My Name is Resolute (54 page)

“Was this the cause for which you sent forty pounds? La, husband. Do not weep. Our lives are good, Cullah. There is corn growing in the garden, our little ones are—”

“Stop! Say nothing more. You will pull ghosts from the trees by saying aloud we have some they want to prey upon here. I have to tell Pa. All our kin are dead. Do not wait up for me.”

“What about your supper?” I asked, thinking that was what he meant.

“I’ll have it with him,” he said, and charged out the door.

Never mind that I had been in this house during many a stormy night. This night, terror struck me as I had not felt in a long time. Moments became hours. I lit candles, three upstairs and three down, to quell my fear. My heart beat so that everything I or the children said was muffled by the pounding of it. The storm began in earnest just as darkness drew in upon us. Though this house was not drafty, the wind came from a different direction, it seemed. An explosion of thunder came with a gust that snuffed every candle. It sent me back in time to being that small girl in the hold of a ship under cannons blasting away. Lightning flashed, for some seconds charging up the room with blue light, then blackening everything beyond what we expected. Benjamin began to cry, and because he did, Barbara and Gwyneth also cried. Brendan made a brave effort to keep his face still, but as I got a taper lit, I saw him turn away from me and wipe at his face with his cuffs. I cleaned the little ones for bed and sent the two older boys upstairs.

If Cullah were here, he would make them jolly, I thought. Cullah and Jacob would tease them and tell them God was beating bad angels with his fists, or blowing ghosts out of the trees. At last, seeing no other way to calm them, I called all the children in with me. Every time they heard thunder I bade them shake their feet to mimic God kicking bad angels out of heaven, and soon their tears became laughter. Grandan slept and soon Barbara did, too. The storm slaked, and the children calmed. The two oldest boys slept. Gwenny stared. “Close your eyes,” I said.

“Where’s Pa?” she asked.

“He’s coming with Grandpa.”

“When is he coming?” she pleaded.

I caught myself. It was as if she, too, knew something was amiss, felt that this strange night could be the end or the beginning of something dark. I smiled and said, “I am sure that with the storm, Grandpa said to him”—I mimicked Jacob’s accent, rolling all the
r
’s to great effect—“‘Cullah me boy, we shan’t go out on a colly-waddler of a night as this one. Just you sit by me fire while I tell ye about a real storm. Let’s see, that was in forty-three. Or was it twenty-three? Well, never mind. That storm was so bad, the wind blew so hard, it blew a stone castle all the way from Jamaica to Lexington. And you know what was in it?’” I paused, for Gwenny had heard the story before.

“A princess?”

“Yes. And do you know who she grew up to be?”

She said, “A knight’s lady, who maked her own clothes and those of her bairnies, jus’ like in the Bible, she work-ed day and night to do it.”

“You know all my stories,” I said, kissing my fingertip and touching her nose with it.

“Tell me again about the little girls running across the roof to see the ocean.”

“The widow’s walk was high up, on the tip-top of the castle. It had a staircase that went through a dark attic and came out on top where the sun was hot and seagulls turned cartwheels all day long.”

“Just like Brendan does?”

“Exactly. Though they were birds and had no such long legs. They put out their wings like this.”

Gwenny stretched out her arms and waved them about. “I want to fly,” she said.

I could not keep the smile in place. A quick image came to mind of all the little tombstones I knew, their carved baby faces couched by feathered wings above engraved names. “It is not in God’s goodwill for people to fly, Gwenny. That is for birds. People have something much more important to do.”

“What? Sewing and numbers and weaving?”

“Perhaps.” I heard the door open below.

Gwenny sat up and said, “Papa!”

I heard no familiar voices. In fact, no voices at all. “No doubt the door simply blew open. Keep quiet and let the other children sleep, now. You should be asleep, yourself. You stay here and I will go and help him and Grandpa off with their wet things. You keep my spot warm, all right?”

“I shall, Ma.”

“Good girl. Bless you, my Gwenny. I will be right back.” Then I left with a single candle, leaving one alight in the room over the heads of our dear little ones. I crept down the stairs holding my breath and trying to make no sound at all. At the foot of it I peered into the parlor. Two large figures crouched before my fire. I spoke no word. My hands trembled at my lips.

