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N
ext morning the widow’s face looked something brighter, Freeman’s much the same. He set off for Winslow’s farm as soon as he’d breakfasted. A brief altercation took place where the widow attempted to hand him some money from her jar, he attempted to wave it off with talk of a loan, the widow thrust it at him again. Freeman took the money and went off.

He returned lugging a bag of wool, and again that thing leaped in Alice’s chest. More wool to spin meant Alice there yet, in the widow’s home. The widow laid an old blanket over the keeping room table, and she and Alice sat one to a side, picking the bits of pitch, dirt, and matting out of the fleece until they were both slick to the elbows in lanolin. They picked the whole day, rolling up the blanket only long enough to serve up a cold mutton dinner, throughout which Freeman sat uncommonly silent; after the dinner he disappeared and didn’t return till supper, where again he had little to say.

Alice went to bed and listened to the wind combing the pines, the waves raking the beach. She thought she might possibly be lulled to sleep by the sounds until she heard a new one: the rise and fall of voices below. She crept to the stairs in time to catch a question from the widow.

“You told her Alice could spin?”

“I did so.”

“Mr. Winslow said right here at this table they had no one to spin at home.”

“He did say that, yes. But as I said before, she’s got no paper, no reference—”

“And a halfhearted recommendation from you. You needn’t deny it, sir; you’re incapable of speaking other than you think.”

“I might say to you, Widow Berry, that one often puts to others what one possesses in oneself. I might also say that we should be a very great pair of fools if we did not assume our friend Shubael had spread the tale of his stowaway across the whole village.”

Silence, after which Freeman took a second turn. “I might also remind you, Widow Berry, of the very fair chance that Mr. Winslow himself said something to his wife about the girl.”

“What might he have said that could possibly turn his wife against her? He sat right here and watched her work at her tasks all the evening without a misstep or a whimper.”

“Perhaps he reported on the uncommon beauty of her face and form.”

Another silence, after which Freeman again took double turn.

“You understand the wife’s not well.”

“Yes, I do. And I understand you men are a great lot of fools. I’m going to my bed. Good night, sir.”

“Good night?”

“Good night.”

“Well, good night, then.”

THE WOMEN BEGAN
carding the next day, pulling the handfuls of fleece through fine-toothed wire brushes over and over until the strands came straight and smooth; after the carding came the combing of the fleece into rolls for easy handling, like the ones Alice had pulled from the dusty basket. As they worked Alice looked often at their paired hands. Alice’s burn had already eased under the widow’s care, but the widow’s scars put an awkwardness to almost any task she attempted, and Alice wondered often at the flames that had disfigured her.

As the women worked, Freeman came and went, his long shadow moving in and out of the house, his horse shuffling in and out of the yard, and although in his absence Alice sometimes worried that he would pop up and surprise her unaware, she felt easier with him gone.

The women worked at the carding and combing until they had prepared enough wool for Alice to move to the wheel again; from there the widow carded and combed alone as Alice spun. The next full day at the wheel Alice spun six skeins of wool, and as that meant a backward-forward walk of near twenty miles, she had no great trouble that night with her sleeping.

THE DAYS MOVED
along: one, another, and another; Alice spent most of each day at the wheel. The nights developed a habit of their own: the widow and Freeman would wait for Alice to take the stairs and then settle into a discussion of the day’s events below; Alice would take the stairs loudly to the top, then creep halfway back to listen. But in that listening Alice caught no further mention of Freeman’s efforts to find her work in the village. She considered what this might mean and decided it meant that for now the widow needed her to spin down her bag of wool. She calculated it would take her eight days to complete the job and lulled herself to sleep that night by chanting it over and over: eight more days in the widow’s home.

