The Wolves of Andover

The Wolves of Andover

The young woman stepped from the wagon and turned to
face the driver still holding the slackened reins. From Daniel’s vantage point, looking through the shuttered windows of the common room, he could not read the woman’s face but could see the rigid set of her back. The man in the wagon was small and as
hard-set as a dried persimmon. The brim of his felt hat was slung so low and angled over his eyes that its very putting on must have been an act of vengeance. Daniel had met his wife’s uncle only once at market, and the number of words exchanged between them could not have filled a walnut. But Daniel remembered well
the look of triumph on Andrew Allen’s face when the old man bested him at a calf auction. That he was now giving his daughter the last of his cautious, brusque advice was clear from the way he punctuated his words with a string of country sayings: “Hech, now listen to me,” and “Hark you well to me now.” The sorts of words that the old Scotsmen still used were like pepperweed in a mutton stew.

Daniel moved through the common room and stood at the
open door. He saluted the old man, saying, “Will you come in for a breakfast?”

To his relief Goodman Allen shook his head and with a few muttered words of good-bye pulled his wagon around, taking the road back towards Andover. The woman stood for a long while watching her father ride away, the hem of her dress slowly soaking up the wet, ice-filled mud of the yard. Daniel studied the unbending arch of her neck, thinking it was a sad thing that she be past twenty and not yet married, still sent out by her parents into service, her few things put into some bit of cotton sacking.

Taking the full measure of her forlorn appearance, Daniel shook his head in sympathy. Andrew Allen was prosperous enough; he could have at the very least provided his daughter with her own bed. But Daniel knew from his wife, Patience, that for all the old man’s parsimonious airs, he swore, drank hard ale, and
gambled at dice whenever, and wherever, the opportunity arose, and was tighter than a tick paying for anything he couldn’t raise from the ground or fashion himself from driftwood.

It would be a blessing for his wife to have another woman at the settlement. He could hear Patience even now retching and puking into a bucket by the bed, as sick in her fifth month with their third child as any girl would be with her first. He was eager to see his wife’s cousin settled into the house as quickly as possible. The roads were freeing themselves of ice, and though they be a rutted misery, Daniel had a certainty that if he didn’t attend to his carting soon, others would beat him to Boston, getting the
best of the off-loaded goods from England, Holland, and Spain.

He called her gently by name, “Martha,” telling her to come in and settle herself by the fire.

Excerpted from the book The Wolves of Andover by Kathleen Kent. Copyright © 2010 by Kathleen Kent. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY. All rights reserved.