Jacob gave me my bundles. None of us spoke. At last I asked, “Ah, shall we have some supper?”
As Cullah was nodding his head yes, Jacob said, “We’ll be sleeping at the goodwife’s house from now on. We will let no man pass the road without knowing what he is about. No more committees will darken your door.”
“But my brother is coming. You would not stop him?”
“It might be your brother. Might be some other wight.”
“No one else would search for me. It is August.”
Cullah said, “What is his look? How would we know him?”
I cast my eyes about. “He was fifteen when last I saw him. His hair was not quite as dark as yours. He was not tall. Very big feet. He had a mole on one cheek right above his dimple, so he looked something like a painted doll when he smiled, and a scar over one eye where he once got a fishhook in his brow. I suppose he might be taller, now.”
“Perhaps,” Jacob said. “With big feet, a boy often grows into them.”
“Would you allow me to measure you, so I could make him a shirt?”
Cullah’s face warmed as if he stood before a fire. “One man is not like another,” he said. A low, rumbling sound came from him, a laugh.
Jacob grunted and said, “Measure me, lass. I’m the best measure of any man.”
Cullah’s eyes flashed with anger. “I didn’t say I would not do it.”
“You did.” Jacob’s manner bristled, too, as if he were ready for a battle.
I said, “I will measure you both, then, to make a shirt for August.” Before I had finished speaking Cullah stripped off his coat and drew a deep breath, expanding his ribs, setting his shoulders well back. Jacob growled and took off his own coat, standing beside his son with a frown on his face and his eyes on the ceiling. I used a thread, knotting it for shoulders and arms, length and girth. While Jacob’s face registered a snarl, Cullah’s seemed merry indeed.
* * *
We began work again after a couple of days of dry weather. I set my loom to make the finest linen I had yet warped, thinking of a shirt for August. Before that, though, I had miles of thread to spin. Jacob and Cullah slept at Goody’s but worked the day through at my house, and within the week Jacob began the thatching of the upper floor. Cullah was still hard at work on something inside, but I had no time to dandle about and watch them, for I had those many yards of weaving to do for August. The noise of their work bothered me not at all now. Three days passed as if but an hour.
The clatter of the men’s tools had quieted for an hour the afternoon Goody came calling up my lane. I had had to take time from my spinning to tend my goats, and had a nice pan of milk to carry to the house. “Abigail? Abigail?” she called.
It vexed me to answer to that name, frightened me, in a small way, that she might find too much to be similar and I would suffer Abigail’s fate. I called to her, “Goody! I am in the goat yard.”
“Never you mind, dearie,” she said, grabbing my shoulder roughly. “In the house. Hurry. Bar the door, bar the door. Abigail, they are coming.”
I searched the sky for clouds but found none. “No one’s coming, Goody. Unless it is Jacob and Cul—”
Goody Carnegie pushed the milk pan to the ground, wrenching it from my fingers. “Abigail, listen to me. Where are the woodsmen?”
“In the house.” I felt before I heard the concussion that stopped her speech. I thought perhaps I had imagined it. That she had taken a fit. Had had a shock. Frozen in place, she had become a pillar of salt, a Lot’s wife to mark the way to my door. “Goody?”
Her mouth moved. A whimper escaped her lips. Goody fell to the ground, a fountain of blood sheeting across her back. I screamed. Ran toward my door. On the lower level, the stone walls had been filled in—the ample window was now but an air hole. The door had a bar but it was heavy and hard to place. I heard a man’s voice in the woods. Another answered it back. The timbre was wrong, for Jacob’s or Cullah’s voices. In the darkened inside, I looked up the staircase. Any who might circle the house could come in. I looked upon my loom, my spinning wheels and baskets. If Indians intended to steal me away again, I would not be found.
I crept into the fireplace, still warm as it was, and pulled baskets of thread behind me. There were too many embers. It would light the baskets and burn me alive. I sought to crawl beneath the loom, but had not got under when a hand, strong as iron bands, took my ankles and pulled me forth. It was no Indian, though, but a white man. I cried out with all my strength, and the wretched fellow laughed, hoisted me up, crushing the breath from me, and started up the stair. My strength was no match for him, but I could kick against the wall and knock him off balance and I did, four steps up. We tumbled down the stairs, him cursing and furious. At that moment another man came down, but this one saw the barred door and opened it, shoving me through to the outside.
