My Name is Resolute (42 page)

I put the paper before my face to hide my expression from them and closed my eyes, trying to fathom the intent of Lady Spencer in combination with the annoyance of these two men. If she had indeed sent them to me, would she have instructed them to treat me as some savage wench? Frighten me? Or was their clumsy jest only that, a greeting
en plaisantant;
and perhaps they believed I had been awaiting their coming?

The young one said, “Come, Pa. We’re paid whether this Miss Talbot prefers our working for her or not. We mean you no harm, Miss Talbot. Personal charms be—”

“I know not whether you speak of your own charms, sir, or mine. However, you cannot blame me for fright on seeing a man’s hoary face in my window before the light of day. Your own mother might scream at such a sight. Now, which of you is Jacob MacLammond?”

The older man said, “That would be myself, Miss Talbot.”

“And what do you intend to do here?”

“Well, as far as a third-story tower, I doubt fifty pounds would cover that.”

I looked from him to the younger MacLammond, who was still glowering in anger, and decided to address Jacob. “What was the purpose, then, of that
mascarade
of speaking to a husband?” I shuddered that the French word had escaped my lips, though I knew no fitting one in English.

Jacob squinted with his one eye. The face before me I saw now was not so much born ugly as it was scarred beyond the point of human features, as if a bear or some other devastating catastrophe had raked him. When he spoke, it was evident deeper scars had fixed themselves to bone beneath skin and wrinkled his visage unnaturally; his mouth widened too far on the left side. “Just a precaution if it should prove I had the wrong house. Wouldn’t want to have some fellow come out for me with a pistol.”

While the thought crossed my heart that I should spend some of my money to own a pistol, I offered them breakfast such as I had, of pears, bread, and small beer. Jacob MacLammond surprised me, taking a bar of tea from his pack, and though he apologized for the saltiness of it, I made a hearty brew of what he shared.

The young one, Cullah, kept quiet as we ate. I had many chances then, by sidelong glance, to weigh his appearance against his father’s. Had not age and some accident misformed the father, they might have been brothers separated by but a few years. I tried to keep my eyes averted as his father ate with gusto, but faced his son as the younger MacLammond had been trained in table manners. At least I surmised so, until he turned to me upon finishing the small portion I had provided, and asked, “How do you come to live alone, young Mistress? Are you widowed? Why are you not indentured or a ward to some benefactor who will watch over you? What is your means, here?”

“Boy!” his father shouted. “Lady Spencer sent us!”

He said, “I want no part of work with a scald or a gypsy. Nor a seductress.”

“I will answer,” I said. “I understand. I am alone because I was abandoned by those who helped me escape from the Canadas. I was a prisoner of the pope.”

“Who helped you escape from the papists?”

I paused and looked the man in his one eye for a moment, because he did not say the word with the affect of nearly spitting it as if it fouled the tongue, as most Protestants did. “I will tell you truly, sir, if you will bind me a promise that you tell no one.”

Cullah asked, “Is it some shame?”

“No. Well, it is. Will you both promise?”

“By my good eye, I will, then,” Jacob said.

“My sister and I escaped the convent with the help of two Indians. She married one of them and left me at the field behind the Boynes’s house.”

Cullah smiled and said, “Oh. Well and aye, then. I feared you were going to say she married some English cod.” Both men laughed. “Do you have wood stock with which to fix this?”

“No, sir. Goody Carnegie—”

“Ah! That one’s gone afey,” said Jacob. “She’s known far and wide.”

“You know her, then?” I asked. “Well, when she is in her mind, she is not daft at all. She has offered me this house as long as I intend to stay. She is not fey.”

Cullah closed his lids slowly, as if sleep had come upon him as I spoke; when he opened them, he said, “So you answer one question with a reply to another.”

“I meant no falseness by it,” I said. “I was beginning to answer but taking a long way around it. My only means is her generosity and the weaving I plan to do.”

Jacob said, “We’ve rightly got better manners than has been shown, Miss Talbot. We have been already well paid. We’ll work the fair amount of it for you as whatever suits your fancy, and improves this house. The boy here is not much good at felling so it goes to me to bring down the trees for your work, but he turns a fine table leg.”

