My Name is Resolute (43 page)

“No, but you and your father must come, too. If you sleep in the woods you will be all night in the storm.”

“Would not be the first time,” Jacob said. “Or, we have the goat shed.”

“Please. I cannot bear the smell you would wear. Goody bade us come,” I said.

“You have no fear of staying with us, then?”

My hand flew to my mouth to hide my shock. “Oh. It cannot be. Goody goes abroad during storms and we would be alone. I know not what to do.”

“Bundling board?” Cullah suggested, his eyes merry.

My face must have glowed like an ember, for his flushed dark, too. Cullah followed me to where Jacob waited uneasily at my doorway. He had stowed his tools inside and barred it. “I’ve made sure the loom will stay dry, Miss Talbot. She’s made off with your cooking spider and half the haunch you’d put in. If we’re to eat this night, we’d better follow the crone.”

Without thinking, I laid my hand upon his wrist, hard and muscled as a horse’s leg, saying, “Goody is naught but kind to me, as are you. Please do not disparage her.”

Jacob gave a wan smile, and patted my hand with his other one. “Maybe, as you say, the townspeople respect her because they fear her. Ah, well. Let us go to her.”

As we made our way, the rain held off though the clouds lowered and darkened. Goody fretted in her first room, tossing about blankets. I saw she’d been trying to arrange one to hang in the midst, as if to create a separate place for privacy. “Aha! You’re here. Woodsman, have you got a nail?” Jacob searched his pouch and came up with one. Goody said, “Don’t gape at me, man. Put this blanket here so’s our miss may have a place to sleep. You men will be there by the door and she will have this side.”

We ate our supper as the storm brewed, sharing her good bread, so light it seemed meant for some royal personage. At first we all stayed quiet, the men intent on cleaning up every last drop in the pot. Then Goody laid out cheese and apples. Thunder rolled across the sky like a cannonball across a deck. Her hands trembled. At length she said, “That is all I can do for you. Sleep if you can. I must go. The wind. The wind comes. And the voices. The fairies will not let me stay.”

Jacob stood holding his arms forth, barring the door with his body. “Stay with us, lady. We will help you fight them. Banshees or fairies, the devil himself, whatever it is that comes for you. Then mayhap you will be freed from them.”

Her cry was terrible, rending my soul with memories of being on ship. “No! Did you bring them here to torment me?” she aimed at me. “Are these the ones, these men, be they changelings come in disguise?”

I stood, too. “La, no. Goody, these are the woodsmen come to fix my little house, the one you gave to me. We accepted your offer of safe harbor while the storm rages. Please stay with us.”

The old woman shrank inside her clothes, until she had none of the form or vitality we had just seen. I worried she was indeed the changeling she claimed she feared. At once a crack of thunder overhead affected her as if it bore grapeshot; the contortions of pain on her face grew so dire I feared her death.

Cullah stepped toward his father. “Let her go if she must, Pa. She is compelled.”

“’Tis only thunder, Goody,” coaxed Jacob. “’Tis the Lord throwing stones at bad angels. The wind is but His wrath, clearing ghosts from the trees.”

“They’ll come for me,” she whimpered. “If I am near a fire or hearth, they’ll come. Out of every nook and shadow.”

“Light candles,” I said. “Have you more candles? We shall stay with you all night. Light lamps, light candles, and we will block the hearth with charms and prayers.”

“There are not enough candles in all of Christendom. I have no fear of the road, only this hearth. Open the door to me in my own house, you brigand!” A gust blew against the house, shaking the shutters in their dogs. Lightning filled the room for a moment with blue, illuminating even the motes in the air; the cannon roar of thunder deafened me and something like an inhaled breath snuffed every flame, all but the fire in the grate. Goody picked up the long-handled fork she called a tormentor from the crane and held it at Jacob as if to run him through. Jacob moved not at all. Cullah slid his feet noiselessly toward me so that he was but a foot away, and leaned on the table with one arm as casually as if it meant nothing, but I read the intent in that strong arm stretched before me. He meant to keep her and her weapon from me. I said, “Dear Goody, please tell us what you fear. We may help you.”

