My Name is Resolute (3 page)

A woman’s voice with a strong Dutch-African accent said, “You gone back to the big house and tarry, Missy Talbot. Gone, now. You be safess’ dere. Don’ be laying out here with us. Summa dese folks don’ speak English. Don’ knows what could happen.”

Patience ran from them and followed me. She cried as we ran, and I wondered if they had hurt her feelings, or did she cry from fear of having Rafe for a husband, or from pirates coming, or from the rocks under our thin parlor shoes? I heard a new cannon report, and this time close enough to hear the concussion of the ball against the stone walls of our house. Another cannonball crashed through part of the roof near one of the fireplaces and a great splintering of glowing cinders shot into the air.

Through a shout of men’s voices I heard Ma calling our names, and I saw her silhouetted against fire, standing alone in the front carriageway. “Daughters!” Ma said. “Go! Go, run.” For a moment Ma ran toward us then back to the house, then turned around and came at us again as if she could not make out which way portended better. “I thought you were safely away! Come. I will give you something. Come quickly.” She pulled us inside, where furniture lay tossed about. The curtains at the far wall waved in flames. Wind blew through the gap where the fireplace had stood. Pa came through the room, his arms loaded with two boxes where he kept the pistols. August followed, holding three swords. Rafe had drawn a sword and carried it aloft, and I saw two pistols pushed through the sash at his waist.

We followed Ma through a hallway to her sleeping room. There she flung open a chest and pulled out two blankets with ties fast at each top. I had seen her a-working at them and asked after them but she had not said what the purpose was, for never would we have needed such heavy covers. She shook one and set it in a ring on the floor. The sound of pistols and a crash of metal on metal seemed far away. Were Pa and August holding off twenty-two men? Might Uncle Rafe be fighting, too? If he were to save my pa, I should have to think on him much more kindly in the future.

Ma pushed Patience’s skirts up and said, “Step in this petticoat,” pointing. In less than a moment Ma had pulled it up and fixed it by the ties around Patey’s waist. “Take everything from this,” she said, pulling her fine worked-silver jewelry casket from its shelf. “Put them all in the folds here.” She plied the quilted petticoat and, as if by magic, opened pockets and duckets, pushing in rings and brooches, and in one, a string of fine pearls long as an ell, which she lifted from her own neck. In the shortest order I had ever seen, she pushed at the seams and squeezed forth threaded needles at the waiting, whipping the openings closed. She tied on Patey’s pocket, a small bag that hung at her waist, and in it put the silver-and-jeweled casket itself. It was no bigger than an egg, and disappeared into the folds.

“There. If they be found, produce that and there remains a gold ring in it. Say your mother gave it ye as a wedding ring that had been her grandmother’s and it will buy you freedom. Let no one find any other of these.” We heard shouts. “Bar the door, Patience. Resolute, come here.”

Ma did the same to me as she had done to my sister, dressing me with a second quilted skirt, procuring yet another casket, smaller still than Patey’s, upon which I had never laid eyes ere now. “Quickly, wait still!” she said when I squirmed a bit. Another cannonball landed so closely that dust and rubble fell from the ceiling. “Wear this petticoat and never, never take it off, understand?”

“It is so warm,” I said. “Makes me drain sweat.”

She did not answer but opened the second casket. Though it was merely wood laid about in gold, it held eight gold rings, eleven silver coins, and a ruby necklace. These she pressed into slits in this new heavy skirt. Then, on her knees, she stitched up the folds and tucked the needle back into the seam. “You take care and you will have a needle. Thread can be found but a needle is a treasure. Keep it close by and oft oiled. If you get a chance to move it to a safer spot, do that, but until then, keep it there.”

“I am sorry we did not stay in the kitchen, as you told us,” I whispered. “Uncle Rafe—”

Ma’s face flushed dark. “There’s no fault in ye, bairny,” she said as she laid coins into the casket. She put two new pieces of eight and six shillings in it and closed the lid, fastening the hasp. She tied a brand-new pocket to my waist with the wooden casket in it. That was to buy my safety, too, I expect. That last, the name she had called me as a wee child, brought tears to my eyes. “Rafe MacAlister is no’ the threat what’s comin’ up the beach. Your pa’d have talked him doon like he done before. Now girls, go. Up the priest’s hole by the fireplace.”

