Bound (2 page)

T
he paper Alice’s father hung around her neck read:

This indenture made the twentieth day of May one thousand seven hundred fifty-six between John Morton of Dedham in the County of Suffolk on the one part and Simeon Cole of London in the County of Middlesex on the other part that the said Simeon Cole has bound and does hereby bind minor child Alice Cole his daughter to any lawful work for and to reside with the said John Morton until the twenty-first day of March one thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven at which time said minor child will have reached the age of eighteen years during which time said John Morton covenants to use all means in his power to provide for said Alice Cole suitable boarding lodging clothing and such attendance as necessary to her comfortable support in sickness and in health and further shall cause her to be taught to read her Bible as she is capable and the said John Morton shall furnish her with two good sets of clothes at such time as her term of indenture shall be canceled.

The paper had been signed by John Morton and Simeon Cole. John Morton began his name with a wavering, feathery spiral. Simeon Cole began his with a thick, sideways wave. When Alice first took the paper out to look at it, the spiral and the wave were all she could make of it, although she ran her fingers over the rest of the letters many times.

At first the Morton household contained Mr. Morton and Mrs. Morton, a son nearing manhood named Elisha, and one daughter three years older than Alice named Abigail whom they called Nabby. Mr. Morton was the one with the locked knee, but Mrs. Morton was the one always in bed with an ail, which she put sometimes to her lungs and sometimes to her stomach. A tall, bony Negro named Jerubah tended Mrs. Morton and ordered the kitchen, working her tasks in dark silence, but the girl Nabby chattered and bounced from one piece of work to another without a care for what was left to Alice to finish. Alice didn’t mind the girl’s chatter—in fact she took great interest in it—and Alice didn’t mind the work, as it was much the same as the work she had done alongside her mother back in London: beating, bleaching and boiling clothes, sanding floors, oiling woodwork, spinning, weeding, and picking the garden; but now Alice worked under a new kind of sky that might shed bright sun and thick snow in a single day, or remain all sun or all snow for weeks together. And space! So much space! The land ran like the ocean, wave after wave of it, and off into a distance nothing but more waves, until it faded into a soft green haze.

Alice hadn’t been very long at the Mortons when Mrs. Morton died of something to do with neither her lungs nor her stomach, and the son, Elisha, married and left to settle in the westward part of the colony. With each change in the household the work changed, perhaps less washing but more spinning, or less cleaning and more weeding, but it didn’t matter to Alice what kind of work it was—it took up all the daylight hours no matter what it was made of.

Mr. Morton saw to it that Alice was fed, clothed, and attended in illness as her paper demanded, and himself taught her to read, remarking many times on her quickness. By her eighth birthday Alice could read the paper that still hung around her neck, and she had stopped going to the window to look for her father in any of the wagons that rumbled along the road. By Alice’s ninth birthday she was reading to Mr. Morton out of Pope and Dryden and had come to understand her life as made up of two parts, divided by the paper. Taken together she didn’t think of the second part as greatly worse than the other. Mr. Morton called her his “sweet, good girl,” sat her next to Nabby at table, and quizzed them out of the Bible together. He smiled at her and patted her cheek each time he passed her in the house or yard and only struck her when she dropped an onion soup in his lap or tipped his pipe into the fire or scorched his stock with the iron.

Nabby Morton in her turn treated Alice as one might treat a younger sister, or a younger sister as Alice had been taught it by her brothers, which meant she was to follow around when allowed and keep away when she wasn’t, yet with Nabby it also meant that when she wanted someone to share a stolen pie or run bare-legged in the creek in the heat of summer it was Alice she called, and when she needed to cry over her mother, she did it into Alice’s apron.

That didn’t mean that Alice forgot her old family altogether. After the day of the spilled soup Alice curled up in the bed she shared with Jerubah, closed her eyes, and conjured up a big, new house in Philadelphia, with her mother in a blue dress trimmed with lace just like a favorite dress of Mrs. Morton’s. She dreamed her father came in from work to smile at her and pat her cheek and give her an orange.

On Alice’s arrival at Mr. Morton’s he had offered to keep her indenture paper safe for her in a drawer in a desk in his study, but as Alice’s father had told her to keep hold of it, she’d been loath to give it over. As time went on, however, and as repeated reading of the paper told her nothing more of her father’s whereabouts, and as she remembered nothing more of her mother than a pair of limp feet dangling from sharp-boned ankles as she went over the ship’s rail into the water, the cord around her neck began to chafe more than it comforted.

