The Hearth and Eagle Read Online Free PDF

perhaps,” she suggested timidly, “we can build for ourselves.”
    His face had blackened and he flung his head up like a spurred stallion. “Aye, on your father’s land! Where he’ll o’ersee all I do.” He jumped to his feet and began to pace the Turkey rug. “Look, Phebe. I mean to be my own master. Nor account for what I do to King or Bishop or Commissioner or father—yours or mine. I’ll never make a clothier nor—” he glanced contemptuously toward the window—“nor sheep farmer.”
    Phebe’s family, after the first dismay, had accepted Mark’s plan. For was there not fear and insecurity everywhere, now that the King had rid himself of parliament and given ear to his Papist Queen who might yet force back the terrible days of Bloody Mary?
    “Aye, times are mortal bad,” Phebe’s father agreed, wagging his grizzled head. “Were I younger, Phebe sweeting, I mought come with ’ee.” Yet even as he spoke he cast a complacent look about his comfortable house and through the window to the rolling downs dotted with his sheep. And she knew that come what might her parents would never leave home. They would bend a little here and there under necessity, and conform to any order, secure in the hundreds of years which had rooted them to these acres and this life.
    And I too, she thought, as she had thought many times during the weeks of preparation, though once the decision had been taken she had never troubled Mark with her doubts. Her love for him deepened as they became isolated together by their shared enterprise. She listened anxiously while he spelled out the Planter’s list of requisites suggested by the Massachusetts Bay Company; bellows, scoop, pail, shovels, spades, axes, nails, fish hooks, and lines. All these were Mark’s concern; for their purchase, and the passage money of six pounds each, and the freightage costs, he used most of the hundred pounds left him by his mother. To buy the remaining requisites, warm clothes, household gear, and provisions, Phebe used her dowry, since Mark stubbornly refused any help proffered by his father-in-law.
    In only one thing had she combated her husband’s will. She had insisted upon bringing her wedding andirons. They had been made for her by a master blacksmith of more than local fame. They were tall and sturdy, fit to hold the greatest logs, yet graceful too in the deceptively slender shafts and the crowning black balls.
    Fire-dogs were not on the Planter’s list.
    “But I want them, Mark,” she insisted, near tears. “I want them in our first hearth wherever it may be.”
    He had given in at last, though he had not understood. Only her mother had understood, that the andirons ordered in love for her byher parents to grace a new hearth would always be a link with home, the twin guardians of the precious flame; like man and wife, English-born, transplanted and yet enduring with steady purpose. But indeed those were womanish thoughts, unfitting to a man, and standing now on the
Jewell
deck beside Mark, she shifted her weight and pressed against him, glorying in his strength and bigness, waiting for the quick response of his arm to the pressure of her body.
    But Mark was not thinking of love. He made a sharp movement, swinging on his heel, and stretching his hand above his head. “God blast, the bloody wind is slacking off again!”
    She followed his scowling gaze up to the sails that now were flapping fitfully, where they had been taut-bellied before. She turned and looked again toward the land and saw, jagged and sharp against the sky, the crenelations of Portland Castle where she and her sisters had so often played, gathering moss roses around the ruined walls, then galloping over the strip of shingle on their little moor ponies. Behind the castle and over that rounded ridge of hills—lay home. Mother would be in the stillroom at this hour, sugaring the new cowslips for her famous wine, or maybe helping the dairy maids skim the cream. And painted