My Name is Resolute (39 page)

She smiled and turned her eyes to the cheese before her, pushing it on her plate with one finger until it made a complete circuit of the cracked old dish. “To watch your eyes. I saw no greed. No grasping. I saw you were but stunned and perhaps unbelieving. If evil led your thoughts, I could have changed my mind with no more word than that I was yet mad when I said it.”

Goodwife Carnegie intended that I sleep in my new “house” yet I could not. The house was home to many creatures with which I had no intention of sharing my bed. I slept that night under the great tree by the door of the stone house, placing boughs for shelter and a hiding place. I vowed I would sleep as the Indians had made me do, glad the night was warm, glad I smelled no bears. Only in the morning light did I marvel to myself that I had slept deeply, unafraid, unbothered by dream or squirrel.

My breakfast was an apple Goody had sent with me when I left her home. My one complaint was that it was too small. I started in with the old broom handle, pulling back vines and rubbish, dragging everything out of doors where I could sort through it to see if there was aught that might be of use. In the corner by the old bedstead, I found a rotted pair of boots. I got to the front corner and took away a nasty vine full of thorns that had grown over a rotted woven blanket, which seemed to have been stitched with padding in it, just as Ma had made the petticoat. When I moved it, a rat darted at my ankles, clawed at my skirt a moment, and I shrieked in terror that the thing would climb my clothing. It tangled one foot in my stocking as it struggled to get away, and I swung the broomstick at it. The rat ran from me and out the door into the light as I hit my anklebone with the stick. Grimacing, I used the stick to raise the blanket.

A spinning wheel.

I pushed away dust and leaves, dragged the thing to the center of the room, and pressed the pedal. It gave an awful groan and the leather strap fell away. I pulled it into the light. The thing was old, painted black, decorated with delicate lines of red with tiny green leaves. All was sound except for the spindle, which some animal had gnawed, yet it still went into its place, still could hold wool. A spindle could be gotten. No doubt Goody must have forgotten and would want it. I sighed, for far more than the land she’d tempted me with, this was something I knew I could use to my advantage. Later, she helped me replace the leather strip that moved the wheel, and clapped her hands when I pushed the pedal. This was not my home, I repeated with each step.

The next day Goody and I started at sunup and walked all the way to Boston. We arrived when the sun was well overhead and the day had become warm and misty as a baker’s kitchen, with a threat of impending rain. We found a jeweler. I spent many minutes eyeing his stock, memorizing his prices and wondering what he might give for what I had brought. I sold three more gold rings for ten pounds and seven. One of the brooches from Patey’s apron was one I remembered Ma wearing. A sapphire, as crystal blue as a Jamaican lagoon, surrounded with gold and small clear stones that might be diamonds. I would not part with it. The other brooch meant nothing at all to me, so that I sold for another sovereign. Altogether, I had enough to get a passage home for two people, if I could find another ship sailing there, another captain willing to take passengers, and a person willing to travel with me as an escort.

I persuaded Goody to go with me to the harbormaster’s offices where I had left notes for August. In one of them, the paper was missing. I asked a man there if someone had taken it, and he shrugged as if I were no more than a squawking gull.

Goody said to me, “You put them notes there? You writ them in your hand?”

“Yes.”

“Then we need more notes. We need to get a woodsman and a thatcher.”

“I need to think,” I said. She had granted me a miserable hovel in which to live, but I did not want to spend my few coins to live there. I had no kettle, no cup, not a knife or a trencher. No bed but pine boughs. I rubbed my head, not because it pained me but just to close my eyes from the sight of her for a moment. I also needed to believe that perhaps my brother had taken the note.

Goody Carnegie said, “Oh, let us have some cider and a bite. We’ll find a nice place and share some victuals, you and I, and talk of all that you must do. I brought bread and cheese.” We bought a flagon of ale, rather than cider, and it was fair stuff for I liked it better than some I had tasted before.

She gulped down the ale and smacked her lips. “Ah, look at them all. Staring at me as if I was the devil himself.”

I looked about the room. “I am sure we are not noticed here,” I said.

“They’re lookin’. I feel it. Lookin’ under their eyes, down their noses, up their sleeves. Ha.”

