My Name is Resolute (71 page)

That August, Gwenny and Roland had a baby girl. She lived but three weeks, and then died. We knew not why. She was buried next to our babies down in the sleepy and misty hollow below the empty house.

My brother August arrived in September to spend a week with us, and then spend the winter in his new mansion. He was well dressed but carrying a small trunk holding, he said, no legacy of his occupation, which had turned to piracy against the British. He would dress like a simple man at our home. He had lost two ships to the British navy, now confiscating cargoes right and left of any who carried goods to the colonies in America. August asked to see the gift he had sent before. Cullah lifted the seat where the cannon lay. He leaned in and inspected the piece then moaned as he straightened. “Couple of broken ribs, that. Hard for me to bend, still.”

Cullah said, “Soldiers arrived with a tax order two days after this new seat was finished. More came for billeting a day after that. I put your crate in here and nailed the lid shut as they were coming up the road. Never thought about it again.”

August took a pouch from his coat. “I cannot keep it in town for my house is searched regularly.” He opened the pouch. “Here. Doubloons. Spanish, mostly, but no matter.”

I opened my mouth, but Cullah spoke first. “August, how did you come by this?”

My brother made a movement that looked as if he settled his head painfully upon his shoulders. “It came from a Tory hold after being stolen from an honest privateer. One minute they contract men to patrol the seas and the next they hang your whole crew for doing exactly what they’d been assigned to do. You may find it causes raised eyebrows to spend doubloons, but they’re worth more than a sovereign apiece. Melt them down. You’ll find the silversmith in Boston town willing and discreet. You know whom I mean. The time will come when it will take a bar of gold to buy a loaf of bread, mark my words. Take no paper money in exchange from now on. Only gold and silver coin. No bill will be worth the paper it is printed on in a year or two.”

“The cannon,” I whispered. “Is worth—”

August smiled with a cold hardness. “Its weight in gold. Aye. Cast iron. I will have sixty of them in a month.”

“What do you plan to do with them?” Jacob asked.

“I am outfitting a ship, that’s all.”

“Under their long noses?” I asked.

“And under their long guns,” August added. “Resolute, I have no intention of putting your family in jeopardy or even the slightest suspicion. It was wrong of me to assume we agreed upon a subject of which we have never spoken. It makes you a conspirator of sorts. I’m sure there is a lawyer somewhere with a name for it. Cullah, Jacob, you men have helped me immensely.”

Cullah said, “I thought you to be a contracted privateer.”

“Until the Limeys began to waylay their own contracted captains like myself, and using the word ‘tax’ rifled our trade goods so that we were left with only half of them to show. The East India Company controlled every grain of spice, every inch of silk, and had doubled and tripled the prices. Once I got back into port, I owed the port taxes on the whole of it and they’d gone up fivefold. What they left me with, after three voyages, was debt that would sink a fleet. All I have left is that house of Lady Spencer’s and the trifles I have stored here.”

“August, you are not planning to take on the British navy?” I began. If he had lost his ships, he must be in terrible straits. That would be as if Cullah lost his shop and tools, his house and family. How lonely my brother seemed. How sad, too. “Wait. If you have lost all, how are you buying a ship and forging guns?”

Cullah raised his hand to me. “Leave this, wife. We will ask nothing and know nothing if asked. I know this kind of anger. Sir, go with our blessings, but if you change your mind and wish to leave the sea for a quieter life, you are welcome here.”

My brother smiled at my husband, and I felt sadly left out of their unspoken communication. “If I don’t come back,” August said, “open the other trunks I left upstairs. You never have, have you, Ressie? I thought not.” He looked deep into my face in a way that felt almost as if he saw something I would not recognize in my own soul. “Ever I should meet a woman like you, sister, I would come home from the sea and never let her go. Trust is the one thing in a woman I have never found, so much that I have thought it was not in women to trust or be trusted. If ever I do not return within three years, everything in the trunks is yours, and the Boston house, too. I will have a will made in Philadelphia and recorded there so it will be kept out of the hands of Tories. I’m going there to buy iron and plenty of it. I should be back in six weeks.”

