My Name is Resolute (86 page)

Two weeks later we had ten coats made, and as many pairs of breeches and waistcoats in contrasting white linen. It was fine work, with small stitches, and not a pucker would I allow. Even Bertie helped, becoming quite a hand at sewing on buttons. This was a small thing, I knew. There was no way a single small family could clothe an army. What I wanted to do was to just make a few soldiers warm.

During those two weeks, five different sets of travelers came to my door begging food. One group consisted of four young men and one old one. We had already finished our meal, but I invited them inside, and said, “Sirs, I have some hasty pudding in the pot. I will share it with you, but I have nothing else.”

“Give us money, then, that we can buy something in town.”

“We have no money.”

“You have money. This is a big house. There is always money.”

Cullah said, “This house was built big because it housed a large family, and once there was money to build it. It is not so now.”

One of the men sidled past Alice and toward the stairway. He stopped and backed from it, feeling with his hands behind him. Down the stairs came Bertie, the pistol in hand, aimed right at the man’s head. Bertie’s voice had not yet deepened, but when he said, “You leave this house,” they listened to him. “I am but the smallest, and my five brothers wait up the stairs, each bigger than the other, and each one carries a pistol and a musket and sword bigger than the last. If you make it past me you must fight the next man, six of us in total, and that man there is my grandfather who is Cullah MacLammond, the heartiest Highlander who ever lived. Waiting by the door is my uncle, a vicious pirate who scuttled seventeen ships on the high seas and never was caught. He will put a dagger through your liver and pin you to a maple tree so the sap will run across your middle forever.”

The men left my kitchen fast as they could. I barred the door. Alice looked at me, at Bertie, and I stared from him to her, too. Cullah laughed, saying, “The lad has your gift of a sharp tongue and a quick story, my love.” Bertie glowed with pride in himself.

I stared hard at Bertie. “Best mind that tongue. It will cause you trouble, too, if you are not careful.”

Cullah said, “Put the pistol away and come with me. We have rows to hoe and a ditch to dig. Nothing like hard work to build up a boy and still his tongue.”

Bertie’s face fell. I arched my brows. “Go on and dig, Bertie. When you are grown you will thank us for it.”

“That is what old people say when it is most miserable,” he said. I smiled.

“Come on, lad. Blisters and a sore back,” Cullah added, “will make a man hungry for an education.” As they left, Alice and I laughed as we went back to work sewing, and now and then, we laughed again.

Two days later I answered another knock on my door to find Emma Dodsil again standing there, holding a bushel basket topped with boiled eggs. I heard Alice rushing the blue cloth from the room even as I greeted her. “Emma? How nice to see you. Would you come in for some pie?” I dared to glance over my shoulder before I opened the door wider.

“Yes, thank you. I mean, yes, I will come in. But I won’t ask you to share food today. I have come to share other things.” She stopped talking, sat down, faced me, and deliberately touched her bonnet twice. I was not convinced. She said, “Virtue and I have been long married, and all our lives have tried to live above any contempt, above reproach, above rebellion.”

“Very admirable of you, I am sure,” I said.

“Your husband has helped us often, when he can.”

“Cullah is a good neighbor.” I felt hairs on the back of my neck rise. She was leading to something, and I felt I could easily be trapped if I were not circumspect with my words.

“As am I,” she said. “Oh, Mistress Resolute, we feel we must support our neighbors who have done so much for us. Will you not take these things for the rebel militia? I know they might help someone.” She raised the sack with its eggs again, dumping it none too gently on the floor, and this time revealing a stack of shirts and pairs of stockings.

I watched closely as her gaze charted the room. “Take those things to the rebels? Mistress, I am not in the business of outfitting a militia that stands against King George.”

“Neither am I,” she said, with a touch of anger in her tone. “I am in the business of outfitting a militia that stands for my family and lands against a tyrant of a governor. I—I have no use for these stockings and shirts. Do with them what you will. Only know, please, that I am no less a Patriot, and no more a criminal, than any of the other wives who make stockings for people they care about.” Emma dropped the stockings and shirts at her feet, scooped up the sack of eggs, and dropped it into the basket again, then headed for the door. “You’ll see someone gets them?” When I said nothing, she went rather angrily out the door and down the path.