A shudder of desperation came over me. If she were to appear to be drunk in public the innkeeper would toss us on the street like tinkers. I had to turn her speech to something other. “Please tell me what it was you meant to say earlier. You said you would tell me ‘what to do.’”

“I’ll whisper so’s they can’t hear us, dearie. Now. You got a place to live and you’ll come to me and learn some to cook if you don’t know. What can you make?”

I thought. “Posset. Hasty pudding. Boiled chicken. Mixed eggs. Roasted goat.”

“Ah? I love goat. Now. With what could you earn your bread?”

“Spinning, of course. Sewing. Embroidery. But any woman does that. Weaving.”

“Weaving and spinning they do, also. But not fine. Can you do it fine?”

“Yes.” I did not want to do that, nor to spend my precious coins for a wheel or loom. I wanted never to touch another wheel or loom.

As the ale affected her, her light accent deepened into a brogue. “There’s a look on your face, dearie. What would you do, lass, if you spent all you had to get there and dinna find what you were searching for? Even if you did not return here, how would you live? Do you think the only thing you must do is arrive, and someone will take care of ye?”

“My mother.”

“Aw. I tell you, that is not enough. You ken yourself she is not at the plantation. She may well be somewhere, earning a living or kept at another fine house, but you cannot assume it will be so for you. You must ha’e more than your passage. You must ha’e a boon. A way to preserve to yourself a life o’ yours. A means to go on if all comes to fail. That’s where a woman falls. That Mistress Roberts, what could she ’a done if she had a boon put by? Buy up her
own
house and not be turned out, that’s what. Give yourself the time to put by more and enough to go on, so that you are not put out. Where would I be if not for that? A woman is a fool that lives from penny to farthing and n’er looks to the possibility of loss.”

“Wallace told me when it came to business to mind my tatting.”

“Ah. A flapjack for his tatting!”

People did turn then, staring at the source of their disturbance. I whispered, to pull her closer by having to lean in to listen to me. “Is it then ladylike for a woman to earn money? I trow my pa swore to me I should never earn a ha’penny.”

“Wherefrom are you? Did you never struggle to survive? Did you unhinge your wits, and let the wind blow you where it lists? No. You made up your mind to go on. I’m telling you. A woman’s business is business. Think about what you’ll do if all your plan to go home comes to naught. I have given you this place because my own bairny cannot have it. The Crown may tax it out from under you. If you don’t think of these things you will be on the street a vagabond, a whore, a fortune-teller, or drowned for a witch if you make your means by aught else. Even if she marries, a woman must know of thrift and house. Now, tell me, what would you do to keep yourself?”

“Could a woman make a living as a weaver?”

“There are those. Find a way to add more color than what is available on the ships from France. You will have to risk the coin you have to find out.”

My mind raced like a shuttle flying through the warp, seeing designs on the future. “I will save back enough for my passage and a little more, if all else fails. I will write and hope for word from my brother. I will spend what I must to keep myself.”

A smile spread upon her face as if a sun rose in her eyes. She dropped the fog of ale and madness. “That’s my girl. Let us work, now.”

We set about making out notices—just two—one we would place on the town board here in Boston, one to be nailed on a post set near the crossroads in Lexington. We walked to the craftsmen’s road, a bustling place, noisy with the sounds of men’s work: anvils clanging, a wooden board falling and someone cursing it, the rumble of a sawmill. Goody lifted her nose and smelled the air. “Would you know a dyer’s if you smelled it?”

We asked at the woodsman’s shop if any knew of a thatcher. The thatcher was working so we left word with his wife, so large with child she looked round as a fish barrel. She knew a woolery where we might find wheels. I bought all the wool hanks they had—filling two bushels, plus two bushels of well-hackled linen. I purchased a flax wheel, and we took the small parts in a crate, the rest we had to carry. Goody and I lugged the bushel baskets, the crate, and the wheel. After we had walked three miles, a young man came upon us from behind. He offered to carry the load for us, and at last added, “I’m plenty strong. Your grandmother is old,” said he. “She is weary from carrying this load.”

“No,” I said. “For you could as well take my goods and run into the woods, and we could not chase you without losing the rest of it.”

