“Well, then, Jacob Cooke, get you outside the house, and if Jack Jenney’s afeard of the one he says makes it smoke, he’d as well go out with you.”
“Thank you for nothing, Dame Damaris,” retorted John Jenney, laughing as he rose to his feet. “I didn’t look to be turned out of the house when I came to make a wedding visit, but mayhap ’tis so new to you to have a house that you haven’t welly learned to govern it.”
“That’s the truth, Jack,” interposed the master of the house, a little mortified; “so we’ll e’en leave the shrewish dame to her own devices, and go out to find a warm corner beside a chimney that doesn’t smoke, and a woman that doesn’t scold.”
“Go your ways. Your room is aye better than your company,” responded the comely dame, whom as Damaris Hopkins we saw a baby on board the Mayflower, and who, lately married to the son of Francis Cooke, was one of the most stirring young matrons of the town.
The two men, laughing, and yet a little reluctant to turn out into the shrewd east wind, paused outside the house. This new home, built upon land inherited by Damaris from her father, Stephen Hopkins, was on the westerly edge of Training Green, and thus high enough to catch the full force of the wind rising steadily since noon.
“Phew!” whistled Jenney, dragging his hat over his brows, “’tis enough to take the curl out of a pig’s tail. There’ll be some wracks along the coast, if this holds all night.”
“Come up the hill to the Fort, and ask Livetenant Holmes to give us a squint through the spy-glass.”
“I’m with you. But Holmes isn’t half the good fellow the captain was. The Fort don’t seem the same place.”
“No. And yet the captain could give a rough lick with his tongue, if one angered him.”