My Name is Resolute (88 page)

“Guard me,” shouted Wallace Spencer, as he swung to my left. His cloak fell to the floor. August was squared against three Regulars with swords drawn; he saw me but looked to his accusers. Wallace continued, “There is proof in this house. I know it. This blackguard has deviled me across the seven seas for years. Hancock has delivered to me my own goods, taken off my ships and resold them to me at ten times the price. He’s charged with smuggling even now. You will be arrested and hung next to him on the same gallows. Don’t stand there, men. Take him.”

As I watched, August looked from man to man, at the eyes of the soldiers. A sly smile spread across his face. He squinted then, as if he enjoyed the sport, and said, “Yes, fellows. ‘Take him.’ How will you have it? Decapitation? Gutting? Shall I let you live but unman you and run the giblets up a gibbet? Come for me. Here’s your chance to die like men. Is that not why you joined the army? Are you cowards to the last?” None moved.

Wallace said, “You will not leave this place alive if you murder one of His Majesty’s men. As a traitor you will hang anyway. If you make a move against these men, I will have you tortured first. Get him, you cowards.”

I opened my mouth to speak. August’s head moved side to side, warning me against it. Another soldier came brusquely through the door and all but bumped me out of his way. “Lord Spencer? The colonel wishes to speak to you downstairs.
Immediately,
your lordship.” Wallace turned, and as if no others remained in the room, he suddenly locked his eyes into mine. I could hear him breathing as he moved past me and out the door.

August used the diversion Wallace’s movements made to strike the sword of one of the three soldiers, sending it flying across the room. I held my hands to my mouth to keep from screaming. Another man crossed him, and with two quick strokes, my brother slashed his face and ran him through. The third put up a brave attempt as the first man regained his weapon and they both worked their swords, but even two at a time could not overcome the man they knew as the Pirate Talbot. When the men lay upon the floor, August wiped his blades on the bed linen, and as he came to me, put them back into scabbards.

He took my face in his hands and kissed my forehead, whispering, “Rupert will bring the old trunk to you. Do not look for me; I will come to you.”

“Old trunk?” I asked.

“The trunk in the parlor? You remember? It was in our father’s study. It has a false bottom.”

I did not. But when he said the words they made me treasure the old trunk. “What about Anne?”

“She’s already on her way to New York to wait for me. Good-bye, Ressie. And I love you, too.” He clutched my hand and shook my wrist, as if he could think of no other embrace.

“Farewell, August.” I kissed him, barely a brush from my lips to his.

He pushed his way through the stumbling soldiers in the gallery, straight up to the last door, the one to the east room where I had once slept. With one great kick he sent the door splintering into the room, entered it, and vanished. I ran after him. There was a window open. A rope hung from it. I watched as in the courtyard below Rupert held a horse. August’s black cloak and black tricorn hat gave him the look of a phantom though the day was clear and bright.

I turned to leave just as soldiers entered. I knew I had to act a part if I were to survive this day, too. I pointed to the window. August was away. I knew he was safe. I shouted, “Look! He went down the rope. Follow him, you! He is escaping!” I continued as if I were a child watching a play, calling, “That man is getting away. After him. Go, go!” I urged them on, amazed at how my words stirred them to act. They ran from me and down the stairs.

More was astir in the grand bedroom. The dead guards had been found. I reached in, crouching low at the door, and pulled Wallace’s cloak from the floor where he had left it. As I did, I raised my hand and bent my elbow. It crinkled with the sound of paper. August had tucked into my sleeve some sort of message. I pulled it forth.

Honorable Sir, everything is arriv’d. Seventy-five kegs of raven eggs and two hundred h.k. blk powder, deliv’d to store, half that more deliv’d your Res this night under cov. dkness. Our honor’d friend W. will X for his service. J.H.

This letter had been meant for August. Raven eggs were cannonballs and “your Res” meant Resolute, not residence. More powder was on its way to my house! The signature, a work of artistic frills and ruffles, was unmistakably that of John Hancock. I liked John a great deal, yet I smiled, knowing those who scoffed at his penchant for showmanship led them to call him “Jonathan Peacock.” Thank God for such a worthy peacock, and thanks also to Margaret, that he, Dr. Warren, and John Adams had escaped the night before the battle at Lexington. I knew one small thing I could do.

