My Name is Resolute (72 page)

“C’est moi, James Talbot de Montréal.”

I stepped closer to him. My hands began to shake. I questioned him in French. “Tell me how old you are.”

Before he answered me, he pulled from his loose shirt the very first knitted cap I had sent him as a baby. It looked completely unworn. “I was a little too big for it when it came,
Tante. Tante
Rachael saved it for me to bring to you.”

I could not decide whether to embrace this strange man, but I did say, “Stay with us a while, James, please. Are you traveling farther?”

“I hoped to go to New Orleans. I can read and write, or I can work in your fields. I wouldn’t be a burden to you.”

“You will be no burden. Stay a few days at least.”

In the hours before Cullah came home, while I baked bread and roasted our supper, James and I spoke of the people I had known at the convent, how for years he had steadily made his way here, learning English as he went, working at farms for food, forever heading south, to me. He slept on our floor for two nights. Then Cullah told him about Goody Carnegie’s old house, and James asked us if he could work for us and stay in it. So rather than a girl to help in the house, at least now we had another man to help on the farm. No one said anything about how long he would stay, nor whether we should pay him, for he refused that immediately. Only that he would stay until he did not.

*   *   *

And then the king was dead.

A new monarch was enthroned in 1760, the year I turned forty-one years old.

George Second was replaced by George Third and still the word from England was, “The king is mad.” New King George’s first act toward the colonies was to levy upon us a sugar tax, making treacle as dear as thread. It forced up the cost of making rum in New England, and traders from the West Indies carrying sugarcane and treacle to us had to build new storehouses for their gold. The cost circled the ocean straight to England so the king’s proclamation cost even the British people dearly for their rum and sugar. Traders carrying rum to England returned to the colonies with their ships awash, their ballast bags of gold. The Crown would allow no sales of wool or woolen products, meaning the cloth I wove; all thread and cloth had to go to England for assemblage, just as iron had to be sent there to make implements. All of it came back to us, of course, but at twelve or more times the cost of keeping it here and doing it ourselves. I felt stunned. Now it wasn’t just the silk. I could not sell my own weaving without becoming a criminal. Cullah had built a false floor in our small wagon as if that were naturally what we would do. I wrestled with my heart. My yearning to continue as I had always done measured against the promise to myself to be honest and above reproach.

And then one day Emma Dodsil, Virtue Dodsil’s wife, tapped at my door. She carried a bushel basket of eggs. “Mistress MacLammond?” she called. She was trailed by three of her children, who ran off to see my newborn goats.

I let her in. “Oh, you poor dear. How have you done since the fire?”

“I have come to try to repay your kindness, Resolute.”

“That is not needed, you know, Emma.” In truth, I wondered what I would do with all those eggs. And how on earth could the ones on the bottom of a bushel still be whole with the weight of all the others on top of them? I poured us ale and we sat quietly for several moments as she looked about the room, guiltily.

At last Emma said, “These are boiled.”

“All right. I will make a pie of them.”

“These are not the gift.”

I lowered my head. “I do not understand, Emma.”

“I have done work. It’s nothing much.” She lifted the rag of hopsacking holding the eggs, and underneath them were folded clothes. “I made these things from our remnants.” She lifted forth an apron, a child’s pelisse, and a kirtle. “I sew, you see, and now it seems I am able to provide more than we need. I, I have heard that you sometimes go to Boston to trade. If you could sell these, I would give you half the money. That is my gift, for—”

“Stop. You know that is against the law, now.”

“Yes, Resolute.”

“Who told you that I do such a thing? Do you suspect me of not being loyal to the Crown?”

“Oh, no, Mistress.”

I noted how her friendly familiarity had gotten formal when I confronted her motives. I rose and stood with one arm against the mantel of our fireplace. With my other hand, I touched the rim of my house cap twice and watched her from the corner of one eye as I pretended to stir the bean pot. She made no like movement. I said, “I hope your family has stayed warm with the blankets I gave you.”

“Yes, indeed, Resolute.”