ONCE THE WIDOW
had finished the carding and combing she returned to the other work the season demanded: slaughtering the calf, cooking up its offal and making mince and sausage, milking, weeding, egging, and always, cooking and washing. But even a weaver of the widow’s reduced dexterity could fully occupy three or more spinners, and so Alice stayed at the wheel. After Alice had produced a quantity of yarn the widow also took on the next chore—dyeing—alone. She emptied the night jars into the blue dye tub to dissolve the indigo cakes with the chamber-lye, and went woods-walking to collect red oak fronds for the red dye and sassafras bark for the yellow. She soaked and dried and soaked and dried and soaked and dried the yarn, first filling the house and then the yard with the stink of it as she spread the wet yarn on the bushes to dry.

When Alice had spun her way halfway through the bag of wool the widow asked Freeman to pull the loom out from under the eaves in the attic and help her repair its tackling, which he did with an ease and agility that belied his hinged-together appearance. Aside from that single task he began to spend more daylight hours outside of the home, attending to whatever was his business, or perhaps just avoiding the stench by visiting the tavern, but he always came home by supper and sat with them in the evening. Alice and the widow would wind yarn or sew while Freeman read, either to himself out of a book by someone named Locke, or out loud from something like Pope or Shakespeare. From time to time Freeman asked Alice to mend a cuff for him, or remove a sauce stain from his shirt, or affix a button, and for each task he gave her twopence. At first Alice feared those coins, suspecting what else the man expected them to pay for, but as time went by and the coins continued to come but the man didn’t, she began to accept them with greater comfort. She even began to look forward to the evenings. Freeman seemed pleased that Alice knew some of the works he read from, and that she listened with such grave attention; he sometimes asked her a question about a particular passage, and if she knew what he talked of he seemed more pleased than he did over a clean shirtfront.

The walking wheel sat in the northeast corner of the keeping room, and from there Alice could observe and take note of the occupants of her new household with freedom. In addition to observing, she listened. She had long ago made note that few masters or mistresses credited a servant with a working pair of ears, but she also imagined that the hum of the wheel caused the others to believe their speech better muffled than it was. Through her listening she discovered that both the widow and Freeman had been raised in Satucket and that Freeman had been a particular friend of the widow’s husband, which perhaps went some way to explaining the loose way of speaking between them. She learned that Shipmaster Hopkins was the widow’s husband’s cousin, that he’d married Freeman’s sister, and had eight grown children. She learned that the widow had one living child, a daughter named Mehitable, who had married a man named Clarke and lived in one of the big houses near the mill, with two babes of her own and several older stepchildren, which explained the age of the widow’s spinning granddaughter Bethiah, but not what might have happened to her.

As the position of the wheel allowed Alice to face the window if she desired she also came to recognize the widow’s nearest neighbors, the mismatched Deacon Smalley, a man so slightly built as to appear near Alice’s size from the road, and an Indian called Sam Cowett, taller even than Freeman and half again as broad. Alice had several times heard the widow or Freeman give their good-days to either neighbor as they passed along the landing road, and heard the neighbors offer up their greetings in return. Yet with all these people connected to the widow by blood or proximity, except for Freeman’s political gatherings, no one ever came to the widow’s home at all. Alice was therefore greatly surprised one day when Freeman returned from the village with a young, pink-faced boy beside him.

If the boy surprised Alice he more greatly surprised the widow. She let a skein of yarn drop from her hands into the dye kettle, and rushed toward the boy in such a hurry she trailed blue dye all down her apron. She gave him a fierce hug, stood back from him, and said, “Well!” and then “Well!” again, before seeming to notice his eyes darting toward Alice’s corner like a pair of hummingbirds. The widow introduced him: her grandson Nate Clarke, her daughter’s oldest stepson. It seemed she would have said more if she could have thought of it before Freeman came up and laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

Freeman said, “Your lad has news for you, Widow Berry,” but the boy stood dumb. Freeman continued. “He’s stood the examination of candidates and has been admitted to the fall term at Harvard College.”

The widow hugged the boy again; Alice gave him a second look. The fine bones, fine hair, and fine features had deceived her; she wouldn’t have thought him the age for college. Besides that, he seemed dim-witted. As the widow inquired after the particulars of the examination he answered with two disjointed words: English. Latin.

