My Name is Resolute (15 page)

These people were Master and Mistress Newham, their daughter, Thea, and their son, a boy as tall as his father, older than August. His name was Lukas. He had a gentle face and an easy smile and waving hair at his temples. When he looked at me, I felt suddenly clumsy, as if all my joints did not fit, a mismatched doll like Lonnie. I quite admired his temples, the cut of them, and his clean hair. I wore a kerchief and a house cap, but my hair, an inch long, felt as if it were announced before the world and he would see it and think I was hideous. I backed into the shadows. The last person with them was a woman but was not introduced. She sat by the door, a hood drawn. A servant, I thought.

“Mary?” Mistress called. “Fetch the cups.” For several minutes I passed and poured and mopped up spills. For I did spill the cider next to Lukas’s cup. He looked up at me just as I came to him and smiled at me. Mistress called, “Mary!” but that was no chide to me in the wake of Lukas’s stare.

Lukas’s gray eyes followed my movements and he had started to say, “Thank you,” but his father stopped him before the words were out, saying, “No need to thank a servant for serving, son. They know their place better when you keep yours.” Lukas then looked down his nose at me with almost a sneer when the cider dribbled down the cup, as if I were something less than he, as if I were not fit to pour his cider. I felt crushed in a way I would not have expected. I felt surprised, too, that I cared so much whether this impudent ruffian cared to have me pour his cup. Why, I had never spoken two words to the boy and he had naught to recommend him save a pair of gray, laughing eyes. What would I want with him or his favor? I turned my haughtiest stare to him, but whether he noted it I could not say.

I took the pitcher of cider to a side table and looked again upon the woman sitting by the door. At the moment I did, she raised her head and looked from under the hood. I stared into a pair of my own eyes! Patience! “La,” I whispered. The Newhams had bought Patience.
The
Miss Talbot of Two Crowns Plantation sat by the door as a servant and not invited to table nor fed. Patey’s hand went to her lips and she motioned me to keep silent. Could I rush to my sister and not suffer for it? I could see her hands, as raw from work and washing as were mine, although they had provided her clothing new and whole.

Once supper was served, I was given a bowl and I took it to Patience, motioned for her to follow me, and we shoved clear a place betwixt the cloaks. On Birgitta’s bed we dipped our bread into the same sauce at last, leaning against each other in the only embrace we dared, shushed as mice. “Oh, Patey! I could climb into your lap.”

“Best they know nothing of us being sisters. They might not let us be together.”

“For a while I believed I had died and this was Purgatory. I have never been so cold. I am planning to run away when the wolves quit howling.”

She licked her fingers. “Summer
will
come. The Newhams and the Haskens are moving to the wilderness with some others. The minister of their church is taking families to pioneer, and once the roads are clear enough for that, you and I can leave.”

“Won’t they want to take us?” I asked.

“We will leave despite their wants.”

I smiled. My whole being felt warmed. “Do you have to milk goats?”

“No, Ressie. Do you keep geese? They bite my hands.”

“No. They gave me to the old one, Birgitta, like a poppet. She named me Mary.”

“The Newhams have talked of the Haskens’ troublesome serving girl, Mary.”

Mistress called, “Mary, the posset!” Lukas held his cup and I turned my head just enough to give the impression that I saw him not, and passed him with the pitcher. As I poured cider and served posset, I slipped three biscuits from the plate into the cuff of the pelisse.

Soon as I could, I sat beside Patience again. I put two biscuits in her hand. “They beat me at first,” I said. “But less now.”

“Mine do not,” she said. “Although they might if they knew my shame. I suppose they will soon enough.” She put an entire biscuit into her mouth, chewing it quickly.

I broke my biscuit and slipped half of it into my mouth. “I steal from them all the time. Stockings. Food. That is my shame. What shame have you?”

“We won’t talk of that now. Ressie, I cannot bear to think that they beat you.” She reached behind where no one could see and patted my back.

I ate the rest of the biscuit. “Are your people foolish? I think the very name Hasken must mean ‘daft’ in some other language.”

“No. They are genteel, churchy, Pa would have said. I warn you, never speak of saints or holidays. Ma taught us a mixture of Catholic from her childhood and some from long ago, from the Old Way. Some African.”