At Alice’s tenth birthday Mr. Morton called her into his study and gave her a twopence; Alice put it in her father’s money pouch and at the same time took out the indenture paper, giving it to Mr. Morton to lock up in his drawer.

Alice didn’t see the paper again until the year she turned fifteen and Mr. Morton gave her to Nabby on the occasion of Nabby’s marriage to Emery Verley of Medfield.

April 1764

A
lice carried her workbasket to the cart, stepped wide of the cow already tied behind, and attempted to wedge the basket between the linen trunk and the washtub, but she felt no great confidence in its purchase. The workbasket had been given to her by Mrs. Morton, already filled with her own scissors and pins and needles, and Alice didn’t wish to lose it in the road or dislodge any of its contents. She took the basket out, climbed onto the cart beside Verley’s Negro, George, clutched it tight in her lap, and waited. Nabby Morton, or Nabby Verley since the night before, wouldn’t get in the carriage ahead; her new husband had to get down out of his seat to collect her.

“Come, Nabby, before you kiss all the hair off your father’s head. Mr. Morton, sir, you must shoo her away or we’ll not get to Medfield by sunset.”

Nabby rubbed at her eyes and ran her thumbs over her father’s wet cheeks to dry them. The father’s and daughter’s tears caused a bad effect in Alice; she dashed at her own eyes, and the movement brought Mr. Morton’s attention, causing him to untangle himself from his daughter and approach the cart.

“My sweet, good girl. My pretty girl. You’ll sit in my heart always, next to my daughter’s place there. God bless you, child.” He turned to his daughter. “Nabby, you see the example you set for Alice? Stop your tears and obey your husband. Get into the carriage.”

Nabby went to the carriage and climbed in; Mr. Morton began a lock-kneed step toward his daughter for one final word, but Verley had already flicked his horse into motion, and the carriage pulled away. The cart lurched after, full of the washtubs, churns, cheese molds, iron kettles, and trunks of linens that, including Alice and the cow, were all part of Nabby’s marriage portion from her father. Mr. Morton didn’t attempt a final word for Alice, which Alice was glad of, because she still found herself in a state of some disturbance.

Alice had been in a state of disturbance for the fortnight past, ever since she’d been handed the new paper that transferred her remaining time from the father to the daughter. The disturbance came from the fact that she couldn’t feel the same way two minutes in a row about her change in circumstance; one minute she felt the wrench of leaving Mr. Morton and what she knew of home, the next minute she found herself caught up in the excitement of Nabby’s prospects.

When Alice had first seen Emery Verley’s well-formed features and the fine set of his coat she had thought there was little to be done in the way of physically improving him; he had turned away from Mr. Morton’s hearth, spied Alice, and given her a little bow—a bow, to Alice—and from there she’d found little to fault in him altogether. A fortnight after the intentions had been published Alice had lifted a carelessly set latch and walked into the supposed empty front room to find Nabby spread-legged under Verley’s dropped breeches, but when Alice carried Nabby’s water to her chamber later that night and found the girl in a cascade of giggles over the adventure, Alice had decided it cast no great mark against the suitor. Add to it that Verley was already set up with a sawmill and good-size farm in Medfield, and Alice could only look ahead with her own share of enthusiasm toward the venture.

Their arrival at Medfield added no discouragement to Alice’s outlook. True, her first look at the village included a black swamp and ugly potash works, but the cart and carriage took them safely beyond, turning along a pretty stretch of river that ended at a well-kept orchard and a pasture speckled with livestock. The house sat back handsomely on a gentle rise of land, the front door boasting its prosperity with both paint and knocker; a fresh-turned garden framed the back door, and the hens charged fat and thick around Alice’s feet as she stepped down from the cart, still holding firm to her workbasket.

The keeping room looked bare compared to Mr. Morton’s, but of course it sat in wait for Nabby’s collection of goods, still piled outside in the cart. The other rooms were more fully fitted, and Alice liked the weight of the furnishings, as if promising they wouldn’t soon be shifted. She especially liked the little room in the lean-to at the back that was to be hers alone, a thing she hadn’t had at Mr. Morton’s. She also liked it that she was included at the supper table, just as she had been at Mr. Morton’s; she further liked it that supper wasn’t just bread and cheese and beer but apple tart and candied plums and seedcake. Above it all, she liked it that Verley lifted his glass to Nabby and then to Alice and said, “To my new family!”