After a time Freeman disappeared into his room and returned with the book by Locke, which appeared to be the real purpose of the visit. Freeman handed the book to the boy as if he were handing him a basket of eggs; in truth, Alice was surprised he could bring himself to relinquish it. He said, “Take heed of him, my boy. Take heed. You’ll find his faith in the goodness of man most inspiring.”

“But how does he account for the not-good?”

Alice gave the boy a third look. Perhaps some wit in him.

“Read the book, lad,” Freeman said. “Now don’t be late for your tutor.”

But the boy didn’t move. He seemed to have shaken off his stupor. “Will you tell me first, sir, what you say of this non-importation plan?”

“Well, lad, you’re fifteen now—”

“Nearer sixteen, sir.”

“Nearer sixteen, then. You tell me what you think of it.”

“My father’s strong against it. He’s against the new tax too, but he thinks—”

“I know what your father thinks, as does all the village. I ask what you think.”

“I don’t know. I have some trouble over it.”

“What troubles you?”

“Well, ’tis the law, sir.”

“Ah. The law. Very good. The law declares the tax must be paid, and so the tax must be paid. Is that how you make it?”

“I do, sir.”

“Very good. Now suppose you ask yourself if this tax is indeed a lawful one. Suppose you ask yourself who made the tax and why, and by what right.”

“I should say a law come out of Parliament to be a law of the highest order.”

“Higher than the law of nature? Higher than the law of a man’s own conscience?”

The boy stood silent.

“Suppose you next ask yourself who gains by this new tax and who loses. Suppose you ask yourself too who pays it, and whether those who pay it are allowed a say in its making. Ask yourself these things, and report to me what you make for answers. Now be gone or you’ll be late for your tutor.”

LATER THAT NIGHT
Alice heard the widow and Freeman in argument below, their voices rising in counterpoint up the stairwell. Alice moved far enough down the stairs to catch such phrases as would identify their subject, and when she discovered they talked of the boy she thought to return to her bed but found herself caught by the next sentence.

“You pit the boy against his father,” the widow said.

“I let him see another side,” Freeman answered.

“You let him see your side.”

“Not mine alone.”

“Nor all the province’s, as you’d let him think it.”

“He’s old enough to think for himself.”

“But not old enough to survive by himself. You shouldn’t have brought him here. If his father were to learn of it—”

“The boy knows enough to keep quiet.”

“Nonetheless—”

Silence.

“Nonetheless?” Freeman prompted.

“Nonetheless, sir, I thank you for it.”

“Pah! A happy accident. By the way, did Myrick send a boarder to you?”

“He did not.”

“How now? I was almost sure of it; a large party come for the wedding—”

“Mine is a ‘pagan house,’ Mr. Freeman. I heard the Myrick sisters call it so two days ago at the mill, before they saw me approaching. I expect no recommendation from them or anyone else in the village.”

“You might do something for yourself in that regard.”

“What ‘something,’ sir?”

“You might appeal to the reverend, return to the church.”

“For that I must be greater starved than I am at present. When you’re next in the village would you be so kind as to fetch another bag of wool from Mr. Winslow? Alice has neared the bottom of this one.”

Alice heard no more talk. Another bag of wool. Eight more days. Nine or ten if she slowed some. Already, the waking dreams of Philadelphia and the high-walled ship had been replaced by dreams of Satucket and her bed in the widow’s attics.

Her sleep dreams remained the same.

A
lice’s eavesdropping prevented any great surprise when the Sabbath came and the widow stayed home. Alice walked to meeting with Freeman, who took advantage of the widow’s absence to pepper Alice with questions he’d no doubt wished to ask her for some days now, and Alice answered in varying degrees of truth.
Where was her family? All dead, sir. Had she always lived at Boston? They’d come from London when she was a girl, sir. And just where at Boston did she live with her master? No great distance from the docks, sir
. As the docks fringed the length of the harbor Alice felt her answer safe there. Freeman might have caused more difficulty over the exact part of the docks if they hadn’t just then come upon Shipmaster Cobb and his wife and four children, also on their way to meeting. Mrs. Cobb was a loose-fleshed, loose-mouthed woman who took Alice under her wing, rambling on about her children’s ills all the way to the meetinghouse, then directing Alice to the women’s gallery.