There, a third man joined the two. Rafe MacAlister. He had grown grizzled and fat. He missed more teeth and had a cotton eye. The three of them dressed in seamen’s motley, though Rafe wore a new-looking cocked hat with a cockade of red satin.
I screamed and had to fight my feeling of faint. “You! What do you mean by this? Your ruffians have—”
He cuffed my face with the back of his hand. “Quiet. Yes, that’s you. That’s who I been looking for. I’ll have you this time, I will. And growed right up, hain’t you? No one to stop me but the old one and she’s not really feeling up to it.” He laughed, that same old sound I remembered so many times in our parlor.
“What do you want with me?” I asked.
“You are mine. For a debt long unmet. You think your father was some kind of walking saint, don’t you? Well, the wretch Jacobite owed me, cheated me out of my position, my land, crawled over the necks of my family to get where he was. Him and the lot of ’em. Caused my sisters to be transported, my mother and brother hanged, my wife run through by the queen’s guard. My children slaughtered and fed to the pigs.”
“My father would never do such as that.”
“Not now. He’s keeping Davey Jones company at whist, I hear.” He took my wrist in an agonizing grip.
“Unhand me, you pirate.”
Rafe laughed, low and menacing, the stench from his mouth more vile than before, and he leaned toward me. “Not until we’ve had the sweets we come for.” He ran his free hand under my skirt and between my legs. I kicked at him as he did but he was too strong. He hissed, close to my face, his breath that of something long dead, “I swore to myself I would have your father’s head on a pike and your mother’s eyes on my shoe buckles. I swore I would kill him and destroy his children and his children’s children. You are the last. You’ll get what’s coming to all of ’em.”
I cried out with the roughness, pain, fear. His brigands stood on either side of me, holding my arms, and commenced to tearing my workday gown to shreds in their hurry to get at me. I begged Rafe to stop. I screamed, prayed, cursed him. The villain tore open his trousers and was upon me and I nearly naked, squirming beneath him, when at once he gave a loud grunt and fell from me.
Standing behind him was Cullah, clad in only his leathern trousers and work boots; he’d kicked Rafe in the head. Immediately Cullah was set upon by the other two villains. I picked myself up, gathering what shreds I could find of my petticoat. Rafe shook himself and joined in the fight, when from the beech tree a roar more bearlike than human made both him and me turn toward it. I looked up to see Jacob, swinging a sword as tall as himself with the speed only a man used to such a weapon could employ. It met one of the brigands right across the neck. The pirate’s hat flew up and across the yard as his head rolled from his body, down his back, and came to a stop at my feet, his eyes blinking three times in surprise, before they shut for all eternity.
Rafe pulled a pistol from his coat and fired, but missed. Cullah sprang at him, knocking him sidelong with the stock of an axe. As he did, the third man circled behind and the head of Cullah’s axe found home in the man’s shoulder as Jaco
b lunged for Rafe. Jacob’s greatsword pierced Rafe’s upper leg. Rafe cried out, taking yet another pistol from his vest. This time Jacob sent the pistol and the hand that held it deep into the woods with a swing of his blade. Cullah chopped his man in the throat, not severing the head but putting an end to his fight, and the two woodsmen circled Rafe MacAlister on either side.
“You’ve no call to come here, villain,” Jacob said. “You’d be the sea captain looking for our lass, here? Your need for revenge will be your undoing.”
“What’s the scuffle? I suppose you’re bedding the wench?” Rafe asked.
He cradled his bloody, spurting arm in the other, wrapped in his coat, and still spoke as if he would bargain for me. As if I were a slave. A chunk of bread.
I said, “Is it not enough that Saracens took my father’s land? That pirates sold his children as slaves? Is it not enough that my family has lost all that you have lost?”
“I will eat your liver while you die like I did your mother’s.” All the while, he circled warily between Jacob and Cullah.
Cullah looked at me for a moment, then turned to Rafe. “You’ll go to the gallows, that’s all you will do.”
