American Gods (10 page)

He had such dangerous eyes, said Essie Tregowan.

Soon enough Bartholomew went up to Oxford, and, when Essie's condition became apparent, she was dismissed. But the babe was stillborn, and as a favor to Essie's mother, who was a very fine cook, the squire's wife prevailed upon her husband to return the former maiden to her former position in the scullery.

But Essie's love for Bartholomew had turned to hatred for his family, and within the year she took for her new beau a man from a neighboring village, with a bad reputation, who went by the name of Josiah Horner. And one night, when the family slept, Essie arose in the night and unbolted the side door, to let her lover in. He rifled the house while the family slept on.

Suspicion immediately fell upon someone in the house, for it was apparent that someone must have opened the door (which the squire's wife distinctly remembered having bolted herself), and someone must have known where the squire kept his silver plate, and the drawer in which he kept his coins and his promissory notes. Still, Essie, by resolutely denying everything, was convicted of nothing until Master Josiah Horner was caught, in a chandler's in Exeter, passing one of the squire's notes. The squire identified it as his, and Horner and Essie went to trial.

Horner was convicted at the local assizes, and was, as the slang of the time so cruelly and so casually had it,
turned off
, but the judge took pity on Essie, because of her age or her chestnut hair, and he sentenced her to seven years' transportation. She was to be transported on a ship called the
Neptune
, under the command of one Captain Clarke. So Essie went to the Carolinas; and on the way she conceived an alliance with the selfsame captain, and prevailed upon him to return her to England with him, as his wife, and to take her to his mother's house in London, where no man knew her. The journey back, when the human cargo had been exchanged for cotton and tobacco, was a peaceful time and a happy one for the captain and his new bride, who were as two lovebirds or courting butterflies, unable to cease from touching each other or giving each other little gifts and endearments.

When they reached London, Captain Clarke lodged Essie with his mother, who treated her in all ways as her son's new wife. Eight weeks later, the
Neptune
set sail again, and the pretty young bride with the chestnut hair waved her husband goodbye from dockside. Then she returned to her mother-in-law's house, where, the old woman being absent, Essie helped herself to a length of silk, several gold coins, and a silver pot in which the old woman kept her buttons, and pocketing these things Essie vanished into the stews of London.

Over the following two years Essie became an accomplished shoplifter, her wide skirts capable of concealing a multitude of sins, consisting chiefly of stolen bolts of silk and lace, and she lived life to the full. Essie gave thanks for her escapes from her vicissitudes to all the creatures that she had been told of as a child, to the piskies (whose influence, she was certain, extended as far as London), and she would put a wooden bowl of milk on a window ledge each night, although her friends laughed at her; but she had the last laugh, as her friends got the pox or the clap and Essie remained in the peak of health.

She was a year shy of her twentieth birthday when fate dealt her an ill blow: she sat in the Crossed Forks Inn off Fleet Street, in Bell Yard, when she saw a young man enter and seat himself near the fireplace, fresh down from the university. Oho! A pigeon ripe for the plucking, thinks Essie to herself, and she sits next to him, and tells him what a fine young man he is, and with one hand she begins to stroke his knee, while her other hand, more carefully, goes in search of his pocket watch. And then he looked her full in the face, and her heart leapt and sank as eyes the dangerous blue of the summer sky before a storm gazed back into hers, and Master Bartholomew said her name.

She was taken to Newgate and charged with returning from transportation. Found guilty, Essie shocked no one by pleading her belly, although the town matrons, who assessed such claims (which were usually spurious) were surprised when they were forced to agree that Essie was indeed with child; although who the father was, Essie declined to say.

Her sentence of death was once more commuted to transportation, this time for life.

She rode out this time on the
Sea-Maiden.
There were two hundred transportees on that ship, packed into the hold like so many fat hogs on their way to market. Fluxes and fevers ran rampant; there was scarcely room to sit, let alone to lie down; a woman died in childbirth in the back of the hold, and, the people being pushed in too tightly to pass her body forward, she and the infant were forced out of a small porthole in the back, directly into the choppy gray sea. Essie was eight months gone, and it was a wonder she kept the baby, but keep it she did.

