My Name is Resolute (12 page)

“No, mum.”

“Is there anything but heresy taught on such an island?”

“As I come from, madam? I do not know what is taught there. I know only that Ma and Pa were both godly and taught us what they knew.” I felt afraid to say more. I knew by the way she asked it that she expected an answer that matched her creed. We held that the Virgin was pure and that certain of the martyred saints followed and watched over those who loved them, yet the Talbots as far as I knew were Anglicans and not given to claiming any original sins as did Catholics. All my sins were my own creation and had come by way of my invention, of that I would swear.

“So you’ve been baptized? I’ll not have a foundling heretic under this roof. Speak up. Baptized? How?”

“Yes, madam. Baptized, indeed.” I asked myself whether I should say ’twas last spring, or say that I was christened at eight days old—neither of which was true. I hit upon a middle ground. “In the scriptural way, same as you, madam.”

She whirled at me, her hands swirling musty-smelling clothing. “Good, Mary. Now, see if this will fit you.” She tied a rough cap upon my head. She came at me with a gown, whisking my arms into the sleeves, tying it in back but not taking off my soiled things. She gave me a short and oft-patched coatlike casaque. Over that she laid a pelisse which had once been grand, but which was several inches too long. “Oh, that won’t do,” she said. “Much too big.”

The promised warmth of the clothes after these days of cold had an immediate effect and I clutched my arms across my ribs, holding on to the garment lest she take it back. I said, “Perhaps if I also had some good shoes to wear, I would be taller and it would fit better.”

I knew the argument was ridiculous, but the old woman put her gnarled and twisted dog-finger against her lips and pondered it. “No, no,” she said. “If one of the girls has a shoe close to the size—”

“Birgitta!” I heard from another room. “Birgitta, I need you upstairs.”

“Follow me and keep quiet,” Birgitta said. “These people are the Hasken family. Patented and Puritan. You address them as ‘Master’ and ‘Mistress,’ understand?”

“Yes, madam.”

“You call me ‘Birgitta.’ I’m the housekeeper but I am Mistress’s sister, too, full part of this household. I sleep by the door, so there’ll be no running out without my knowing.”

“Yes, madam,” I repeated, as we trundled up the poorest stack of stairs I had ever seen, more rickets than wood and less foothold than the secret stair by the waterwheel. I began to feel warm under the layered coats, yet my bare feet ached from the cold. At the top of the stair, we entered a low-ceilinged room where three beds crowded together in such tight space that there was no room betwixt them. A fireplace that had gone cold came off the chimney. Beyond, the attic was dark and drafty.

“The misses sleeps here,” Birgitta said. “You’ll find the honey pots under there. Mistress won’t allow the girls to the outdoors in this weather. You take ’em to the outdoor privy and dump ’em in the hole. Wipe ’em good and clean, after.”

“Ah, no,” I said. “I told you, I could never do that.” Birgitta rapped me on the shoulder with the rod she produced from a rope at her waist. I gasped in pain. Even the lowest pirates who stole me never whipped me. I cried out, “Do not hit me with that again!”

“Who!” came a child’s voice, from under the beds. “Who is this lady?”

Birgitta patted the bed nearest her. “You hiding again, Lonnie? Come out. This is Mary. She’s to dump the pots. You’re to find your old shoe for her.”

“There’s only one. Mother took one to save for the wall on the new house.” The girl wiggled from under the bed as she spoke. “It’s good luck to put a shoe in the wall of a new house.” She stood taller than I, with a stunted left arm and leg as if she were a doll assembled from two different patterns. “I have a long foot and a short one, a long leg and a short one, a big arm and a little. I even have a big titty and a little ’un. You can’t have my new shoe!”

“No, of course, I would not—” I began.

Fast as the strike of a snake, the old woman brought the stick down upon my forearm. “Don’t talk back to the misses. Best you learn your place quick. Now, Lonnie, give me the old shoe. You, Mary, you say ‘yes, mum’ to everything.”

I was about to insist that Mary was not my name when Lonnie reached under the bed and came out with a squashed and battered wad of leather. I thought it a dead bat and shrank from it in her hand. She shook it at my face and sang, “What are you scared of? Scary Mary! Scary Mary.”