“It is only against the law to trade in such. I am still allowed to make them for my family and my friends. It was a gift to you from our best, Emma. Nothing less than any neighbor would do.”

“Of course, dear friend. I meant nothing by it. It’s just, we have need of so many things. Prices are so high. I hope you don’t think I would do anything against the law.”

I turned to face her and smiled. “Absolutely not. It was but a misunderstanding. I am sure you need the money.” I wondered if she might even be paid for witnessing against any neighbor thwarting the law. Lest my words seem like the accusation it was, I added, “We are all finding prices higher. Doing with less.” We finished our ale and she packed up her goods, with her cloth of boiled eggs atop the basket so it looked as if that were her only burden. As I watched her call her children and walk away, the smile left my face. I would have to be far more discreet in everything I did and said from this day forward.

Before long the ladies to whom I sold cloth made it clear whether they would flaunt British law or not. I came very near to being caught trading in woolens one day. I rolled a length of wool in a sack, and once in Boston, placed it in the coal bin of Constance, the dressmaker. I made other stops and returned, to find inside a pouch holding a pound and ten shillings. Then the next week when I repeated the charade, I opened the coal bin and found the pouch, but in it were two colonial paper notes, virtually worthless unless I were to trade in Loyalist shops. I took the money and boldly walked inside. I wanted gold, not paper, and I would have it. There were four people in there, three women and a man I knew not. I handed Constance the notes. “For my bill,” I said, then whispered, “Would you please change these for gold?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Whatever do you mean? I carried no credit for you, Mistress MacLammond.” She raised her brows to the man. He stepped closer to me.

I felt the hairs on my arms rise and a tingling took my fingertips. Angered, fearful, I said, “No, no. Fancy that. I have gone to the wrong shop. It is money I owe the butcher. What a silly mistake I have made. I’m sure the only things you butcher in this shop are ladies’ gowns.” I made my way to the door, resolved never to trade with Constance again. I felt doubly sad for it, though, knowing that the split between Loyalists and the rest of us would only deepen.

CHAPTER 33

January 2, 1765

Five years can pass like the blink of a cat’s eye. I had not opened the chests my brother left with me. Though I spoke not of him, he would return, I knew, for when he was not with us, I heard about him instead. He had gained repute as a smuggler, and it was sometimes said with a low voice and a wink, “This be got by trade or by Talbot?” as a way of acknowledging the fact. He was hailed for it. Though I feared for him, I took pride in his reputation, too. Every day I held his image in my mind’s eye and thought of him standing on the foredeck of his great ship, the wind filling the sheets as she moved across swells. I pictured him happy, standing there. Each woman I met, I considered as a bride for him, but none was fitting. None could replace his first love, the sea.

During those years August made furtive sorties on land. Sometimes he boldly occupied his house in Boston. Often he unloaded his “trade” on the harbors. Once in a great while, he came in the dark of night with a wagonload of things to put in the double floor of our barn, or the upper room over my loom, or in the eaves where Cullah had built shelves then closed them off from view. While Lexington had once seemed rather isolated, and its only thoroughfare simply a path between Concord and Boston, now with a great influx of poor people we were hailed night and day by straggling travelers, so that I told Cullah we might as well open an inn, but he did not laugh at my jest.

Gwyneth had three more children, so that her life was constant in duties at home. I knew well the exhausting toll that took on a woman, so when Dorothy, by her own choice, lived with them I tried to believe that she felt no less love for her father and me. But she was twelve and still had not recovered from Jacob’s terrible death. She told me she would never marry, that she wanted to care for her sister’s children, and felt happy there.

Benjamin was apprenticed, not with his father but in Boston with Paul and the Revere family in the silversmith business. It worried us both that without Benjamin or Brendan, we had no hope to carry on his work when Cullah grew old. It came to me that someday our land would lie fallow, but I pushed the thought away. We had Roland, a good farmer, and now James, too. James had chosen to live in and repair Goody Carnegie’s old house. He kept secret his Roman Catholic ways and worked with Roland, tending sheep and cows, hoeing weeds.