One of them straightened up. “Colly-waddler,” he said. “Pure colly-waddler.”

“Jacob?” I whispered, now mindful of the children.

The other man turned. Cullah. “Oh,” I cried, and ran to him, setting the candle upon the table before I flew into his arms. “I was so frightened.”

He smiled down at me, pulling off his cap and cloak. “Now, Resolute, I told you where I was gone. You didn’t expect me to trudge uphill in mud from one little house to my own in the black of night in the middle of a storm, did you?”

“But so long? You could have gone to Boston and back in that time. You terrified the children with talk of ghosts before you left.”

The look on his face changed and he studied my eyes. “You are afraid,” he said. “Poor wife. I terrified you, too.”

Jacob knuckled Cullah in the arm and said, “You’d a done better by her to stay with her during the storm and get me in the morning. There was no reason to rush.”

“A fellow in town was speaking on the corner near the shop where I could hear him the day long. Gave me to fright of the old ways, the fairy ways and the small people, brownies in the shadows, you know. He preached so well I thought the devil was at me.”

I rubbed my forehead, trying to hide my astonishment. “Have you eaten?”

“We did,” Jacob said.

“Well, come up to bed then. We shall have to carry all the children to their beds for they are all in ours.”

After that time, on Cullah’s insistence, Jacob lived with us. I watched my husband change somewhat. He seemed suspicious of everyone and everything outside the circle of our hearth, and began a series of changes to the house. Where there was an ample room, a new wall was built a foot or so away from the old, with shelves and notches in the paneling to lift and move things, so that every square of panel hid a secret box as if his new fears could only be assuaged by building places to hide. Some of them could have hidden one of the children, some were too small to house a thing larger than my hand. On the outside, too, he built an addition that would look to the world as if it were always part of the saltbox house, yet it enclosed a stairwell to the barn. The two of them worked through the rest of the summer on all the little secret places of this house, until it was as honeycombed as the home in which I grew up, in Jamaica.

I asked him to put a siding of rock around the original house where I worked. In it we could store all things of value which might be lost in a fire, such as the deed to this land and our marriage papers. I stored the old tattered petticoats, the pearls, the brooch, and the ruby ring, along with Ma’s other jewels in their caskets on a shelf behind the loom. All I had to do if I wished to wear them was take a piece of wood from the wall which appeared to be a brace. Behind that, a flattened piece of lead flashing could be moved, and it revealed a slot where I could push a narrow stone aside to the little crypt. Before I closed it that first night, with a satisfied smile, I also placed within it thirty-one pounds in gold coin as savings against any need in the winter to come. Cullah and I spent hours devising hiding places for things large and small.

Fall turned early so that by the third week of August we were chilled at night and needing blankets put back upon the beds. I awoke one night in September with a familiar flutter in my belly. I stood and looked out our window upon the full-moon-lit fields below. A child. A sixth child. Oh, la, I thought, and sighed, leaning my head against the panes of glass. And the little one not out of clouties, yet.

From the dark, Cullah’s voice asked, “Resolute? Where are you?”

“Here.”

In a moment he was behind me, his great hands warm on my shoulders. “Can you not sleep?” he asked.

“I felt a babe.”

“Is he not in his cradle?”

“No. Another babe. A new one. I felt the flutter.”

The thrill he used to show was gone, as this was now so familiar, but he smiled as he rested his cheek against mine, wrapping his arms about me from behind as we looked out the window. “I will have to build the tower your ladyship once asked for.”

“Well and aye,” I said, with a tired smile. “This one will come too soon and there will be two in clouties at once.”

“No matter.”

“Not to you. I wash them.”

He patted my arm and led me back to the bed. “It’s time to take in a girl, then. A maid. Apprenticed out, you know, same as with boys. There are likely girls in town. I will ask about for you.”

After he had asked throughout Boston, Cambridge, and Lexington, fate decreed that it was America Roberts came to live at my house. She was the last of the Roberts girls, all her older sisters already married. Her mother was caring still for the two boys until they could be apprenticed, yet her new husband refused money to send them to any worthy professional man, so they would have to be attached to a tradesman.

