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“What news? The agreement?”

“The agreement? Well, of that I may tell you that the merchants are all up in arms; the papers are full of nothing but these new restrictions. They guard us more in peace than in war; their ships swarm the coast and stop anyone at the least excuse. I couldn’t sell our alewives at any price; all trade is near killed.”

“By trade you mean smuggling.”

“I mean trade as we’ve known it these many years in this colony. We’ve no choice but to ban imports if we wish to continue to make a way for ourselves.”

“I’ve been thinking of this ban. At the rate Alice spins—”

“I’d not count too far on Alice.”

“How, now? You can’t say she’s not a good worker.”

“I neither think it nor say it. I only question the likelihood of her remaining here.”

“Why, she blooms here! She wouldn’t leave us!”

“Unless she were obliged to.”

A paper snapped. Freeman’s voice dropped so low Alice had to move dangerously low on the stairs to hear him. “There’s more in this paper than news of trade.”

Silence, except for the crackling of the paper.

After a time the widow said, “It says ‘light hair and blue eyes.’ This can’t be our Alice. Her hair is far too rich a shade for ‘light’; her eyes most clearly hazel.”

“You must agree the rest matches.”

“It says ‘aged fifteen years.’”

“You might recall I remarked the first day I saw her she couldn’t be a day over sixteen.”

“And ‘five feet in height’?”

“You can’t say she’s greatly over it. Come now, you must consider the chances of two such creatures, two such Alices—”

“All right, then, suppose I consider it. Suppose this is our Alice. What then?”

“According to law—”

“The law! Again the law! And after that fine speech you made to Nate about a higher one!”

“Widow Berry, calm yourself. I’m not about to fetch the constable. I confess I’ve come to your way of thinking about the girl. In truth, she’s won me utterly.”

The widow’s voice softened. “And don’t think I haven’t noticed the effort you make with her.”

“She has a fine mind, which someone else must have noticed before me. She reads and speaks well beyond what I might expect from someone in her situation.”

“And she’s been taught to work. And she looks to please. That in itself—”

“You needn’t add to her charms on my account. But we must take into consideration those who aren’t so charmed, and would see this advertisement and make something of it.”

“Who in this village—”

“Anyone in dire need of the five pounds reward he offers.”

They fell silent.

At length the widow said, “But indeed, sir, it doesn’t sound just like. Blue eyes! Light hair!”

“Well, no, not just like.”

ALICE WAITED THE
next morning until Freeman had gone into the village and the widow out to the barn to apply a balm to the cow’s udder. She picked up Freeman’s
Gazette
and made her slow way through the advertisements:
For Sale—two Negro men and Negro woman and child…Run away from his master William Brown…To Hire—Woman in her thirties capable of all House Hold Business Town or Country
…On the third page, Alice found it:

Run away on the 3rd inst. from Emery Verley of Medfield, a servant girl, indented by the name of Alice Cole, aged fifteen years, five feet in height, light complexioned with light hair and blue eyes, comely features. Whoever secures this servant in any gaol in this or the neighboring governments shall have five pounds reward and reasonable charges paid by E. Verley of Medfield. N.B. All masters of vessels are forbid to carry her off, and any others to harbour her at their peril.

Alice stared at the box, exactly centered in the middle of the newspaper page. The words
five pounds
seemed to leap out of all the other words on the page. Surely, surely, such an advertisement would attract the attention of every reader. It occurred to Alice to wonder how long the advertisement had been out there, and she returned to the front page of the paper to find the date. When she saw that it had been published on June the twenty-fifth she received her second great shock: it didn’t seem possible that so much time could have passed since she’d left the Verleys. She closed the paper and raced to the cupboard shelf where the widow kept her almanac. June had indeed run down. July was well along. And so came her third shock: the courses that should have given Alice their usual trouble a fortnight past had never appeared to trouble her at all.

A
t first it seemed some trick of time only; she hadn’t been gone as long as she thought and she only needed to recount the days to ease her mind. Alice counted and recounted but she couldn’t make any better sum of it: Nabby Morton had married Emery Verley near the end of April; Verley had lain atop her from the end of April until she’d run off in early June; her June courses had never come. Such was the truth of it.

Next Alice decided it was nothing but an ordinary quirk in a usually most reliable schedule. She watched between her legs for the first week, then another; she imagined the griping in her womb that always signaled the dark blood and imagined the streaks on her bedsheet and shift; in the dead of night she felt sure she could feel the stickiness with her fingers. But every morning it was the same: the snowy linen, the dry skin, the still womb.

Oddly, the rest of life continued the same, with the single exception that Freeman commissioned the widow to make him a jacket of the crimson broadcloth, and out of the sum he paid the widow the widow paid Alice a shilling, making careful note in a ledger that showed the hours spent at spinning the yarn for the length of cloth, as well as the subtraction for her keep.

