My Name is Resolute (73 page)

“You heard the call to fire and saved them. That will serve.”

“Aye.” He kissed my cheek. “You are my rudder in an evil sea, Ressie.”

After the Easter sermon, Reverend Clarke received a note from one of the deacons. We sang a hymn. Then he announced that Imperial Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion in Boston had been burned down and messages had been left stating it had been done by the Sons of Liberty. No one made a sound. I imagined that some cheered within themselves, some were saddened, even angered. Some wept, but that, I knew, was no indication which way their feelings leaned. I stayed myself from any expression and looked at my prayer book. I noted that the singing of the next hymn was so rousing as to shake the glass in the windows.

Cullah drove our new third-hand wagon to Boston the next day, whistling, as he carried the four well-made chairs to the governor’s new temporary quarters. The buggy had a seat for two with a shade behind them, and a place to stack things in back. He tied the chairs with as much gentle care as if they had been children. No questions were asked, he said, for he had found the menservants at home, and he left the chairs amongst their congratulations for the salvage.

He left for his shop carrying his toolbox on his back on a Monday two weeks later, a beautiful April morning, the kind of morning when the whole earth seemed to be celebrating its life and warmth. All the pear and apple trees had blossomed, frost was but a memory, and birds pecked at our windowsills. I had kissed him and he slapped my hip playfully before he left. I collected eggs. I put out bread dough to raise. I swept the floor. In that much time, less than two hours, he returned to the house, his face pale and wan, his right hand wrapped in cloths none too clean, and to my horror, he had lost half the littlest finger on his right hand to a whirling blade. I cleaned his wound and wrapped it in linen bandages.

“Ah, I’m a terrible fool,” he said. His voice barely hid his pain.

“My poor husband. It must hurt so dreadfully.”

“I cannot hold a sword now.”

“But you can. You will.”

“It will feel different.”

I looked hard into his face. “Why do you need to hold a sword? Why did you not say a saw or an axe? Or a plane or chisel? Why did you say a sword?”

“Cooper and Prescott came by the shop just before I did this.” He held his bandaged hand up. “There is yet another new tax. It was passed six months ago without a single man from the colonies to question it in Parliament, without any of us knowing it beforehand. Every piece of paper must bear a stamp and every stamp must be paid for. A penny for a receipt. A pound for a license and three to sell a piece of land. Ten shillings for a pamphlet and five pounds for a newspaper! It will drive the newspapers out of business, and it is meant to do so, for they speak of nothing but angry outcries against the king. They say there will be open rebellion this time, far beyond this colony. War.”

A chill ran through me. “But, how did that make you cut your hand?”

“While they were talking across the street from my shop at Elliot’s Wheel and Carriage, Tories went in, front and rear, and confiscated all the wheel rims he had. Claimed they were illegally gotten iron not from England but made in Philadelphia. It caught my eye. I was trying to look as if I did not notice, for they aimed muskets in every direction, even at a young woman crossing the street with her bairny at her side. I looked away for just an instant. With a band saw, an instant is far too long.”

“I should say. Were they English wheels?”

“No.”

“Will Goodman Elliot get his wheels returned?”

“He’s out his inventory and can’t make his orders without wheels. Now they’re so high, he said, when he finally delivers the coach he has made no profit at all. Ressie, a man cannot stay in business making no profit!”

“Will you have some rum and willow water for the pain?”

“Well and aye. It did not hurt at all, did you know that? It felt like nothing, until now. Now it feels as if the devil himself has chewed it off.” I poured rum. Mixed him a toddy of willow water. He took a long draught of the drink and coughed. “Ah. Would you give me cider instead? I am not fond of this stuff. I feel it already, making my brains spin. I heard your brother is in Boston.” He coughed again. “The army has ransacked his house but not found him, yet Hancock just got a load of spices from Talbot’s ships.”

Ships? August had recovered his losses, then. “Will he come here?”

“I don’t know. I do know this. There is talk of rebellion in every quarter. Your brother is planning something that might get him an appointment with the hangman.”

That, I knew, I could not change. August would do what he willed.

