Crane Pond by Richard Francis Read Free Book Online

from heaven!’
    Sewall looks down at him in astonishment. Joseph is absorbed in his farm toys as if he hasn’t spoken at all. ‘Joseph my love, what did you say?’
    Still busy pushing a cow along on the grass, Joseph repeats, ‘News from heaven.’ Since only the back of his bowed head is visible, the voice seems to be coming from nowhere, from heaven itself.
    â€˜What news, Joseph?’
    â€˜The bad people are coming.’
    Captain Wing and Sewall exchange glances. ‘And where are these bad people coming from?’ Sewall asks.
    â€˜Everywhere,’ Joseph replies.
    Captain Wing lays a hand on Sewall’s arm. ‘It’s hardly surprising,’ he says. ‘People talk of nothing else but the French and the Indians, and attacks, and massacres.’ That’s true, of course. Only two weeks previously there was a horrible massacre at Salmon Falls in Maine, with almost a hundred murdered and even small children of Joseph’s age tortured to death. But Sewall and wife Hannah shield the children from news of the war, Joseph most of all.
    He asks Bastian if he has said anything to the child; Bastian shakes his head indignantly. Sewall sends him to fetch Hannah and the household servants. Nobody has put words into the infant’s mouth or ideas into his head. Hannah picks Joseph up and hugs him, wanting to protect her child from that world of dark snowy forests, lonely settlements, French attacks and Indian savagery. She’s pregnant again, and at such times always especially caring of her living children.
    But Sewall is much affected too. He remembers how, in the winter, young Betty retired to her cupboard in despair at reading how the people of God had broken the covenant. Perhaps his children have the gift of prophecy and are foretelling the destruction of the colony. He lies awake for hours that night listening for noises of enemies invading his garden and breaking into his house.
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    A couple of weeks later Sewall accompanies the acting deputy governor, William Stoughton, on a mission to New York. They will attend a congress of the American colonies to coordinate a military response to the French and their Indian allies in the wake of the massacre at Salmon Falls.
    Stoughton is a severe unflinching man with a pale face and black rings under his eyes. He doesn’t wear a wig but grows his own grey hair long down each side of his head. He tends to hold his mouth a little open as if wishing to have it ready at a moment’s notice to rebuke any foolishness you may utter. He’s a bachelor of sixty in a fashion that suggests a wife and children would have been an unnecessary frivolity in a life devoted to duty.
    They clop south in silence for a time, and then Stoughton says in his dry considering voice, ‘A sad business about the pirates, Mr. Sewall.’
    â€˜The pirates?’ Sewall asks, perplexed.
    â€˜I meant to discuss that fiasco with you before, but the opportunity hasn’t arisen.’
    â€˜Ah, the pirates.’ Sewall has buried that memory over the last few months.
    â€˜I believe justice was mocked on that occasion, with those helter-skelter reprieves.’
    Sewall feels himself blushing. He’s glad the two escorts are following at a discreet distance. ‘Our governor signed some of those releases before we had even discussed them.’
    â€˜Governor Bradstreet is a good man, but that’s neither here nor there. Justice isn’t negotiable.’
    These words give him a pang—they recall his own assertion to Mr. Winthrop that justice is blind. ‘Maybe not,’ he says, ‘but people who knew them well spoke in their favour.’
    â€˜Mr. Winthrop, I take it,’ says Stoughton grimly. ‘And Madam, no doubt. Their arguments were telling, I imagine.’
    Sewall tries to remember what their arguments actually were but can’t. Something about the vicissitudes of the sea. ‘They spoke to the