Alice went to bed that night with only one brief, low thought for Mr. Morton, and fell into the restless sleep that excess excitement often caused in her, coming half awake at the sound of the lifting latch, coming fully awake at the sight of Verley’s gold hair glinting above his candle.

He came to the bed and stood over her, wearing nothing but his shirt, hanging loose to his knees. He held the candle high. He said, “Well, now, my pretty Alice, let me see just what we’ve got here,” and before Alice could understand his presence or his words he set the candle on the floor, pulled down her blanket, pulled her shift over her head, and pressed himself on top of her. When Alice cried out his hand came across her throat, cutting off air with sound, and that soon became the worst of it—not the pain below but the suffocation above. After a time Verley made a sound like a log falling off a fire and pulled himself away. He stood up, reached down, and picked up the candle. He said, “Not a word of this to my wife, Alice; if you try it I’ll simply counter that I came to your room because I heard a noise and caught you bedding young Sherbourne, the smith’s apprentice. You might imagine who she’ll believe. Then, of course, I’ll be forced to add a year to your time for fornication. Or I might have to sell you to Old Peters at the tar pit. He has one eye and the breath of a corpse and he likes to puncture you in odd places. Boys or girls, it makes no matter to him. Should you like to go to Old Peters, Alice?”

Alice shook her head.

“Good girl, then.” He raised the candle, swept it over her. He said, “Oh, you are a lovely thing, aren’t you, Alice?”

A
lice would have said she never slept if the sound of the crow hadn’t so startled her. She opened her eyes and saw the first graying of the sky; with it came the first gray uncertainty. Had she dreamed it? As she eased her feet to the floor she felt the burn between her legs and thought no, it had been no dream, but even as she thought it she began to search for other reasons for the soreness. The long, rough cart ride. An early onset of her courses. Irritation from the stiff, new linens. Yes, a nightmare, surely. But how real it seemed! And how could she know such a thing in order to dream it? Was it from seeing Nabby and Verley in the front room at Morton’s? Might she have gone to bed full of thoughts of the reenactment going at that moment, and at no great distance? Might she, indeed, have imagined herself in Nabby’s place, and from such a sinful thought the nightmare had descended?

Such half-belief-half-disbelief allowed Alice’s feet and hands to move, to take her skirt from the hook and collect her shoes and stockings from the floor, to dress herself and enter the keeping room to begin the morning ritual. The sight of the keeping room table reminded her of the comfortable supper the three of them had shared the night before, and gave even more weight to the idea of a nightmare. She removed the ashes from the fire, blew up the coals, fed in enough wood to get a blaze for the kettle, unwrapped and sliced the bread, and set the first slice on the toaster.

Nabby appeared from her brand-new marriage bed in such wide-mouthed cheer that Alice felt even more sure of her imaginings. But the minute Verley appeared she knew it had all been as real as he was, standing there smiling at her.

“Good morning, Alice,” he said. “And how did you enjoy your first night in your new bed?”

Alice blushed and made no answer.

“Now look how you embarrass her!” Nabby said. “Don’t tease my Alice.”

Verley bowed an apology, and Alice marveled that only now could she see how the gesture mocked her. She marveled too that he could continue to smile at her. Alice felt the lock of that smile as she’d felt the lock of his hand at her throat, forcing her to draw breath as if through a cheesecloth; only when he’d finished his gill of cider and left for the sawmill did her breath come clear.

THE FIRST DAY
at the Verley home was spent as many at Mr. Morton’s had been, working side by side with Nabby to order the household. They shifted and unpacked trunks, brushed and aired clothes, set up her iron spiders and kettles. On this day, however, Alice’s thoughts weighed as heavy as the work, and the only thing that kept her hands and feet in rhythm was her fear of drawing Nabby’s suspicions. She didn’t want a year added to her time. She didn’t want to be sold to Old Peters at the tar pit.

Oddly, when Verley returned for supper that night, he seemed to take no notice of her, and Alice’s spirits lifted. He made a fine fuss over Nabby, reading to her from the almanac after supper as she hemmed a curtain, getting up twice for no purpose but to drop a kiss on her hair or draw a finger across her sleeve. This last appeared to be the signal that he wished to retire; Nabby leaped up, all smiles and giggles, and followed him to the bedroom.