The Reverend Mr. Clarke came to visit and spent a long afternoon with Cullah on the bench outside by the parlor door. I knew nothing of what they spoke. The gentle rumble of men at talk felt soothing to me, same as it had when Pa had had ships’ captains in our parlor. It troubled me a great deal, though, when they lowered their voices and I could hear nothing but an odd word. I told myself the Reverend Mr. Clarke would never do anything against the law, whereas I did not believe that of my husband. Yet, the two, with heads together and voices lowered, made them seem more alike than not. I tried to go about my chores and ignore them. Was that always the way with men? Were the soothing rises and fallings of their voices indicative of plots of subterfuge and rebellion?

After Reverend Clarke left, Cullah took to his chair before the fireplace, and stayed there for five days. In pain, perhaps, or sulking, or both, perhaps. I could not guess at his malaise, and he would barely speak at all until I feared we might have to send for a doctor, that he had some sickness of heart or mind that time and clean bandages could not salve. I carried his meals to him, for he would not so much as come to the table to eat. He refused Gwenny’s invitations to their home. He stared into the fireplace whether a fire burned there or not.

*   *   *

In the warming of May, after working in the field alongside Roland one long day, James seemed exhausted. One thing I had discovered about him already was that the man could stand little in the way of nervous excitement. He was a fair farmer, but not energetic, as if he’d never known a man’s strength. He worried that the cause of distress in our household was his presence, but at last Cullah told him what had happened. He asked him, “Will you swear to keep our secrets, keep our home as if it were your own?”

I repeated it all in French. James agreed. “Of course, sir,” he said. Simply because this man was related to me, being a nephew, did not make his allegiances ours or ours his. He smiled, laughed a little, trying to make light of it. In his smiling face, I saw Rafe MacAlister’s grimace. A coldness came into me at that moment. I feared I would never look at James without seeing his father, again. I resolved to guard well my actions.

That evening as I sat to spin and he sat spellbound by the flames, I imagined Cullah standing at the great saw with its blade encircling a gear in the roof, the only control of it a brake pedal. It ran by a waterwheel, or if the stream was low, by apprentice power on a spoke. This time of year there would have been rushing water, making the blade run faster than normal. British soldiers had been searching the shop across the street, ransacking the place, and my husband had been distracted. Distracted by guilt for his part in burning the governor’s mansion? Had he stood there pretending to work, all the while terrified of them repeating the same orders at his place?

*   *   *

That summer, soldiers walked every street of Boston, every avenue of Lexington. County lanes were as often trod by Redcoats as by farmers. I created bolts and bolts of cloth. Cullah had made me a wheelbarrow with a false bottom that fit the rolls of cloth. I carried some of them to Lexington town, sold them in private homes as if I were a fishmonger, or took them to Boston under layers of ragged but clean muslin surrounding tarred canvas, and topped with old vegetables. Sometimes the vegetables, so oft used that way, grew limp and withered. Once on my way to Lexington, when stopped by a gaggle of six young soldiers who inspected my load, I told them in a rather silly voice, “Your Honors, I be just a poor goodwife. This is the best I got. It wo’ not bring me a farthing but maybe sixpence for someone’s pigs to eat.”

“What’s under the top, there? I see some cloth.” His accent was Irish.

I smiled and cocked my head as if I were simple and I mimicked Mistress Boyne’s manner of speech. “Why, it is cloth, you clever one! ’Twas once a cloth from the altar at a papist shrine. And there is something under it! I got a cat that was kill’t by a fairy down in the dell by the grave of a witch. There’s a power to that one. I have seen her meself, a-prowling the land on a winter’s eve. The cat is to keep fairies awa’ from me whilst I walk. ’Tis the only way. Would you like to touch it? Marvelous charm, it is. If ye take one of the worms and put it in your collar, you cannot be shot by elves on your journey. Tha’ knows what a pity elf-shot is.”

The men wrinkled their noses and backed away from me. “Be off with you, woman,” one said. He turned to his mate and whispered, “What a creature!”

I nodded and smiled, and walked on, amazed myself at the drabble that had poured from my lips without so much as a pause to concoct it. Sister Joseph would have been appalled.

He called after me, “And for Christ’s sake, go to church. Damned colonials.”

