“I think this might be a shade of indigo mixed with crimson or rouge. I will have to experiment. If you can get your hands on it, send me vinegar. I will need gallons of it, but send all you can. What about trousers? Will you need linen trousers with each coat?”
“Yes, make pants. Wool and linen. Different sizes. Plenty of our men are wearing rags. Two men showed up naked. You never saw the like. Determined as a Trojan but with not a stitch of clothing. Some cut up saddle blankets and sewed themselves some short pants. For that matter, while I’d like to have uniforms, if you have aught to make pants of any sort, rough and homespun, as long as they have buttons I’ll take them. We’ve got Indians, too, but you can’t tell me any man doesn’t get cold in the winter. Summer is coming, but I don’t think, as some of the fools say, that this will be over in a month. We’ll be having this same conversation next year at this time.
“We will leave tonight under cover and take it to your house, return, and you will be able to rest tomorrow. You then leave whenever you feel it is proper. I would not take you but for the woman at your house who might fear me. You have to accompany me. Will you join us, then?”
“I will. But Cullah is there. He would have let you in.”
“No he’s not. The Sons of Liberty have business in Braintree tonight, and I fear your Alice knows too well how to fire a pistol.” He gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, then called, “Anne?”
“Oui?” came a woman’s voice.
“Come in, please.”
A young woman, mahogany colored and strikingly beautiful, entered the room and glanced at me before turning her eyes to August. He said, “Anne, this is my sister, Resolute MacLammond. Ressie, Anne.” He held not the slightest hesitancy that I both knew and could overlook his introductions, for in it he left nothing to be imagined of their relationship in not adding either a last name, “miss,” or “mistress.” August looked me up and down as if he had not seen me before, made a face of near derision, and continued. “I much prefer you in satins, Ressie. I had not expected you in black but more’s the better. Anne, find anything you have as close to the shape of my sister’s gown. Just make it black, it matters not about the details. And fetch that black gauze. Resolute, take this,” he said, holding the filmy cloth to me. “Your hair is too fair and a white cap will shine like a beacon. It is my experience that one can see quite well through this stuff, and it hides the glow of skin. Wear it under your bonnet so it doesn’t blow off. Give Anne your cap. She will wear it, and keep your back to the windows at all times,” he said to her. “We will be back before daybreak. See that you both bar the doors at seven and retire by ten, since that is when I put out the lights.”
“August, it is nearly twelve miles to my house. Another twelve back here. I doubt I can walk that in a night.”
“We’ll take a boat across the river. A man I know keeps two horses always at the ready for me. Tonight I shall take them both.”
“I cannot ride a horse, brother. I have never done it. Can your horse take two?”
The sun lowered and the evening’s mist arose, adding gloom to my fears as I pulled the veil across my eyes. I felt some courage in that I could see quite well through it. How I wished I had stayed in bed and nestled next to Cullah, wished all of us were not part of this terrifying world around us. August and I crept through the lower window, dressed in blackest black, wearing gauze upon our faces.
August was adept at slipping through shadows and alleyways I would never have dared to breach had he not been there. At the river’s edge, we stepped into a shallow boat well hidden in the reeds. The boat was a leaky hull with a shallow draft and August’s oars had been wrapped in sacking and tarred so that they made little noise. At the center of the river, he believed he heard something and we bent low in the hull. I remembered my ride in such a craft, a much larger boat, remembered the haughty slave girl upon my knees, and I remembered my blue silk gown and how little I had valued such things, thinking only that it must be replaced. The boat rocked and I was ten years old for a moment. Then we were at the other shore, and I stepped into the water and mud, soaking myself to the knees.
In one hand, I carried the wrapped bundle of blue cloth. I held August’s hand with my other, holding it with all the strength I bore as I pulled my feet from the mud. “August, please stop a moment.”
“What’s the matter?”
I reached for his neck and hugged him. “I never said before now that I love you.”