Alice took her seat and looked down, pleased to discover she knew so many faces now; the boy Nate’s stuck out as it swung in her direction and fixed there. Alice attempted to fix her own attention on the reverend, but she couldn’t manage to keep it there. A young boy pulled a louse out of a smaller boy’s hair and cracked it between his fingernails. Two little girls pushed at each other until their mother cuffed the girl nearest her. The boy behind the lousy boy took a pin out of his coat pocket and stuck it in the lousy boy’s arm. A woman in the black of mourning began to weep quietly. What had the reverend said to start her tears? Alice tried to attend the sermon.
Eternal wrath shall come to the soul who neglects the call of the church.
Perhaps the woman’s husband hadn’t done his duty toward meeting. Or perhaps the reverend spoke of the widow?

Whoever he spoke of, he spoke till the sun had moved out of the east window and into the south one. As they filed out of church Alice saw the boy Nate wait at the steps till the pin boy passed close by him; he gripped the boy by the shoulder, bent low, and spoke in his ear. The boy passed something to Nate—the pin, if Alice were to guess—and Nate held the boy another second before releasing him. The pin boy rolled his shoulder, as if it ached him, and dashed down the steps, from time to time looking behind him.

AT MR. MORTON’S
all the household members had fasted between morning and afternoon services; at the Verleys a full dinner was prepared, but for Mr. Verley alone, which often left him snoring in his pew during the afternoon sermon; at the widow’s a cold platter was set down so that each could partake or not as it suited him. The widow ate heartily and well; Freeman took a chicken leg as he walked past the table; Alice tried a piece of bread and butter and found, contrary to Mr. Morton’s teaching, that it did not fight with God’s words and make her ill.

If Alice had been shocked when the widow stayed home from meeting, her eyes indeed popped when the widow sat down to wind yarn after her meal; Alice hadn’t worked on the Sabbath since the day a storm had flooded Mr. Morton’s front parlor and they’d been forced to mop the floor. She stood in great unease halfway between the fire and the wheel until the widow said, “Mr. Freeman, before you retire to your room to go over your accounts—or excuse me, as it is the Lord’s Day you of course do naught but pray over them—would you be so kind as to fetch down the Bible so Alice may spend the Sabbath as she’s no doubt accustomed?”

Freeman retrieved a dusty Bible from the top left-hand cupboard next to the fire, handed it to Alice, and retired to his room without a word. Alice sat at table and opened the Bible wherever it would fall, but the words wouldn’t take up any kind of order, her mind too busy piecing together new evidence about the people whose roof she shared. She got so far: The widow did not attend church, or abstain from work on the Sabbath, or read the Bible. Freeman attended church and would have the widow so do, to the point of his prodding her about it the night before. The widow did not care for his prodding and now jabbed back at his working his accounts on the Sabbath with a poorly disguised sermon of her own—those who lived in glass houses should not throw stones—the widow thus driving the last word home.

Or so Alice thought until Freeman’s courtroom voice boomed out of his bedroom: “Eight pounds ten and two. Amen.”

THE NEXT MORNING
Freeman fetched the widow her bag of wool and departed for Barnstable. When Alice inquired when he might return, the widow said, “When he can. He’s a law practice to attend to.”

“At Barnstable?”

“’Tis our court town, and the place Mr. Freeman lives in his own fine home, when he’s not engaged in trading with his brother at Satucket.”

Alice pondered that in wonder a time. “So you have a room to let now.”

“I don’t let Mr. Freeman’s room. He pays me twelve pounds a month to keep it ready for him.”