When I met him at his shop, Cullah took my barrow and said, “I was thinking that you work too hard, always at the cloth. You will cause yourself to go blind.”

“I will be careful, husband. I will rest my eyes.”

“There. Working, working. Resolute, my wee wife, you are as determined as a badger, and for what? Our children are grown.”

“I suppose I cannot stop. I feel I must work at something.” And like a chant or an old string of Latin prayer, the sentence finished itself in my mind as, “or I shall not get home to Jamaica, to my mother,” and that surprised even me. It was true, now that I was alone so much, the children gone, those old words echoed more and more.

Meanwhile, Cullah had continued talking and I had not heard anything until he said, “You need a diversion. Let’s stay the night in Boston. I’ll drive the wagon. I have chests to deliver. We’ll bed at your brother’s house.”

I stopped walking and said, “I have no way to dress my hair in the morning. What shall we eat?”

“What is the fuss with hair? Women fiddle for an hour and then cover it with a cap so you would not know if she were bald as a pumpkin. If your brother cannot give us meat, we shall eat at an inn or a stall in the street. He has had provender at our table often enough, August could grant us a stale crust and a noggin of something. I must get there today, Resolute.”

I said nothing still. What could he know about my pride? My hair?

When we got to Boston we went to Revere’s, and Benjamin showed us a hammered brass charger he had created. I was so glad then that Cullah had come with me. Our son was growing so quickly. Seventeen already, and tall as his father, but with my lighter hair and skin. We all went to have a meat pie and ale at a nice tavern nearby, but Cullah grew more sullen as the meal continued, until he ceased speaking at all.

When we returned, Deborah Revere herself met us, smiling, and she kissed my cheeks. “Come next Thursday to our supper. Dining at eight o’clock. There will be music by seven, so come early. We are having some new music done.” She looked from my face to Cullah’s. “It will be a good place for all our sons.”

He glanced at me. “Then they shall all be there, madam. We have a daughter of a good age, too.”

“Of course. Then I shall expect, what, four of you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you so.”

She cast her eyes around the place. “There shall be excellent company, Mr. MacLammond. Twenty-one of us, sir. Good day, then.”

“Good day,” Cullah said, as my mouth was open to utter the words.

When we left her presence, I tugged at Cullah’s sleeve. “Tell me, husband, what wounds your spirit so? Is it your finger causing such distress?”

He did not turn to me, or smile. “It is that I see my children, Gwenny’s bairns, and I do not wish them to grow up in a land such as this. I did not mean to be harsh to you. I am worried about the future.” He chucked the reins. “It’s intolerable.”

He tied our workhorse and farm wagon at a ring several doors away from August’s home. The street was lined with hansom carriages, and music poured from the open door at Wallace and Serenity Spencer’s house. Candles had been lit in several downstairs windows and more of their guests had just arrived. I pushed aside the knowledge of it coming from their house, and stepping to its beat let the music lift my spirits. I said, “Was it not excellent that we happened to go to Benjamin’s workplace in time to see Mistress Revere?”

Cullah said, “It was no accident. I was promised to go there, today.”

“Promised? For what purpose?”

He looked about the street, his eyes wandering to some flowers overhanging a ledge outside a window three stories up, but he muttered, “Mistress Revere has given me a message and we must attend that supper even if we are standing at death’s portal. The sons to whom she refers are not our children. Nevertheless, our son Benjamin must be there, likewise Dorothy. We must see that she is dressed as befits a child of royalty. And you, too. Have you got a new gown? Silk? Something with the finest trim?”

“It is but ten days away. I have some embroidery work, a stomacher, and some silk fillets made that I meant to sell. I can make the colors work for a mantua and wear my old petticoat with a bit of ribbon. There remain three bolts of silk from that stock Lady Spencer left to me. Dolly and I shall create her a gown from those.”

“See those flowers there? Why do you not plant some of those?” he asked, as three men in fine clothing walked past us. Then he lowered his voice again. “I suppose I shall need a coat such as that?”

“That I can do for you. So much for lessening my work, though.”

“It is important.”

“What is twenty-one? She said there would be excellent company, twenty-one.”