I said, “Wait. We have a cannon, too. We found a small piece in a field. And the cannonballs, take them and melt them down for your purpose. They are all rusting in our barn. We meant to have them melted but that is no easy thing with something as obvious as a cannon.”

At the end of seven days, two wagons approached our house, stopped, and one man left his wagon, climbed into the other, and drove away without a word to anyone. In the back of the wagon left behind were a set of similar clothing, a slouching, misshapen hat, and boots that were more wrapping than leather. August asked Cullah to help him roll the cannon in the blanket and get it into the wagon. He also took the old rusted small gun we had found long ago, the cannonballs, and the iron ring. In the morning, looking like any poor wight off to market before daybreak, the cannon nestled hidden in a load of hay surrounded by enormous barrels of salt cod, August left us, bound for the ironworks in Pennsylvania. We spoke words of farewell with our eyes locked. A fearful silence fell over us then, and no cheery waves accompanied his going.

I took Cullah’s hand as we watched August’s squeaking wagon roll away. “I do not understand him, husband. His anger seems more than revenge upon Lord Spencer.”

“This is not about Gwyneth. It’s about your brother. If I had had everything taken from me, I might feel the same. It feels even now as if the Crown could take everything a man has, all he has worked for, take it all so a fat sow in a silk coat is not inconvenienced by the national debt. Someone somewhere is getting rich by all this confiscation.”

“Do the English not pay taxes?”

“Never enough for a king intent on ruling the world.”

“Goody Dodsil told me she heard there will be yet a new tax of five pounds per household across the whole of Massachusetts. She has no way of making five pounds.”

“Five pounds to someone who has twenty thousand a year is pittance. Five pounds, if you haven’t got it, is a fortune. Aye. We will pay her tax and ours.”

“Aye. Find a way to sell the silks before they all go to worms.” To change the subject I said, “I do miss my brother. If he would come home from the sea, he might meet a nice woman. He loved America Roberts.”

“He is a hardened man, wife. What woman wants to share a man with the sea? He wants what I have with you. He will never find it if the only women he meets are in seaports pursuing a huzzy’s trade.”

“Do you trust me as he said? I never considered myself trustworthy. I spend my days trying to make up for all the lies I have told.”

“You have done that and more.” He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it, then looked at it as if it were new to him. “These wee fingers were never meant to have such calluses. They belong to a lady born. She should have all that is gentle and beautiful about her.”

“I do. I have you.”

“I am getting old, Ressie. I will turn fifty after next year. I have not provided for you as I intended. Without America Roberts here, you have no one to help you at the house. And now there is all this messaging to Boston. I am tired. I am going to tell them I will no longer carry messages.”

“Are you ill? Is there something you have not told me?”

“No, I am not ill, though I just watched August grow old before my eyes. When your brother arrived and smiled at you, he seemed no more than a youth. When he said farewell, he looked older than Pa. I saw myself grow old with him. Perhaps we should take in another ward to help you.”

“I would like that.”

“I will ask at the town meeting next if any have a daughter ready to go out.”

Cullah missed the next town meeting, though. Jacob slipped in the barn and broke his leg in the biggest bone above the knee. It did not come through the skin, but I could see the lump in his leg. He groaned like a child, with tears in his poor blind eye. We sent Benjamin scurrying to town for a doctor. By the time the doctor arrived, Jacob had begun to sleep fitfully in a way I feared was not rest but near death.

The doctor said it might kill him to set the leg, but that it was also the only thing that might save his life, for the leg was blue and would go to infection if he did not bleed to death first. It was given to Cullah to hold Jacob’s chest and arms braced against himself, to me to hold Jacob’s good leg. The doctor began to pull. No matter what he did, Jacob’s wrenching and miserable screams broke our hearts yet the bones would not set together. At last, after one long, dreadful pull during which Jacob kicked as wildly as any horse with the leg I was holding, groaning and grimacing so hard that even with a wrapped stick in his mouth, chips of his teeth fell from his lips, the leg was set. Cullah had sent Benjamin and Dorothy to get wood for a splint from a shed by the house where he had some planks left, and they got back just as the terrible operation was performed. Both children burst into tears. The doctor put the splint on either side of his leg and wrapped cloths around the leg to hold it in place. “Do not loosen that binding. If you do it will come unset, and if it should come unset,” he said, “he will die. Better pray for him, even so.” He bled Jacob seven times before the old man calmed and slept.

