Bound (19 page)

F
inally, Nate came. When Freeman asked if he were prepared for his return to school he said, “I’ve not at all determined on going.”

Freeman and the widow exchanged a look but made no remark, and after a time Nate left, without a look at Alice, or at least not while Alice dared look at him.

THE PLAN WAS
settled between Freeman and Hopkins that the party would travel to Boston by ship as soon as they could secure a wind. The widow arranged with the Indian girl to tend the livestock; Freeman rode about the village, settling his own affairs, collecting the usual pouch of letters to be delivered to the various relations and commercial connections in Boston. He also gathered the usual commissions for this buckle or that book, but no one would have dared ask him for a bolt of Irish lace or a barrel of West India molasses.

All the activity distressed Alice, for it meant she could no longer keep the line ahead of her fixed at a vague distance. As the new week broke upon her she found her stomach growing uncertain; she woke each morning with a tightness around the eyes that by nighttime ran from her temples into her neck and down through her shoulders. Her dreams were wild black things, with both the Verleys chasing through them; once in the dream Mr. Morton came and held Alice while Nabby fetched the poker, freshly heated from the fire. He said, “Take care, you don’t burn yourself, daughter,” whereupon Nabby raised the poker and brought it down on Alice’s already scarred hand, somehow managing to turn the star into a moon. A circle.

THE WIDOW ORDERED
Alice to sponge and air the same dress she’d worn at Barnstable, thinking it good luck for her. She helped Alice pack her few things into the widow’s trunk; together they put up a chicken pie and some cheese and a pan of corn bread, cut and wrapped for the journey. Alice looked at her money pouch; to leave it meant her confident of her return; to take it meant she doubted. Alice emptied the shillings and pence onto her coverlet and counted: nineteen shillings eight pence, one pair of buffed shoes away from a pound. She would leave it.

But the water sat as becalmed as if a large, phantom hand pressed down on it. On the tenth of August Freeman and the widow began to form plans to set out by carriage. On the morning of the eleventh Alice got out of her bed and felt a fine, steady breeze coming through her open window. She dashed for the night jar and puked a vile, yellow acid into it.

Within the hour the shipmaster arrived, their trunks were loaded into his cart, and they were taken to the water; all had been rowed to the ship, and the crew stood ready to make sail when they were hallooed from shore. Alice peered over the rail with the rest of them and saw a pale-haired, slender form in gray breeches and bleached shirt waving a mustard-colored coat over his head. Nate. The longboat was again lowered and rowed to the beach; Nate threw a canvas bag into the boat and leaped after it; he was rowed to the ship and monkeyed himself up the ladder as neatly as any seaman. He’d been sent on business for his father, he said; he had a letter, which he waved at the shipmaster, at Freeman, at his grandmother. He didn’t wave the letter at Alice, nor did he speak to her. Alice determined to pay him no attention, which was easy to do, as the ship itself engaged her entirely.

Alice had by now traveled twice by sea, but on neither journey had she been positioned to witness any of the ship’s workings in detail. She stood transfixed by the change in the village men she had come to know as one kind of thing and now saw as something other. Idle bodies turned to a synchronized row of straining backs and pumping muscles; the wavering shipmaster turned into a barking mastiff. “Stand by to make sail! Ready on the throat! Ready on the peak! Haul away throat! Haul away peak!” The men rolled back their answering chant: “One, two, heave! One, two, heave!” with the fine rhythm of psalm singers. The mainsail jerked up the mast, whipped against the wind with the crack and rumble of distant thunder, and bellied out against the sky. The shipmaster cried out for headsails. “Trim! Ease away! Make fast!” The boat took on a gentle cant and flew over the rippled sea as smoothly as any osprey or gannet.

There Alice’s own mood turned on her; she saw what a fair, fast journey it should be and could take no enjoyment in it. She could only wish a mightier wind that would force them to turn back, or a lesser one that would cause them to slow, anything but this fine, steady breeze that pushed them so effortlessly toward Suffolk.

