“No, I did not.”
“I look like a cur.”
I studied my callused fingers. I had spent so many hours at the loom, I felt almost as if I could not walk without repeating in my mind the clickety-tick sounds of the countermarche. It was just as the day we alighted the ship and the sand on dry land seemed to roll like a wave. “I have my scars, too. You look like a woman. The reason we love to see a babe is to be reminded what immortal beauty will be. We cannot walk this earth without our marks. Will you and George come for Thanksgiving in November?”
“Did you not hear? Governor Hutchinson has outlawed it. He said it was too frivolous, and that the colonists ought to be thankful they are not all hanged, rather than celebrating.”
“He is a cur.”
“Resolute? When did you grow so old?”
“Why, what a terrible thing to say.”
“I told you I was rude. I did not wish to imply your mien was unattractive. But, as you said to me, we are only as good friends as we are honest ones. I meant that you have such a motherly way about you. It is wisdom as if you were a hundred years old. I never noticed it when we used to sit and gossip. When did that change?”
I did not want to repeat the obvious to her that it often came with motherhood. I valued Margaret. I loved her spunk and vitality. I wanted to see myself in her, I suppose. “It comes with the scars, sweet Margaret.” As I picked up the reins—for I had learned to drive my own wagon—I said, “Margaret? If I have need of you? If ever I cannot get into Boston and want you, what can I do?”
She smiled as if she, too, knew we needed this. She reached into her skirt and into her pocket, and pulled out a silver shilling. “Send me this,” she said, placing it in my hand and closing my fingers with hers. “Send me a shilling and I will come. Only keep it in your hat, and let no one spend it.”
“Send a shilling,” I said. “It will only happen, of course, if I may trust any messenger with a shilling in these times.”
“True. Sixpence will do as well. Farewell, friend. I know not whether we will meet again soon. There’s talk they will close the town completely.”
“Let us plan, then. Come to my house next Tuesday for tea. I will spend my last lump of sugar making cakes.”
“I will, then. As long as it is your last,” she said with a grin. “I relish that sort of extravagance.” We both laughed, knowing, I suspect, that it was no doubt true, and that it would be bittersweet in any event. “If I can find a needle I shall bring it, also.” We kissed each other’s cheeks and bade farewell.
Tuesday morning arrived and I gathered eggs earlier than usual, intending to begin whipping the whites for a light cake. Alice sat sewing, making herself a quilted petticoat in the fashion I had showed her, one with secret pockets sewn in. Cullah was in the field with Roland. I worked happily, expecting my friend, and sifted flour, then set to beating the eggs. My arms grew weary before I got the egg whites to rise up in stiff mountains, like snow in a bowl.
A heavy hand rapped at my door and a voice called, “Open up in the name of His Majesty King George.”
“Just a moment,” I called in reply, knitting my brows as I stared at Alice. I went to the door just as it came flying inward at me. “La!”
There stood a gaggle of soldiers, seven or eight of them. “Outside, woman. Who else is in here? Everyone outside, now. Look lively. Out the door!”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “You have but to ask and I will provide you food such as I have.”
“Our orders is to search this house and premises.”
“For what, sir?”
“For anything that seems amiss. Now out with you.”
I turned my head this way and that, looking at my bowl of beaten egg whites, mounded up for a cake sitting beside a crushed cone of sugar and a pile of whitest flour, sifted nine times. I took my cloak from its peg by the door, and Alice did likewise. We stood in the yard while seven soldiers ran indoors. From the yard, I heard all manner of banging and crashing, quiet periods, and then more knocking about. After a while, one of them held the door ajar while the others joined and carried out chests, dumping the contents upon the damp ground. They brought out the mahogany highboy, Cullah’s last creation for our house, pulled drawers from their places, tossing them here and there.
One of them said, “See if that has got a false bottom on it,” and kicked his foot through the back of the cabinet. “Anything suspicious, that can’t be opened, bring out here and we’ll open it that way,” he said to the others, laughing.