In her life ever after she would have nightmares of her time in that hold, and she would wake up screaming with the taste and stench of the place in her throat.

The
Sea-Maiden
landed at Norfolk in Virginia, and Essie's indenture was bought by a “small planter,” a tobacco farmer named John Richardson, for his wife had died of the childbirth fever a week after giving birth to his daughter, and he had need of a wet nurse and a maid of all work upon his smallholding.

So Essie's baby boy, whom she called Anthony, after, she said, her late husband his father (knowing there was none there to contradict her, and perhaps she had known an Anthony once), sucked at Essie's breast alongside of Phyllida Richardson, and her employer's child always got first suck, so she grew into a healthy child, tall and strong, while Essie's son grew weak and rickety on what was left.

And along with the milk, the children as they grew drank Essie's tales: of the knockers and the blue-caps who live down the mines; of the Bucca, the tricksiest spirit of the land, much more dangerous than the redheaded, snub-nosed piskies, for whom the first fish of the catch was always left upon the shingle, and for whom a fresh-baked loaf of bread was left in the field, at reaping time, to ensure a fine harvest; she told them of the apple-tree men—old apple trees who talked when they had a mind, and who needed to be placated with the first cider of the crop, which was poured onto their roots as the year turned, if they were to give you a fine crop for the next year. She told them, in her mellifluous Cornish drawl, which trees they should be wary of, in the old rhyme:

She told them all these things, and they believed, because she believed.

The farm prospered, and Essie Tregowan placed a china saucer of milk outside the back door, each night, for the piskies. And after eight months John Richardson came a-knocking quietly on Essie's bedroom door, and asked her for favors of the kind a woman shows a man, and Essie told him how shocked and hurt she was, a poor widow woman, and an indentured servant no better than a slave, to be asked to prostitute herself for a man whom she had had so much respect for—and an indentured servant could not marry, so how he could even think to torment an indentured transportee girl so she could not bring herself to think—and her nut-brown eyes filled with tears, such that Richardson found himself apologizing to her, and the upshot of it was that John Richardson wound up, in that corridor, of that hot summer's night, going down on one knee to Essie Tregowan and proposing an end to her indenture and offering his hand in marriage. Now, although she accepted him, she would not sleep a night with him until it was legal, whereupon she moved from the little room in the attic to the master bedroom in the front of the house; and if some of Farmer Richardson's friends and their wives cut him when next they saw him in town, many more of them were of the opinion that the new Mistress Richardson was a damn fine-looking woman, and that Johnnie Richardson had done quite well for himself.

Within a year, she was delivered of another child, another boy, but as blond as his father and his half sister, and they named him John, after his father.

The three children went to the local church to hear the traveling preacher on Sundays, and they went to the little school to learn their letters and their numbers with the children of the other small farmers; while Essie also made sure they knew the mysteries of the piskies, which were the most important mysteries there were: redheaded men, with eyes and clothes as green as a river and turned-up noses, funny, squinting men who would, if they got a mind to, turn you and twist you and lead you out of your way, unless you had salt in your pocket, or a little bread. When the children went off to school, they each of them carried a little salt in one pocket, a little bread in the other, the old symbols of life and the earth, to make sure they came safely home once more, and they always did.

The children grew in the lush Virginia hills, grew tall and strong (although Anthony, her first son, was always weaker, paler, more prone to disease and bad airs) and the Richardsons were happy; and Essie loved her husband as best she could. They had been married a decade when John Richardson developed a toothache so bad it made him fall from his horse. They took him to the nearest town, where his tooth was pulled; but it was too late, and the blood poisoning carried him off, black-faced and groaning, and they buried him beneath his favorite willow tree.