The shipmaster had packed the hold full with barrels of salt cod, mackerel, flaxseed, corn, and rye. He had likewise packed the deck full with passengers. Besides Freeman, the widow, Nate Clarke, and Alice, he carried two Snows, four Crosbys, one Howe, and one Doane. Alice heard distant talk on deck of where each was going and what they were going for, but she didn’t turn her ear to it, afraid of being drawn into a discussion of where she was bound. If the widow or Freeman wished to toss her business back and forth with the others they were free to do so, but if they did so, Alice didn’t want to witness it.

They ate their first meal off the gently sloping table below-decks at noon; they ate their second near dusk. Alice took only a small lump of corn bread and a mug of beer at each, but she might have taken an entire pie for the length of time it took her to work it down.

They slept in the bunks in shifts, in their clothes, or rather Alice lay awake in her clothes, listening to the sounds of waves smacking wood, the half-whispered giggles of the two small Crosby boys, the full-throated snore of Mrs. Snow. Only an hour into her shift Alice gave it up and returned to the deck.

A slightly flattened moon had blossomed out of the dark shoreline while Alice had been below, and now it hovered just under the great triangle of stars, marking so bright a path over the water that Alice imagined she could climb atop the rail and step off onto the white road below. As she gazed at the moonlit water she thought of her mother and her brothers; she imagined a pair of wide child’s eyes, the teary gleam of a mother’s.

A voice said, “Alice.”

Alice made a small, startled leap back from the rail, and Nate dropped a hand onto her back to steady her, then plucked it off, as if she’d burned him. He said, “I must talk to you.”

Alice said, “You have business for your father in town?”

“I’ve no such business.”

“But your letter—”

“’Tis written by myself to myself. If anyone had asked me to open it and failed to recognize my father’s hand I’d have been put back to shore in an instant.”

“I don’t understand you.”

He said, “Alice. I don’t know the least thing to say to you. I can’t sleep for thinking what happened to you. Good God! You told me not to touch you, and now I know the reason for it! To think on what you suffered! What
I
might have made you suffer!”

Somewhere a hatch thumped. Nate reached for Alice’s arm but dropped his hand before it touched her. “Come,” he whispered, and backed away from the rail toward the shadow of the after cabin. Alice followed. Nate sat down, leaning against the wall of the cabin, and after a minute Alice slid down near him. It seemed such a strange thing, sitting on the ship’s deck in the dark beside Nate, that Alice missed the first words he said to her, but it seemed the second words were the key ones.

“I don’t go back to school. I don’t go back to Satucket. My father will be enraged to find me gone. I stay with a school friend in town until I find a boat for the eastward.”

“The eastward!”

“I go to Pownalborough. ’Tis a fine place; trees one hundred feet high and seven feet thick through the middle. There’s work at lumbering there for anyone with two strong arms. I go to live at Pownalborough.”

Alice was silent. She hadn’t thought of Nate as greatly connected to her life in any way, and yet the thought of him gone away unsettled her. After a time she said, “I’ve not heard of this Pownalborough.”

“’Tis on the Kennebec, in the province of Maine. ’Tis no wilderness, Alice; it has a new courthouse, a fort, two mills—” He broke off. She could see nothing of him but a brown rectangular shape. “I don’t like what Mr. Freeman does with you, Alice, marching you to court just because some justice orders him to. I don’t like giving this Verley any kind of chance at you. Who knows what trick they’ll spring at you? Who knows what will become of you?”

Alice could feel the beginnings of the old, torturing shakes again. Oh, she was so tired of shaking! She’d tried so hard to lay her trust in Freeman, to push August fourteenth away into the distance, and here Nate’s words put her right back to the beginning. She leaned forward and hugged herself into a tight bundle to still her flesh, but it did nothing, until after a time she realized it wasn’t just her own arms that contained her. Nate had put his arms around her too, caging her against him as gently as if she were a live pigeon. She thought to break away from him but then realized a wonderful thing: her shakes had begun to subside.