I said, “My mother might see fit to repay you, if what you say is true. The land has been forfeit to the Crown. You could seek recompense from the king.”
“God’s balls, you are a fool besides being a dirty little whore. More fool than your father, curse his eyes. Maybe as tasty as your mother was, though. I rutted her before she died and after, too. She’s deader’n a tinker’s damn. Put down that claymore, Scotsman. Christ. I have need of a drink.” Rafe shrugged and actually smiled, as if making friends with Jacob and Cullah were that easy.
I shook in every fiber of my being. It took all my strength to continue standing.
Jacob lowered the sword. As he did, Rafe said, “So tell me. Is she tight as a new sloop? Have you both been well satisfied?” As the words passed his lips, he used his last strength to find a dagger under his belt and thrust it at Jacob in a mighty lunge. When he raised himself Cullah reacted with what I could only imagine might be the speed and instinct of a lion, for he whipped that broadaxe across the backs of Rafe’s knees, crippling him, sending him into the dirt.
Jacob looked down at his side where Rafe’s blade had slashed him. Rafe groveled on the ground, howling in pain and anger. Jacob and Cullah exchanged weapons, tossing them to each other. Cullah raised the sword high, the basket hilt covering both hands. Jacob stood upon the man’s legs. Cullah put one foot on his chest and leaned on him, the claymore across one arm as if he held a religious article. He said, “Have ye a god, ye bastard?”
“Go to hell,” Rafe snarled.
“No,” Cullah said, quietly as if he were in conversation in a parlor. Then he plunged the tip of the sword through Rafe MacAlister’s throat and said to him, “Go to your god, then. If he lives in hell, so much the better. You’ll feel right to home.”
I ran into the stone house and fell against the fireplace hearth, holding a remnant of my skirt to my face. I wept. Later, wrapped in a blanket, I wept more, resting in Cullah’s arms, on a settle in the top floor of my house, next to the new fireplace where cider bubbled. I felt as if the shaking would never stop, as if I might die from it.
After the sun went down, I accepted the hot cider. By the light of four candles, I replaced a clumsy bandage on Jacob’s side. Cullah went out, saying he would create a coffin for Goody, and it took but a few moments. “She was light as brush,” he said. “Bones and worries, all that was left of the woman.”
I heated water and then turned my head as the men cleaned the sweat and blood from themselves. I wanted a bath, too, but it was not possible with them inside, and it would have to wait. I supposed later that they had done something with the bodies of the three villains. I did not ask.
Cullah made beds for the three of us on this new floor of the house, hanging a blanket for my sake, as Goody Carnegie had done. We spoke not at all, but pointing and nodding, we made for bed. Before I went behind the blanket, though, I saw Jacob and Cullah had both brought their boxes of tools and both boxes had been opened and laid out. They had false frames in them. Under the woodsman’s tools, a fold of plaid lay unwrapped, displaying an array of blades of differing sizes—swords and daggers, dirks and pistols. A brace of leather had held the claymore in place, though with the clatter of hammers, bits and drills, no one could have heard it rattle. In Cullah’s box lay more plaids and a large silver buckle, with a set of pipes and two glistening swords.
I lay on my pallet staring into the darkness. I did not weep, then. Poor Goody had gone to her Abigail at last, and perhaps was at rest. No more would she cry through the woods. I had to get away from this terror-filled place of cold and gray and wickedness. Rafe MacAlister was lying; I knew my mother was still alive. The men talked in whispers in their strange language. Then Cullah called, “Miss Talbot, are you asleep?”
“No.”
“We were almost too late to save you. I am truly sorry. I hope, that is, I pray, that, that you were not much harmed.”
I said nothing but squirmed on my pallet, thinking of that vile part of Rafe MacAlister so close to me. If not in body, could a spirit be raped? For if so, then I was much harmed.
He went on, “You see, we had had no need of the weapons for so long. The false bottoms of the chests were secured and hard to open. I am terribly sorry. We would have come sooner.”
Jacob added, “We did come soon’s we saw them from the rooftop, but getting our weapons took too long. I apologize, too, lass.”
“I am still whole, if that is your worry. I am only broken of heart and soul. Only that.”
“Men may die of that,” Jacob whispered.
The fire crackled in the grate.