Alice added the shilling to the other coins she’d received for this and that small task from Freeman. She continued to listen at her wheel, and at the stairs, but since Freeman’s return he’d made no further mention of either sending her back to Boston or finding her work in the village. In fact, the nighttime chats seemed to have diminished; working a loom was heavy work, and Freeman seemed to have come back from Barnstable in greater fatigue than he’d left for it; most nights the household retired to their beds in unison. Every morning Alice checked her sheets and shift, but she did so as if she were in a dream, as if she couldn’t believe the sight of nothing could be made into something to fear.

With Freeman’s return came the boy Nate, or that was to say, with his return the boy Nate actually came inside, exchanging the Locke for another book and asking Freeman his questions. Freeman had a way of answering a question with a question so that the boy was forced to talk more than seemed to suit his natural inclination, for if Freeman left the room to fetch a book or paper the boy at once fell into silence, as if he were a bird whose cage had just been darkened. He looked at Alice from time to time, his face such a glowing rose if she caught him out that she found herself taking looks at him when his attention was engaged with Freeman. For a time she thought her oldest brother might have grown to look like him, for another time she thought the younger; in the end she decided no; the boy Nate was too finely made, too fair-haired, too
pink
to have ever been her brother.

The next week a shift occurred in Alice’s workday that temporarily distracted her from her womb: the widow took her off the wheel to process the flax. First the full-grown plants were pulled up by their roots, then the seeds shaken off for the next year’s sowing. Next the stalks were bundled for soaking in the pond to rot away the leaves and soften the tough bark. There came the work for the men. The widow bartered three cheeses and a hen for a pair of strong boys from the village to haul the flax to and from the pond and then brake and swingle the stalks; the sound of the heavy brake bats pounding away the outer husks continued for days, right up to the edges of dark. Once the braking and swingling were done the widow and Alice set to with the hetchels, combing out the fibers into fine, long strands; Alice and the widow ended many days coated in the fine dust and dirt of the flax work.

When Alice returned to the wheel it wasn’t to the great walking wheel she’d used for the wool but to the smaller foot wheel, which allowed for sitting, a thing Alice might have appreciated at another time, but now it only increased the restlessness of her spirit. She pumped the foot wheel in a quick, frantic rhythm and fidgeted the flax through her fingers onto the bobbin; as she worked she tried to distract herself by keeping a kind of chant running through her head—a half skein, one handkerchief, five skeins, one shirt—for Freeman had placed another order with the widow for two shirts and twelve handkerchiefs.

Perhaps it was the fact that Freeman must have known every piece of cloth he bought meant that many more days Alice might work for the widow; perhaps it was the other thing distracting her mind; perhaps it was the talk she’d heard on the stairs about having won him utterly; whatever the reason, Alice found herself worrying less and less about Freeman. She found herself even performing small chores for him unasked. She cleaned his boots, reamed out his pipe, trimmed his quill, and learned to know his smile as she did so, but the most gratitude came down on her when she restitched the loose binding in the book by Montesquieu that he read from often in the evenings.

But mostly, Alice spun. As she spun the widow bleached the thread, running it through many cycles of soaking and wringing in hot water and ash before laying it out over the grass to whiten in the sun, and from the finished thread the widow wove a fine dimity, which she bleached again. Alice took a fair degree of satisfaction in the sight of yard upon yard of snowy cloth, but the whiteness that filled her days only showed up how black her dreams had become.

At night Verley chased her into dark, pulsing caves; he bound her in long ropes, and when he pulled them off, her clothes came too, revealing burned skin like the widow’s; he forced bread into her mouth, suffocating her until she swallowed, making her belly expand and expand until a putrid black thing burst up from her belly and into her mouth, suffocating her again.

AUGUST CAME; THE
non-importation date came; the widow’s house filled with men again. The voices around the table sounded less spirited to Alice, as if the thing they had agreed upon two months past had changed into something else, now that it had turned real; if a man did speak, his voice rang thinly while the others stared at him as if he spoke in a foreign tongue. After a time Freeman took over the floor, urging them all to faith and steadfastness, reminding them what they worked toward; he spoke of his dream of a village full of homespun-clad wives and daughters. He pointed to Alice, to Alice’s wheel, to the neatly folded length of dimity “fresh off the widow’s loom.” He raised his mug to the widow and Alice, to the other men’s wives and daughters, to the king, and for each toast the table followed him. When the men spilled out into the night they seemed livelier, and Alice didn’t put it all to the cider.

The big excitement for the women, however, was Sears. He paused at the door, pointed to the length of cloth, and said, “Are you selling?”

“Indeed,” the widow answered.

Sears turned to Freeman. “Test the waters.”

“Yes, yes,” Freeman said. “Fine thinking.”

The widow said, “Three pounds ten.”

THE WIDOW GAVE
Alice two and six out of Sears’s money; three days after the sale she sent her to the store to see if the cloth had sold. As Alice walked by the big house nearest the millpond she saw the girl Jane coming out of the door with a sack in her hand. At the store she found the dimity uncut on Sears’s shelf, and Alice had something of a struggle to remember that it had only been three days, that the non-importation agreement wasn’t two weeks old.