In the midst of what seemed to be spreading poverty, the call and need for cloth grew. I turned to my loom and my spinning as I had not done since before the children. At the same time I developed a web of women whom I trusted and we traded and bartered for goods so much that I might see my own cloth worn by a magistrate’s wife who had traded a sow to the undertaker for some porcelain and the porcelain pitcher was on my table full of milk, the cups holding settling posset. I spun every moment I was not occupied with something else. I wove yards of motley and yards of fine, yards of linens as dainty as a shimmer, and woolens of every sort. I wove black and tan and gray, and I wove plaids of tartans when Cullah could remember the setts or patterns of color. If he could not, I made up my own pattern of color from what I found pleasant. I wove linen with silk chasing. I loved that the best. It was almost embroidery, doing chasing work.

“I want a girl to come in,” I told Cullah one night, while I cut chunks of lamb for a stew. “I need help with the work. When I am spinning, the weeds overgrow the garden, and while I cut out weeds, the sheep have gotten into the corn. Then the cows, the cows seem to need me there. They give better milk for me than for Roland.” That was not true. I knew that what I wanted was not so much an apprentice as someone with whom to talk. Cullah worked in town. “Remember?” I said. “You were to ask about, but Jacob fell. His death changed everything.”

“It did,” he said. “I am lonely. I expected my boys to follow my trade. But since they have not, without Pa here, I am also too much alone.”

I put down my knife. “We could force Dorothy to come home.”

“She’d be unhappy. Might grow melancholic.” Cullah looked at me with an old familiar longing. “I’d have been happy if you’d had more children. I did my best.”

I smiled. “You did, indeed. Perhaps we must be thankful for the quiet and a full night’s sleep.”

“Every season has its beauty.”

“You are become a philosopher, husband. Will you ask in town, then?”

April 2, 1765

Often, Cullah stayed in town and did not walk home until late at night. If ever I questioned him, he smiled and said, “It’s business, Mistress MacLammond, keeps me from your bosom,” or, “Not to worry, Goody MacLammond, your husband is neither a reprobate nor a drunkard. He is merely the most hated thing, a patriot,” and tell me nothing. I wanted to cudgel him into speaking it, but there was no use. I knew the man I had married by his stubbornness as well as by his face.

In spring he spent two nights away from home. When he got back in the darkest hours before Easter morning, April 7, 1765, he came with the oddest burden I could have imagined. Two sack-back and two comb-back Windsor chairs. They were large and comfortable. He had placed them back to back and putting his hand through the rungs lifted two in each hand and carried them all the way from Boston down a narrow path that led across a swamp, a bog, two neighbors’ farms, and through the woods. I asked him, “You brought them from Boston?”

“Aye.”

“And why, on Easter morning, did you feel you must do that?”

“I made these chairs. Each one took a week’s worth of labor in itself. A good chair is the hardest thing there is, and these were my best work. I couldn’t let them burn.”

“Why were they going to burn?”

He cast his eyes about the room as if, I thought, trying to come up with a believable lie to tell me. “They were in the governor’s mansion, and there was a fire.”

“Who set it?”

“The Committee of Safety. It’s as well you know. We lit a candle for the cause of freedom, that’s all. I am taking these to the attic, and I ask you to come with me and help me lay something atop them. But ask me no other questions, wife, for I have been abroad for two days and I must eat and get to work now or seem conspicuous.”

“It is Easter Sunday. If you go to work, not only will you seem conspicuous to the soldiers, you will be called to question by the deacons. Nevertheless, husband, if you sold them to the governor, and you’ve taken them back, you stole those chairs.”

“You’ve a bitter tongue, Ressie.”

“Aye, well, I live with a thistle.” More and more I thought of Scotland’s symbol as indicative of her people. Rugged. Uncrushable. Beautiful. Armed with wicked thorns.

“I made them.”

“He paid you for them. That means you stole them.”

“Well and aye. There were too many high spirits last night. I didn’t think clearly. At the last I couldn’t watch my work go to the flames. Risked losing the hair off my back for them.”

“You have to give them back.”

“Will you allow me at least to say that I saved them from the fire? Must I confess all and be hung?”