“Go on with you,” Goody Carnegie said. “You heard the lass. We need no help.” When he had gone, she asked, “Why did you turn him away? I am sore tired, carrying these.”

“He asked for nothing in return. If he had said, ‘Give me three farthings to help you get your load to town,’ I would have believed he simply wanted the farthings. No. I believe he wanted to steal from us.”

“You will get along, I see. There’s the girl.”

With luck, two boys came alongside us, carrying between them a loose basket with two squawking geese inside. “Pleasant day, misses,” one boy said. He had a missing tooth in front, and half the other greatest tooth was eaten away with decay. “I’ll take half your load for a shilling. My brother can carry our ma’s geese.” We let him carry the wheel and two bushels, so we had the crate and a bushel to trade between us. The boy left the wheel at Goody’s door, too, not shirking the last steps. I gave him the shilling and Goody gave him an apple.

In a week I had turned the wool and flax to thread, and carried them back to town in one of the baskets. I sold them to the woolery and bought as much as my three baskets could carry plus another basket. I did this for two more weeks, and by the second week of July I had a purse of nearly five pounds. After two more weeks, I asked at the woolery for a loom maker. I was sent back two streets near another wood shop.

The loom maker, who insisted he not be called “sir,” or any salutation other than Barnabus, was a wizened creature who wore a long robe like the priests I had known. His shop was a muddle of pieces, jumbled and confused bits of wire, tools on the floor and on tables, burned-out tapers having waxed everything to the tabletops. Little light came through the blackened windows and balls of some kind of animal hair drifted about the floor. “My wife of thirty years has died. These three days has she lain in her grave. I can do nothing. Nothing. Please go away.”

Goody said, “Had she been sick a long spell, Barnabus?”

“A year to the day she died. One year. I have done nothing, all these many months. I’m no weaver. Now if you will leave an old man to his grief? Go down the street to Vicksley’s. He’s no good but he needs the work. He’s got fourteen or fifteen children. Maybe eighteen. Who counts?”

Goody Carnegie looked the more sad and said, “And you have none? Oh, you poor man. Poor man.”

I walked toward the back of the shop while they spoke. There in a small room, a loom such as I had never seen took the whole of it. A passage had been cut through the wall so the weaver could climb through it upon the bench. Another passage existed on the far side where the finished cloth could be taken and new warping placed. It had to have been built in that space. Dim windows filtered light upon a bolt of fine linen, so delicate, so intricate a pattern that it must be for some fine use. I memorized it, the warp in black and gray, the weft in four subtle colors. Raw silver and black, threes on threes, raw golden in twos and tens with a single strand of bloodred crimson splitting the pattern.

Inspiration came as if a moment of prescience had descended upon me. “Barnabus,” I whispered. “Perhaps you can do nothing because this cloth remains unfinished. Perhaps you cannot weave this, for you are the loom maker, not the weaver. I am young but I have been a master weaver for four years. If I finish this cloth you may sell it for a great deal of money. It will allow you to carry on, having your wife’s work completed and off the loom.” I smiled and peered into his eyes. I couldn’t say why I liked this old man. He was balmy with grief, that was true, but I had been so, myself. “No one else you shall meet would be able to finish this linen cloth. Your wife had the skill to make the finest cloth in the New World. I am her second. When it is done I believe you will work again.”

“That was ordered some sixteen or eighteen months ago. Who counts? And she could not work on it at the end. I cannot pay you to do this.”

“You said that you cannot use the loom yourself. If I finish this cloth, would you give to me this loom? It will have earned you a living, it will continue to earn me the same, and it will no longer be filling up this room with its sad reminders of what you have lost. What say you?”

He mumbled something, and then asked, “How long will you take?”

“I will start tomorrow. I ask no money. Only the loom itself.”

Goody’s face beamed with happiness. She clapped her hands softly. “That’s my wee Abigail,” she said.

Barnabus appeared worried, but he said, “I will do this as you ask. We shall see if you arrive on the morrow. We shall see what skill you have. If you ruin this and I have to pull it out, I will not do business with you again. But if you can complete this, I agree that I will take this loom apart and carry it to wherever you direct, and rebuild it there for you. You must have a room large enough for it. Do you?”