Looking for love in colonial Massachusetts
Written by Rebekah Benoit
Wednesday, 11 January 2012 14:20
As settlers struggle to carve out a new existence in the untamed frontier of the New World, young women were expected to marry early, and if you reached your mid-20s without being married, you could more or less kiss your chances of wedded bliss goodbye. Such is the fate of Martha Carrier, the sharp-tongued heroine of Kathleen Kent’s novel, The Traitor’s Wife, which serves as a prequel of sorts to her later novel The Heretic’s Daughter. Being a fan of historical fiction, I loved Heretic, which captured all the gritty realities of life in an early American colony while creating a moving portrait of the often tumultuous relationship between mothers and daughters. The Traitor’s Wife, finds Martha Carrier en route to her cousin’s home. The young woman, labeled an old maid and written off by her family, has been shuttled from relative to relative as an unpaid servant in the hopes that she’ll catch the eye of some desperate bachelor and relieve her parents of the unwelcome burden of an unmarried adult daughter. Martha has been tasked with helping her cousin Patience, a beleaguered mother of two married to an often-absent farmer who is preparing for the arrival of her fourth child. As Martha helps set the home to rights, her characteristic stubbornness and sharp tongue set her at odds with her cousin, the hired help and even the neighbours, a dangerous prospect in the colonies. But one person is not put off by Martha’s prickly exterior. The towering, quiet hired man Thomas Carrier seems intrigued by Martha’s spunky personality, and Martha in turn finds herself drawn to Carrier and the mystery that surrounds himself. Against the odds, a fragile affection blossoms between the two in the midst of the travails and dangers of colonial life. Thomas Carrier is a man of many secrets. Rumours abound that the Welshman is actually one Thomas Morgan, who served under Cromwell in the English Civil War, and that his hand was the one which struck the head off anointed king Charles I. Far across the ocean, there is a price on Carrier’s head, and King Charles II is determined to see the man who executed his father returned to England to face the king’s justice. A band of merciless cutthroat assassins have set off from England, determined to collect the bounty and bring Morgan back, dead or alive. Kent does a fine job of creating suspense, as the ruthless band of killers draws ever-closer to the unsuspecting Martha and Thomas, but what I liked best about this book was that it shared many of the same qualities I admired in The Heretic’s Daughter. Kent doesn’t shy from the harsher realities of life in the colonies, painting a vivid portrait of the difficult and often short lives of settlers as they scrabble to eke out a living amidst the plagues of weather, Indian raids and the crushing cloak of religion which blankets the colonies. Kent also spins a love story amongst the most unconventional of people, bringing her characters to life with skilled wordcraft until the reader finds herself rooting for the initially unsympathetic Martha in the face of her many challenges, both internal and external. Though I didn’t find this novel as gripping and hard to put down as The Heretic’s Daughter (there’s just something about the Salem witch trails which never fails to intrigue), I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and found it an enjoyable read.
The Traitor's WifeIt’s not easy being a single woman at a certain age, and if you think it’s tough to dodge the “old maid” label now, imagine being labeled a spinster in colonial Massachusetts.