I lay awake one night, restless at having America in the room we had made for her in the attic. I wondered if she felt as I had when sold to the Haskens. At last, I could lie there no more. I got up, put a wrapper about me, and took a candle up the stairs. At the attic door, barely tall enough for me to go through without lowering my head, I paused and tapped. There was no answer. The girl was asleep. I chided myself on foolish worries. Being with child had often kept me awake with goblins of the mind. I turned on the stoop, just as the door swung inward.

“Yes, Mistress?” she asked.

“I came to see if you are warm enough,” I said. “Sorry if I awakened you. I could not sleep thinking you might be cold up here.”

“As long as I undress quickly, I am warm enough once I have the coverlets on.”

I held the candle up to see her face. “Do you have need of another?”

“No, Mistress.”

“You will tell me, please, if you do? And tell me if any of my children are cross with you, or tease you? I will not have them being unkind or rude. You are not a slave. You shall withstand no ill-treatment in my house. Report it to me at once.”

“Thank you, Mistress.”

“And, America?”

“Yes?”

“I will get another bed warmer that you may use each night.”

“Thank you, Mistress. You are far more kind than, than I had expected.”

“Good night, then.”

I was not a lenient mistress as mistresses go. I bade America clean floors and launder from morn till night, taught her to bake before the hearth and to season meats and puddings, that last with an eye to her fitness as a wife someday. We purchased an extra brass bed warmer, which she could fill with coals any evening she chose to carry it upstairs, and every evening the bed warmers stood waiting their charging by the great hearth like so many muskets waiting for their soldiers to do battle against the cold and damp. In most chores she was compliant, even happy. America could have gone to any home as a maid-of-all-work. I did not ask why it suited her to work in my employ. If ever I thought of my life at the home of her parents, it was with a mixture of thankfulness and sad regret, anger and pity.

CHAPTER 25

October 4, 1746

After the first chill of fall, an Indian summer came upon us, and the balmy days with cool nights, gentle breezes, lifted Cullah’s dark spirits, for he had not been the same since the news of Culloden, worried every night about lurking evil. I tried my best to entertain the family with stories of Jamaica, and was surprised, now that I had an audience, how much I remembered. The colors of the place came back to me as I spoke, and I imagined embroidering with those shades, when I ever had time again to work at my own craft, and just the thought of it filled me with joy.

The next morning being Sabbath, we were up early preparing for the Meeting. Jacob and Cullah went to the field to hitch our wagon to the one plow horse we now owned. America was busy trying to get Barbara’s and Gwyneth’s plaited hair to stay under their caps, for she had not done them well and she kept having to start again.

I put Grandan into new clouties and went to replace my house apron with a clean one. Cullah came through the door. His countenance was ruddy, his eyes flashing. He lowered his brows when he saw my face and pointed to the door at the stairs to the lower room of stone. “It is about a cross.”

I said, “America, take the children out to the wagon.”

“It is a
gumboo
cross,” Cullah said. “They should stay inside the house.”

“Stay in and bar the door,” I told her. When I caught the look on her face, I said, “Ask me no questions. Do as I say.”

“But Mr. Jacob?” America asked.

“Do as you are told,” Cullah commanded her with a voice so low it gave me even greater fear. Then he turned and went ahead of me down the stairs. As I reached the floor, he made sure none of the children or America could hear him before he said, “Soldiers are approaching from Concord. It looks to be at least a dozen. They are armed.”

“Perhaps they are but passing us on their way to Boston.”

“Pa has hidden in the woods. Are you able to proceed to Meeting without me?”

“Of course. But if you wish not to go, we shall all stay here.”

“It would be better for the children not to be here to witness, well, anything.”

“Eadan.” I looked at the fear mixed with determination in his face and said, “I will do as you say, then.” I started up the steps but turned halfway up.

He stood upon my bench and pushed back the panel in the ceiling, then drew out his broadsword and axe. I raced down the few stairs and threw myself against him. “Promise me, husband, promise this, that you will not value your honor and your pride above the life of your children’s father.”