Fairies ha tak my husbnd. I teld them to bring him home and say’d many charms for it, tho this one demanded I be mad. No, say I, I shall not be had by fair folk, & I pointed at it a smoking pistol. The fairy left him, then, when the bullet went in, but my husbnd was not returned to me. I buried the old fairy skin out in the pasture and the cows are afraid to eat the grass thereof.
I crossed myself as I might have in the old days, and turned still more pages, filled with receipts for concoctions and cures using herbs with names I knew not. All seemed then to be written in ink, and in English. Until again, a page writ in brown—could it have been blood?—and telling a story that brought me tears.
Abigail be tak by fair folk. I saw them running with her beyond the field where the cows graze, and what was left in her place was an old nasty fairy woman. And I teld it I would burn it to bring back my child, yet it did naught but whimper. I say’d to it, leave her be, And then it called up a storm. & so I burned it and buried it in the dell below the house. Water cress and a salmon’s tail I put therein, and walked around it three times three.
I flipped to the last page. Near the end of the book was another writing in the old script that I could not read. I expected it was the final entry she had made, and turned back a few pages. There I read:
Abigail has grown up in the fairyland & escaped after all the leaves I have burnt for her. She came home and knew me but for the sake of townfolk pretended not. I have made her to stay in the old house. If she stay in this house where fairies live in the shadows, she will be tak again and I will have to put her in the fire again. Abigail asked me to stay home from the storm but for her sake I ran fast eno to keep her safe & not burn her.
I tore the page from the book. The paper was yellowed with age though the ink bright. Leafing backward, I found again the other pages where she had confessed to murders of her husband and child. I tried to tear them out. I creased them with my scissor and worked them out, stirred up the coals in my fireplace, and laid the three papers upon them. I said a prayer, then sat watching the smoke rise to the chimney, remembering Goody Carnegie’s kindness to me, and yet feeling sure that the brown ink had once been red blood, and that some darkness had filled the old stone house where she had lived, now home to James. I looked down at the book in my hand. I had always known books, could not remember not being able to read. For me, to destroy a book was a crime. Was this volume I held a book of spells, or the ramblings of a madwoman? Was it a priceless volume of antiquity, or the habitation of Satan, able to unleash charms and spells from a time long past that should never see daylight again? I said another prayer, this time Memorare, and in English, Our Father. Feeling as if I knew not the right thing to do, I opened the tragic old book and made ready to lay it in the ashes.
It burst into flame, ripples of color dancing above the thing. I dropped it into the fire as I said, “If, just if, there is magic in this book of a kind I know not, if there is power beyond this earth, send this fire to keep Eadan warm. Take this smoke to keep him full. Bind away all pain from him and bring him home to me.” Then I was filled with fear and dread that I had brought Satan himself into my life by my own selfish longing. I prayed on my knees through a Rosary, and sat up the night through, begging forgiveness.
* * *
Though I wrote letter after letter to the magistrate in Nova Scotia, I heard nothing. I sent a cloak to “the prisoner, Eadan Lamont,” though feeling uncertain to use his real name even as I did so. I sent a coat, too, made from his pattern. I stayed at my loom until my back felt as if it were growing a crook in it.
At times, I could sell nothing, for the searches and the soldiers questioning everyone who went down the roads either to Lexington or to Concord. Boston was all but emptied of commerce. Battleships were said to be anchored in the harbors to ward off smugglers and to keep the peace by intimidating any colonists who remained. The Crown passed new duties on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea. They sent soldiers to count our trees and handed me a tax bill for every one of them that still had apples or pears clinging to it. I put the bill into the fireplace and warmed our cider with it. I told Alice I was not flaunting the king’s authority, as much as I was in need of kindling. She gave me a look that frightened me, for I knew not whether she mutely approved of it.
Our friends began to organize groups and meet in the woods, in houses. I let them use our barn for meetings and even drilling in formations like soldiers, but I allowed no firing of muskets.
