“My name,” she told him. “Plant-time Star.”

“My name Ned,” he replied.

Plant-time Star showed him how to heap the earth into hillocks, how to plant the seeds with a fish to feed them, how the three seeds—squash, beans, and maize—should grow together to feed the earth and should be eaten together to feed the body. “The three sisters,” she said, as if there was something holy about planting. “Given to us: the People.”

He had thought she would come back to see how the crops had grown but he had not seen her after an argument about fish traps set in the river. Someone going downriver to the sawmill at Northampton, steering a raft of felled logs, had grounded the boat on half a dozen of the exquisitely made basket traps. The women had complained to the elders at Hadley who had said, reasonably enough, that it was no one from the town, and that they must go for compensation to the sawmill, or to the logger himself—whoever he was. Now the women crossed the river in their own dugouts, as if they did not trust the raft ferry nor the broad green common that ran through the center of the town, where every house stared at them as they went by.

Ned missed their cheerful chatter, and the little goods they paid him as fees. He even spoke up for them at the town meeting, but no one could agree how long a native fish trap took to make, and what one of the fish traps would be worth. No Englishman had the knack of making them so no one could say, and many declared that native time was worthless anyway, and the traps were made from twigs that were worthless too.

Without the native women traders to walk with him, Ned went alone, calling at one house and then another down the street, exchanging his goods for a small tub of butter at one house, a whip of an apple tree at another, and setting some new-laid eggs against his slate at the third. He sold to households whose gardens were not as productive as his, and to those who would not spend time in the woods looking for food. The debts he paid with his produce were part of the constant exchange of the town. When Ned had first arrived he had hired other settlers to help him build his house, roof it, and set up his stock-proof fence.

“I don’t dare go into the forest,” one woman said, standing on her doorstep and looking at his basket of mushrooms. “I’d be afraid of getting lost.”

“No fish today, Mr. Ferryman?” a woman called over the stock fence, irritated at the shortage.

“Not today,” he said. “Probably next week.” He did not tell her that he had set his fish traps as usual but someone had pulled up the stakes that held them to the riverbed and released all the fish but two or three, as if to leave enough for Ned to eat, but not enough for him to sell.

“You won’t get my business if you can’t be relied on,” she said sharply.

“Why? Who else are you going to buy from?”

She looked around at the empty lane. The women who usually brought fish and food to trade walked past in silence, their creels dangling empty from their hands, their faces closed and unfriendly.

“I don’t want to buy from them,” she said, walking away, her expression sour.

“By the looks of it, they don’t want to sell to you,” Ned said under his voice.

Ned went on to the blacksmiths’, where Samuel and Philip Smith worked at the forge in the double lot behind their clapboard houses. Ned swapped some leeks for a bag of new nails to fix the shingles on his house walls against the coming winter.

“Heard you refused to come into town,” Samuel Smith said with a slow smile at Ned. “Thought it was odd.”

“I didn’t refuse!” Ned exclaimed. “I’ll come when I’m needed. But I can’t leave the ferry without warning. I’ve got to get someone to man it. Like now, Joel’s lad is minding it for me. I’ll come when I’ve something to sell or to buy, or when I can serve my neighbors or the Lord. Not because some selectman, in his place five minutes, comes and tells me I’m to take orders from him.”

“All you old roundheads will only take orders from your own,” Philip joked, and saw Ned’s slow smile.

“Thing is,” Sam interjected, “you don’t know, living that far out and ferrying the savages as you do, friendly like, that there’s rumors that the French are sending messages to them, stirring up trouble against us. Telling them we can’t be trusted.”

Ned gave him a rueful look. “Oh, can we be trusted?” he asked. “For I heard that the Massasoit—their chief—swore that he would sell no more of his people’s land, and we swore he should keep his own; and yet we go on buying. I heard it was the Plymouth governor’s own son: Josiah Winslow himself! Taking up mortgages on Indian lands and making them sell when they’re caught in debt.”

“But why not? Mr. Pynchon is buying land at Woronoco and Norwottuck. These lands are empty!” Philip protested. “The plague killed them before we arrived. It’s God’s own will that we take the land.”

“Was London empty, after the great plague killed a family in every street?” Ned demanded.

The man hesitated, leaning on the bellows so the forge glowed red with the hiss of air: “What d’you mean?”

“Would it have been right for French families to move into the London houses that had a big red cross on the door, and the owners dead inside?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why call the lands empty, when you can see they were farmed, and worked for years? When you use their well-worn paths and trails through the forest and can see their fields well worked and the forest they’ve cleared of undergrowth for hunting? Just because they were sick, don’t mean they don’t own their fields as much as ever.”

The two men looked at Ned, as if they were disappointed in him. The town of Hadley clung together with a common purpose, survived by a common will. Dissent in anything—from religious tradition to politics—was not welcome. “Nay, Ned, don’t talk so daft,” the older man counseled him. “You’ll make no friends here talking like that. We’ve all got to stick together. Don’t you want more land to master?”

“No,” Ned said bluntly. “I had enough of masters in the old country, I don’t want to breed more here. And I don’t want to be one myself. I came because I thought we would all be equal, simple men together starting a new life among other simple men without masters. All I want is enough of a garden to farm and feed myself.”

Philip Smith laughed and clapped Ned on the shoulder. “You’re a rarity, Ned Ferryman!” he told him, despising his simplicity. “The last of the Levelers.”

JUNE 1670, LONDON

James was waiting at the far end of the quay beside a stack of barrels, hidden from the blank windows of the house where every blind was drawn down, except the ones in the turret—Alinor’s eyrie. The front door opened and the Italian widow stepped out, opened a black silk parasol against the glare, and tripped lightly in her little silk shoes over the cobbles towards him.

“We will walk towards the City,” was the first thing she said.

“Not to the fields?”

“No.”

He offered his arm and she took it, resting her hand on the crook of his elbow. “Is this very shocking?” she asked him, peeping upwards. “Should we have a chaperone?”