Alice stayed still, quiet. Nate stayed so. After a time Alice discovered that she could rest her head along his shoulder, just fitting it between his chin and collarbone, and so they sat, Nate’s arms drawing more snuggly around her. A new calm settled into her. It felt like something she’d never known but always wanted; it felt like the thing she’d spent so many fretful nights in hunt for. After a little more time Alice discovered another thing: if she turned her head a quarter turn and tipped her chin to Nate he could move a very little himself and fit his mouth on her mouth. She discovered that she could take her mouth away and he would wait there for her to put it back again; she discovered he could take his mouth away, and if she didn’t move, he would put it back again. Soon enough Nate formed his own ideas of where to put things, his hands sliding down her back, over her shoulders, his mouth finding her cheek, eyelid, temple. She remembered touching his cheek and mouth with her fingers and touched them again; in fact, she felt his next words with her fingers.

“Come with me, Alice. Come with me to Pownalborough.”

Alice took her weight back from him and sat upright in surprise.

“You must! You must come! You can’t count on some lawyer’s trick to save you! We would have a fine life, a wonderful life, free of all of them!”

Alice wanted to laugh at how insane the idea was—a runaway sixteen-year-old boy trailing a runaway servant with him to someplace like Pownalborough. They wouldn’t be in town a minute before they’d be accosted by the constable. This was Alice’s first thought, but soon enough she thought of another: how much more insane was Nate than Alice? How different had her situation been when she’d run off from Verley? Indeed, how mad would it really be to go with him? To escape Suffolk and Verley, to escape all that had happened, to start over, free of all of them.

All of them.

Alice said, “Mr. Freeman’s ‘tricks’ as you call them saved my life.”

Nate’s hands came up fast, one to grip her shoulder, the other to lay two fingers across her lips. A shape had risen up out of the companionway and into the moonlight: the widow, her hair come out of its pins and blowing out behind her like its own kind of sail.

She called, “Alice?”

Nate pressed his fingers harder to her lips, but Alice pushed his hand away and shrugged out of his grip. She stood up as soundlessly as she was able and moved along the rail, into the moonlight, until she came into the widow’s line of vision.

“There you are! I’d begun to fear you’d gone over.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“You take a bunk when offered at sea. You’ll not get another.”

“I’m sorry to have worried you. I didn’t think you awake.”

“I must confess I sleep poorly at sea myself. Though perhaps ’tisn’t all the sea in this circumstance.”

Alice said nothing.

The widow dropped her hand over Alice’s on the rail. “All will be well, Alice.”

“But how do you know it?” Alice cried. “You can’t, you can’t know it!”

“’Tisn’t I alone who says it. Mr. Freeman assures me it will be so.”

“And how can he know?”

“He knows the law. He knows the human heart. He knows your heart.”

No, thought Alice. He couldn’t know a thing she didn’t know.

B
oston rose up ahead of them with the late-summer sun, striking Alice as a grander thing than it had appeared in her childhood, perhaps because her memories of London had drifted so far and faint behind. But as they wound their way around the islands and up to the great long wharf Alice noted things that had certainly escaped her before, if they’d been there at all: the hulking British man-of-war anchored off the point; the row of warehouses like tall, multiwindowed dovecotes lining the far side of the wharf; the skeleton of a ship in dry-dock, waiting for rigging and sails before it could be set free; and so many carriages, carts, people, noise.
Mackerel! Oysters! Cod! Fresh in this morning!

The ship itself carried its own noise: the beat of the sailors’ shoes across the deck, the rattle of the block, the creak of mast and boom, the snap of stagnant sail being secured. Nate attempted to move close to Alice, but the widow and Freeman were likewise too close for anything like private speech. She read something like panic in his eye until she heard him speak with Freeman over where each planned to stay in town; there Nate winked at Alice. He would know where to find her.

People and barrels began to spill off the ship together, and Alice lost Nate. Freeman had moved ahead to secure a carriage, but before he could do so he was accosted by a tradesman, a man he appeared to know, who spoke to him long and feverishly, his arms waving in a westerly direction. After a time Freeman broke away from the man and hailed his carriage. The trunk was loaded, Alice and the widow were loaded, Freeman climbed in behind and gave his order to the driver: “School Street.”