Twelve pounds a month, for a bed not slept in! Alice’s wonder deepened. It seemed an extraordinary amount to pay, an extraordinary arrangement; but if the widow collected her money whether Freeman lived there or not, she no doubt wished him long at Barnstable. It likewise suited Alice. Freeman hadn’t made the slightest attempt at her person, but he wished her gone, and so Alice could wish him to be so with untroubled conscience.

And yet the house seemed strangely flat without him, although it filled with a certain easiness that had heretofore been absent, the easiness not come from Alice alone. The widow made less fuss over dinner and didn’t always trouble to sit for breakfast, nibbling at an end of bread and sipping tea as she worked a paste or turned her cheeses; neither did she always trouble to put on her shoes and stockings or lace up her bodice.

Alice continued to work the wheel as the widow moved to the loom to lay a web for some blanketing. The loom was situated in the eastern, cooler part of the attics, positioned so that the light would pass over the weaver’s shoulder, and the widow worked almost every morning there, the heavy thump of the loom traveling down the stairs as easily as the voices below traveled up. With Freeman gone, of course, Alice had no one to eavesdrop on and so heard no further talk of her finding work in the village, but the idea began to fix in her mind that the scheme to be rid of her had disappeared with Freeman. Left alone, the widow would be content to keep her as long as she could afford to feed her. Thinking this, Alice resolved to take a smaller share on her plate at each setting.

The boy Nate came looking for Freeman, and when Alice told him Freeman was at Barnstable the boy hung silent and awkward on the doorjamb until Alice said, “Shall I get the widow down? She’s upstairs at the loom.”

“No!” the boy answered in a kind of alarm. “That is to say no, please. That is to say, no thank you, miss. Good day to you.” He bolted out of doors.

The next Sabbath came around, but without Freeman to mark the day Alice nearly lost track of it until the widow said to her, “Are you not getting late for meeting?”

Alice ran the length of the road and slipped in under the darkening eye of the deacon, but again the reverend’s sermon escaped her attention, her eyes too busy taking in all the colors of the villagers before and beside her. She found Nate Clarke’s pale hair in his family’s pew, but she couldn’t find the pin boy until a loud knocking of boot on wood drew her eye to a seat a good deal farther away from Nate than the pin boy had positioned himself the Sunday before.

After the sermon Alice left the church, keeping her eyes to herself until she heard someone behind her say “Oh!” as if he’d been stepped on. She turned around to find the boy Nate.

“I didn’t think you here. That is to say, I was looking out for you to ask if Mr. Freeman were returned.”

“He isn’t.”

“I see. Thank you. Good day, then, miss,” but he hadn’t managed to move either forward or back before a couple drew up to them. The woman was striking enough to fix Alice’s eye; the man she wouldn’t have noticed at all if he hadn’t barked at Nate, “Come along, come along, you take a week to get your knees up, I’ve not seen the like of you,” which was an odd remark, considering that the man barking was the shape of a short, stubby cask, and his own legs could make but half the boy’s stride no matter how hard he pumped them. Two girls came after them, the younger a pale, jumpy sprite who caught up to her brother and hung on his elbow, chattering at him until her father shouted, “Quiet yourself, Bethiah! God’s breath! Show some respect for the Sabbath.” The other girl, perhaps a year or two older than Alice, walked at a pace that kept her halfway between the three in front and the woman behind; in fact, the woman behind seemed to linger until she fell back even with Alice.

The woman said, “You’re the girl that keeps at my mother’s.”

Of course, thought Alice, the widow’s daughter Mehitable, the boy’s stepmother, and so close a print of the older woman as to allow no question of the relation, except for the way she’d pinched her features.

“What is your name?”

“Alice Baker, madam.”

“And how do you find it there?”

“I couldn’t have found a better situation, madam.”

“Indeed! And all are in health there?”

“Most certainly.”

