got my property, which would, I gather, have been so sweet that you could ignore any foulness in the manner that you came by it.”

“Mother!” Joan cried. “Don’t look at me like that! You frighten me! I’ve never meant you harm. Nor has Thomas exactly. You’ve never understood him.”

“Bah!” said Elizabeth. “Go back to him then. You’ve made your bed. So lie in it I”

This was the beginning of a series of vexations. Another one came from Lisbet. Pequot and the Winthrop mansion had provided the girl with a life she much preferred to Greenwich. She yearned for it and was discontented. Having met many more sophisticated lads, she no longer thought Danny Patrick attractive, and there was no one else in Greenwich of her age.

Elizabeth’s sons Johnny and Robin, were not discontented, they were always pleased to be near Will, but they were growing into noisy, dirty, quarrelsome boyhood, impatient of their mother, scornful or their sisters - a natural state, but Elizabeth found it trying. Even Hannah was not as sunny-tempered as she had been. She took to going off by herself, and reading Will’s books. She learned many of George Herbert’s poems by heart, and thought about them. She read the Bible too, steadfastly, from cover to cover, propping it up against the wall as did she her tasks, poring over it at night by candlelight.

That this worried Elizabeth, Will found amusing, and one night in bed when she spoke of it, he said, “Good Lord, hinnie, you pick strange things to fret about, most mothers’d be delighted at a daughter’s piety.”

“I mistrust piety,” she said. “And I can’t help remembering how Robert -” She stopped, never wishing the thought of Robert to intrude on them.

To her surprise, Will spoke seriously into the darkness. “Hannah has true sane knowledge of the spirit. Leave her alone, Bess. It would be better if we had the enlightenment that child has got.”

“Why, darling -” she said, twisting around, and trying to see his face, “I didn’t know you thought of such things.”

“I think of them,” he said. “I feel a lack.”

This frightened her. Always she tried to believe that there could be no lack in their private life any more.

She put her hands on either side of Will’s face, and kissed him. “We have each other now for aye,” she whispered, “and so
I
feel no lack. It saddens me that you do.”

His arms closed about her, and he held her tight, while her hand found its accustomed place en his shoulder and her long soft hair spread out over his chest. But he did not speak for a time, and she was nearly asleep when she heard him say in the quiet cold tone with which he met difficulties. “Robert is back, Bess. He’s in Watertown.”

She started and raised her head. “What?”

“Robert is back from England,” he repeated in a level voice. “I’ve not wanted to worry you, but now I must. Thomas has been to Watertown, He has somehow inveigled Robert into writing yet another document invalidating all our claims here.”

“My God - ” she cried, sitting up. “It can’t be - how can this - coil start up again?”

“It has, hinnie,” said Will quietly. “And must be dealt with. ‘Twas Angell told me of this. He says all Stamford’s buzzing. They say Robert’s destitute, and very wild against us. That he swears we’ve stolen all his property, and I have stolen his wife.”

“But he was in London, in the Fleet, and quite distracted, I told you what Jack said. Oh, I can’t understand this -” Her voice cracked, she turned her face into the pillow with a short dry sob.

Will stared up at the great tester. “I’m going to Watertown, Bess. Tomorrow. We must find out the truth. From now on we’ll never again hide our heads in the sand, and live with deceit and evasion. And if injustice has been done to Robert, we must rectify it”

“Oh, don’t go -” she cried. “Will, don’t leave me here, wondering and fearing, how do you know you’ll be safe up there? - or what Thomas has done now? God, how I loathe that man! I hope you kill him, if you meet him - nay, I don’t mean that but I hope God strikes him dead, or the Devil, who is certainly his master -  and as for Robert - oh
why
did he come back?”

“Hush, hinnie!” said Will sharply. “You’ve more sense than this. Hatred of Thomas Lyon’ll do no good. Nor yet a wish that Robert should disappear forever. He hasn’t. You must pray as I have that the right course will be shown us. Have faith.”

“Faith in what?” she said, turning away from him on the bed.

“In decency and kindness, then,” he said with a curt laugh. “If you can think of no loftier objects. Nor am I sure that I can.”

Ker passionate tears and turmoil checked themselves. She sighed hard, then she lay back quietly on the pillow. “The old fairy tales -” she said at length in a controlled voice, “I remember those my nurse would tell - ’and so then, Miss Bessie, the prince married the princess wi’ the castle bells a ding-donging fur joy - ’n they lived happy ever arter’ - she believed it and I believed it, yet we’d only to look about us to see differently.”

When Will left next day by horse for Watertown, he carried with him all the cash they had on hand, also the silver ladle and the gold chain Robert had given Elizabeth as bridal gifts.

The journey took a week, and presented no dangers beyond the routine ones of swollen fords, drenching rains, and a temporary lameness of the horse. The long trail was well worn now, and easy to follow.

Will avoided Boston and rode directly to Watertown. He crossed the Charles by the Mill Bridge, and after inquiries, went to the parsonage, as being always a fount of information.

The Reverend George Phillips had long since died, and the Reverend John Sherman had succeeded him. Mr. Sherman was at home, working on a sermon. He received Will cordially, and with no recognition of his name.

“Sit down, sir, sit down,” said Mr. Sherman, who was square, bristle-haired, and bright-eyed, rather like a benevolent wood-chuck. “What can I do for you, you’ve travelled from New Netherland, you say? My, my - a long journey.”

“And a worrisome one,” said Will. “I’ve come to see Mr. Feake, Robert Feake. He’s here, isn’t he?”

The minister’s smile faded. “Oh dear, yes - he’s here, poor creature. ‘Tis very sad. Silly, you know - mad as a March hare, though harmless. Are you a relation?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Will. “I’d like to see him, and also to be sure that he wants for nothing.”

“Excellent,” said the minister, looking relieved. “There’s been another kin of Mr. Feake’s here recently, a boisterous man called Goodman Lyon, had some long-winded tale of rights and property of Feake’s, and a wicked woman - a Winthrop she was once, and lived here too before my time. Left in a hurry ten years ago, the Feakes did. But Simon Stone, our head selectman, he doesn’t want that talked about. Thinks the town did very wrong by the Feakes, that’s why he’s arranged to keep poor Mr. Feake now - since he wants to stay here. At least he seems to from his babblings. But I fear he’ll be a town charge.”

“That he won’t, sir,” said Will. “That’s why I’ve come.”

The minister rose with a kindly smile. “I’ll direct you to Mr. Stone, he knows far more about this matter than I.”

Will made his errand known to Simon Stone, who examined him gravely for some minutes, and being a man quite capable of making up his own mind and a shrewd judge of character, Stone thereupon discounted all that Thomas Lyon had told him. His decision was strengthened when it appeared that Mr. Hallet was determined to see that Feake had immediate support, especially as Lyon had done nothing for Feake except badger him and force him to write letters.