“Really, sir, I need no work.”

Jacob raised himself from the table and, using one finger, flicked crumbs of wood from the very beam on which I had stacked my coins. From his bag he pulled an iron hammer. With a mighty swing he sank the head of it into the beam. “Rotten to the core,” he said. “Been thatched, aye? But the wight that thatched it did nothing to replace the rotted beams. Let me look a bit. Aye. Aye. Well, there won’t be a tower for fifty pound, but we’ll do what we can for you. Replace the rot. Make ’er sound.”

Jacob seemed to be measuring with his hands, his lips moving soundlessly. After great length, he said, “It will take a month. That’s without fixtures or furnishings, you understand, but we’ll fit what we can for cupboard and larder.”

Perhaps this was something I could do in return for Goody having allowed me this house. If Lady Spencer had paid these men to work on it, I could return it to Goody better than I found it. “All right, then. Can this be done without disturbing the loom?”

Jacob studied it. “We build a roof under the beams, at the top posts there. When we take down the thatching, there will be a mess like a haystack turned up, but I can save your work. Then we will put it right, and take down the false roof. It can be done.”

“When will you begin?”

Cullah rose and moved behind his father. He wrenched out the hammer embedded in the beam. Shreds of wood that came with it fell as dust. While I knew little of wood and its crafting, I knew a beam was not supposed to powder. “We just began,” he said.

Outside, they opened their boxes of tools, axes, and blades of all types. While they made a survey of the land for suitable trees, I collected my coins. I saw them looking at the enormous beech that overshadowed part of the yard, but I asked them to leave it. I went for Goody’s home, to tell her of this news. She returned with me, abeam with joy. She claimed that my coming had brought her more luck and then some. She pointed them toward the woods that stood on her land, and said they could use what they needed there.

In just a few hours, they had a shed built within the stone walls that roofed over my loom from anything above, and they began tearing down the thatched roof. The shed was hot as an oven inside, but I worked in it, thankful for it. Then after a time, I found the rhythm of the loom echoed with the rhythm of axes striking the trees. I lost myself in my work, and was startled when Jacob and Cullah came to the place, weary, sweating, and smelling badly, and asked me for some supper. Then both of them laughed and Cullah pulled forth a rabbit he had killed and cleaned.

“I have never cooked a rabbit,” I said.

Over the next weeks, Jacob and Cullah turned my tranquil life into havoc. Every day my work at the loom started with one blessing and I put the shuttles to rest with another. Every day the music of weaving was but a trill above the booming of hammer and peg. The granite walls of this house served now as a foundation, and another, larger house grew atop it like a mushroom. Stairs and another door opened to the world from atop the rise upon which the granite abutment had made a wall below.

Between building, Jacob and Cullah hunted. We ate more often with Goody Carnegie than not. I was glad of her presence. More than once I had come outside to do some little chore and found the both of them working without shirt or hat, clad only in breeches and heavy boots.

Cullah lost no chance to shed his coat as he worked, and after he had asked me to bring him water more than one time, he crafted a bucket to keep at his side. As wood dust and flecks covered him, he often took the dipper and washed himself. I had never seen so much of a man, his body, his skin, other than swimming with my brother and sister. Even then, August was a boy with spindle legs and a narrow build, a pointed chest like a bird. Cullah was of some age I could not guess and did not dare ask. What I knew was that his body rippled in the sun, dripping water. Dark hair made a diamond on his belly and coated his arms, catching the sawdust and wood chips so that he looked as if he wore a feathered armor. His long hair he bound carelessly with a leathern thong. Though he shaved his face almost every day, a dark beard as menacing as his father’s threatened his countenance by evening. He was altogether vulgar in appearance. A brute to be used as one would an ox. Across his back and one arm a band of white scar no wider than a good thread lay, testament to some old wound.

Jacob caught me observing it one time as I stood behind Cullah as he poured water over his sweating back while I held another cask of water. Jacob said, nodding at his son, “Fell from a tree, he did. As a lad. Means nothing.” Hundreds of scars, like those on his face, webbed Jacob’s back. He’d been mercilessly used.

