I rubbed my hands together in clean water. “You mean someone who finds the dead men will steal it? And you set it there as a trap to keep him quiet? Who would steal from the dead?”
Jacob only smiled.
“You have a low opinion of mankind, sir.”
“Well earned. There’s more to our tale. I stole the Scottish Stone. Even the knave who has it now, on these shores, would not admit to that. The wight claims to be a Templar and he’s hidden it in a glade on a long island to the south. Now we have opened our confidence to you. Can we expect your word that our secret will be safe in your hands?”
“My pa was a Jacobite and a Mason. My ma was a Radclyffe and a Jacobite. I worry for the disposition of my soul, the way my talent for telling only part of the truth has flourished under practice. You have nothing to fear, sir. I have carried secrets my life through.” I knew as good as daylight that they, too, held my life and repute in their hands, for they could easily denounce me through the countryside as a wench who had bedded the two, and I would be from then on as outcast as any leper.
I prepared us a meal, my mind busily stirring the previous conversation. Cullah and Jacob sat by the fire in silence until I called them. Though they had built the chimney up from the bottom level, at one end, a second wall made a safe place, with its own exit to the rafters overhead, from whence a person in need could make their way to the outside, and a cunning little stairway that looked for all the world like one of the beams. I stood at the top of it and looked down. Every step had its wee niche. I could escape to the outside, just as Pa and Ma had made in the wall of Patience’s room.
Cullah had created furnishings I never expected, two items referred to in this area as settles, which, when placed before the fire had the effect of collecting the warmth and keeping it by the persons sitting there. They needed cushions, which I would have to make later. There was a table, two small stools which might have several uses, and a cupboard built into the wall by the chimney. He raised a cloth to show me another. A chest, carved all about the four legs and front, with my name cut into the top, decorated with two geese or hens, some bird I dared not guess for fear of hurting Cullah’s feelings.
“It is lovely,” I said.
“Miss Talbot, you are the blithest maid I have ever known.” His voice was lower, silken, and gentle. “I would that you kept it for a marriage chest.”
“Well, then. It would make a fine one. I have no marriage in mind, but I suppose someday that will come. I will take it with me to Jamaica.”
A parade of emotions traveled his face then, and at last he turned away, speaking to the fireplace. “We cannot keep living here. Our work is finished, though I’m glad we waited this day.”
“Lady Spencer was generous. It is a nice house,” I said with my eyes on Jacob.
He looked forlorn. “If you leave it, now we have built it, what will become of it then, lass? We cannot own it. I have it that Goody Carnegie left the whole of it to you.”
“I cannot keep this house and land. It is not mine. I have a home in Jamaica.”
Jacob took my hands, and as tenderly as he could look through his one eye, he nodded and said, “You yourself said the plantation went to the Crown. No English king is going to give it back to you, a girl, who can neither prove its ownership nor work it if you did. Providence has placed you here, in this land. I am not asking you to have my son, that’s a matter for your heart. But I am asking you, as would a father, an uncle, a friend, to think on staying here. You have means to work and live. Risking everything to go to some far isle on the hope of finding someone who is probably long dead is foolish.”
Having his son? Was that what Cullah meant by a marriage chest? Had I not seen it in his eyes or heard it in his words? “My mother is not dead.” Yet as I said those words, the image of Rafe MacAlister squirming on top of me, the image of him doing the same thing to Ma became blurred until I thought they were one and the same. I felt the demon’s weight again, saw Ma’s face close-up, covered with tears and blood, her own blood. I pulled my hands from Jacob’s and rushed to the hidden stairwell, feeling the stony wall of the chimney, its warm rocks, except for the drip of water, the same temperature as long ago those had been as Patience and I descended them. I looked down into the rocky room below where the loom awaited me.