“School Street!” the widow cried.

“I must see Otis.”

The carriage reeled into the knots of well-dressed and ill-dressed people, a greater knot of the latter than Alice had remembered from her last brief passage through town: a mix of workingmen and boys, apprentices, what seemed a great lot of sailors. She peered through the crowd for Nate but couldn’t see him. The sun being low didn’t help her, either blinding her or turning all she looked at into rusty shadows, reminding her of her long-ago struggle to make out her father’s shape in the wagon as it drew away. Had it been this very street where she’d last seen him? Had she come again through another circle? Alice looked wildly around her. She saw boarded-up buildings, brand-new street signs on all the corners, new even since her flight the year before; she couldn’t recognize her past here.

The carriage whirled down King Street, a wide, inviting avenue crowned in the distance by a stately brick building whose corner facades were decorated with the gold lion and unicorn of the royal crest. Freeman pointed. “The Town House.”

The carriage swung past the Town House onto Corn Hill, then onto School Street. It stopped in front of an elegant house that somehow frightened Alice and seemed to give Freeman pause as well; he sat in the carriage and sent the driver up to the door. A Negro servant appeared and disappeared; the door blew back wide, and a great, looming giant of a man leaped down the steps toward the carriage.

A whale, Alice thought, looking at him, a suited and shod whale, but as the man drew closer and she saw his startling eyes she changed her mind. Not whale, but eagle.

“Freeman, by God,” the man cried. “I’d have conjured you if I could! And Widow Berry!” He grasped the widow’s hand, kissed it, and helped her down onto the cobbles. Freeman and Alice followed.

“I’ve just landed,” Freeman said. “I ran into Edes at the wharf. He tells me there are plans.”

“Plans! What good are plans when you put them in the hands of a mob? ’Tis all Sam Adams’s doing, you may be sure of it. He’s called out McIntosh and his Pope’s Day gang. A mess of cudgel boys who wouldn’t know a Stamp Act if it bit them. Add to them the bankrupt shipwrights and sailmakers and soap boilers and braziers with naught to do but look for someone to blame—”

“Edes spoke of a peaceable assembly.”

“He may speak as he likes. When the pot boils the scum arises.” Otis turned to the steps, still talking, eyes dancing wildly, as if struggling to follow his own thoughts. A woman appeared in the open door, as handsome a woman as Alice had yet encountered, but to Freeman’s greeting, “Good day to you, Mrs. Otis,” she lifted a silky hem and turned back into the darkness in silence.

Otis laughed. “She knows your politics, sir, and dislikes them as much as mine. Take heart that she denies you naught but her company at the tea table; for me, alas, my sacrifice extends to another piece of furniture entirely.” He pointed up the stairs and laughed again. As he turned around his eye fell on Alice; fooled by the laugh, she was surprised to meet up with such grimness.

“So this is the girl?” he asked. “This is our famed Alice? I understand all, my friend. All and more. And now you come to town to wait on the court at Suffolk?”

“We do.”

Otis came down a step until he stood on the same plane as Alice. “I see a scar on the cheek. How reads the law? ‘If any man smite out the eye or tooth of his manservant or maidservant or otherwise maim or much disfigure him, unless it be by mere casualty, he shall let them go free from his service and have such further recompense as the Court shall allow him.’ Would we call her ‘much disfigured’? Not on any other cheek, perhaps, but on this one…. Is there any other marking?”

Freeman pointed to Alice’s hand. Otis bent low. “Would you allow me, please, miss?”

Alice held out her hand, and Otis picked it up, as if he were to kiss it as he’d kissed the widow’s. His hand felt warm and chill at once, as if heart and nerves had met together in the tips of his fingers. He turned Alice’s hand over, flexed her palm as far as he could, extended each thumb and finger, took up the other one. “The scarred hand doesn’t extend to quite the degree of the other; could we call it ‘maimed’? Indeed, you might make the case. You might indeed make the case. The scars, the reduced efficiency…at any rate, ’twould be a thing worth testing.”