After the doctor left, the leg swelled and swelled, above the wooden battens, around the wrappings. After three days of breathing hard and moaning like a woman in childbed, Jacob called out, “Mary?” one time and then slept the sleep of the ages.

Cullah dug his father’s grave on a bright, sparkling day, a day that seemed as if all the world should be at peace and happy. He sweated and his legs shook, but he would not stop until it was right. The children did not run and play and it seemed no matter what I told Dorothy, she would not believe that the doctor had come to help. She believed, because old Sam the horse had been put down the year before, that the doctor had come to kill her grandpa because he was old and his leg was broken. I was taken with a sadness that surprised me.

Once our funeral was finished, Dorothy ran across the fields, desolate with harvest already gathered, to Gwyneth’s house, and stayed there for a week. I missed her. I knew she was grieving but until she decided she wanted to come home, it was good for her to be with Gwenny.

A week later, I walked to Gwyneth’s house. She and Dorothy and I shared tea and we wept for Jacob. We talked. We smiled a little. Then I left my daughters and returned to my home. My empty home. I stirred the pot and waited for Cullah, and thought what a great emptiness was left by Jacob’s passing. At last, I sat at the front door, on the chair where Patience had died. I held my hands folded at my heart, and ached for all who had passed from my world.

People from our congregation did not leave us bereft. Every three days or so for the next four months, someone came with a cake or a sack of meal, a clutch of eggs or a noggin of rum. It was good to know now that we had made a place in the hearts of our community. I counted the worth of that place more valuable than the sack of doubloons August had left with us.

When I walked to Boston every other week, I took a doubloon to Revere’s shop and had Paul exchange it for minted Massachusetts coins by weight. The doubloons he could melt down for the gold and filigree a mantel clock or make bars for trade. When I entered the shop, he either found a way to pat the top of his head as if it were a nervous habit, or to touch his left elbow. Every time someone made either of the signs, the “high signs” to me, I thought of how clever my boy Benjamin was and it was easy to smile as if nothing in the world troubled me, though it was not safe to speak openly at the moment.

Christmas in 1759 found us gathered at our fireside with Gwenny, round with child, Roland, and Brendan home from battle at Ticonderoga. Smallpox, he said, had fought on the side of England, but cost the British army dearly in terms of men lost. He had a month’s rest leave coming and was glad to take it. I repaired his uniforms and sewed him many pairs of new linens and stockings until he laughed and said the generals were not outfitted so fine. When he left, I tried to keep myself from weeping, but it was not to be. He was a jaunty soldier, a man born to it.

*   *   *

In late March of 1760, the new year turned and Gwyneth’s babe was born. They named her Elizabeth Victoria, as English a name as could be. In private when we left them, Cullah winced. “Could they not find a good Scots name for her?” he asked.

“She has your features,” I said. “So pretty a wee thing.”

“Not as pretty as her mother,” he fumed. “Gwenny was beautiful from the first moment.”

“Grandfather, you have become a curmudgeon.”

“Grandfather?”

“Had you not realized it? Your daughter’s daughter makes you a grandfather.”

Cullah smiled with one side of his mouth. Then with both. “Grandfather,” he said. “Grandfather.”

*   *   *

Our house, a quarter mile off the road from Lexington to Concord, could be seen on a clear day from the road, and was sometimes sought by travelers, so it was not a great surprise one day at noon, while Cullah was in town building a warehouse for a man named Parker, that a strange fellow approached me while I pulled weeds in the garden. He watched me, saying nothing, for so long that I felt uneasy. He was rather short of stature and wore a flat parson’s hat but nothing else in his attire marked him as a cleric. At last I asked, “Are you looking for someone, sir?”

“Is this the woodsman’s house?” he asked with a very French accent that made my throat tighten.

Had someone come looking for Roland? I said, “It is. Cullah MacLammond.”