“Men are weak,” I said, not hiding the anger in my voice.
“Well and aye,” answered Cullah. “My tears for you were about the other, and yet these words you say are the more sad.” His large hand breached the opening where the blanket hung, twisting by its own sagging warp, away from the wall. I saw it, outlined from the light of the fire; I remembered my own hands cupping a flame long ago. He turned his hand and reached as if to beckon me, and against my own impulse, but feeling so bereft of hope, I reached for it. Instead of a hearty, strong grip, he held my hand with the tenderness I would use to lift a fledgling bird back to its nest. I held on as his fingers closed over mine.
I fell asleep with the words ringing in my head, “Ma is not dead.”
CHAPTER 20
October 20, 1736
I wrapped clean linen around Jacob’s middle, stretching my arms so far that it was as if I hugged the man. “You must have been a soldier,” I said, stifling a shudder when touching his back webbed with white scars far worse than his face.
“It is better you know little of that time. Let it be that my son and I have built a house for you. We work for Lady Spencer. We are woodworkers.”
“You are Jacobites.”
“Aye.”
“Freemasons, too?”
Jacob looked surprised. “Aye.”
“And what are your real names? Were you transported here or did you flee after the rebellion? You thought I had not heard of it? My father talked of little else. My mother also. How did you come by the scars on your face?”
“You are a right pressing little lass.”
“It is my nature. I know this much. A MacLammond is the son of Lommond, from the shores of Loch Lommond. Highlanders. Argyle and Donald, they were my mother’s people.”
Cullah said, “Ceallach Lamont. It means war. None of those are my real name. It is Eadan. I’ll thank you not to use it.”
Jacob moved my hands from his chest and pulled his shirt over the bandage. “It was a crazed flight through the nights to the sea. Captured and sentenced by the magistrate right there on the shore, we were both to hang again, but we were put aboard a filthy transport to the colonies.”
“In the hold?”
r /> “Aye.”
I nodded. “I was in a hold. More than one. It was wretched. Patience nearly died.”
“They sought to make a puff of my boy. When he fought back, the bosun’s mate slashed him with a sword. I killed the man. They took the cat to me. Tore out my eye. Bled me near to the bone.” He grinned. “The mate had beaten another boy to death, causing the crew to tramp upon his wee corpse and grind his grease into the deck. When I was thrashed, the crew mutinied. Took the ship and sailed to Virginia. Took the captain to the authorities but they only fined him and commenced to put us all in jail. Hung a few. My boy slipped out of their hands. When they went to send me to the gallows, he argued with the magistrates. When that didn’t work, he found a pick and dug me out of the cell. We are wanted. Unwanted, too, I expect. The names of Brendan and Eadan Lamont will get a man hung. Jacob and Cullah MacLammond are just two woodsmen making their trade serve to fill their stomachs.”
Cullah looked up from working the edge of his axe with a stone.
“And what is a puff?” I asked.
“What?”
“You said they would make a puff of Cullah. What is that?”
“To use a boy as a woman. Filthy sodomites. Oh, lass, I’ve blighted your ears. No way to speak to a lady. I beg your pardon.”
I was puzzled, and it must have shown. “Let us speak no more of it, then. How shall we explain to the ministers the death of Goody Carnegie?”
Jacob walked to the window and opened the shutter. “We’ll lay her in that hollow below her own yard, by her child. Found dead. Buried. We’ll ask them to come pray for her but I doubt any will. Town’ll be relieved. I am, too. It is no good to have much exchange with one taken to fairies and there’s naught to be gained by too much truth.”
“And where are those men? Did you bury them? What if someone finds them?”
Eadan-Cullah said, “Someone will find them, to be sure. I put them in a field, the three propped as if they died there. Built a fire between their feet and put it out. Set out their packs for a nice supper. Put a dagger in the first man’s hands and an old axe in that sea captain’s. Wasn’t one I use, just something I found in a river. It will look as if a terrible fight took place between the men, the one still owning his head being the winner, though he bled to death with MacAlister’s gold chain in his hand. Found that in a river, too. Someone will find them and sort it all out and be quite happy to report that is exactly what happened, though he will not remember seeing a gold chain. He’ll be paid well for his honest testimony.”