Alice came from the stairs and said, “Mistress?”

“We will see if we can know their sympathies from a source other than her words. Cullah said Virtue is never at the meetings. If he is one of us, we have to find out before I say anything to his wife that will put all of us on a gibbet.” I could imagine a certain number of shirts and stockings, being found in my possession, and placed in the hands of another of our friends, could be enough to hang us all if she were to be plotting.

The next morning I wrapped the coats in layers of old rags. I took Emma’s stockings and shirts, too, but wrapped separately, so that if this were a trap, they were not mixed with my work. I set them into the bottom of the wagon and put a blanket across them and my feet upon them. Bertie drove and Alice sat beside me. Soldiers walked up and down the road in groups of five or six. They were not armed, and paid us no attention, so that when we arrived at John Hancock’s house, I felt confident that all would go well. A butler answered the door, and when I asked to see John, he showed me to a fitted parlor.

“Mistress MacLammond, oh, how good to see you,” John said. “Do you know my friend here? Quite an irascible lawyer. I am forced to entertain him, for I think no one else can stand to do it. Please let me make you acquainted with Mr. John Adams of Braintree.”

A man no taller than I, but stout, stood and bowed. “Good morning, madam,” he said grandly. “Will you have refreshments with us?”

I had heard of him, and it was none too flattering, so I simply smiled. “Good morning, sir. Thank you but I cannot stay. I have people waiting for me. I only came to deliver some goods ordered by August Talbot to be sent here.”

John scratched his head. “Adams, lend a hand here. We shall both prosper by some physical labor, eh?”

So my parcels were carried by the twine around them, one in each hand, by John and John, Alice, Bertie, and myself. As I said farewell, John Hancock kissed my hand and, leaning his head, said, “Mistress MacLammond, your work will serve a mighty purpose. Keep an eye on this fellow here. Mine are the pockets. His are the brains. My regards to your friend Talbot.”

“Mr. Hancock? Are you familiar with all the families who provide supplies for the Patriots?”

“Not really, no.”

“Would you be so kind as to let me know anything you discover about a man and wife, Virtue and Emma Dodsil?”

“Where did you hear those names?”

“They are my neighbors.”

The two men tried to maintain their composure, but I saw John Adams’s eyes flick nervously to John Hancock’s, and he turned as if his attention were caught by a robin whose russet fluttering crossed the window. Hancock smiled and said softly to me, “Dodsil and wife are Tories to the bone.”

“Ah,” I said. “I feared it was a trap. She brought stockings for the militia. I have them hidden in the wagon.”

“Deliver them to the first British soldier you come across, Mistress. No doubt they have something in them of the nature of itching powder or poison.”

Adams pursed his lips and added, “Or a length of rope.”

*   *   *

Alice and I removed our bonnets in my parlor. It had been that simple. This gave me a joyous feeling of being part of something wonderful, and the great relief of having escaped a trap by such a sweet-voiced neighbor.

Late the following night, the sounds of a horse in full gallop stopped just outside our door. A hand rapped. Cullah opened the door. August darted in. “Ressie, put out the candle.”

“Yes, but why?” Without answering, he pulled his horse right into my parlor, straight through the kitchen, and down the narrow passage to the barn. I followed him and yelled, “Take it all the way to the far stall. There are two cows on either side, and the smell will mask a run horse.”

Cullah ran after him, calling over his shoulder, “I’ll tether it. Ressie, you go in the house and sit by the fire as if nothing happened. I’ll watch from the doorway. Tell Alice to hide Bertram.”

August turned, saying, “I’m going into the hidden room. Sweep your floor. Trust no one except my man Nathaniel—do you remember he came with the messages?—or Rupert, unless they give you the word
gumboo
.” Before I could say another word, he crawled behind the stairway panel.

In the kitchen, Alice already had the floor swept and leaned the broom against the chimney just as we heard more horses at a gallop headed this way. I blew out all but one candle, took off my apron and house cap, pulling my hair loose about my shoulders as if I had been ready for bed. Bertie hid at the staircase with Alice. I sat in the settle with a book close to my nose, as if I were too poor to light another candle.