Alice finished the curtain hem, banked the fire, and went to her own room in some good hope that Verley had done with her, but she hadn’t yet managed sleep when the latch lifted and he came exactly as he had the night before, standing over her in his shirt, holding his candle. Alice crabbed backward into the corner of her bed, against the wall.

“What’s this, now?” Verley said. “You can’t mean you’re not glad to see me.”

“I am not, sir!”

His hand snaked out, clipped her throat, and pushed her back against the wall she’d foolishly thought might be some help to her. “Now, Alice, why do you beat those lovely bird-wing lashes at me? Could it be you’ve not understood me? Or could it be you don’t like your breath stopped? Very well, then, here’s where we strike our bargain. I take my hand away and you lie quiet. You may nod your assent when you wish to breathe.”

Alice nodded. The hand came away. Whether she wished to make noise or not, the sucking of air was all she could manage.

“So,” he said. “You keep quiet. ’Tis a wise child you are, Alice,” and he yanked her away from the wall by the ankles, pulled off her shift, and beat himself into her.

Afterward, as before, he held the candle high and looked her over. He said, “It would be a shame, indeed, to let Old Peters have you. Or did I mention the hot tar? It would do bad things to such a skin as yours. Very bad things, Alice.”

OVER THE YEARS
Alice’s daydream of the house in Philadelphia had grown and expanded. Her mother had acquired more fine dresses; her father had brought her dolls as well as oranges; every night he pulled her onto his lap and held her tight while he listened to her recite her Bible passage. Even her brothers had grown kinder, sharing their books with her, showing her the pictures and even teaching her some of the words. That night Alice’s dream changed again, the house changed; it sported a room just for Alice on the second floor, the window too high for anyone to climb up from out of doors, and the door locked with a big gold key that Alice kept on a cord around her neck. The house itself was surrounded by a high fence and a gate barred with a long, iron bolt; she and her mother spent their days behind the fence planting tall lilac bushes that twined together with long-thorned roses.

AT FIRST ALICE’S
daytime hours appeared safe, as she and Nabby worked so often side by side there was little space for Verley to fit between them. Alice bore his nighttime intrusions buoyed by the hope that after a time he must surely grow tired of his little game with her, but instead of growing tired he grew bolder in the daytime, as if testing her will to keep silent: he grabbed her buttocks as she left the room just behind Nabby or thrust his fingers beneath her skirt as she leaned over him at table; once, with Nabby absorbed in cutting out a pattern in the front room, he followed Alice out to the barn and pushed her facedown across the feed bin. The rough head of a nail in the lid of the bin cut into Alice’s cheek, and when Alice came inside Nabby said, “Good heaven, Alice! What have you done to yourself? You’re bleeding all down your face!”

Now, Alice thought, now is the time to tell her, with the smith’s apprentice hard at work at the forge, with Verley just taking his horse from the barn behind her. She said, “’Twasn’t I did it,” and readied to say more, but Nabby’s eye had fallen to the damp stain on her skirt and come back up to her cheek, and there looked away.

It seemed to Alice that Nabby looked away from her many times more, but then came the day of the escaped mare. Verley was at the mill, and Nabby was first to see the horse through the keeping room window. “Alice!” she shrieked. “Come! The mare’s got loose!” And she leaped out the door. Alice ran after her and they divided, Alice down the road behind the horse, Nabby striking out across the field to cut the horse off farther along the way. Nabby reached the fence, picked her skirt up to her waist, and flung herself over. She ran into the road, flapping her arms and shouting to turn the horse; it pivoted on its hind legs and ran straight at Alice, who in her surprise leaped back and turned the horse again, this time away from them both and into the neighbor’s meadow. Alice and Nabby took after it, by now gasping like a pair of bellows, finally cornering the horse up against the neighbor’s stone wall. Nabby whipped off her apron and tied one end around the horse’s neck to lead it home, but there they collapsed together against the wall to collect their breath, and they began to laugh.

Oh, how good it felt—the laughing, the damp grass, the cool stones against her sweating back! And oh, how silly the horse looked in its apron! The laughter rose and rose, and burst, and turned wet, and dried away. They fell silent. Now, thought Alice, now I’ll tell her, and she began to form up the words, thinking out which ones might work best to show Nabby who her husband was and that she must take them back to her father. She had the first words ready, but she felt she needed to give Nabby some kind of warning; she reached out and touched Nabby’s arm.