The widow Richardson was left the farm to manage until Richardson's two children were of age: she managed the indentured servants and the slaves, and brought in the tobacco crop, year in, year out; she poured cider on the roots of the apple trees on New Year's Eve, and placed a loaf of new-baked bread in the fields at harvest time, and she always left a saucer of milk at the back door. The farm flourished, and the widow Richardson gained a reputation as a hard bargainer, but one whose crop was always good, and who never sold shoddy for better merchandise.

So all went well for another ten years; but after that was a bad year, for Anthony, her son, slew Johnnie, his half brother, in a furious quarrel over the future of the farm and the disposition of Phyllida's hand; and some said he had not meant to kill his brother, and that it was a foolish blow that struck too deep, and some said otherwise. Anthony fled, leaving Essie to bury her youngest son beside his father. Now, some said Anthony fled to Boston, and some said he went south, and his mother was of the opinion that he had taken ship to England, to enlist in George's army and fight the rebel Scots. But with both sons gone the farm was an empty place, and a sad one, and Phyllida pined and plained as if her heart had been broken, while nothing that her stepmother could say or do would put a smile back on her lips again.

But heartbroken or not, they needed a man about the farm, and so Phyllida married Harry Soames, a ship's carpenter by profession, who had tired of the sea and who dreamed of a life on land on a farm like the Lincolnshire farm upon which he had grown up. And although the Richardsons' farm was little enough like that, Harry Soames found correspondences enough to make him happy. Five children were born to Phyllida and Harry, three of whom lived.

The widow Richardson missed her sons, and she missed her husband, although he was now little more than a memory of a fair man who treated her kindly. Phyllida's children would come to Essie for tales, and she would tell them of the Black Dog of the Moors, and of Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones, or the Apple Tree Man, but they were not interested; they only wanted tales of Jack—Jack up the Beanstalk, or Jack Giant-killer, or Jack and his Cat and the King. She loved those children as if they were her own flesh and blood, although sometimes she would call them by the names of those long dead.

It was May, and she took her chair out into the kitchen garden to pick peas and to shuck them in the sunlight, for even in the lush heat of Virginia the cold had entered her bones as the frost had entered her hair, and a little warmth was a fine thing.

As the widow Richardson shucked the peas with her old hands, she got to thinking about how fine it would be to walk once more on the moors and the salty cliffs of her native Cornwall, and she thought of sitting on the shingle as a little girl, waiting for her father's ship to return from the gray seas. Her hands, blue-knuckled and clumsy, opened the pea pods, forced the full peas into an earthenware bowl, and dropped the empty pea pods onto her aproned lap. And then she found herself remembering, as she had not remembered for a long time, a life well lost: how she had twitched purses and filched silks with her clever fingers; and now she remembers the warden of Newgate telling her that it will be a good twelve weeks before her case would be heard, and that she could escape the gallows if she could plead her belly, and what a pretty thing she was—and how she had turned to the wall and bravely lifted her skirts, hating herself and hating him, but knowing he was right; and the feel of the life quickening inside her that meant that she could cheat death for a little longer . . .

“Essie Tregowan?” said the stranger.

The widow Richardson looked up, shading her eyes in the May sunshine. “Do I know you?” she asked. She had not heard him approach.

The man was dressed all in green: dusty green trews, green jacket, and a dark green coat. His hair was a carroty red, and he grinned at her all lopsided. There was something about the man that made her happy to look at him, and something else that whispered of danger. “You might say that you know me,” he said.

He squinted down at her, and she squinted right back up at him, searching his moon-face for a clue to his identity. He looked as young as one of her own grandchildren, yet he had called her by her old name, and there was a burr in his voice she knew from her childhood, from the rocks and the moors of her home.

“You're a Cornishman?” she asked.

“That I am, a Cousin Jack,” said the red-haired man. “Or rather, that I was, but now I'm here in this new world, where nobody puts out ale or milk for an honest fellow, or a loaf of bread come harvest time.”