Hiding holes and tunnels threaded through our house. Escape was always in our sights. The sounds of battle grew closer, and shouts followed the pistol fire. I heard glass breaking as Patience and I reached the fireplace. We nestled into the shadows. Fallen stones blocked the way up. I turned to see what had happened behind us. The leaded window lay in shards on the floor and from Ma’s raised hands a thundering bang deafened me. A man dressed in short breeches and a torn vest fell to the floor without uttering a sound. Ma turned to stone, her eyes locked on the blunderbuss in her hands. At that moment two men who had been kicking at the door with hard boots accomplished their task and the wooden door hung loose on its hinges.

Two more men clambered through the window opening and reached Ma. She had drawn a dagger, one I had seen lying in the shelf of books she kept in this room. One of the men smiled, his mouth a toothless cavern, his long cutlass waving in front of her. I would have screamed had not Patience’s hand covered my mouth and nose so that I could hardly breathe. Ma stepped backward, rotating the dagger from pointing at the intruder to pointing it at her own chest. I bellowed into Patey’s hand. I fainted, I suppose, for I knew nothing more but Patey crushing me to her bosom.

“Back to the new stairway,” she hissed, “behind the waterwheel.”

The bedroom seemed empty, and we stood in the open fireplace in perfect silence for the span of several heartbeats. “Where’s Ma?” I asked.

“Do not talk. Run.” We hid at the doorway until we were certain no one saw, and then pounded up the stairs. At the landing I looked down to see Uncle Rafe, Pa, and August, all fighting beside each other, holding four men back with their swords. Pa had blood on his shirt but he moved so boldly that I was sure it was not his. Patience pulled my arm nearly out of its roots as she forced me away from that spectacle and toward the armoire. Heavy steps came up the stairs behind us. She tugged the great chest forward and put me into the opening first, climbed through, and pulled at it with the handle.

Again, blackness enveloped us. I stood by my sister, motionless. I leaned toward her and whispered, “Where did Ma go?”

“Out the door.”

“Did she get away from them, then?”

She let out a tiny sob and said, “Be quiet. Shush.”

At first I thought a mouse had whimpered, then I heard the voices, speaking some foreign tongue—I knew not what—and the armoire rattled as its door opened and the drawers were pulled from their frames. Light came through the place where the slats in the back did not meet, and Patience leaned back so far she nearly fell on me. She tapped my shoulder and, when I did not move, tapped again harder. I took three steps down. This was more clumsy and frightful because I was leading. There was no one there to catch me. August was not waiting at the bottom.

When I had gone down a dozen steps or more, the wall opened up to the place that the water splashed in and there I stopped. “Stop,” I said aloud, lest she tumble us both to our deaths. I spoke over the water. “If we go down all the way, we shall be in the midst of ’em.”

“Let me think. We’ll tarry here a while.” Patience put her hands on my shoulders, but since I stood two steps below her, when I tried to return the embrace I could only hug her knees. I felt the heavy quilted petticoat she now wore, and the funny lump of the pocket with the casket in it against my face. She held my back and we each held the rope on the wall. We both began to weep.

We had seen pirates before, and thieves or renegade slaves, and all manner of situations. But never with such force. Never with cannon. Another cannonball shook the house, yet though it sounded far from us on the steps, people might be in danger in other homes, too, and that was a powerfully troubling thought. I would not mind a great deal if Uncle Rafe were blown to bits, but I wondered where Pa and August were.

With a mighty crashing, splintering sound, the wall where the waterwheel gears threatened and sprayed us fell away. We screamed with all our might and water gushed across the opening from the pipes, which had fed the wheel and now swayed overhead. I would have fallen through had not Patience clutched my clothes, for I felt as if the gears pulled at me. From somewhere in the dark below us, a three-pronged metal claw on the end of a rope came up like the hand of the devil. It reached for me again, closer, and closer yet the third time. It slashed at my skirt, taking a bit of the hem down, and it flew up a fourth time, arching far above our heads, hanging itself on the wall above us. A man scrambled up that rope as if he were a ship’s rat, clutched me around the waist, and tore me from Patey’s arms, swinging him and me down into the spray. We landed with a hard bang and hands pushed me about, wrapped me up with rope, and in a few minutes, Patience stood by me, tied the same as I. I stopped crying, too afeared to make noise.