* * *
At the end of January 1769, on a bitterly cold day, Alice sat sewing while I spun fine linen I meant to weave into a cloth of silk tracing, and Dolly read aloud to us from a sermon at one of the Boston churches. It was another leaflet that had been smuggled in and out of that town, for Boston was by then completely occupied by the army. The fire in the grate crackled while snow drifted down in light flurries that moved about as if they were living things, dancing across the fields.
The sound of wheels of a light carriage interrupted our talk and I stood from my work, pressing my hand against the wheel to slow it. I stopped at the door. No one had knocked from outside but the carriage had stopped. I waited. The others watched me. I inclined my head toward the door and felt an agony awaited the opening of it. At last, a hand rapped upon the wood and caused me to start.
Dolly said, “Ma? Will you open it? Do you want me to do it?”
“I will open it.” I raised the latch and let it swing open. The tall, imposing figure of Reverend Clarke filled the gray, misty day. He removed his hat upon seeing me. I said, “Please come in, sir. Are there others?”
“I came alone, Mistress MacLammond. Good day, ladies. Miss MacLammond. May I sit at your fire?” I sat on the settle where Cullah and I had shared so many, many chilly nights. Reverend Clarke took my hands in his and petted them the way you might stroke a piece of leather or cloth, to note the strength of it. He took a deep breath, and said, “Mistress MacLammond, your husband is dead. It came in word to me, a written letter, that is. One of our men carries the post and thought it best if I bring it and tell you, so that you are not informed as if it were nothing of consequence. I am deeply sorry. We knew Cullah to be a fine, upright man. If he did wrong, he did it in the name of the freedoms we all seek to maintain—”
I raised my hand to stop his deluge of words. The pastor was a kind and loving man, but he did like to talk. And talk was not what I wanted right then. Cullah answered every conflict with silence. I wanted silence. I stared at the hearth. It could not be true. Dorothy sobbed. Alice comforted her, patting her back. An ash popped just then and tumbled toward me. “Thank you,” I whispered. “For coming.”
“I am so sorry.”
“How? How did he die? Did they shoot him? Hang him?”
He pulled the letter from his coat. “No. He was sentenced to a year. He had already served it and was released.” He laid his hand upon mine again. “He was much reduced by then. Starved and beaten. They turned him out before Christmas and he began to walk south. The weather, as you know, was more bitter than here. The letter said he was found by a swamp, frozen to death, one of your letters in his pocket.”
“He had no cloak? I sent two.” I gulped and stared into the fire, saying, “He had not even a shirt, for they tore it from him. My husband frozen to death in a swamp? After all he risked, to die like a sick animal. It would have been kinder to put him in a noose.”
“They write that he was a cooperative and gentle prisoner. He was liked.”
How many times had I stopped what I was doing, listened to the air, waiting to hear Cullah whistling, merry, smelling of rosewater, and lifting me in his arms? “Liked? Liked not well enough to give the poor wight a shirt.”
His face bore deep sympathy. “I am sorry, Widow MacLammond. I have the church’s widow’s offering for you.” He placed a folded paper in my hand. It was heavy, wrapped within it, a few coins.
I looked down at the paper, afraid my tears would overcome me. I had probably donated the coin
s now come to me. “I would rather you gave them to someone else.”
“I know, but keep it. You might need it for something which you do not yet know.”
“I have been without him almost as long as I was when he was sent to war. I know how to be alone.”
“For your Dorothy, then.”
“For Dorothy.” I squeezed the coins to my bosom and bowed my head over them. Then I said, “Will you have food, Reverend? Will you have meat and hot cider?”
“Thank you.” He ate with us, sparingly, as befits someone conscious of the meager means of a widow, and then drove his sad curricle away from my door.
I held Dolly and cried. Finally, it grew late and we went to bed. I argued with the darkness. “It was not he. My Cullah is coming home. He will come back to me.” When I slept, it seemed the darkness clawed at my ankles while I clambered up a stair of a thousand steps. “Allsy, come with me!” I called. “Come to the widow’s walk.”
“It is too far to climb. The wind will take you away and dash you to your death.”
