My Name is Resolute
Read My Name is Resolute Online
Authors: Nancy E. Turner
Tags: #Fiction - Historical, #18th Century, #United States, #Slavery, #Action & Adventure
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
MY NAME IS RESOLUTE. Copyright © 2014 by Nancy E. Turner.
All rights reserved.
For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Laura Klynstra
Cover photographs: Boston, from the ship-house © by W. J. Bennett/Library of Congress; fabric © Genotar/
Shutterstock.com
; panel © wanchai/
Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN: 978-1250036599 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1250036582 (e-book)
e-ISBN: 978-1250036582
First Edition: February 2014
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
This book is dedicated to Jackson Bracht,
to Martin Richard, Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi, and Officer Sean Collier, killed in the second Boston Massacre, April 15, 2013,
and to all, whether their acts be great or small, who ever have stood or ever shall stand fast in the face of tyranny and injustice.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Were it not for the encouragement from, patient rereading by, and good advice of brilliant writers and beautiful friends Bonnie Marson and Jennifer Lee Carrell, I would never have heard Resolute tell me her story as you find it here. My agent, the late John A. Ware, provided helpful feedback along the way, along with a line-by-line check as one of his last acts. My husband, John, went with me through the ups and downs of creating such a lengthy work, supporting every decision along the way, trudging the hills of Boston and the vales of New England, carrying the apple cider doughnuts necessary for intensive research. And, of course, my great thanks and appreciation go to Thomas Dunne of Thomas Dunne Books; my editor, Marcia Markland; her assistant, Kat Brzozowski; and copy editor Ragnhild Hagen for attention to detail above and beyond the call of duty. For the first time ever, I have included a bibliography at the end of a novel. It is not to be taken lightly, for those wonderful authors have recorded in their works much that is both fascinating and largely forgotten, and which should be read and relished as much as any fictional account of the world past.
CONTENTS
Glossary and Pronunciation Guide
Proclamation regarding linen and woolen goods … of use to the enemy:
I am informed there are large quantities of goods … which, if in the possession of the rebels, would enable them to carry on the war.
And, whereas I have given notice to all loyal inhabitants to remove such goods from hence, and all who do not remove them, or deliver them to your care,
will be considered abettors of the rebels.
You are hereby authorized and required to take into your possession all such goods as answer this description … And, you are to make inquiry if any such goods be secreted in stores, and you are to seize all …
—General William Howe, Commander in Chief of the British Army in America, March 10, 1776
CHAPTER 1
Two Crowns Plantation, Jamaica—September 30, 1729, by the old reckoning
Never step over a lighted candle. If you do, the flame she rise and the Shush-shush come and take you.
Gumboo.
I used to laugh when my favorite person on this earth, Old Poe, furrowed her brow and whispered that like a singsong rhyme, then put her finger against her lips, saying, “Hush, now, child. Don’ tease de devil, now, child.” When I heard Ma say it just now across the supper table, all fine and glowing with porcelain and crystal, and me nowhere near a candle other than those high above in the chandelier, it made me run cold, deep in my bones. There were few things in the life of a young girl wearing her first long skirts more treacherous than a candle on the floor. I held a picture I had drawn in India ink on heavy paper. A drip had formed at the bottom edge, pulling the shoe on one of the figures to unnatural length. My eyes went from my drawing to Ma, to Uncle Rafe. He had just invited me to sit upon his knee and show it to him.
My sister Patience had called me to dinner many minutes earlier and I had ignored her summons to put some finishing touches on it that were now ruining the picture. It depicted two little girls, one white, one black, holding hands and running across the white-sand beach. Their faces smiled quite cunningly, I thought. The figure of my dear Allsy in the picture held up an apple, precious fruit shipped here from far away, the last apple we shared, the danger of it so like one of my favorite stories in which a princess sleeps for a thousand years after a single bite. I had drawn crowns over Allsy’s and my heads, as if she and I were princesses.
Uncle Rafe slammed his tankard of rum on the table boards, and said, “Aye. A girl’s petticoats catch fire soon enough. Tender as tinder.” He laughed and winked at Ma, his face all bright and sweating in a way that made me push his cup and plate over into his lap. I stuck out my chin, thinking old Rafe did not know aught about a fiery petticoat. Uncle Rafe roared and hollered, “God’s balls!”
I may have been ten years old but I knew Rafe was not my real uncle, and that Pa’s voice got thin and Ma’s hands trembled when he was in the house. I stood and stuck out my tongue just as Pa came into the dining room, buttoning his vest, with Patience and our brother, August, following him. He looked from Uncle Rafe to Ma and to the mess on Rafe’s pants and me standing there with hellfire in my eyes.