His broad shoulders and strong arms held me for a moment, in a way Cullah could never have done. He held me without desire, but in a loving way that gave courage in his touch. “Let’s go.”
We reached the stable. He leaped onto the horse and pulled me up behind him, and we made it to Menotomy in less than an hour, and made my home before midnight. I pulled at the string that knocked a hammer against the jamb inside, then gave three taps followed by two, and Alice opened the door.
“Mistress? Sir?”
I said, “Alice, please hide this in the inglenook next to the fire. The nails in it are loose and all we must do is raise the lid.”
August and I ate some bread and had a small ale. Then we mounted and left Alice, heading for town. About halfway through the swamp, he stopped and reined his horse to one side so abruptly I nearly fell. “What—” I began.
“Quiet.”
Men ambled past us. They talked among themselves, we guessed about five of them. After a while, we followed them at a good distance for a time so that we would not overtake them. My heart bumped. I closed my eyes. From somewhere in the distance I believed I heard drumming and smelled smoke. It was so like hiding from the dangerous Indians when I was a child. I wondered what ghosts wandered these woods. The path narrowed in a few places. All felt familiar, yet terrifying. The deeper into the forest we went, the more fear gripped me. The horse shifted its weight and I nearly fell off again. August told me to “toe a line” and stop my foolishness.
How had Cullah done this, and on foot? He, who was more afraid of a fairy than a soldier with a musket trained upon him? My brother, I believed, had no such goblins to fight. His whole person seemed to bristle with excitement at the notion of a confrontation. An owl wooed overhead and glided above me on silent, silver wings. Crickets sang. Night thrushes warbled, their spooky song part of the mystery of darkness that kept good people in their homes at night with the doors barred. In the distance, the howl of a wolf made the hair rise on the backs of my hands. I remembered Massapoquot and the other Indians leading us through the north woods, carrying us at times, ever moving, never afraid of the dark. The Indians had seemed one with the forest, to embrace it as a familiar place, a hearth side populated with its own furniture. I straightened my frame and took several deep breaths. My skirt was soaked with water over my knees, and the weight and cold of it made it seem as if I were pulling anchors on my feet when we finally left the horse and crossed the river. Slinking through the shadowed alleyways, I nearly fainted when a dog barked. A cat yowled and I heard voices overhead from a window left open.
The greening sky and the smoky heaviness of morning fires added urgency to my feet, though by then August had my hand in his again, and pulled me along. We reached the courtyard of his home and got through the window before the watchman called five.
We joined Anne at breakfast. I sat at table in August’s dressing coat. August said Anne would give me the clothes she had worn, but that he wished I would sleep and spend another night. “I will,” I said. “But I have much to do when I get home. How do you have horses always at the ready?”
He smiled. “It’s a web like that of a spider, Ressie. One must simply tug at the right connection, and things fall into place. I leave the boat where it was, too. No one has found it though it be used every night. Revere and Dawes run across the river at least once a week. Prescott had it yesterday. It’s all a silken, invisible web. You know the strength of a single strand of silk.”
“I do.”
When I arrived hom
e the next noon in Margaret’s gilded chaise, Alice sat at the fire tatting lace, her feet upon a hassock.
“What are you making?” I asked.
“House cap for the lady of this house.”
“That looks beautiful. Most extravagant. It is lovely. Thank you.”
“I t’ink you wear this, and you t’ink of my affection with it.”
Warmth flowed up my face from my bosom. “How kind. I shall. Is Master Cullah home?”
“He is, Mistress. Sleeping upstairs from the sound of his snoring,” she said with a grin. She blushed.
I said, “Now, we have work to do, rather, I have work. I am going to mix dye and see if I can replicate that blue with indigo and whiting. I will not insist you help me. This is treason against the Crown. I alone will hang for it if I must.”
“I have already made a pattern of it for you. I took apart the sides real gentle, and pressed it, and laid it on muslin. Marked all the places of it. I didn’t cut any of it, so it can be put back together in no time.”