Nabby leaped up and began pulling at the apron to start the horse back toward the barn. In a tight, fast run of words that left no room for Alice, Nabby began to talk of her husband. Her husband had bought her the mare. Her husband had just that week bought her a pair of silver hair combs. Her husband had declined to go to Boston for a lucrative trade because he couldn’t bear to part from his bride so soon. She could not have asked for a finer husband.

Alice stayed silent.

Nabby said three other things to Alice in the course of that day: she’d oversugared the pudding; she’d put out the wrong plates; she’d raised too much dust with her broom.

THAT NIGHT ALICE
heard husband and wife arguing in the study; when her own name rose up out of the noise, she made her way closer to the door to listen.

“Your father?” Verley said. “What the devil do you want to give her back to your father for?”

“I told you last week after my visit to him. He misses her terribly.”

“No doubt. But he’s missed his chance now.”

“He would give us Jerubah instead. He wished to in the first place, but I begged for Alice. I now see the mistake I made.”

“And what should I want with old Jerubah?”

“Why, she’s not yet thirty. In three years Alice will have served her time and be gone; Jerubah we’d have forever. In truth, Emery, I’m not happy with Alice. Not happy at all. She’s lazy and careless, and today she spoke to me most rudely.”

“You would take one wrong word as an attempt on your life? I’ll speak with the girl.”

“I don’t wish you to speak to her; I’ve already spoken to her and misliked her answers. Indeed, I fault my father for making such a fuss over her, sitting her at table and teaching her out of his books as if she were my sister. She’s grown so bigheaded only he can manage her.”

“Leave the girl to me. I’ll set her right.”

“I don’t wish her set right, I wish her gone! She must go back to my father or be sold. I’ve decided.”

The next words were said softer but pierced the air all the harder for it. “Perhaps you forget, my love, that what was yours became mine by law at the time of our marriage. ’Tis I who’ll decide what’s to be done with Alice.”

Alice waited for Nabby’s answer but heard none.

AFTER THE ARGUMENT
in the study Verley changed the game. He stopped troubling to close the door. He spoke loud, laughed loud, grunted louder. One night he said, “You don’t make a sound no matter what I do to you, do you, Alice?” And he picked up her hand and thrust it palm down into the flame of the candle.

That night Alice stopped dreaming of a house in Philadelphia and began dreaming of a high-walled ship sailing across a wild but sunlit ocean. Her father sailed the ship, pulling Alice between his knees and holding her warm and close as he steered; her mother and her brothers had become odd, finned creatures, half human, half dolphin, who swam around in the water and leaped out of the wake to smile at her.

TWO DAYS LATER,
with Nabby not ten paces away setting candles in the front room, Verley pulled Alice onto his marriage bed and drove himself into her. No matter how quiet Alice chose to be Verley made his own kind of noise, too much noise, or so it seemed until footsteps approached the door and Alice saw—no, felt—the surge of excitement in Verley; there Alice understood it. Verley wanted Nabby to hear. He wanted her to see. He had grown bored with his quiet wife and his quiet Alice; he would test them each against the length of her separate chain, forged by her separate contract. But good, thought Alice.
Good.
Because Nabby had now seen for herself what her husband was; now she would take them away from there.

ALL THE WAY
through supper Alice watched Nabby for a sign. They must wait for the right time, of course: after Verley had paid his visit to Alice, after he had returned to his room and fallen asleep. That was how Alice would do it. But after supper Verley went off to his study with his bottle of Madeira, and Nabby declared illness and went to her bed. Was the illness a ruse? Alice couldn’t determine. She cleared away the supper and put the beans to soak for morning, listening for sounds of Nabby stirring, perhaps secretly packing, but she heard only Verley, leaving the study and going outside; soon after she heard the horse pounding out of the yard and down the road.
Now
, Alice thought.
Now
. And yes, she’d barely drawn up the thought in full when Nabby appeared in the kitchen.

“Where’s he gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?
You don’t know?
Is that how you talk to me? What of ‘I don’t know,
madam
?’ Do you think yourself the equal of me? Is that what you think, Alice?”

“No, madam.”

Nabby lifted her hand, drew it back, and slapped Alice hard across her face. She dashed to the fire and grabbed up the poker; Alice twisted away as the poker came down, and it glanced off her shoulder, clattering to the floor.

Nabby leaned over, clutching her stomach. She straightened and caught Alice gaping at her. “What do you stare at? Why do you stand there? Get away from me! Be gone!”

Alice backed toward her bedroom door, whirled around, and dashed through it.