“Allsy, do not leave me alone! I cannot be here alone. I cannot stand it. I am so afraid. Open that door! Unlock it. Do not leave me here!” I ran from one end of the widow’s walk to the other, trapped. There was no way down once Allsy shut the door behind me and locked it, for the door itself vanished. I raised my hands to the sky, to one of the gulls laughing at me. “Take me with you, Cullah. I want to fly.”
I jumped toward the gull. I felt the roughness of its toes within my grasp but it darted away before I could close my fingers. I fell, not drifting like a feather on a breeze, but flat, a stone in dead drop to the beach. I tasted sand.
I opened my eyes. Someone held a candle above me and the glare of it hurt my eyes. “What are you doing, Dolly? How long have I been asleep?”
“Two days, Ma.”
I said, “I have to get up.” I dressed, stunned at how feeble I felt. Little by little that spring, my strength returned.
When March turned to April, one day I was alone in the house. I pushed open the door to the secret room over the loom. I crawled inside the small doorway then backed out again but returned with two large candlesticks that held three lights each and a stob from the fireplace. I lit all six candles.
The room seemed alive with the feeling of Cullah’s having been the last person there. The dust motes stirred under the flare of the candles. Hung on the wall, as if he would return any moment, were his claymore, his pipes, a worn leathern shirt, and a length of plaid. Under that was the old chest. I opened it. Inside it held a pair of soot-black leggings, trousers not made by my hands. A ragged and scunging black woolen shirt lay folded atop a black cloak, thin and torn in a multitude of places. It looked useless, and it, too, I could see, was not made by me. There was a folded linen, also black. Someone had gashed it. I clucked my tongue. People could be so unthinking of fine cloth. I raised it to judge whether it were worth cutting for something else. Then I saw that the two gashes were eyeholes. I laid the cloth over my head and peered through the eyes. His hat was still on its peg. How did he keep this upon his face? Another folded cloth lay below this one. It had been knotted in the end so that it made a headscarf. I put it on. This was how my husband had slipped through the woods. I felt a surge of power, a feeling almost as if Cullah had lifted me and swung me like a bell.
“Tante?”
I jumped with such violence that one of the candles tumbled, still lit, into the open trunk. I pulled the cloth, blowing out the smoldering cinder. “What do you want, James?”
“What is this place?”
“A room. Just a room.”
“A hiding place.” He paused, searching for words. “Those are weapons. And there, rolls of cloth you have not paid tax for. It is lawless. God ordains all kings and you and your husband shun the laws of this land. Your brother, my uncle, is an outlaw and now your husband is as well.”
“My husband is dead. These rolls of cloth incur no tax sitting here, for I made them and intend to use them. Do you mean to make charges against us, James?” I felt fear and anger welling. I smelled the hatred in my soul, the brimstone of hell, for all that his father had done. I saw Rafe MacAlister in James’s face and the memory of Goody Carnegie’s book of herbs and stories exploded again before my eyes, as if Lucifer himself stood before me.
He thought again, far too long, so that I felt keenly uncomfortable. Then he said, “It is a Christian’s place to bow to the authority given him, but I am a French citizen first, and not a British one. Perhaps I should leave, tante.”
I could no longer bridle my anger. “For New Orleans? I’m sure there are no godless outlaws there. Perhaps you should have stayed in Montréal,” I snapped at him. I would be glad to see the heels of his shoes, I vowed. Then my heart lurched within me. “James, are you willing to join the British army to quell the people of this continent for their love of independence? Would you see us turned out, our farm taken, so King George could buy another cannon to shoot other Frenchmen?”
“No. Not that. It is not as simple a decision as that. I had come to find you to tell you I have been thinking for three days that the time has come for me now to head south, that I had decided to go. I appreciate all you have done for me, but I am really no farmer. I think I will make my way in some kind of trading on the river.”
“Then I am sorry for being angry with you just now. I thought you were condemning me. What will you trade?” Even as I spoke, I had to push away thoughts of Satan’s beguiling ways.