That seemed all the woman wished to know. She hurried ahead to chastise the younger girl, who had now dropped back to pester her sister with a chant: “Jane! Jane! Fair or plain!
Fair
says Joseph!
Plain
says James!”

Jane, if such indeed was her name, was indeed fair, as fair as her brother, and either as poorly skilled at being sociable or put out of humor by her sister’s teasing. She increased her stride just enough until she was again balanced in solitude between the two pairings of parent and child, her spine as straight as a mast, and continued so until Alice lost sight of them down the road.

THE WEATHER WARMED,
and with it came new changes to the view outside Alice’s window: the yellow pine pollen no longer rimmed the puddles, the plum blossoms faded, the seaward skyline became dotted with masts, as the ships prepared to set off after fish or whales. The smell of the house changed too: the must of the seaweed that packed the foundation, the salt of the sand flats at low tide, the yeast of the new-turned earth, all came unimpeded through the open windows to replace the winter smells of smoke and grease and too-close bodies.

The boy Nate Clarke came by several more times to see if Freeman had returned, but neither time did he step within the threshold. The shipmaster Hopkins came by to leave off some papers for Freeman, greeting Alice now as if he’d forgotten how she came there, but those were their only visitors.

Alice’s hand healed into three thick, red, intersecting lines, forming a near star shape that caused that hand to open and close a fraction slower but otherwise didn’t restrict its function. Her neck had returned to its natural color. Her shoulder had stopped aching. The cut on her cheek could only be seen if one strained to look for it, like a fine, pale crescent moon in daylight. Alice could look at the widow’s scars and feel lucky.

The widow finished her blanket and laid a second web for a piece of jacketing, in a fine, deep crimson. When it was done she sent Alice to the fulling mill to get the weave tightened and cleaned of lanolin. The fulling mill sat across the stream from one of the fine, big houses Alice had made note of on her first walk to the village; as she walked past she saw a boy chopping kindling in a hail of flying wood chips; his hair glinted gold like the boy Nate’s, but he seemed less delicately built, unless it was the wild fury of his swinging shoulders that gave the look of heft to him. He looked up as Alice passed and stopped his work to stand dumb. The boy Nate, surely.

Alice left the cloth with the fuller, who shouted over the beating paddles for her to come back for it on Thursday, without giving Alice a first look, let alone a second. Oddly, that was the moment Alice began to feel at home in the village.

WHEN ALICE RETURNED
for the fulled cloth and brought it home to the widow she surprised Alice by saying, “Take it to Sears. Ask him if he’d like a piece of homespun on his shelf to soothe the non-importers.”

Alice carried the piece of cloth to Sears with no small pride over her part in its making, but at the store Sears pointed to three bolts of English wool and said, “I’ve jacketing aplenty.”

The widow took back the cloth with nothing but a mild stiffening in the jaw and sent Alice back to her spinning.

AT NIGHT THE
widow and Alice sat together, winding yarn or mending or knitting; it was that hour, and the quiet in it, that showed up Freeman’s absence the greater. It wasn’t that the widow and Alice didn’t try to talk; it was that there seemed no safe thread of talk for them to follow. If the widow made a remark that suggested a past life including husband and children and more back-and-forth with the people of the village, it would prompt a question from Alice that the widow appeared disinclined to answer. She would divert to talk of the great number of shipwrecks over the winter, or the lateness of the growing season, or the health of the rhubarb. And as the widow had learned long ago not to push at Alice about her past, it greatly narrowed their communion. But perhaps it was the fact that the widow leaped so eagerly on any general remark that Alice managed, such as the great number of crows, or the chance of a rainstorm, or how best to make a sauce for turkeys, that taught Alice a new thing about the widow: she was lonely.

WHEN FREEMAN DID
return, Alice wasn’t present to witness it. She woke out of a deep sleep to the sound of voices in the keeping room and crept to her spot on the stairs.

“’Tis a late hour, Mr. Freeman, to charge in and wake a household.”

“I apologize for waking you, but I’ve brought news I thought you’d wish to hear at the first possible instant.”