Crow Hollow by Michael Wallace Page B

muttered in his native tongue.
    During the night, when he’d been struggling with his fever (or poison, as James claimed), he’d spoken in his sleep. It was nothing—something about digging for clams—but she’d been shocked by how well she’d understood. Not just Nipmuk, but the same dialect spoken by the tribe that had taken Prudence hostage.
    “Peace, friend,” Prudence told him in Nipmuk.
    “Mother. Are you there?”
    “What is he saying?” James asked.
    “He is asking for his mother.”
    Peter shuddered and fell still. A final sigh leaked through his lips, and his body went limp. James set Peter’s head down in the snow, then buried his face in his hands. She reached out a hand of comfort, but James seemed to regain mastery of his emotions before she could touch him, and he lifted his face from his hands.
    “I don’t even know if his mother is still alive,” he said. “I know nothing of his family, of his tribe.”
    “You never spoke of such things?”
    “He told me very little,” James said. “I know little of his life before he came to England.”
    James got up to inspect their attackers, and she followed. She felt weak, the blood drained from her face, but refused to hide in the carriage while he sorted things out.
    Of the four injured enemies, the first—the man with the face half-destroyed from James’s initial shot—was also near death and wouldn’t last more than another minute or two. The other three were in some stage of dying.
    “We should try to get them help,” she said. “These three, at least.”
    “Two of them won’t live out the hour. This wretch,” James said, pointing to the man Prudence had shot in the back, who was groaning piteously, “might survive, but you hit him right on the spine. If he does, he’ll never walk again.”
    “We have to try.”
    “And this is the man who murdered Peter Church,” he said. “I should put a ball in his head and count the world rid of another filthy vermin.”
    “And a court of law will see him hanged.” She was surprised at the edge in her own voice. “Meanwhile, we’ll do our Christian duty.”
    “All right. I suppose it would be better if he survived, anyway. Then I can question him.”
    James collected the horses of the fallen and roped them to the team before tying the bodies of the injured men onto the animals’ backs. One man groaned, the other cried out in pain. The final man James wrapped in Peter’s blankets and carried back to the coach. He put Peter’s body in next to him.
    James looked at Prudence and frowned. “I need to drive the team. I can’t be back here with you.”
    “I want to sit up front, not back there.”
    “It’s bitter cold.”
    “Better than sitting alone with a murderer.” And a dead man , she thought, though this uncharitable thought filled her with shame. Poor Peter. To travel all the way across the ocean only to die almost the moment he reached his native soil.
    While James checked the team of horses, Prudence climbed to the perch and drew her cloak against the cold. One of the men tied to the horses groaned. She pulled her hood closer around her face so she couldn’t see him out of the corner of her eye.
    Panic still swam below the surface like a monster of the deep, all teeth and grasping tentacles. Memories.
    For a moment she was not here, she was there .
    A woman screams while men cut her throat. An old man holds his granddaughter in his arms and runs. A gunshot puts him down, then men bash the infant with the butts of their muskets.
    Prudence is running with her daughter in her arms. They see her, they are coming.
    “Hold still, you,” James said.
    The words jolted Prudence from the horror of her memories. She drew back her hood to look. James stood over a groaning man tied to a horse. He pulled back the man’s head.
    “Leave him be!” she cried. “He’s dying already.”
    James came up holding an empty vial, which he tucked back into a pocket in his cloak. The man was no