Otis dropped Alice’s hands, snapped upright. “And why do I keep you standing here in the damned street? Come in. Come in. Freeman, we’ve much to discuss, you and I. I hear talk they would put you up for the legislature. We need you there now, sir, above all others. We must argue reason over riot, a peaceable resistance over a bloodletting; I beg you, my friend, to join us.”

He turned from Freeman to the widow. “And you, madam. ’Tis your skillful hands this province needs, not some bloody trampling feet of a Pope’s Day gang. Let them keep to November and Guy Fawkes! Or would they like to raise him from the dead now, and this time help the papists blow up Parliament?” He laughed again. They stepped into the hall, Freeman and Alice following, but as soon as Alice had planted her second foot inside the door an elderly woman in homespun appeared, separated Alice from the others, and brought her to the kitchen.

The first thing Alice noted was that the political divide in the household stretched into the kitchen as well; the housekeeper sent a servant with a pot of real Bohea tea up the back stairs with the Negro while she carried another pot smelling strongly of sage to her master and his guests in the downstairs parlor. Alice followed the woman as far as the door, listening to the rise and fall of Otis’s nervous, fiery voice:
Sam steps wrong with this one…. Degrades the cause…Talks independency…The madness of it…Lawless rabble…Bedlam…I fear it, sir…. I fear it….

If Freeman got a word in, Alice couldn’t pick it out. She returned to the table and the cup of tea the woman had left her; she hadn’t dared hope for and, in fact, barely yet believed what her nose had told her: Bohea. Alice sat and sipped and attempted to make some sense of what she’d heard. Here she was, at James Otis’s kitchen table, the man she had heard so much talk of, the man who had stood up before the legislature and challenged the laws of Parliament, and what did he talk of now? Fear! Of a Pope’s Day gang! A little parade of boyish mischief makers, or so they had always been at Dedham.

But now Alice could hear the low, steady rumble of Freeman’s voice, almost like a lullaby, as if he were attempting to settle his friend to sleep. Otis’s voice came back, softer now, and once or twice Alice heard the widow’s clear note. Once she heard Otis’s voice rise in wild laughter, break, and fade.

It seemed a long time before the servant reappeared and fetched Alice to the front hall, where the two men and the widow now stood before the door. Alice peered at Otis; the whale had disappeared, and so had the eagle. Alice had once seen a weasel suck the innards out of a hen’s egg, and that was what Otis resembled now: not the weasel but the hollowed-out egg. He kissed the widow’s hand again, mumbling an amputated, “Pleasure…too long,” but even that rang empty.

Once they were under way in the carriage the widow attempted some banter about the non-importation plan implemented by Otis’s wife, but Freeman would accept no diversion. He leaned silently into the corner of the carriage, his face well shadowed. After a time he burst out, “Did you know the governor once called Otis ‘as wicked a man as lives’? Did you know he once said that the troubles in this country take their rise from and owe their continuance to that one man? Well, he’d best look now and see the friend he has in him!”

The widow exchanged a look with Alice. “I might understand Mr. Otis better than you do, Mr. Freeman,” she said. “He believed his reasoned argument over the sugar would prevail, and not only did it not prevail, the stamps came. Next here comes Adams, with his gangs and his talk of independency, and poor Mr. Otis, who was happy enough to twist the cord, now stands back aghast at the idea of cutting it completely. He thinks, surely he must think, What will happen if we cut it? Will we end with Mr. Adams and his mob ruling the province? Will it all end in havoc?’ And so he grows cautious. He thinks again. He contemplates which is the lesser evil: King George or King Adams. And I for one think such contemplation, while perhaps serving ego as much as politics, is to his credit. And our benefit. My grandson’s benefit. I would see Nate someday standing before the justices engaged in educated argument, not lying dead on some bloody Boston cobblestones.”