“I’ll be glad to open anything for you,” I called. “Please do not break my furniture.”
He pointed his finger at me and said, “Quiet.”
I heard glass breaking from inside.
“Do you not know what a window costs?” I asked. “Tell them to stop, sir, and I will open all to you.”
“I said quiet, Goody. If you impede His Majesty’s search, you will be arrested.”
“Pray tell me what His Majesty is searching for?”
“Anything amiss, I told you already. Here, boys, bring that one over here.”
He caved in the top of a small cloverleaf table with one thrust of his boot. They emptied every drawer onto the floor, opened every cupboard, and even upended the crocks of flour upon the table. One of them opened a tin where I kept precious black pepper.
“Here we go,” he said to his fellows with a grin.
“You leave that be,” I said. “It is pepper that cost me dear.”
He sneered. “It’s black powder, eh? And look at this, a silver sixpence.”
“That is to keep it fresh,” I said. Cullah came running and stood beside me.
“So you’re hiding money and black powder. We could shoot you on the spot, but as we are gentle chaps, we won’t. Long as you close your yap. Word is that you’re hiding wool and soft cloth. Where is it?”
As he said that last, one of them pitched my flax wheel into the yard where it landed with a crushing sound.
Cullah put his arms protectively about me. I shook with fury. After a while I was even more angry because I sensed he was protecting them from me. Of course, I would have suffered, but the storm raging in my ribs was the size of a hurricane.
By the time they had dragged half of the household outside to the front yard, one of them decided to search the barn. He returned, leading one of our three cows. Another man came from the house with the bowl of egg whites. He stuck in a finger and licked it, made a face, and tossed the bowl into the flowerbed where the crockery broke in three pieces and the eggs lay like a tiny snowdrift against a stand of summer daisies past their season. Alice stayed close to Cullah and me. One of them poked a dagger at her chin, which she raised defiantly, and he asked her, “We seen that spinner’s wheel. Where’s the wool from it, wench?”
“It is a flaxen wheel,” Alice said. “It does not make wool; it spins flaxen thread. It’s the stuff your underwear is made of, if you are so gentle as to wear it.”
The man’s mouth opened and his face reddened, saying, “I’ll show you, wench, who needs underwear and who don’t.” Then he laughed and ticked at the ruffle of her cap with his dagger, laughing again before he walked away.
Finally, the soldiers assembled themselves at my front door, and began to walk away, leading my cow. Two of them held folded woolen blankets, our best quilted ones, the warmest for winter. Off they marched, as much as they could with a cow in step.
I took a breath, ready to protest again, but Cullah nudged me. I ran to the highboy chest, now stoved in at the back of it, splintered wood everywhere. I threw my arms about it and cried. Every inch of it had been touched by Cullah. With tender fingers I pressed the splinters in at the poor broken side.
In the parlor, a blanket smoked at one corner where it lay too near the fire. I pulled it back, and as I did my mind spun to the parlor on Meager Bay, the night of devastation caused by cannonballs falling through the roof. Not one thing had escaped their search. I ran to the stairs d
own to the loom. Slid open the panel. They had not found the secret room. Upstairs in my bedroom, I sighed with relief. They had not pushed the wall and found the other stairway.
In the barn, August’s crates lay untouched in the room above the loft. Cullah joined me there. I asked, “Did they find your new musket?”
“No. I hid it in the last place anyone would look. Plain sight.” He stood upon a barrel and reached above the door where, standing, its length almost invisible in the shadows, stood the fowling piece. “It is my best guess,” he said, “that men hunting something or someone almost never look up, and certainly never look back after they’ve gone through a door.”
It took all three of us, Cullah, Alice, and I, with Roland’s help, to get the highboy back up the stairs and set in place and it took weeks to restore a semblance of order. Even so, the drawers would not close in their tracks.