Birgitta took the leather thing and tugged at it. It changed not at all under her hands, and she tossed it at my feet. “Well, there’s one. We’ll find you another.”

Lonnie said, “It has been squashed under the bed for a year,” as she dove back under. She came up with a worn-out larger shoe. It had a hole in the toe.

By the time the candles were put out that night, I had learned much about these people and none of it endeared them to me. The old woman made me wipe out pots and I vomited with each one, worse than seasickness. I was to sleep in a tiny alcove under the eaves, furnished with a fetid mat and a bearskin. I pulled the mat against the chimney and made myself a tent of the skin. I pilfered a rug I found rolled in a corner behind a chest, adding that to my little tent-house. Master and Mistress and Birgitta slept downstairs.

The Haskens’ three daughters ranged in age from twenty-one to fourteen. All of them snored. Lonnie was given to fits where she stuttered and stammered and sometimes fell down, spitting and foaming. Birgitta warned me to keep her from falling in the fireplace and away from all candles and lamps. When she was not taken with fits, she played at braiding and unbraiding Christine’s hair while Christine sat knitting. I longed to have my ma work the painful knots from my hair and I would have asked Lonnie to do mine had this been any other place. Lonnie’s given name was Livonah, but she could not pronounce it. Lonnie found ways at odd times to pop out of a corner or from under a bed and call out, “Scary Mary!” It kept me so uneasy that I wanted to scratch her face. She slept with Rachael and clutched a doll made of wood and dressed in miniature clothing.

Rachael was the eldest, cross-eyed as a baby bird, and made me most uneasy. She had a way of asking, “That, there! That one, I told you, Mary,” without pointing a finger or naming a thing, expecting me to guess which eye she had aimed at something she wanted brought to her. I could not tell what she wanted and I hated the way it made me feel stupid, as if I had left my senses behind on the voyage. I thought of her as a prating, narrow-backed, long-nosed, cross-eyed fool.

Christine was the middle girl, nineteen, plain as her mother and more dull than Birgitta, as if her mind had a hollow place in it which wanted filling. She did nothing throughout a day other than sit and knit stockings. The stockings seemed nice and there were more than enough to go around, so I smiled and remarked to her that they looked ever so nicely made, and that I should enjoy having a pair of the extra stockings to keep my feet warm, as she had a stack of nine or ten pairs in her basket. Christine flew from her chair, squalling, “Mary tried to steal our stockings!” which caused Birgitta to lay me a whipping across the back.

The next day I sneaked up to Christine and hissed into her ear, “You pathetic, defective creature. I would not touch your worm-infested, pox-ridden, goat-shit-filled stockings if I held the devil’s pitchfork in my hand.”

That got me a whipping by Master himself with a leather strap he tethered next to the fireplace and once a week used to strop his razor. Once he had laid five great whacks across my back and legs, he said to me, “You are not an equal in this house; you are a servant. You will never address this household with insult or familiarity. You will never say the name of the father of all evil aloud within these walls. It is my duty and right to train you until you understand your place. It is also within my right to take you to the deep woods and leave you for the wolves. Is this understood by you?”

I nodded that it was, though I could not speak, for the effort of weeping inside myself had left me mute. That night after hauling wood, water, and slops all day, I was sent to my corner in the upper floor without supper. I did not wake until Lonnie poked me with a broom handle the next morning.

They kept goats in a room of the house. The stench was as wretched as the hold of the Saracen pirate ship. I suppose one might say that that goat room was in its content and purpose a barn, but they had created it by simply building a wall at one end of the house itself. The whole place smelled dismally sharp. Everything I touched and cleaned, even the food I ate, tasted of the tang of goat dung.

The flattened shoe was too tight and gave me blisters. The other one was loose and floundered upon my ankle, causing me to trip. This house where I had been lodged was somewhat bigger than our kitchen, though the whole of it including the fenced yard would have fit into the first-floor ballroom at Two Crowns. I dumped their pots and wiped them with a towel. Not in all my days had I known any such duty, and every time I performed it, I vomited everything I had eaten until at last I fainted and the old woman, Birgitta, dragged me into the house.