Their words came through the door, “This way. In here.” One of them put his hands around his eyes against the window in the kitchen. I was sure he could see me but I did not look up. A few moments later, they opened the door. “We’re chasing an outlaw, Goodwife. Did anyone come by here? Did you hear a horse? Anyone enter this house?”

I closed the book. I cupped my hand behind my ear and asked, “I am gone deaf, young man, you will have to speak up. Did you say you were raising dust? I should say. Look at this floor!” I looked beyond him to the soldier behind him. “What did he say? Can you not understand English? Now, do not mumble. Is he speaking to me?”

With frustration upon their faces, they left. I waited until I heard horses’ hooves striking the stones in the road before I dropped the bar inside the door.

CHAPTER 38

April 17, 1775

That Monday afternoon, Cullah, Bertie, Alice, and I were sitting in the shade of the flowering apple trees, petals so delicately scented as a whisper drifted about the shadows like lights falling at twilight, when a messenger arrived. He was sent from the governor’s house, with another invitation from Margaret for me to come to tea on Tuesday at four. It was handwritten, folded and sealed with her husband’s seal and a very large glob of wax holding her own. When I opened it and the wax came off, a shilling was pressed under the red wax. In truth, I felt so busy, so exhausted, and so weary of the soldiers in Boston, that I wished to tell her my regrets. But her last line said, “Make me no excuses, dear friend. I shall have no greater joy in my life than the sight of you that day. As a candle warms the night.”

“Terribly dramatic of her to write such a thing, is it not?” I said.

Cullah said, “That’s odd.”

Suddenly, without explanation to them, I ran with the message to the house. I pulled a stob from the fire and lit a candle, holding the paper across the flame. After a couple of minutes of warming the whole thing and worried it would burst alight, writing appeared at the side margin. “The tide turns tomorrow. Come.”

Cullah stood behind me. I watched the mysterious lettering disappear as it cooled. “I must go.”

He said, “I’ll drive. Take the note with you. If soldiers stop us, we will need it.”

We left in the morning after sending Bertie and Alice to Dorothy’s house. While Lexington had been busy with troops, commerce had not stopped. Boston, however, was closed down, a city under siege. So many streets were blocked, so many soldiers crowded the way, that getting to the governor’s mansion was an hour from the Neck, where it had used to be but a few minutes.

“Will you come inside with me?” I asked him. “I may be an hour or more.”

“To a lady’s tea? No, my love. I have suffered my share of torments. No, I will sit here. I will be your patient lackey. An hour’s quiet thinking will do me no harm.”

Margaret’s parlor fluttered with the silks and voices of many ladies. Most of them were well-dressed Tory wives making the best of their husbands’ dreary assignments when they had rather be in a drawing room in London. Margaret rushed to kiss my cheek and pet my hands. She was too flawy in her words, too demonstrative of affection, her fan waving about my head as she kissed me. When she drew away at last, I saw in my palm another silver shilling. Quickly as a butterfly in flight, she murmured, “Find a reason to go to the library and I shall meet you there.”

In the library, Margaret closed the doors. She all but scurried through the room, checking every nook for the presence of another. Then she came to me. “We must make a ruse that we are discussing books I should donate to a dame school you may plan to run.”

I paused. “Very well,” I said.

“Tonight. It is tonight. You must get home before sundown.”

“What is tonight?”

“Ressie, do not ask me to speak more plainly. Do what you have to do to get word to the committee as quickly as possible. Do not wait so much as an hour.”

“You know about the committee?”

“Everyone does. We don’t know who they are but we know that they exist. Thomas invited all these women here as a diversion for me. He thinks I have paid no attention. I can do no more than this, my friend, except to pray for your safety. They plan to break the rebellion starting tomorrow morning. Soldiers are mustering tonight.”

“How shall I make my exit from you?”

“Headaches are always convenient.” There was a rattle at the door. She raised her voice a bit. “And I should like you to mark every book that it was donated from my generous collection. I think that is nice, do you not?”