January 1771
The new year found us thankful that the last year had been a mast year for acorns—for the bulk of them fell every other fall—and that I had gathered acorns to hoard against the worst of winter. By February, we grew weary of boiled acorns, but we stayed full on them, and ground them, adding them to hasty pudding and bread, too.
The last week of February, we got word that our poor Rosalyn died in childbed. Brendan brought his boy Bertram to my door shortly after the letter had arrived. I asked him, “Why do you not leave the army, then? Is it possible? You could care for your boy and live here if you like.”
“Ma, I am a proud soldier of the Realm.”
“Well and aye. I am a proud mother of a soldier. But son, the Realm is sapping the life out of her people like a canker. We are poor farmers now. The Realm has taken your father’s shop and all his tools, and others of those proud soldiers have come to this house too many times to despoil it.”
“Will you not welcome my son, then?” he said, sadly.
“Of course I will. Bertram may stay with me as long as he likes; as long as I live, he has a place. Just know, my bonny Brendan, that I—”
“I will send you money for his support.”
“If you do I shall put it by for his education. Brendan—”
“Mother, please speak no more of this. I must trust you to raise my son to be a loyal British subject. Promise me you shall?”
“I promise to raise him in truth and honor, seeking ever the high ground. I will take him to church. I will feed him. He will have everything I can give him, Brendan, but loyalty? As he grows to be a man, just as you did, he will choose.”
“Very well, then.” He turned to the lad. “Son, you know I have no choice. Mind your granny, and be helpful. I’ll come for you when I can.”
“Pa, take me with you.”
“I cannot. You know that, boy. Straighten up, now. Let’s see my little soldier. Take it with pride and hold your chin up. That’s the lad. Your mother would be proud.”
The boy Bertram, deprived of his mother, now lost his home, too. I knew well the taste of that abandon, but when I tried to speak to him, he turned away.
“Brendan,” Cullah said. “There is something I must tell you.”
“Pa, there is something I must tell you. The rebels are all but shaking pitchforks in the streets. They throw rocks at His Majesty’s men. That is why I want Bertie here, away from Boston town. You must be very careful. Uncle August has long been suspected of smuggling goods to the colonies, and I’m told his path leads often to your door. The suspicion may fall upon you as well.”
“It has already,” Cullah said. “At least you were not among those sent to search and destroy our property.”
I chewed my lip, weighing words. “Brendan, you brought a French man home from the war, the way some men brought home a string of wampum or a necklace of bear claws taken after a battle.”
Brendan smiled. “My sister was so homely I had to capture her a husband.”
I looked to the sky and shook my head. “I should box your ears for such an insult to your beautiful sister. May she not hear you from heaven. Think, son, why you did such a thing. Because you looked about you and saw more than orders. You saw the small thing, a single man, who, once you knew him, was not your enemy. You saw the large thing, too. A war fought over greed, a thing that was inherently wrong. From where I live, the crushing of Britain’s subjects to use their blood to grease the wheels of world conquest is equally wrong. Every pulpit in Massachusetts rings every week with talk against such by the king. We are a churchgoing family. Do you hear what I am saying?”
His face held firm but his eyes would give away his thoughts even in the dark. “Be safe, Ma. Keep my son safe.”
“I will.” Brendan shook hands with his son and his father, settled his hat upon his head, and walked away, that tall son of mine, that man who spoke with Cullah MacLammond’s voice and strode with his father’s stride. I said, “Well, Bertie, let us see if you have need of clothing.”
* * *
Bertie was a good lad but easily bored. It was my thought that he was too intelligent to be satisfied without schooling. I dug through my hidden troves and came up with six pounds in total. I felt such an odd dismay, for on the one hand it was not enough to ensure Bertie an education, and on the other, it was more than enough to have provided better food and shoes for all of us in the present. Should I put it away in keeping for that future day or spend it now upon keeping us alive and in warm shoes? I raised my hem. A couple of yards of twine held my shoes together even now. Perhaps something now must be spent on the boy. Perhaps I should not face another year in these old shoes for the sake of my own health.