She howled as if she were a wolf over a killed deer. The sound faded to a moan that wove itself into the wind as it howled through the eaves of the house. “Let me go! You cannot stop them. They know what I have done. They made a changeling of my babe, new as it was; in the midst of a storm they took her. I knew it was they. I only held her to the fire a little to chase them away, to make the fairies leave her and return her to me. She cried out in an unholy voice, so used was she by them. I don’t know, I don’t know!” Her voice trailed off and she covered her head with her arms. Then she drew in a strong breath with a shriek. “I don’t know why it happened. I dressed her in white. I offered them gold and rosemary. Gave the babe hairwort and periwinkle. Oh, but I could find no dog’s head! I called the chants and charms until I was hoarse but she would not stop her changes. Only a little more fire, a little more, I thought. They caused the dress to catch fire. Abigail! Abigail. The fairies took her breath away in the fire. Now they’re coming for me. In the winds and rain, they chase me, trying to get the one that leaped from the fire to my heart—”

With that, she knocked Jacob a strong whack on the knee with the tormentor and threw it wild across the room. As he bent to rub his knee, she thrust herself past him. The door swung on its hinges, banging into place. I rushed to it and opened it, Jacob and Cullah behind me. Leaves blew in as if borne on fairy wings, like the souls of hundreds of duppies intent upon populating the house. Lightning flashed about the yard and sky as one, as if the storm had sat upon the ground before us.

“I’ll go for her,” Jacob said.

“No,” I countered. “Leave her be. She had better run.” I felt ill, as if I could cast up my food, stating, “She put her child in fire.” Nothing I had ever known could compare. No Jamaican, African, or Guinean chant required such. Neither Protestant nor Catholic. I stared at the door, my brow furrowed, my chin taut with unspent tears. We watched the rain begin now, gentle for but a moment, then a torrent from on high engulfed the world before us. None of us could speak. At last the rain came aslant, and we shut the door. “Lock it not,” I said and turned to them. “She may return before daybreak if the storm stops.” I mopped my face upon my sleeve.

We made beds, honoring the blanket Goody had hung, though I slept in my clothes, awake long after the men’s snores rattled dust out of the thatching. I placed a knife from the worktable under my pallet. Whether I feared Cullah or his father, or Goody Carnegie more, I could not have said. I wished I had stayed in my own tiny place, tucked under the false roof over my loom.

My loom. My cloth. My home. Was this my home, this terrible place?

CHAPTER 19

October 3, 1736

Goody did not return the next morning. We left as soon as it was light to see if aught needed care at my place. Since it was still raining that evening, I fed her geese and chickens, and she did not come home then, either.

Jacob and Cullah slept at Goody’s house that night. I slept alone in mine. All those days and weeks before they had arrived, I had little noticed the lack of other human beings there. Then with the rain, I felt closed in, confined as if in the cattle hold on the ship. Jacob and Cullah so far away. There was nothing they could do in the rain, for certain, yet I missed them.

Rather than my usual singing, I wept as I worked. It was as if all the sadness, all the lost people of my life, came to my mind’s eye in somber dirge. I felt so alone. Still, my hands worked as if they belonged to the loom and I merely oversaw them. The rain did not stop for three days. The men returned every afternoon in the downpour, to report that Goody was still gone, to see that my temporary shelter was still holding, and as Jacob said, “To be sure that I was not carried off by salvages or beasts.”

The morning of the third day, a knock at my door stopped my hands. I had my hand on the latch to open it before I realized that it might not be Jacob or Cullah, for they had long passed the need to knock, and usually just opened it with a call to make sure I was not in a stage of undress. I was most surprised to find eight black-frocked men under spread cloaks. “Miss Talbot? We would have a word with thee.”

Eight more people had no room for foothold in this stone house, filled as it was with the loom and the false ceiling. Four came in, one squeezed himself out of the rain at the door, and three peered over his shoulders. They were the men from the town who had met me when I first came, missing, of course, Selectman Roberts, but adding one in his position, the newly made selectman, Mr. Jones. They had heard, and would tell me not from whom, that I was living alone in the woods with two men not my relatives, in the employ of the devil spinning gold out of flax. I could happily report their missing men were at the Carnegie house, and put on my cloak to take them there to show them.