I refolded Wallace’s cloak, searching for and finding a slit pocket in the inside right-hand seam. I slid the note into it so that one end of the paper was exposed. Then, as if I had actually come to participate in the search of my brother’s house, I carried the cloak across my arms as I descended the stair. In the main parlor, I approached Wallace Spencer and the colonel as they shuffled through papers, hunting, perhaps, for this very note. “Lord Spencer?” I called. “Your prisoner has escaped. You should have taken him yourself.”

Wallace shouted. He cursed. He ran up the stairs.

I faced the colonel. I said to him, “Sir, do you know subterfuge when you see it? Have you ever been in the presence of an actor so cunning at lies that not a word from such a one can be trusted? I hear the Patriots have such in their employ.”

The officer said, “I have not time for you, woman. Get out of this house. We are trying to conduct business here.”

“Lord Spencer is
such
a gentleman, is he not?”

“Yes, yes, I suppose so.” He stacked some papers, straightening the edges.

Wallace returned to the room in full run, grasping at the doorjamb as he came. “The villain is away! Why did your men fail? We had him! Blast your eyes, man.”

“I
am
sorry, your lordship,” the colonel said.

I held Wallace’s cloak, gesturing. “Here, Wallace. Lord Spencer, I brought your cloak so it would not be soiled by the villainy afoot.”

He shook his head, his teeth gritting together so that I heard the squeak. “There it is. I thought the man had taken it, too. Give me that.” He whipped it from my arms and the note whisked out of the pocket, flew through the air, and spiraled to the floor at the feet of the colonel as Wallace stormed toward the front door.

The colonel looked at the note for a count of three before he knelt and picked it up. He read it. I counted three ticks, like the circling of a spinning wheel. Tick. Tick. Tick. The colonel shouted, with a voice I expect had been trained on a battlefield, “Stop! Arrest that man! Arrest Lord Spencer!”

In the ensuing chaos, I slipped from the house and ran for the wagon. Alice helped me in. She said, “Mistress, the servants at Mistress Gage’s home would not let me in the door. I went to the back and say some words with the cook. Mistress Gage is gone. Her husband shipped her to London this morning. The ship sailed before dawn.”

I was breathing hard. I hung my head. “Poor Margaret, but I may write to her?”

“The cook told me to ask you not to do that. She said, Mistress Margaret give you her last, best gift. Best way to accept it, is to leave it all be.”

I would weep for her later. I would not weep in the street. “You are right. Let us get home immediately.”

“What of your brother, Mistress? It look like there are soldiers there.”

“There
are
soldiers there but my brother is escaped. I saw him go.”

Two days later, a man with black gauze over his face knocked on my door at midnight. He did not give me a signal I could trust. I did not open the door. When the sun arose I saw at the doorway my father’s old trunk.

It took me three days to discover the secret to getting the hidden panel open in the trunk’s bottom. It held the deed to August’s house in Boston. It held the license granted to him by the Crown to privateer Dutch, Spanish, and French ships and commandeer them for the British navy, and it held a single peacock feather, long and slender, shimmering with blue-green and light; at the top the colors formed into an eye shape, as if the bird could see from it. This was the one thing August had taken to remind himself of our childhood, our beginnings. I saw him anew; that gruff, perhaps hard man had indeed once been a boy who played, carelessly gamboling as I had done. He had gone back to Jamaica and fetched this chest after the place was ransacked. Had walked among the ruins and found a trace of the peacocks. The feather brought to mind the cry—almost a woman’s scream—of the peafowl wandering the grounds at Two Crowns Plantation. I took it to my bedroom and placed it upon two nails above my bed. Every night when I put out the light, I would see the eye of it, and look into that, to my first home.

Alice and I lugged the chest up to my bedroom. I put the secret things in their secret place, and I put on top of them, as if all were innocent and calm, old and ragged winter bed linens for the upstairs. All the good ones, I hid beneath the beds themselves in case a search party should seize my linens, again.