I am old, now, wizened, some might say. I will tell you how I came to
this
place from that potent evening so long ago and so far across the oceans. The day after I was born my parents named me Resolute. Pa said it gave me an aspect of solemnity and perseverance, which are pretty things for a child with a sanguine humor. It was a good name for a girl, Ma always added, and there was nothing wrong with a girl being confident and ruddy. A boy could grow to “make a name for himself,” but a girl needed a special one from birth.
I knew all about fire. I had been playing with Allsy when we were both but six years old and my family had been on the West Indies island of Jamaica for the same six years. Allsy and I had been hiding in the priest’s hole, up the steps behind the fireplace. I brought two cakes and an apple for us to share and she carried a burning candle, placing it on the floor. I jumped over it. As I did, my petticoats made the flame bob and nearly go out. The edge of my skirt got a brown place and we held it between us, curious, as the spot grew and grew. A yellow tongue of flame suddenly burst from it, licked at us and burned my fingers. Allsy slapped her hands upon it and crushed out the flame. She winced, but made no sound; putting her hands over her mouth, she made the sign of the cross as long black shadows of us spun around in the stair tower like ghosts dancing.
We held our breaths. We laughed. Hand in hand, we climbed up to the widow’s walk on the highest part of the house, where we could see far and wide across the ocean. In the distance, storms sometimes carried on all day, lightning dancing upon the water against a backdrop of gray roiling clouds like a silent mummer’s play, never a stray wind ruffling our hair. We watched, hoping for the rise of a mast that might mean cloth or shoes or more of Ma’s precious goblets made of real glass. After we got tired of mocking seagulls squealing at each other, we shared a cake and took turns eating the apple.
I had stepped over a candle and nothing had happened. I thought we were safe. But five days later, I took fever. The sixth day, Allsy did, too. The Shush-shush, Old Poe’s name for the devil or death or something that you must not say out loud, something bad and haunted, he came whilst I lay afevered. I retched and I itched, covered with smallpox. I cried and Ma brought cold rags for my head, and after two weeks I got up. Allsy must have been too close to me in that stairway. As I jumped over that lit candle, the old devil reached for me and caught Allsy. While I was too sick to know, Pa and Old Poe wrapped her in white gauze and laid my heart’s friend in a grave.
Old Poe caught it and died, too, after two days of sickness. Cost Pa £15 to replace her. That meant nothing to me. Talk of pounds and crowns and sixpence went on all the time in Pa’s office at the side of the good parlor. What mattered to me was that Old Poe knew how to make a lap for me to sit upon, knew more stories than I could ever remember—some of them including two fine wee girls just like Allsy and me—and knew how to wrap a sore finger with potash and brown paper and kisses.
I never told Ma or Pa that it was my fault Allsy died. I had escaped Old Scratch’s claws. Ma said it is because I have something special to do. What is a girl going to do? Embroidery and arithmetic, that’s what I get. I wondered someday if the devil might wake up and see he got the wrong girl, what will happen then?
All my days I had heard things about England where Pa was born. Even more about Scotland, Ma’s homeland, the two of them united into one country by that time. I knew about how my brother, August, used to wait with Pa until a dark night and watch the farmers light gorse when the village had a festival. How Patience, my only sister and ten years older than I, had loved the son of a lord, a lord who faithfully waited on Anne the Queen’s favor. Anne was a Stuart and a Tory through and through, and our father, being of both Tudor and Plantagenet lines with Radclyffe blood thrown in, made Patience a politically unsuitable bride for his son. So, on recommendation of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, Her Highness and His Lordship found that the Crown was in great need of Pa to mind a plantation in the Indies.
This is where I was born and all around us is all I have ever known, fields of sugarcane and coffee, slaves to tend the cane fields, and then, wearing starched white linen, to bring in the roast chicken at dinner, the smell of the sea and the soil and the perfume of flowers. Throughout the night, breezes off the mountains brought the rhythm of drums from the slave quarters. Sometimes if I kept quite still I heard singing. I imagined their happy world filled with music. I wished I could join them.
By day I did my lessons in the schoolroom on the top floor where the window blinds were all that kept a girl from dreaming of a home she had never known beyond the sea, for the wind off the ocean seemed to pine for England, to mourn her like a lost promise, the way Patience weeps at night for her lost love and lost future marriage. I pressed her to tell me how she could have threatened the son of a lord with marriage if she herself had been but ten years old. She told me that the path between our house and his was a common one, but a hedge had grown at a certain shady secluded point where they had used to meet together and play. He was two years older—a vision of manliness, she said—though I pictured a boy of twelve being spindle-legged and having great flopping feet. Such keen friends they had become that they spoke to each other of promises and everlasting love, and when he told his father, that was that. She kept a lock of his hair, near black as pitch, in a box along with a little paper he had written upon with their names entwined by something rather like a crow carrying a twig although Patience says it is a dove holding a ribbon.