“It’s fine now but it’ll soon be too hot to speak,” she predicted. “The summers here are as cruel as the winters. I miss an English summer day!”

“We all do, I think. But I like this warm weather.”

The minister lived in a well-built house; handsome wooden steps led up to a double front door. The housekeeper led Ned around to the back, where the grassy lot stretched away east to the start of the forest. Near the house a black slave chopped a tree into firewood, another stacked it. Mrs. Rose led Ned up the two steps to the kitchen door. They went in together, and Ned put down the baskets on the scrubbed table.

“You can go down,” Mrs. Rose said quietly. “They thought they’d keep out of sight today in the cool, while there are messengers coming and going.”

She nodded him towards the main part of the house. Ned opened the door and stepped into the wooden-floored hall. A long-case clock ticked loudly, as if to proclaim the wealth of the master of the house. Ned glanced into the empty study where the minister wrote his impassioned sermons. No one was there, so he rolled back the rug that covered the trapdoor to the cellar. He tapped on the hatch door, the old familiar rat-tat-tat-tatta-tatta-tat, and opened the hatch. A ladder extended below him into darkness. Ned climbed down into the pitch-black and only when the hatch above him thudded back into place and he heard the shuffle of Mrs. Rose rolling back the rug, was there the sharp click of a flint, a spark, and the flare of a flame.

Ned felt his way to the bottom of the ladder and there, faces illuminated by the bright flame of candlewood, were his former commanders, both men in their sixties, exiles from the English Civil War which had finally turned against them: Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, regicides, men who had signed the death sentence for their own king and were now hiding from a warrant of arrest from his son, the restored king. The three shook hands in silence and went from the foot of the ladder to the end of the storeroom where a window set high in the stone walls admitted a greenish light and fresh air to the cellar.

“No strangers in town? No one asking for us?” Edward asked of Ned, who had served them and guarded them for the five and a half years they had been living in Hadley.

“No one that I saw, no one came in on my ferry,” Ned told him. “But you’re wise to stay down here, there’s another town meeting this afternoon and messengers expected from Boston. They’re warning about the Pokanoket—if they’re planning something? People out of town are fortifying their houses. I had one of the selectmen at my house telling me to come and translate for the town council, and that next I’d be mustered.”

“Of course you’ll serve,” William told him. “There’s not one of them has ever seen warfare. Half of them can’t light a matchlock. The town needs you.”

“There’s not one of ’em I’d trust with a weapon,” Ned said scathingly.

“Aye, but they’re our people,” Edward agreed with his son-in-law. “And they can be trained. Don’t you remember the early days of the New Model Army? You can make a great army from ordinary men if their cause is just and you have time to train them.”

“I was proud to serve then,” Ned said quietly. “But that was my first and last cause. I served a great general to free my people from a tyrant. It was an honor to serve the Lord Protector against the tyrant King Charles. And when we won, and you two sat in judgment on him, I was there! I was in court for every day of his trial and I knew it was justice. I watched him step out of the Banqueting House that morning and put his head on the block. I swore then that I’d finished soldiering. I’d never take arms again. I swore I’d live in peace to the end of my days. I’d never make war on innocent people.”

“Aye, but savages are not innocent people, Ned! These are not comrades like us in the New Model Army. They’re not Christian, half of them are pagans. They don’t think like we do. And mark my words, you’ll have to choose a side sooner or later. Josiah Winslow himself said to me that there will come a time when it’s us against them.”

“His father would never have said that,” Ned pointed out. “Everyone says his father and the Massasoit were true friends.”

“That was then,” Edward said. “When we first arrived there was real friendship, I know. This is now: it’s changed. They’ve changed.”

“The savages won’t spare you if it comes to a fight of English against Indians,” William said. “They’re cruel enemies, Ned.”

Ned nodded, reluctant to argue with men who had been his officers, and served in the highest council in England. “I really think it was us who were cruel,” he volunteered quietly. “At Mystic Fort we fired the village with old people and women and children inside, and shot those that ran out. Even the Indians who served with us, the Narragansett, cried that it was too much! Too much—those were their very words. They couldn’t believe that we would burn children and women alive.”

“That was thirty years ago,” William said. “Ancient history. And worse things happened in Ireland.”

“And anyway, they make war like that now,” Edward said grimly. “They’ve been quick to learn, they burn now, and they scalp too.”

Ned threw up his hands. “Sirs, I’ll not argue with you,” he said. “I came to see that you’re well and pay my respects.”

William patted him on the back. “And we’d be fools to fall out with you,” he said. “I don’t forget that it was you that brought us here, two days’ trail through the woods and up the river never setting a foot wrong. We were glad then that you were friendly with savages and knew their trails. We’d never have got here without them to guide us and you to command them. You’re a good friend, Ned, we don’t forget it.”

“I thank you, sir.”

“But their leader is a king, isn’t he?” Edward could never let an argument go. “The Pokanoket call him King Philip? Never tell me that you’d serve a king rather than your brothers, Ned!”

Ned smiled. “He’s not a king like Charles Stuart: a tyrant. He’s their leader, but they consent to him leading them. They don’t call him a king, that’s the name we gave him. They call him Massasoit. His real name is Po Metacom. They don’t call him Philip. It was us gave him the name Philip, and the title King, out of respect to his father, who truly was our savior the first winter we got here.”

“That old story?” Edward queried.

“They’ll never forget it. The English would all have died that first winter, but the Pokanoket built them shelters and gave them food. When the English robbed native corn stores, the Pokanoket gave them more, freely. That’s part of their religion, to give to someone who has nothing. But you know, we even dug up their graves for the treasures that they had buried with their dead?”

Edward grimaced. “I hadn’t heard that.”

“It doesn’t reflect very well on us, so it’s not often told,” Ned said wryly. “But we were like greedy beasts that first winter, and they were forgiving. We promised them then that we’d only come to trade: us on the coast, wanting no more than trading posts on the coast, and all the land should always be theirs. That’s how people thought it would be. D’you remember, before our war, when King Charles was still on the throne, nobody ever thought we’d live here? Everyone thought the New World would be just for fishing and a few trading posts?”