On her way out of the store she found the boy readying to come in, with the sack she’d last seen in the hands of his sister.

He said, “I come on an errand for my mother. Allspice, three ounces. A pint of salt. Cloves.”

Alice said, “Oh.”

As he said nothing more, she added, “Good morning,” and moved toward home.

The widow took the news of the unsold cloth with a short nod and climbed the stairs to the loom to lay a web for a piece of check. Alice returned to her spinning.

AROUND THE TIME
of the unsold cloth Alice’s stomach began to grow unsettled, and with the taste of the bile came, at last, the truth of her situation. She was with child, and once the widow discovered it, she would be sent away, no matter whether Freeman ordered more clothes or Sears bought cloth, or the non-importation plan took hold. This was the thing Alice knew as she now knew the widow’s loneliness or Freeman’s smile; this was a shame no woman would willingly keep under her roof, and Alice feared the discovery of her shame far greater than she feared the horror of bearing a bastard child.

The next week the widow sent Alice back to the store; when she saw the empty shelf where the dimity had been she didn’t believe; she walked the whole store round till Sears said to her, “You tell the widow. I’ll take more if she has it.”

“Would you like a check, sir?”

“A check? Yes, a check too. And the dimity.”

When the widow clapped Alice’s face between her hands at the news, Alice’s excitement was so great she came close to forgetting. Even Freeman beamed at her, but Alice understood the cloth meant more to him than the money the women had earned; it meant the non-importation plan had indeed begun to take hold. He went out and returned with a fine goose; the widow rung its neck, plucked its feathers, spitted it, and returned to her loom.

THE WIDOW’S FLOOR
began to collect more litter and the garden more weeds as the women extended their hours at wheel and loom, working as long as the light held. The days had already begun to shorten, and the view outside Alice’s window was now deep and thick with the full colors of summer, the air heavy with the scent of honeysuckle, manure, and, always, ocean.

Alice felt always overstuffed; her stomach grew more troublesome; at night she snuck downstairs to steal bread to settle it down. Her dreams remained full of swollen black things that burst out of her from all her openings, sometimes suffocating her, sometimes beating her with pokers, sometimes lying on her like a Verley.

Freeman came and went, and the boy Nate came, each time exchanging one of Freeman’s books for another, books by men named Coke and Bacon and Fortescue, until one day Freeman held before him, instead of a book, a new pamphlet written by James Otis.

Freeman made to hand the pamphlet to Nate but snatched it back and flipped into its pages, his excitement too great to be borne in silence. “You must listen to what he says here, Nate. ‘The end of government being the
good
of mankind points out its great duties: it is above all things to provide for the security, the quiet, and happy enjoyment of life, liberty, and property.’” Freeman ruffled more pages. “And here. ‘The people certainly never entrusted any Parliamentary body with a power to surrender their liberty in exchange for slavery.’” Another page. “Ah, Alice, hearken as you wear away your fingers; this is for you: ‘No British manufactures can be paid for by the colonists. What will follow? One of these two things, both of which it is in the interest of Great Britain to prevent. One, the northern colonists must be content to go naked and turn savages. Or two, become manufacturers of linen and woolen cloth themselves, which will be very destructive to the interests of Great Britain.’”

Freeman crossed to the wheel and leaned over Alice, holding the page in front of her face. “Do you see this, Alice? According to Otis’s calculation, if the colonies were forced to manufacture one suit of clothes per person per year, the cost to Great Britain and Ireland would be two million pounds per annum.
Two million pounds.
By God, I must read this to the widow.”

Freeman bounded up the stairs, leaving the boy to stand alone with Alice, his eyes fixed on his shoes. After a time he said, “He makes a fine argument.”

Alice was so surprised to hear him speak that she assumed Freeman had just returned. She looked up and saw the boy’s eyes fixed on her for a moment only before they flew up to the ceiling, but from that position he managed to repeat, “Do you not think he makes a fine argument?”

“Do you speak of Mr. Otis or Mr. Freeman?”

“Mr. Otis. Although where one differs from the other I’m sure I can’t say.”

“Mr. Freeman does seem to hold a great love for Mr. Otis’s words.”

“But what if his words are wrong? I mean to say—” The boy stopped there, but it had been such a fine lot of words for the boy, that Alice tried to think of something to say in the way of encouragement. Knowing herself unequal to the subject of politics, she tried another.

“When do you begin at Harvard College?”

“Michaelmas.”

“Why, not two months, then.”

The boy seemed to have no further words on the subject, and so Alice decided to leave him be, but after a time he surprised her again by asking, “Where do you come from?”

Alice repeated the lie she’d told Freeman. “Boston.”

“I’ve lived the whole of my life in this village.”

“But you go away to college now. At Cambridge, is it?”

“Yes, at Cambridge.”

The idea of Cambridge seemed to cast him into a gloomy silence. At that moment Freeman returned, which was lucky, because the boy had now dispensed with both Otis and their geographies, and Alice didn’t think he had it in him to take up a third subject.