Birgitta talked and scolded without stop. Mary, this, Mary, that, until my ears felt as bruised as my arms. I was made to bring in snow and melt it in a pot for cooking and cleaning. Birgitta told me to peel vegetables but hit me for the result, saying I wasted too much. She constantly referred to the single table over which hung two copper kettles and a prong for meat as “the kitchen.” I did not dare ask whether there weren’t a proper kitchen. No home I knew had a kitchen in the house. Too dangerous and hot with all that cooking. Birgitta bade me to clean the master’s boots but beat me for not knowing to rub them with a lamb’s wool bob she kept in a wooden safe with tallow and old candle bits.

One morning Birgitta led me to a shed hard against the house which held a stack of logs as tall as the house and several feet thick. She lectured me in her droning, nasal voice about their last house girl who had pulled the pile down upon herself. I watched a mouse pitter around in a corner, thinking that I wished the whole pile to fall upon Birgitta. I imagined Birgitta aboard ship. I would bet my one good shoe that no becalming doldrums existed which she could not break with speeches about scrubbing, tending, sewing, and milking goats, goats, and goats, buckets and stools. What they ate. What they excreted. When to set the ewes and when to butcher the kids. Everything about goats tied itself to Lent and Easter and Passover, Midsummer Day, and the black days of the moon. How to tell if the goat had been possessed by a demon or spirit of Satan, for goats were easy prey to that Villain. If I asked a question I was as likely to get a rod as an answer, so I did not inquire as to the nature of a goat that made it Satan’s prey, after, of course, unchaste little girls.

Morning and night I carried pots. After a while, I was able to keep down my food by covering it with the towel first, holding my breath, and closing my eyes. I ate at the foot of the table if anything was left in the trencher after the family gobbled their fill. Sometimes there was little but drippings and a crust. Each night I pulled off the miserable shoes and I tried to rub my frozen toes to keep them from hurting so, but they hurt worse with every passing day. They stung so that I could not sleep at times. Birgitta watched me at every moment, quick to bring that rod down upon my shoulders. I crept into my small hole under the bearskin, more tired from work, more bruised by beatings, until I felt at last I might cry out in my sleep as Patey had done, “Not again!” I wrapped my feet in the bottom of my skirt and put them against the chimney, curled up like a housecat, waking stiff and cold.

By the passing of another week I almost looked forward to the dumping of pots for the chance to emerge from the house, to look for a road or path, some way to leave. My main reason for staying, however, came as Mistress Hasken settled her girls for the night, telling them stories of “the old country,” as she called the place. It did not sound anything like the Scotland and England I had heard of, but was wintry as this, full of harsh people and wolves, as well. In one of the stories, a queen saved her three daughters from being eaten by wolves—massive hairy animals with teeth like daggers and a never-ending hunger—by throwing out their worthless servant girl when the wolves clawed at the door. At night, the howl of wolves in the distance made me too afraid to sleep, much less think of running. If only there came a night without wolves, I decided, I would know it was safe. I lay awake, after the stories and their shared kisses and tucking in of wrapped, heated stones from the fire. Every sound triggered my heart to beat faster, my eyes to open wider. An owl called. Something rattled in the thatch. I often slept with my arms over my face so nothing could claw at my eyes.

Master Hasken was a puffed-up booby who fancied himself a scholar and philosopher, prating before a polished copper plate every Sunday morning. In another home equally as dismal as this, a crowd assembled and stood, there being not room for a single chair. I found a corner and crouched so I could rest my sore feet. Master Hasken fumbled the words of a psalm so that it came out that the Israelites had prepared a feast to eat their enemies. I covered my smile.

By the time Meeting was finished, a stormy wind blew and sleet hit the house. They sent me to their house alone to build up the fire so it would be warm for them. I thought of escape, but where and how could I, in such a storm? They must have known I could not run away in such weather. Still, it was blessed to be alone. I pushed the coals with an iron rod, and fed straw into the fireplace. I looked out the door. No one yet, so I ran upstairs, pulled off my shoes and dug into Christine’s basket of stockings. I selected two pairs and put them on, one over the other, and got the shoes tied on just as I heard stamping at the doorstep. I nearly fell down the stairs in my rush, but I sat myself upon the floor, flushed and panting. I knelt, holding kindling against a mound of coals and blowing at it by the time they’d removed their wet blankets and cloaks enough to see me. Christine never mentioned that her store of stockings had changed.