Blood Sisters
An excerpt from an alumna's new book
The following is the first chapter of Blood Sisters: A Novel of Colonial New England by alumna Nancy Coffey Heffernan (Grad class of ’61). Set in the 1680s and ‘90s on the New England frontier, Blood Sisters is the story of two real women, Hannah Duston and her sister Elizabeth Emerson. Against a background of ongoing Indian attacks, witch trials, the struggling frontier and hellfire Puritan preachers, the sisters grew up to be courageous, independent and rebellious. Each in her time faced terrifying situations. In self-defense and for good or ill, they planned and carried out dark deeds to save their own lives.
War and Love
The mist of early spring crept in before sunrise, enveloping the Dustons’ house and the wilderness around it in a cloud as gray as nickel. The smoke that curled through the chimney settled under the mist and wrapped the little house in a blanket of quiet. Inside the cottage, Hannah Duston smiled at the wrinkled face of her newborn daughter Martha. Her heart sang when the tiny baby opened her eyes and stared into her face. “I’ll nurse the baby, Mary, before I dress,” she said to the midwife.
Hannah embraced the peace that followed childbirth. All the world seemed centered in this rough cottage, her children, her husband, and her new baby. Having survived childbirth and now holding Martha to her breast, she felt happier than she could remember.
He was not alone. A hundred yards down the stream that flowed on his left, his brother and two other Pennacook warriors lay concealed in the tall grasses near another cabin. On the outskirts of the village on the south bank of the river lay his cousins and his friends―maybe twenty in all―waiting for a signal to attack. An experienced warrior, Coyote had mastered his weapons and the wily tactics of raiding these outlying settlements. Once more he would shock the pale and cowardly English intruders with war cries. Coyote’s family was thin and hungry. In the house would be corn to tide them through these lean days of early spring. And there would be other things the Pennacooks could use. A musket with shot and powder. Blankets, flints, kettles, tin buckets, knives―treasures the Pennacooks had learned to need. And, of course, captives. They could be valuable, too, though for his part Coyote wanted the man’s musket more than his wife.
“Others will be needing your help more than I do now, Mary. No need for you to come tomorrow.” Hannah said. “I thank you for all your help.” She touched the midwife’s hand and Mary smiled.
Tom and the children had gone out to the field. All but the smallest would help clear debris before Tom burned off last year’s stubble. Hannah sat by the fire nursing baby Martha and whispering to her. Mary was tidying up the breakfast one last time before she went home, a bundle of her extra apron and shawl waiting on a bench beside the door. Handing the sleeping Martha to Mary, Hannah put on her petticoat and chemise, and a wool blouse and skirt.
Outside, just a few yards from this quiet domestic scene, a thin dovelike call wavered through the mist about ten yards from where Coyote lay. It was Samoset’s signal. Silently Coyote leapt to his feet and, clutching his tomahawk, bounded to the house that he had been watching. Hannah had pulled on her stockings, put on one shoe, and picked up the other one when his war whoop split the morning air and raised the hair on her neck. Dropping her shoe, she rushed to the window.
“Oh, my dear Lord,” Mary gasped.
Through the window, Hannah saw Tom riding behind the children and shooing them like a flock of baby chicks toward the house. For a moment she felt relieved. If they got to the house, if Tom had his musket, she could hide the children and he could fire through the window―drive them away. But in the next moment, three warriors rushed out of the woods to intercept Tom and the children. Hannah’s head reeled. If the little band ran toward the house, they would certainly be intercepted, and she would see them all tomahawked. No, no, she thought, fly to the garrison house and safety for the children and for Tom. But the garrison was only a bit closer than the house and she did not know if he could outrace the warriors to it. She watched in desperate fear.
When Tom spied the warriors so close, he hesitated. Then he made a split-second decision. Seeing Coyote just outside the door of the house and other painted warriors rushing toward it, he knew that he and the children could not reach it without getting caught. With a sinking heart he swept up onto his horse the youngest, four-year-old Timothy. Jonathan at five and Abigail at seven were too big for Betty and Mary to carry, so all he could do was shoo them all before him. With one more backward glance at the house, he gave a little sob as he wheeled his horse and turned to the nearby stockade.
Before Hannah could see whether they were safe or not, Coyote reached the window of the house. From inside, Hannah stared, shocked and horrified, into the war-painted face of the Pennacook warrior. With one sweeping gesture she slammed the shutter in his face. But not before Coyote had seen the two women instead of one, and also a baby―a worthless nuisance.
“Quick, Mary,” said Hannah breathlessly. “Take the baby. Hide in the cellar.”
But still holding the baby and following Hannah’s lead, Mary had rushed to slam the rest of the shutters. Too late. The Pennacooks were already bounding into the house. There was nothing and no one to defend the house, the baby, Mary, or herself. Frantically, she picked up the iron poker from the fireplace and swung it wildly at the warrior’s head, but he knocked it aside and it clanged to the floor. He shoved her down on the hearth. It took no more than five minutes for him and a second warrior to grab everything they wanted―sacks of cracked corn and meal from the loft, a side of last fall’s bacon that hung from the rafters, some cooking pots, some quilts and blankets, a bag of gunpowder, even a piece of linen that Hannah had woven. Meanwhile, Mary slipped behind the two warriors and fled out the door with Martha in her arms. Hannah struggled to get to her feet.
Coyote pushed her back down on the hearth and continued searching the house. Hannah thought of nothing but the baby. Had Mary escaped with her? Maybe, she thought, they’d managed to hide in the hayloft. Or under the straw. The baby had just been fed and wouldn’t cry. The warrior jerked Hannah to her feet.