Freeman said nothing. The carriage reversed its route past the Town House and continued no great distance before stopping in front of a flat-faced, two-story brick house with no kind of sign to identify it. The driver removed the trunk and deposited it in front of the building; Freeman got out, paid the driver, and lifted the knocker on the door. A woman dressed in homespun pulled open the door and greeted them with a curtsey; Mr. Freeman called her Mrs. Hatch; she didn’t appear to know the widow. She pointed Alice to the kitchen and led Freeman and the widow up the stairs.

The kitchen was bustling, or so it appeared, for the room was small for the number of people within it. A girl as black as a charred stump sat dressing a fowl; a young man in a tradesman’s apron stood unwrapping a collection of pewter spoons from a flannel cloth and laying them on the table; a boy who looked to be about five worked at filling a kettle from a water bucket he could barely lift off the floor. The black girl saw Alice, wiped her hands on her apron, and walked to a small door at the back of the room, where she stood waiting. Alice followed. The girl led Alice into a small, windowless shed attached to the kitchen, pointing to the pallet along the far wall. “That you,” she said, the accent of Africa still on her. “Sleep there.”

Alice didn’t want to sleep there. The shape of the room reminded her of her room at Verley’s; the lack of windows, the pallet on the floor, reminded her of the Barnstable gaol. Alice took one step, two, until she reached the bed; she dropped her sack on it and backed up again to stand near the door.

She heard the widow’s voice behind her. “I want the girl who came with us. What have you done with the girl who came with us?” The widow appeared in the shed door, looked around, and said, “You’re to sleep with me. Roll up your pallet and come.” Alice did as she was ordered, wondering as she did so who had given the order—the widow herself or the man who had stood surety to deliver her safe to the Suffolk courtroom.

The widow’s room was neat and well enough fitted with a bed, a chest, a chair. The widow pointed to the floor on the far side of the bed, and Alice laid the pallet down. She looked out the window and saw the Town House steeple, along with a large swath of King Street below.

The widow pulled off her cap, dropped it onto the chest, and sat heavily on the bed. “I dislike travel,” she said. “More and more with each addition to my years. Floundering about someone else’s house. Unable to get a simple cup of tea when I wish it. Attempting to beat some life into a worn-out bed tick. Lying awake all night listening for a strange step on the stairs.”

“You’ll find no worn-out bed tick here,” Freeman said from the open door. “And if you wish a cup of tea, you need only appear in the parlor downstairs. As to a strange step on the stairs, it will likely be mine. I’d a message waiting for me that Mr. Verley’s lawyer should like to meet me upon my earliest convenience; I think I’d best seek him out now.”

An odd deafness settled over Alice’s ears; either that or utter silence fell at that moment over the room and the street below. After a time she heard the widow say, “Would you consider this invitation to bode well or ill?”

“I think well,” Freeman said, but at the same time he gave Alice a look so full of gentleness that the words brought her no comfort; why should he think her in need of such a look now?

Freeman left them. The widow said, “Shall we see if the Hatch kitchen can brew up something less foul for tea than Otis’s, or should you prefer to rest?”

A belated cowl of guilt dropped over Alice, one she hadn’t felt while sipping the fine Bohea at Otis’s. She said, “I’d prefer a rest, madam.”

The widow left, and Alice returned to the window. Pockets of men idled about in the street below. Alice spied Freeman among them, distinctly tall and purposeful, the neatness of his queue and the whiteness of his stock standing out against his surroundings. As Alice watched he appeared to slow his step and turn his head left and right, as if to listen to the rumblings of the men as he passed through; whatever he heard seemed to stall him, for which Alice was glad, for she discovered she was loath to have him pass from her view. At length he picked up his original speed and rounded the corner by the Town House; Alice retreated from the window. She lay down on the pallet and closed her eyes, feeling it a promise to the widow to do so, but with no thought of sleep. She listened to the town noise, so different from the noise of Satucket: a steady drone of voices broken by the occasional shout, the rattle of the cart wheels, the whoosh of the carriages, the stray toll of bells.
I think well.
Or ill. She thought of the words Otis had quoted, apparently from some book of laws, or rather she thought of one word Otis had quoted:
free.
Of late the word had meant being set loose from the gaol, not being hanged. This
free
that Otis spoke of was another thing.