I straightened. “You did in so few hours?”
“I didn’t want to cut it, so I took some time holding it and pinning it. Missy Dolly helped. She going to have baby, you know? She and I cut the pattern. All we need is cloth.”
“I have cloth. All we need is the dye. A baby? La. Another grandchild. Wonderful!”
“Mistress? I have somet’ing to tell you.”
“Yes, Alice?” I busied myself with clearing off the table to begin work.
“Mistress, it was me dropped that crystal glass.”
“I have no crystal glass.”
“Long time ago, at Master Spencer’s ball. It was me.”
I searched my memories. “Why did you say it was not you?”
“Because I already owed you for too much. You buy me from Mistress Spencer, her throwing a fit. Then you say I am free. You saved me from a beating that night. I didn’t want to have you t’ink I owed you so I must stay, must do as you say, must be somebody’s slave. I wanted to see how it would be if you had not’ing more to hold me.”
“Why tell me now?”
“Just want you to know, I see you now.”
“I do not understand.”
“It took a long time to trust. Now I know.”
I nodded. “It does. That is good of you to tell me. I will love my new cap.”
Outside, I stirred and boiled and dried dye mixtures on differing weaves and thread. I could not get the blue of the coat exactly, but what I had was within five shades of it. I bleached whites and creams, and we pressed and shrunk, stretched and dyed yard after yard of cloth. Then we began to cut them. I worked until my fingers bled.
Two weeks later we had ten coats made, and as many pairs of breeches and waistcoats in contrasting white linen. It was fine work, with small stitches, and not a pucker would I allow. Even Bertie helped, becoming quite a hand at sewing on buttons. This was a small thing, I knew. There was no way a single small family could clothe an army. What I wanted to do was to just make a few soldiers warm.
During those two weeks, five different sets of travelers came to my door begging food. One group consisted of four young men and one old one. We had already finished our meal, but I invited them inside, and said, “Sirs, I have some hasty pudding in the pot. I will share it with you, but I have nothing else.”
“Give us money, then, that we can buy something in town.”
“We have no money.”
“You have money. This is a big house. There is always money.”
Cullah said, “This house was built big because it housed a large family, and once there was money to build it. It is not so now.”
One of the men sidled past Alice and toward the stairway. He stopped and backed from it, feeling with his hands behind him. Down the stairs came Bertie, the pistol in hand, aimed right at the man’s head. Bertie’s voice had not yet deepened, but when he said, “You leave this house,” they listened to him. “I am but the smallest, and my five brothers wait up the stairs, each bigger than the other, and each one carries a pistol and a musket and sword bigger than the last. If you make it past me you must fight the next man, six of us in total, and that man there is my grandfather who is Cullah MacLammond, the heartiest Highlander who ever lived. Waiting by the door is my uncle, a vicious pirate who scuttled seventeen ships on the high seas and never was caught. He will put a dagger through your liver and pin you to a maple tree so the sap will run across your middle forever.”
The men left my kitchen fast as they could. I barred the door. Alice looked at me, at Bertie, and I stared from him to her, too. Cullah laughed, saying, “The lad has your gift of a sharp tongue and a quick story, my love.” Bertie glowed with pride in himself.
I stared hard at Bertie. “Best mind that tongue. It will cause you trouble, too, if you are not careful.”
Cullah said, “Put the pistol away and come with me. We have rows to hoe and a ditch to dig. Nothing like hard work to build up a boy and still his tongue.”
Bertie’s face fell. I arched my brows. “Go on and dig, Bertie. When you are grown you will thank us for it.”
“That is what old people say when it is most miserable,” he said. I smiled.
“Come on, lad. Blisters and a sore back,” Cullah added, “will make a man hungry for an education.” As they left, Alice and I laughed as we went back to work sewing, and now and then, we laughed again.