He smiled, a genuine, honest face, with no guile, I saw. Not Rafe MacAlister, but Patey’s abandoned and forgotten son. “I have learned much about the price of woolens.”
We laughed together. “I have some, but I will not sell them to you, because then we would have to pay taxes. I will give them to you, to start your trading business, but I will write you a bill that shows you own them. And, James, I wish you the best of fortune. Will you help me sort them? I can tell you much about how to keep moths away.”
James nodded and turned away just as someone rapped at the front door, making it rattle in its hinges. I climbed from the room and straightened the panel, then my cap. The gusty air of April seemed to press against the door as it opened.
Margaret Gage swooped at me. “I just heard, Ressie. Oh, poor dear. Oh, dear. Poor Cullah. And your sweet Dolly, I am so fond of her. She must be heartsick. Oh, dear, your heart must be broken. My husband said it was a terrible shame. It was not his doing, I swear it. Please say you will come to Boston for a few days? Please say you will. I so want to be near you at a time like this.”
My face went slack. Painful, bitter tears flowed yet again, and I let her clasp me as Patience once did, my arms round her waist. I looked about at my house, my Dorothy standing as still as an ice-covered tree. “That is so kind of you, Margaret, but I could not leave my house.” In truth, I cared not what Margaret wanted, for I was numb.
“I meant all of you. Alice, too. Please do come.”
Dolly spoke up. “Your horse is wandering, Mistress Gage. I’ll get him.”
I raised my brows at Margaret. “You rode horseback?”
“What else could I do? I had to come to you the moment I heard.”
I marveled at her to have jumped upon a horse to be with me. I smiled, though it felt weak and trembling, even to me, and said, “If you will have the three of us, I shall come, then, Margaret.”
“Oh, my sweet friend. You are so kind to me,” she said.
“Kind to you?”
“I feared that you somehow placed blame upon me.”
Without a knock or waiting for us to open, Gwyneth let herself in. “Ma?”
“Gwenny? You look afright.”
“I cannot find Sally. She wandered out the door while I was changing Peter’s clouties.”
“She cannot have gone far.”
“You know that one. She has feet like wings. And the sun is setting.”
“Where is Roland?”
“At a meeting i
n Concord. I sent Nathan to the Parkers’ and Dodsils’ to ask help.”
Margaret fastened her bonnet, too, and followed fast on my heels. We went first toward Gwyneth’s house, calling for my next-smallest grandchild. The babe, Peter, cried, so that Gwenny was forced to stop and feed him, but carried him with her, calling Sally.
The sun set. Roland and James joined the search. Before long, everyone was hoarse from calling. We fetched lanterns, and the neighbors came with more lanterns, so that our woods was alive with moving lights. It seemed as if we had just begun when the sky turned such a strange color it seemed lit from some magic within the woods and hills. It was sunrise.
I told Gwenny I had to fetch water for my throat, so weakened since that terrible day that I had nearly lost my voice calling for Sally. I opened the door to the barn to go through it to the house simply to save a few steps. I felt such panic, such rushing of need, as if every step I wasted could cost the life of this wee girl.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of gray-green amongst the dry hay where a single needle of sunlight illuminated a bit of cloth. One of the cows, ripe with its own odor, lay there, chewing cud. At the cow’s back, a wee form. Whether she slept or had died there, crushed perhaps, or fallen from the loft overhead, I could not tell. Teeth clenched, I let myself in and the cow stood. To my horror, beside the child, half buried in straw, lay the form of a man. His clothing was tattered to shreds, his long hair and beard knotted and greasy, and his skin scaled. I pushed the cow and went to Sally. “Is this Grandma’s wee mite?” I crooned as I picked her up, expecting a stiff little corpse.
Sally’s eyes opened as if on springs. “I hided, Grandma. No one found me. I found Cap-aw.”
“Cap-aw?” I searched my memory. “You found Grandpa? No, child, every old man you see is not your grandpa.” I looked down at the man’s foul-smelling body, unmoving still, and began backing out of the stall with the child in my arms. “That’s not Grandpa, dearie. Oh, little Sally, did he hurt you?”