“Wait,” she panted. “My shoe.” She gestured to her bare foot and searched for the shoe she had not had time to put on. The warrior glanced around. Not seeing the shoe that had been pushed aside in the scramble for booty, he shoved Hannah out the door with one bare foot. Hannah stood shocked at what she saw in the dooryard.
There stood Mary, still holding Martha, under guard of a Pennacook warrior. The noise had startled the baby awake, and she cried in distress in her thin, desperate newborn voice. The sound under any circumstances called forth every motherly instinct.
“My baby, give me my baby!” Hannah screamed, tearing herself from the grip of her guard and rushing toward the nurse. But Coyote knew that a baby was nothing but a hindrance on the trail, and he was too quick for her. Before she could get to Mary, he put out a stiff arm and stopped her. He took one step between the two women and tore the baby from the nurse’s arms. The tiny wails of the frantic infant wove through the war whoops of the men and the yells and screams of the terrified women. Holding the wailing infant by her feet and letting the blanket slip away from her tiny body, he swung her in an arc around his head and dashed her soft head against the trunk of an apple tree. When he dropped the body, it landed at Hannah’s feet.
Unbelieving, stifled with horror and grief, Hannah looked at the bloodied head for a scalding eternity of seconds. As if moving through water, she reached down to pick up the tiny crumpled body, thinking she might wrap her baby once more in the blanket, wash the blood from her cracked head, make her whole again. She didn’t even see the guard who shoved her forward so that she stumbled and almost fell on top of Martha. He grabbed her arm and dragged her away from the house. To leave Martha there naked on the ground was the final horror. Hannah almost tore herself from the warrior’s grip.
“No, no. No, give her to me!” She wailed, struggling wildly to get back to the body, clawing at the hand that gripped her arm as though it were a leather strap. Nothing mattered but the baby. She would have pulled her arm from her shoulder to escape him, but he grabbed her around the waist as well. Kick and scream and fight as she would, the warrior resisted her. Then, in the thrashing struggle, she turned her head to the right in time to see another warrior toss a burning torch into the house with much the same gesture used to kill her baby. Hannah wailed.
Smoke rose from the Dustons’ burning house, and soon from nearby houses as well. The Dustons’ neighbors, too, were driven from their homes or rounded up in the fields. More captives joined them under the guard of two of the twenty or so warriors. Hannah stood by Mary as the Pennacooks piled their loot beside the captives―rifles, bedclothes, clothes, cooking pots, bags of dried peas and corn.
Hannah saw smoke from the cabin of the adjoining farm where Mistress Marsh lay in the doorway, half in and half out of the burning cabin. Her skirts were ablaze, but she felt nothing. Her head had been dashed in by a tomahawk. Three of her children, a little boy and two girls, lay on the ground around her. They had rushed to their mother for safety and fallen at her feet. The warrior had their scalps already looped through his belt. At the foot of Long Hill, another neighboring farm, the Corlisses’ son, age eleven, had tried to defend their house with an unwieldy old musket, but had not even managed to lift it to his shoulder before Samoset pushed the weapon aside and knocked the boy down. Hannah heard his scream as the warrior took his scalp.
The sounds of fires raging, people screaming, dogs barking jumbled in her head and mixed with the shouts of the raiders. She coughed from the fire and rubbed her eyes, stinging from smoke that mingled with the last of the morning mist. Black soot rained down on her. The shrieks and groans of the wounded and dying, the wails of the bereft filled the air, and she added her moans to their cries. Coughing and rubbing her eyes again, she turned back to her baby’s body lying still on the ground. As she wailed and reached toward the baby, the Pennacook guarding her struck her on the side of her head. Her ears rang; she staggered and almost fell. Her head was light, and she was no longer able to focus on what was happening.
In less than an hour, twenty Pennacooks had turned half of the village into a smoldering ruin. Hannah stood at the edge of a field of stubble in back of her burning house. Eyes glazed, head drooping, hair hanging long beside her cheeks, she stood hugging herself tightly among the other twenty-eight frightened and dazed settlers who had been spared the tomahawk. Fire had blazed a trail for greed. Loaded with booty―kettles, cloth, shoes, clothes, sacks of grain, sides of smoked meat―the captives could barely stand. When Coyote flung a sack of corn meal onto Hannah’s shoulder, she almost let it fall before grabbing the mouth of the bag and heaving it into place. He gave her a prod in the ribs with the handle of his tomahawk, much as if she were a mule. With grunts and jabs, the Pennacooks drove all their captives from the village into the forest. Given no choice, the English left their families and neighbors still screaming in grief or agony.
The warrior whose hair was tinged with gray had directed the attack. When he thought the band had collected as much booty as they could carry, he called out, “Coyote.” Hannah did not understand, but even in her dazed state the name stuck in her mind like a curse. Coyote was the warrior who had killed Martha. He turned and followed the older man, who said something else. Then Coyote called to the attackers, who gathered near the rising pile of booty.
“Pray God for mercy, Hannah!” Mary exclaimed, falling to her knees.
Hannah looked at her with unseeing eyes. “It’s too late,” she whispered. She struggled along, numb even to the strain of carrying such a burden. Mary was given a lighter but clumsier load of bacon, a bag of dried peas, and an iron skillet. And the other captives were also loaded like mules with booty from their own houses. Hannah didn’t notice who the other captives were or their condition. She was losing contact with what was going on around her.
“They’re going to sell us to the French,” Mary said. “I guess that’s why they didn’t kill us to begin with―unless they just wanted to use us for pack mules.”
Hannah had neither breath nor interest in speculation. Some mechanism in her brain protected her from the full realization of what had happened―Martha’s death and the plight of Tom and the children. For a long time Hannah felt numb even to the weight of the sack of meal and the cold in her naked foot. Only the most primitive urge to live, deeper than any pain, forced her to stay upright, to carry the load, to follow her captors into the wilderness.