One evening Cullah called him to sit beside him on the settle. “Have you any yearning, Bertie, for education? Medicine? Law? The clergy?”
“I do, sir. I should like to be a minister.”
“You will have to go to Harvard for it. It will mean a great deal of work for you and me both. Do you feel as if you are called by God to do this?”
“I want to be able to move people with words like Reverend Clarke does. I want to have people weep, or cheer, or shake in their boots. I wish to speak so that happens.”
I thought that was what I had wanted as a child, to speak and be heard. I asked him, “Are you good at writing, then? Have you read any books or poetry?”
“I cannot read at all, mum.”
“Then we will start there. You will soon read.” Cullah listened and smiled to himself as we began that very night by the fire.
CHAPTER 37
December 1773
That winter snow flew early. Cold seeped into every crevice of the house. In mid-December the navy set up a blockade of the coastline from Long Island to Maine until the East India Company should be repaid for the shipload of tea broken and soaked in brine at the bottom of Boston Harbor. What were we to do? The ones who had spilled it would not pay, and the rest of us could not pay. I knew Benjamin had taken part in it, and I held a very real terror that one day my sons would find themselves aiming at each other. On every street corner men preached day and night against the burdens upon us, but rarely did they get their second page of notes from their pockets before they and their listeners were dispersed at the end of a bayonet.
The long winter days seemed to give Bertram dark moods. I asked him, “Next year, do you want to apprentice? Would you like a trade rather than a profession? What about going after your uncle Benjamin?”
“I should like to be a woodcarver like Grandfather, but he says he won’t teach me. He’s always minding cows, now. Maybe I should go to sea.”
“They say the difference between being a British sailor and being a prisoner in Newgate is the added possibility of drowning, but if that is what you want I shall ask Uncle August—”
“No, mum. I should want to be in His Majesty’s navy. Uncle is a pirate.”
“He is not a pirate, Bertie. Child, I cannot make you happy. I believe you are troubled, wanting a man around, a father. I am but your grandmother and none too exciting. Try to take some interest i
n your schoolbooks.”
He made a face.
“Well and aye, boy. It is high time you were apprenticed, if you are not going to study. And if you do not appreciate what I have done for you it is also high time you learned to keep that face under control. A lad who wears his every thought upon his face is asking for someone to change his opinions. You could help your uncle Roland more on the farm. No? Then we shall have to ask around. I cannot give you happiness, but I can at least give you a chance to find it.” I felt vexed with the lad. He was never satisfied, never settled, and only half accomplished chores given him.
“I am sorry, mum. I know Pa tossed me off on you.”
“He did no such thing. Brendan is my son, Bertie, and you my grandson. As long as I am able, I will help you both but you have to do your part. Boys go out at fourteen and you are almost that age.” I sat. “Your father is doing the best he can for you. He cannot disobey his orders.”
“He could become a Patriot, then he would not be a soldier. He would be a rebel.”
I sent him to bring in extra wood one day and opened the secret room above the loom. On a passing fancy, I took Brendan’s drum from its place, found the drumsticks, and closed up the wall before Bertie returned. On Hogmanay morning, I served up cakes of Indian flour with a slice of cured pork and treacle. “Look,” I said. “This was your father’s. It shall be yours now. Remember, make no face, young man, other than one of polite curiosity. I will not order you to play it, but it would be something to do. Take it, if you want, to Meeting on Sunday and we will see if there are any men who can teach you to make some music from the thing. I will not harp at you about it. Do it or not, as you please. We shall also ask if there is one who would apprentice you. You may try out five or six trades before you find your task. A man must make a living, and you will see what suits you.”
“Mum? I would rather join the Sons of Liberty and learn to drill with a musket.”