“Not a single crumb for Shortest Night. Anyway, everyone was ill with a fever. They cut off my hair.”

“Oh, poor thing,” she said, running her hands over my head. I closed my eyes, humming at the smoothness of her fingertips upon my brow. “It will grow. Keep your kerchief on and it does not show.” She took my hands in hers and said, “I so missed Pa breaking open the holiday cakes.”

“We shall go home, Patey.”

“Mary!”

“Yes, madam!” When we were not fetching things Patey and I sat side by side for long stretches without a single word, breathing the same air. I whispered, “If you and I don’t leave I will have to stay eight years.”

Patey looked on me with Ma’s eyes. “Unless a prince comes to pay your price.”

I did not want a prince. Certainly not one as bowlegged and bug-eyed as Lukas. Perhaps there
were
other young men in the town, comely ones, smart and gentle as our pa. I remembered Patience dreaming for her prince back in England. Perhaps I was old enough to dream of a prince, too, but not Lukas. “What if I pay my own price?” I asked. “My price was five pounds.”

She whispered, “What is the matter with your feet? You’re limping.”

“One shoe is too small. I change them from one foot to the other to let one foot rest.” I held forth the foot wearing Lonnie’s little crumpled leather bat of a shoe. Patience clucked her tongue and held up her feet. Her shoes were new and she had warm stockings of brown wool. I added, “I have stockings now. I stole them.”

The evening was gone too soon. Patience helped them on with their wraps and giant shoes, and I held the door as they trudged out. Patey stepped close to my side, brushing against me with her new crisp clothes. It was as close to a hug as we dared. No sooner had I pulled the door in place than it opened again. Lukas stood with Patience’s shoes in his hands. “Here,” he said, thrusting them at me. “My father will give you these and provide others for our servant. My sister died last fall and she can have hers.”

Oh, Patience! Her shoes! Though now she would go home in the most dreadful cold, other shoes awaited her there. Oh, how simple was this gift, and how valuable! I never imagined that one master might do such for another’s servant.

Mistress began bundling the girls up the stairs. Birgitta stood by the fire, watching me as Lukas closed the door. “Let’s see,” she said. Birgitta snatched the shoes from my hands and made as if to throw them into the fire.

“My—their
girl
gave them to me, seeing I had only one fit shoe.”

“This will just make some other way they can look down upon this family. Always with their noses in our business and in the air.”

“Please,” I said, “I could work so much faster if both feet had a good shoe.”

Birgitta turned them this way and that. She handed them to me. “I suppose you’ll be taller, too, and the clothes will fit better? Pah, little spider. Only let the mistress not see them. The daughters have naught so new or fine a pair between ’em. You’ll need a longer skirt for to hide them.” She said it almost as if accusing me of some crime.

“I might sew it all myself, if you would but guide me, Mother Birgitta.”

Her face brightened at that, brows lifting, almost a smile across her mouth. “On the morrow. I’m tired. You’ve much to do.” She lumbered to her cot and sat upon it. “I’ll just sit a few minutes, then I’ll bank up the fire,” she said. But within moments she slumped over onto the blankets and a rattling snore came from her.

I carried her candle to the table so I could see to clean up the cups and plates. By then the entire household had begun to snore. I heard an owl cry and a wolf howl in the distance as I cradled Patience’s shoes against my chest and crept up the stair to my little mat, so tired my ears had a strange sense of fullness and sound, like a hundred insects in my head. The wolf howled again, joined by a chorus of others. They sounded as if they were just under the window.

I thought about my sister and myself, all our travels, all our ways before then, and afterward being sold. I touched my skirt, feeling the petticoat stitching through the thin gown, the places Ma had sewn as if she knew I would live in such cold one day. My sister was not far away and not for long. Our owners were friends to each other and were going a-pioneering. Reverend would marry Rachael, a girl half his age. Lukas would travel with us wherever we were going. All of it made my heart warm and my face flush. I shook my head. He was probably drafty and dull-witted, too. I knew not what attracted me to him at first. My thoughts swirled like coddling posset and my heart ached for him.

When I emptied the morning pots, I put the broken, pinching shoe down the outhouse hole with the mess. After I finished cleaning the morning dishes, Birgitta offered me a bit of brown wool, quite plain, and guided me in the sewing of long side seams and gathering the waist at a band to make a skirt. I made my stitches as small and straight as I could manage. After a while she said, “You called me ‘Mother Birgitta’ the other day. I wouldn’t mind were you to call me that.”