Two days later I answered another knock on my door to find Emma Dodsil again standing there, holding a bushel basket topped with boiled eggs. I heard Alice rushing the blue cloth from the room even as I greeted her. “Emma? How nice to see you. Would you come in for some pie?” I dared to glance over my shoulder before I opened the door wider.
“Yes, thank you. I mean, yes, I will come in. But I won’t ask you to share food today. I have come to share other things.” She stopped talking, sat down, faced me, and deliberately touched her bonnet twice. I was not convinced. She said, “Virtue and I have been long married, and all our lives have tried to live above any contempt, above reproach, above rebellion.”
“Very admirable of you, I am sure,” I said.
“Your husband has helped us often, when he can.”
“Cullah is a good neighbor.” I felt hairs on the back of my neck rise. She was leading to something, and I felt I could easily be trapped if I were not circumspect with my words.
“As am I,” she said. “Oh, Mistress Resolute, we feel we must support our neighbors who have done so much for us. Will you not take these things for the rebel militia? I know they might help someone.” She raised the sack with its eggs again, dumping it none too gently on the floor, and this time revealing a stack of shirts and pairs of stockings.
I watched closely as her gaze charted the room. “Take those things to the rebels? Mistress, I am not in the business of outfitting a militia that stands against King George.”
“Neither am I,” she said, with a touch of anger in her tone. “I am in the business of outfitting a militia that stands for my family and lands against a tyrant of a governor. I—I have no use for these stockings and shirts. Do with them what you will. Only know, please, that I am no less a Patriot, and no more a criminal, than any of the other wives who make stockings for people they care about.” Emma dropped the stockings and shirts at her feet, scooped up the sack of eggs, and dropped it into the basket again, then headed for the door. “You’ll see someone gets them?” When I said nothing, she went rather angrily out the door and down the path.
Alice came from the stairs and said, “Mistress?”
“We will see if we can know their sympathies from a source other than her words. Cullah said Virtue is never at the meetings. If he is one of us, we have to find out before I say anything to his wife that will put all of us on a gibbet.” I could imagine a certain number of shirts and stockings, being found in my possession, and placed in the hands of another of our friends, could be enough to hang us all if she were to be plotting.
The next morning I wrapped the coats in layers of old rags. I took Emma’s stockings and shirts, too, but wrapped separately, so that if this were a trap, they were not mixed with my work. I set them into the bottom of the wagon and put a blanket across them and my feet upon them. Bertie drove and Alice sat beside me. Soldiers walked up and down the road in groups of five or six. They were not armed, and paid us no attention, so that when we arrived at John Hancock’s house, I felt confident that all would go well. A butler answered the door, and when I asked to see John, he showed me to a fitted parlor.
“Mistress MacLammond, oh, how good to see you,” John said. “Do you know my friend here? Quite an irascible lawyer. I am forced to entertain him, for I think no one else can stand to do it. Please let me make you acquainted with Mr. John Adams of Braintree.”
A man no taller than I, but stout, stood and bowed. “Good morning, madam,” he said grandly. “Will you have refreshments with us?”
I had heard of him, and it was none too flattering, so I simply smiled. “Good morning, sir. Thank you but I cannot stay. I have people waiting for me. I only came to deliver some goods ordered by August Talbot to be sent here.”
John scratched his head. “Adams, lend a hand here. We shall both prosper by some physical labor, eh?”
So my parcels were carried by the twine around them, one in each hand, by John and John, Alice, Bertie, and myself. As I said farewell, John Hancock kissed my hand and, leaning his head, said, “Mistress MacLammond, your work will serve a mighty purpose. Keep an eye on this fellow here. Mine are the pockets. His are the brains. My regards to your friend Talbot.”
“Mr. Hancock? Are you familiar with all the families who provide supplies for the Patriots?”
“Not really, no.”
“Would you be so kind as to let me know anything you discover about a man and wife, Virtue and Emma Dodsil?”
“Where did you hear those names?”
“They are my neighbors.”