The men about us wore brushy beards and turbans, some no more than a torn rag about their heads; they smelled of filth and fusty old rum and something far nastier than Uncle Rafe’s wig. Betwixt these ugly fellows, meant to guard us, we stood long enough that my feet began to burn though I chilled from being soaking wet. The men spoke to each other in their strange tongue. Soon, along came a train of our slaves, tied with their hands bound to the neck of the person in front of them, and still naked. They brought children and adults, all tied. At least Patience and I were not tied in a chain, I thought. At least that.

“Where’s Ma?” I asked Patience. I got a cuff across the back of my head for it.

I saw Pa and August and Rafe coming, tied hands to neck just as were the African slaves. Surely, Ma would appear similarly bound. No one dared speak. So, if Ma had been there, mixed in, and tied, and afraid, she could not speak. I told myself she was there. Doing just that. Staying shushed. She would find me in a while.

It seemed as if we waited hours on the beach. I shivered, sometimes almost faint, my teeth chattering. I looked for Ma as much as I dared. At last they allowed us to sit, though the sand wet our skirts through to the skin. Fingers of pale washed-silk green sky moved through the smoke that rose over our plantation. Slivers of light gold reflected in the misty air. They had lit the cane fields and they had burned the house and kitchen and all the slave houses. If I had hid in the cribs in the kitchen loft I might have had no other fate than to roast there like a goose.

Men came from the smoke, blackened with soot and carrying crates and sacks filled with our household goods. I felt the small casket in my pocket and the jewelry sewn into my clothing. Ma always sat with sewing. I never looked at nor cared what she made in recent days, as I was always laboring over my own embroidery stand, wishing for my carefree days before I was expected to learn it. When had Ma done these things? Why had she created such a cloth for me, like nothing I had laid eyes upon? I had never before had such a garment. It was heavy and thick as if I had been clad in mud. I whispered to Patience, “My embroidery. What is to become of it?”

Patience’s face reddened and puckered with sorrow and she began to cry.

“I will make another,” I said, to comfort her.

“Are you blind?” she asked.

I studied her eyes for a moment then turned my face from her to our burning house. No, I was not blind. I only meant that we had lost all. Down to the smallest things. My things. And here I sat tied like a pig held for slaughter. I had been stolen; we had all been stolen, as if we were gilt furniture or a chest full of linen and purple-dyed cloth. I pulled myself into my clothes, shrinking from her chastisement. I received a shove from a foot behind me, pushing Patience and me as if we were indeed a pile of goods that must be kept aright.

I turned to see who had kicked me. I said, “We are being held by hideous, pitiless gargoyles that are not decent enough to speak the queen’s English.” The man felt nothing of my reproof, though, and kept on watching over our heads toward the ship in the bay.

CHAPTER 2

October 1, 1729

Tidewater receded and the galleon listed, her foredeck thrust upward in the morning light, masts angled against the sky. Indeed, someone on board may have been surprised by the great uplifting, for even
I
could have told the pilot not to moor her so close. I had seen ships careened before but this one looked in danger of tumbling over. The coral at that place is so near the top that at low tide August goes there with Pa and standing waist deep they fish with gigs for my favorite lovely white-meated fishes.

From the deck, men tossed ropes thick as stumps and climbed down the treacherous rigging, some getting into smaller boats, some just hanging there at the side of the ship. A few stood in the water on the shoal. Soon the sounds of scraping and banging filled the air as barnacles flew off the hull. One man made excited motions with his arms and pointed to the water nearby. Several of them shouted something like “Oh-ho!” just as one of the working men fell into the water. I saw his knife rise in the air. He struggled and fought near the fin of a shark. He had met his fate.

As the tide went out they worked on and on, and the day grew warm. I slept, leaning against Patey, and I dreamed of lying in a hammock full with comfits and warm bread. Eating sausages in cream.

As I began to taste the sweets I awoke. Patience had tears running down her face. She stared into the distance, so I followed her gaze to the ruins of our house. I marveled that there were girls seated nearby, no taller than I whom I had never seen before, but there were always whole groups of people we did not house living in the brush shacks and cane brakes, besides those we did. I supposed I should feel sad. Or afraid. All I felt was hunger gnawing at my insides. Ma might have brought something if she had had a chance, but then we were not here for a picnic. The African slaves next to us seemed almost nonchalant about being held as we were. These brutes saw all of us as nothing more than booty. The image of sausages came back to mind a few minutes later and made my mouth water. I could have eaten sausages, even without a proper dish.