Yet, as I crawled into my bed, just a blanket on the floor by the loom, I fingered the tiny scar I had on my left hand, remnants of the nail holding grapevines crucified under a full moon. I thought of no way a fall from a tree would produce a fine line that stretched across a man as if he’d been caught in a warp thread. Jacob’s scars were a different thing altogether. I wondered if he had suffered as did the man beaten to death under August’s eyes. I thought of Foster, killed by a bear, and others I had seen with scars. I remembered Patience lovingly bathing the wounds of the Indian man.

That night and many that followed it, I fell asleep thinking of Cullah. What meaning his odd name might have, whence he had come before Lady Spencer knew him, what his age might be, and whether he were really the son of Jacob, who was nearly as brawny as Cullah. The third evening of thinking thus, I had a mysterious dream of home. Rather than Allsy running, holding my hand, the hand I took was rough and large, attached to an arm with a scar upon it that matched mine, yet the faceless person to whom it belonged was lost in some sort of mist.

The next morn, I hummed softly as I prepared our food and began my day’s work. To my surprise, Jacob heard me, and with Cullah both knew all the verses to “O Waly, Waly.” The two burst forth in song as if the need of it had been held, steaming, under a lid, waiting for release. For some reason, it made me feel so homesick to hear a man’s voice the way Pa’s would have done, carrying on with his work, a tune on his lips. Then Cullah sang another, all in some tongue I knew not, a melancholy melody that made the heart ache and tears rise. It fair took away the hours and my hands upon the bobbins worked as if by magic, disembodied, as I felt the tunes course through me.

The sky threatened rain early in the afternoon. Goodwife Carnegie walked my path. Only when she called to me did I wonder at having it seem “my” path. Strife drew her face into a frown. “It comes. The rain,” she said.

“I know. Please, Goody, stay in my home and run not through the forest. I fear much for your life when you do that.”

“I cannot. I cannot.”

Jacob frowned and worked his chin with a grizzled hand. I offered him the water bucket, but before taking it he said, “There’s much to fear in the woods, lass, but sometimes there is more to fear in the mind.”

Goody looked upon him, trembling helplessly. “It is neither memories nor ghosts, the phantasms haunting me. They are real. They come for me when the wind blows.”

“
I
would keep them away, if you stay with me,” I said. “Whoever follows you through the storm will feel my wrath.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Cullah smile. “Aye. I’ve known it, lady. A firm redoubt it is.”

Goody said, “I came to see your progress, whether you can stay during the rain, but I see you have no shelter yet except over the loom. Come you all to my house. Follow quickly before it arrives.” Then she hurried in the direction she had come.

Cullah peered at the sky and sniffed deeply, then said, “It looks to be a killing storm, Pa.”

Jacob wiped his face. “We’ll see your loom is covered, and get the animals in.”

I went with him to chase the goats into the wee shed he had built for them. I had insisted I would not have goats in my house so they had their own cunning little shed and yard. Jacob chased down the billy and then went to collect their tools. He kept them oiled with bear grease when not used, and I saw him fetch the pouch of grease.

When I shut the goats’ door and he’d latched the bar across it, Cullah said to me, “I believe what you said. She’s not truly mad.”

“I know only that she is called mad by the townspeople yet they will listen to her with some respect. Other than when it storms, she seems to me given only to the madness caused by loneliness. I have stayed in this house simply because it made her happy. I need to earn my fare to Jamaica, but more and more the thought of deserting Goody Carnegie saddens me.”

He pulled on his kirtle and worked at lacing up the front. As he did, he cocked his head. “When do you go?”

“I know not. I must have a companion with whom to sail.”

“No honest captain would take you alone.”

“I have left word for my brother. It would be fitting if I could go with him. He went to sea. Years—ago.”

He must have seen the sorrow on my face as I said that. He smiled, saying, “He’ll try to find you, if you have left word. I’d never leave a sister such as you. He will come.”

I felt heat rush from my bosom to my forehead in the glimmer of time it took for his smile to form. I smiled in return. “That is kind of you, sir. Yet, the sea is a dangerous place. I lost my pa to it.”

“You have no fear of staying with the old woman, then?”