I saw her. Ma. Sprawled on the floor, the dagger to her own bosom, the vile and rough hands upon hers, raking it back and forth, crosshatching her bodice with blood. And the ripping of her skirt, the crying out for Pa. I saw her in my lower room, dragged toward the hole in the wall, then drawn back, limp and unmoving. I saw Patience’s bodice, crushed against my face, her hands forcing my eyes away from rape and murder, suffocating me until I fainted. Patience crushing me again in the hold of the Saracen ship, ready to kill me to keep me from a fate such as our mother suffered. And that wee redheaded girl who insulted me on the boat. And the other woman. And all who perished.
I awoke with a man’s arm across my body, holding my shoulders down. I screamed and scratched at his face. “Miss Talbot, Miss Talbot,” called Jacob. The man, yes, I knew him, the one-eyed woodsman and murderer. His son, slasher of tendons and poser of corpses. Had they raped me or were they about to? Had I fallen into their perfidy by my own ignorance? Had they plotted treachery with Rafe MacAlister?
Jacob clutched my hands to keep them from his face. I burst into tears. “Ma! Oh, my ma!” I know not how long I wept. I know that I awoke again and it was dark, the snores of men round about me, filling the air. I awoke again, painfully thirsty, my tongue stiff and hardened, split in the center and dry, but when I stood I could not tell where I was. The hold of some ship? I felt the walls, all unfamiliar, as if someone had spirited me away. There was no water. No fresh water unless they let you up from the hold. The floor rocked. Dolphins cried and gulls answered. I found my way to the side as the vessel pitched and turned. At the side was a stairway, and down it, my mother cut and bloodied, holding an empty cup. My thirst o’erwhelmed me but I could not drink. She called my name but so afraid was I to go to her that I could not move. Then Patience tried to smother me, and I awoke.
“Miss Talbot?” A gentle hand brushed hair from my face. “You fell here, and we let you sleep, but maybe you would rather get to your bed? Look, I have made you a real bed, not just a pallet on the floor. Let me help you.”
I opened my eyes. Who was this man? Yes. This was the son. The one sliced across the back for refusing to be abused and abased. “Cullah?” I asked. “Is there water?”
“Ah, you know me at last. Good. I will fetch you water.”
“Where is my—” I started to ask for Ma, but I knew. Oh, I knew. So I asked instead, “My cloak? I am cold.”
“Would you sit by the fire?”
“Yes.” While we sat there, Cullah and I, I told him my other secrets. Of Patience. How she had run away with the Indian man. How she had broken my heart and spirit so many times before, but that I believed I had not understood her, with the understanding I now had of life. I told him of August, whom I never expected to see again. Told him of living on hardtack and rum. Of picking flax until my hands became great mitts of pain. Of thinking all this time Ma lived and waited for me. Of being punished for eating a single carrot.
“Many’s the lad,” Cullah said, “hanged at London town for stealing a rabbit.”
“My mother is dead,” I said, tears brimming anew.
“Mine is, too.”
At that, I gave myself completely to weeping and sorrow. He told me of how it happened with her. How they’d fled, him barely a lad, and her swollen, carrying another baby. Soldiers had caught them and she began to miscarry. They put her in prison where she bled to death. He said, “Never would I have believed a person, any person, could hold or lose so much blood. I have bled people since then. Seen animals slaughtered. But Pa said, because she was with child it was life’s blood, that it comes from heaven itself, and so the bleeding was two people slaughtered because the wee one bled to de
ath, too.”
For a long time, then, we held each other, not as lovers but as friends, as brother and sister might, our tears wetting both our shoulders.
At last I said, “The way Jacob told it, I thought you were one of the fighters. I watched you against those three. You are a warrior.”
“He has taught me since. A man has to fight. There is little else for one not born to title and land.”
“I was born to title and land, and I have now naught but a loom.”
“So, you will fight with your loom.”
I thought that was foolish, but I said nothing. Instead, I asked, “Why do you carry pipes?”
“You saw? How did you know what it was?”
“There was a painting in Pa’s study. A man in kilts playing pipes.”
