London - Edward Rutherfurd [399]
“I fear, Mistress Wheeler, that this document may be a forgery. I will look through my father’s records. If I can find this chest, of course it will be yours. But I must tell you, I have never seen it. Unless,” he added, with a flash of inspiration, “it is at Bocton. But then you must ask the Roundheads for it.”
Jane stared at him; then she remarked very calmly: “You’re lying.”
Outraged, Sir Julius asked her to leave. “No one,” he declared, “has ever said such a thing to me.” But late that night, when all the household was asleep, he went down to the cellar, and found the old chest, and broke it up and burned it in the fireplace, and took the metal remains from the cinders, and buried them before dawn. And hoped, thereafter, to put the business from him.
He could not. A week later, Jane returned.
“Gideon has had Bocton searched,” she told him. “The chest was never there. What have you done with it?” His assurance that he knew nothing more about it drew only an angry snort. “You will hear more,” she promised.
She was as good as her word. She challenged him again and again. She had a lawyer write to him. She demanded to search the house, which he indignantly refused. A year passed. And another. And still she was not satisfied.
1652
Yes, Martha reflected, she had been blessed with a joyous homecoming. How sweet it was to be reunited with Gideon and his family, with dear Mrs Wheeler, and with her husband too, of course. She wished indeed that she had paid heed to Gideon’s urgent letters, and come sooner. But most important of all, it was clear to her now, just as Gideon had told her, that in old England after all – perhaps even more than in Massachusetts – there was a chance to realize her lifelong dream.
Truth to tell, Martha had grown a little disappointed in Massachusetts. She had hardly liked to admit it even to herself while she was there; but as she confided to her friend Mrs Wheeler: “There has been some backsliding in New England.” In Boston and Plymouth, even. And when Mrs Wheeler gently enquired what it was that had tempted some of the colony from the path of righteousness, Martha did not hesitate. “Cod. It’s fish that have taken men from the Lord.”
The catch off the New England coast had been phenomenal, past all the settlers’ wildest dreams. “There are so many fish,” they declared, “you can almost walk on the waters.” Every year the Massachusetts fishermen were sending between a third and half a million barrels of fish across the ocean to England. “God has granted them such abundance they do not think they need Him,” Martha complained. “They are laying up treasure on earth instead of in heaven.” Indeed, the growing riches of the men by the coast, and the promise of wealth for the farmers and for trappers who were staking out great land claims in the interior, had so insidiously worked upon men’s hearts that there was hardly a church in the colony that had not been affected. “They speak of God, but they think of money,” Martha admitted sadly. And some of the fishermen did not even trouble to do that; Martha could never forget, or quite forgive, the terrible occasion when the eldest Dogget son, now a sea captain of some wealth, had turned on her and shouted: “Damn it, woman, I came here to fish, not to pray.”
It was not Governor Winthrop’s fault, it was not the fault of the good men and women of the congregations, but subtly the character of the Massachusetts colony was taking on the duality it was never to lose: Protestantism and money would walk together henceforth, hand in hand, in New England’s promised land.
It was therefore