I kept my eyes on my stitches. I had called her that with insincerity verging on disdain. I had also done it knowing the woman might be affected by it, and that it might soften my life until I could find a way to escape. Soft answers turn away wrath, Ma always said. “I shall, Mother Birgitta. I heard we are moving.”

“We start a new settlement in the west. Rachael will wed Reverend Johansen in a few weeks. Mayhap Christine shall marry Lukas.”

I nodded as if I were a wise woman consulted. “I think he
should
take Christine. She seems, most—inclined to marry.”

“Most natural, you mean. The other is touched in some way.”

I smiled. It was as if we shared a secret that bound us to each other, to agree to something as obvious as that Lonnie was not whole. When the skirt was done I believed by the look on her face that Birgitta felt proud of me wearing it.

When Mistress saw it, her face turned a dark scowl. I feared she would reach for the strop hanging by the chimney. “A waste, Birgitta, a sheer waste when that cloth could have made aught for the girls. And you! Mary, I do wonder but you’ve been growing faster than any of my daughters. Have you been stealing food?”

I feared lest the biscuits and the bowls of goat milk show in guilt on my face. I tried to make it as hard and blank as stone, like the pirate Aloysius nodding before Captain Hallcroft. I lowered my eyes. “I have a sturdy constitution and God’s good grace to thank for my health, Mistress,” I said with a curtsy. I kept my knees bent so that on arising I was not so tall. She said nothing but kept eyeing me so I added, “Perhaps, Mistress, the larger my stature the more work I can do.”

“You’ve been stealing food.”

“No, Mistress. I swear it.” I was getting used to swearing promises that were as hollow as Lonnie’s head.

She raised her hand as if to slap me and I cowered as she proclaimed, “No supper for you tonight.” I looked at Birgitta, wishing for a sign she would feed me. Birgitta was my protector, but not in everything.

After that, I nurtured my hatred for them all while I stole more food. I took any morsels that I could tuck into a cuff or push up my sleeve, a bit of raw potato or a sliver of trimmed roast beef. I sucked on wheat grains as I had done on the pirate ship. When I milked goats, I took a hearty drink of the milk before I brought the bowl in the house. If I was going to hell anyway, I might as well go with a full stomach.

I hummed a tune and muttered words under my breath while I milked goats. It fit to sing,
“Damn your eyes, Mistress Hasken, damn your eyes.”
Was I a villain, then? No, I decided. When I returned to Ma I would put off this hate and thievery as I would put off these filthy clothes and pitch them in the ocean. In the meantime, I practiced the salty words and curses I had learned, every one of them aimed at one of the Haskens.

Once the snow quit falling, a few days of warm rain turned everything to a blight of mud. The rain stopped and the air cooled, but for a few days there was blue sky of the oddest, pale shade of blue I had ever seen. With the thaw, a stream flowed nearby, and Birgitta sent me to fetch water from it rather than hauling snow. We were going to wash the winter’s clothing, she said. I took two buckets and filled them half full as I had learned to do on the ship.

I made several trips, filling the cauldron as Birgitta stirred up the fire to heat the water. She added plants she had pulled and dried last summer, as if we were making dirty-clothes soup. Birgitta and I scrubbed dirty linens against boards and rocks, hung things on bushes, while I carried pail after pail of water and kept the fire burning.

“If you intend to wash your raiments,” she said to me under her breath, “do the underthings first. Then when they are dry you put them on and wash the outer. Pretty soon you’ll be all dressed again, and since Master isn’t at home, we’ll start early and be finished. Tomorrow we begin Miss Rachael’s wedding gown.”

I rushed up the stairs, so excited about a bath and clean clothing Ma would have laughed. I worried about cleaning my things with all that lay hidden in them, but the only thing in danger of being found was my pocket. I took the tiny casket from my pocket and burrowed it deep under the bearskin, wrapping it under three folds of the rug and piling everything so that it looked heaped. I smoothed the bearskin over it all and felt pleased at the result. I undressed and removed everything down to my skin, dressed myself again in the brown skirt and pelisse.