“It makes a sound to wake the dead and call forth the living. Puts the fear of hell into the heart of any Englishman.”
“You are an Englishman.”
“I am a Scot. I will never be an Englishman.”
“My pa was English. My ma, Scots. I thought they were the same. The only people who seemed different than us were the Africans. Now, I am Jamaican but you and I both live on colonial soil.”
“Soil the English took from some other poor farmers.”
“Cullah, if you’re never to be English, why do you wish to live here? Why don’t you go home to Scotland?”
“It is as Pa said. We don’t live to go somewhere else or to do some future thing. We fight if we have to, but we try to make a living. This is the life I have.”
“For seven years, I have only been able to go on by thinking that this was not my life. That I had something to go to, to escape to.”
“That is hard. As if you’re living but not alive.”
“What will I do, if I do not long to go to Jamaica? Who am I if not Allan Talbot’s second daughter? Where shall I be without Two Crowns Plantation?”
“Why not be Miss Talbot the weaver, of Lexington and Concord? Maker of fine woolens and linen, keeper of some acres of forage and pasture, hills and forest, and a wee graveyard? Why not?”
“I am not made to be a tradeswoman. A crafter. I was born a lady.”
“And so you will not be a tradeswoman. You will be the planter’s daughter who has a skill and uses it wisely. You will find another reason to live.”
“I am being punished by God.”
“Hah. That is why almost everyone who meets you thinks you to be the highest and noblest? Goody Carnegie gives you her family land. Lady Spencer treats you as an honored child. Even the old buzzards in their plain garb come to find you in sin and as God would have it that is the night we slept with Goody and you were safely in your own wee house. Your house. You have a surfeit of good and call it punishment. Are you quite sure you are not really an unhappy fairy?”
“No, I am not.”
“I have to admit, at first I thought you were.”
“Bless me. Why?”
He grinned. “Never had I seen a lass as cunning as you. So fair, it was as if you sprang from the light flickering through a maple leaf in autumn. So clear of complexion, I thought you’d skin made of milk and water. Your hair is, is—” He stopped, suddenly embarrassed. “Beg pardon. I didn’t mean to speak so personally.”
“You are forgiven. Please. Let us have some food.”
But as I turned to straighten my gown, my eyes took hold of his. In a moment I remembered Wallace using the ruse of reaching across me to take a kiss. When Cullah leaned his head toward me, pausing, hesitant lest I push away or call out, I needed no ruse. His lips enveloped mine and I pressed against him, held securely by his strong arms, feeling the soft stubble of his chin. He raised one hand to cradle my face and I leaned against it, and though the kiss lasted far too long to be proper, when at last he pulled away, I closed my eyes and pressed my head against that hand.
He laid his cheek tenderly against mine and whispered in my ear, “Miss Resolute Talbot, thou art the blithest maid e’er walked the dews of Skye.”
“That sounds almost like a song,” I said.
“It is. That is the English for that song I tried to teach you.”
“I will not be happy when you are finished working on this house.”
“But, we are finished. We would have gone before now were it not for your fit.”
“Fit?”
“Well, what do you call it? Your spell. Your grief. I went through the same though I was but a boy when my ma died. For two days you had frightening dreams, for you called out. But you seem better now. We have work to do.”
“But where will you live?”
“In Concord. We have a shop there. Where did you think?”
CHAPTER 21
October 30, 1736
They were gone. Jacob and Cullah, the woodsmen. Brendan and Eadan, the rebels, the warriors, the hunted murderers. Gone to Concord. I wandered for two days, missing Cullah. I hung on a peg the shirt I’d made to his measure but for my brother. On an early afternoon when the day had been warm, I took flowers to Goody’s grave on All Hallows. I laid a sprig of yarrow upon the grave of little Abigail. Then I walked to Lexington to attend church on All Saints’ Day.