At Goody’s house I was relieved to see her, ragged as a beggar but sitting between Jacob and Cullah, drinking tea from a cup by her fire. The men spoke to each other, satisfied that no illicit behavior had taken place here. I had to wonder what had caused this sudden interest in the condition of my integrity yet I was far too busy to tarry over it. As the men were finished with their inquisition, they bid us good day.

At the end of the path from Goody’s door to the road, one I remembered as Mr. Considine turned and said, “You understand, the committee cannot allow unrighteous action within the reaches of the town? ’Tis bad enough that Goodwife Carnegie has given you her property, but that she holds with old ways. Witchcraft and transport with the devil follow those who do. It was only, Miss, that some sea captain had been asking after your whereabouts. Wallace Spencer declared to us that you were of the highest virtue, and that it did not mean what we took it for. We had to be sure.”

“A sea captain? Who? When?” August had found me! My spirits soared but the man simply shrugged. “I have witnessed no devilment except her own sorrow affecting Goody Carnegie, but I assure you, sir, I hold no ill will toward you for your concern on my behalf.”

“Good day, then.”

“Do you know anything more of the sea captain?” I called toward his back.

“See that you attend church more regularly, Mistress,” was all he said.

In Goody’s house, as we baked and ate, we chatted about the silliness of that visit. She called me Abigail twice. As we spoke, two men, not the ones before me, kept coming into my thoughts to interrupt my speech. Wallace had defended my honor? Yet, he had left me because he thought I had none. And then, the sea captain. Who could it be but August? August, come for me at last. My heart swelled. Laughter came easily. Birds sang and my spirits rose on their melodies until I felt as if I enveloped all before me.

I looked upon Cullah, speaking with his father and Goody. What a bonny young man he was. His eyes sparkled when he laughed, as eagerly as they flashed like flint when he was angered. His hair was as unmanageable as mine and his father laughingly said something about his last having cut it with a broadaxe. I could barely hope my spindly brother had grown to such a good height and broad shoulder. When August came, I would make him a fine linen shirt just to fit him.

When at last the rain stopped and the world outside was a pit of tarlike mud, there was no work to be done with the wood wet and swollen, Jacob declared. He told me they would make a trip to Boston town for hinges and iron-worked handles for the doors. I asked if we could go together.

I took my cloth from the loom, forty yards of fine gold-white linen. I had thirty-three yards of good wool and fifty yards of fine wool. I wrapped my linen carefully in layers of wool, and folded the woolens within sacks of tow. We left in the early morning mist, a fog so thick and cool that the air swam before us as we moved through lowlands by the marsh on the road to Boston.

To ready for the trip I had folded my skirt up and held it with small ties of yarn, hidden in pleats and folds, covering my petticoats with an outer skirt made of roughest sacking that, when in town, could be folded up and tied. The sky was clear, but as we trudged through a world of mud as I could never have imagined, the road so cut with the travelers and wagons and slow going for all, the travel was too much labor to talk or sing as before. I pined for the seacoast and home. Nearing the coast I could sense the difference in the air; albeit grimed with the presence of so many people, it still held the smells of the shore.

Stopping at a pathway between houses, I folded up the mud-splattered sackcloth, let out the yarn, and dropped my better skirt over the sacking. I was proud of this linen, finely woven by my own hand and stitched in good style. Plain in design, but not without ornament. I had taken care, though I had done it with so little color available to me, the frills and embroidery in natural colors but intricate patterns made a statement I thought elegant simplicity. No Quaker garb, this.

At Barnabus’s shop I sold my woolen for silk thread. I sold my linen for an alabaster vial of indigo, dyes of black and crimson, plus twice as much fine linen tow. I put my coin, nearly ten pounds in value, in my stockings. When I required Jacob to go to the wharves to see if any had left word from my brother August, he was not pleased to do it, but we did walk there. Now little was left of my notes, the ink faded almost away. One was missing. Could I dare hope someone had found it and knew the writing, knew August Talbot and showed him? Might we meet him on the road?

Jacob shadowed me as if my safekeeping were his sole charge. I asked him if we could call at Lady Spencer’s home. I meant to renew myself to Lady Spencer, to ask her to speak to her acquaintances about August, and failing that, whether she knew of someone traveling to the Indies to whom I could apply as companion.