*   *   *

Brendan, August, Benjamin, and Bertie had set out with their officers, to fetch the cannons left at Fort Ticonderoga. On their return, Benjamin had promised they would also take the two their uncle had sent, from my barn. They returned by the first of June, moving at night through dismal rain over the roughest of ground. I packed them food in knapsacks, and I covered their shoulders with shirts and their legs with new britches. The cannons rolled away just two days before my house was searched again. It was so full of bolts and bolts of cloth I had woven, baskets of tow and spun wool, there was barely room for them, and the Redcoats found little to confiscate. So they took a rug August had sent me from the Orient. It was battered and threadbare, I said, to console myself.

Many nights, I could not sleep. Every night I thought I heard a distant drumming, a distant firing of guns, like distant thunder, so much so that rain surprised me when it actually fell. I heard Goody Carnegie wailing with sorrow, and I heard Cullah’s voice saying, “War is coming. War is coming.”

And then it came. June seventeenth.

Breed’s Hill, they called the place. Later the name would be forgotten and the taller mound, Bunker Hill, remembered.

My Cullah fell there and I will never forget that place. It was said by a man who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him that when he’d fired five shots that old fowling piece jammed. After that, he fought with claymore in hand like a vicious fighting machine, boldly fending off soldiers three and four at a time, while behind him, Dr. Warren loaded and primed a musket. The ball that felled Dr. Warren pierced Cullah through the heart first.

Something told me, as I washed him, lying naked on my kitchen table, that he had always been meant to die this way. That there were indeed better and worse ways to die, and that he deserved a death both valiant and quick rather than the slow torment of disease or aging’s loss of mind. I pictured him standing there, reloading that fowling piece, finally giving up and resorting to fighting the way the Scots at Culloden had done and died, swinging that claymore against an overpowering enemy bearing powder and shot. “My Cullah, my Eadan. My Scottish Highlander. Your mind always hearing the echoing drums of war from centuries past, in which you might have been a valiant hero. You were not meant for this time, were you?”

Alice helped me dress him. The hardest part was putting onto his feet the old boots that used to smell of beeswax. It took us an hour but I could not bring myself to bury him barefooted. We laid him beside Jacob, next to Gwyneth. As Reverend Clarke read the words, my heart, so often hollowed by loss, had always known Eadan Lamont was alive even when he was not with me. Now the emptiness I felt was a vast ocean. I closed my eyes. A stiff gust of wind moved my hair and bonnet, and I felt myself holding to the swaying gunwale of a great ship moving through stormy seas. I inhaled and held my breath. Then I knelt at the grave as men I knew not filled the earth in upon my love.

“Widow?” one of them called. “I say, Widow MacLammond?”

“Do you mean me, sir?”

“Yes, Mistress. Have you a sixpence for us?”

In my pocket, Margaret’s shilling. I placed it in his hand. “Take this.”

“La,
thank
you, Mistress. ’At’s generous of you.”

I walked home, pushing my feet to a hard rhythm so that Alice, whose knee still pained her, had no choice but to lag behind me.

My sons and grandson survived Breed’s Hill and cheered their rout of the British army, though Bertie was sent back to me for a rest, and for two weeks could not keep his food down. He fretted until I gave him permission to return to the fight once he was well. In the meantime, he practiced, inventing new drum patterns, so that no one would mistake his beating for that of a British drummer boy.

July 21, 1775

No one moved through Boston. It was besieged. We worked our farm as we could then, we women, always with Cullah’s pistol nearby. We hid from any travelers on the road.

On a night in July, a birdcall and a tap at my window made me open the door. My brother August stood before me, dressed in huntsman’s leathers. He motioned behind his back, and a cadre of men in fine blue coats entered. One of them was taller than the rest. He would have towered over Cullah, and I saw he was seconded and attended by my son Brendan, who also wore a blue coat. Brendan looked neither right nor left, nor at me. I held my breath for a moment, sensing that this was not the time for motherly kisses.

“Madam,” began the tall man. “I beg your indulgence. May we spend a couple of hours before your hearth?”

“If August Talbot brings you to my door, you are welcome. I have a piece of mutton warmed, with parsnip roots and celery. I have cider.”

August jerked his head from Brendan’s direction to the kitchen table, then he addressed the tall man. “General Washington? You will do the Continental army a good service by letting this lady inspect your coat.”