Overhearing gossip, I learned that, as Cullah had suspected, Mr. Considine had recently found three vagabonds dead in one of his fields and named the place Sad Field. He claimed they must have been drunk and fought each other due to their poverty, for they had nothing of value betwixt them but their weapons, old and worn as they were. Immediately afterward, he purchased another tract of land that met one boundary of the Carnegie Farm, having, he said, payoff of a long-forgotten but very good investment.
I collected pears and apples and dried them, storing them in rough bags hung from the rafters. On Saturdays, Cullah came to my door and brought with him some little box or shelf he had made. Wooden trenchers and spoons. The odd iron hook he said was “left behind” from some work they had done during that week. Last week he brought me two gallons of vinegar. One time he brought his father’s great tool kit, and from it drew a pile of staves from which he created for me a barrel-vat for dyeing cloth. When I told him the dye would soak into the wood and all my cloth would become the same color, he only smiled and said he would make another for every color I wished to create. I prepared supper for him on those Saturdays. We ate in the cool of the afternoon, and then he swept the crate upon his back and walked back to Concord.
On Sundays, I walked to town and went to Meeting, not for spiritual renewal but for companionship. Fall turned the night air sharp, though the days stayed pleasant.
I set about my work with renewed energy on Mondays, and by two weeks’ end had thirty yards of fine linen. I mixed dyes and tested the results on scraps. When I had just the right shade of rose—darker than the blush on a dogwood flower—I added blue to make lavender. I wrote the formula and mixed my brew. I held my breath as I plunged the length of fabric into the new barrel. Only then did I see how smoothly Cullah had planed and shaved the wood inside, so that it had no burrs to catch the thread.
When an hour had passed, I rinsed the cloth and laid it upon a rope Cullah had strung from the wall to a tree. When it had dried I laid it upon my table and took the one thing yet unused and clean, a fifth new trencher Cullah had left me, and put it upon the cloth, then drew around it, making circles. On each circle I drew a leaf on the left with a posy by it, and then with a spoon for a straight line, I made dots where I would put flowers and leaves. When I sat to embroider I decided that this would be a very fine cloth, and perhaps I would take it to Johanna the dressmaker myself, not sell it to Barnabus. I mixed threads to create subtlety of color that pleased my own eye, all the while thinking that if it pleased only me I should be out the cost and labor of creating expensive fabric. If others found it to their liking, I would charge more than I had ever asked before, for I intended to embroider every yard—all thirty—so that any lady could have the largest farthingale on this continent and still make use of it.
When
my back ached so that I felt I needed to move or be forever frozen in place, I cleaned out Goody’s house, aired the blankets, and washed everything else. I stored candles, candleholders, and a little mirror, her leech book of herbs and poultices, most of which was writ in some tongue I could not read, in a rough chest. I made sure to be finished there before the sun began its descent, for I had no love of the shadows that haunted the place. If my house was really the place where she had burned her babe to death, it had no feel of it. It was Goody’s own hearth that caused me to shudder upon opening the door. I was only too glad to close it and place the largest log I could move against it, wedging it into the mud to hold it closed.
That evening I sat before my hearth stirring apples and molasses with some Indian flour into a hasty pudding. A drop bubbled and popped upon my hand but landed where calluses had toughened the skin and I licked the sweet pudding without pain. Though it was November, there had been no snow, no storms. As I thought that, tears welled and spilled down my face. Loneliness echoed in the empty house.
Then and there I made up my mind that in the morning I would pack my things and go to Boston, find the first ship heading south and get aboard. With calm weather, there had to be someone headed south. I remembered Jamaica. I saw my mother killed and all these years I believed the lie I had told myself. I sat at my flax wheel and pushed the treadle. The familiar whishing that had kept me afloat all these weeks now seemed accursed. Goody Carnegie’s words rang in my memories, too, of what I would do if I got to Jamaica and found nothing the same. How adrift I might be there, worse than here where I at least knew how to make do.