My Name is Resolute (77 page)

“Mistress Gage asked me to accompany her, to make your introductions.”

“But you are not expected until three.” She shook her arm from Wallace’s hand.

“It is quarter of four,” Margaret said. “We waited to be received by you, but apparently you and your husband had household matters to discuss.”

“Here is my sixpence,” I said. “I insist you give me my girl.”

Wallace stormed, “No, by God, the wench is not for sale.”

Serenity grasped the coin from my fingers. “Sold! Take that tripe from my floor and never let me see her again.” She kicked the woman again and the poor thing curled more into a ball. “Baggage! Slut!” She turned toward Wallace, her lower jaw extended. “Thank you very much. Now I have been made a fool before a new acquaintance, Mistress Gage. What is it about Boston that makes you into such a lusting baboon? I repent the day I married you, you cur!”

Wallace made a smile that was more a sneer and turned to us. “I believe I have enjoyed quite enough female company this afternoon. Mistress MacLammond, please take your purchase and excuse me. Mistress Gage? A pleasure, I am sure. Good day.”

Serenity screamed at him. “Where are you going?”

“Out the door. You will hear from my lawyer in the future.”

Serenity dropped the riding crop and pulled herself to a chair, falling into it. “I hope a carriage runs over him.” After a while, she looked at us. “Get out,” she hissed.

I went to the woman still curled on the floor and touched her shoulder. “Come with me,” I said, motioning. “Come on, dear. Serenity? Give me a bill of sale.”

“Why don’t I throw rotted fruit at you instead?”

I picked up the riding crop and pointed at the desk with it. Her eyes widened and I saw fear in them. “There is paper and a quill before you on that table. Write it. Purchased, this date, for sixpence, one African woman named, what is your name, Miss?”

“Tassie,” Serenity said, curling her lips. “Her name is Tassie.” She scribbled, dipping the quill, dropping blots everywhere and blackening her fingers. “Take this. Take that blackamoor and never let me see her again.”

Margaret and I took Tassie’s arms as if we were three friends, and we led her from the room. At the front door, Margaret asked her, “Do you have anything to get? Combs or stockings? Anything that is yours?”

“No. No, Mistress.”

Margaret looked at me behind Tassie’s head, and motioned with her eyes to the carriage out front. When we had gotten in it, Tassie held her head down without looking around. Margaret said, “Well, Resolute, dear. I meant to meet this Mistress Spencer for some jolly entertainment and I believe this afternoon you have given me enough to fill a shocking novel. At any time if you know some other woman who is even half as frolicsome as Mistress Spencer, do include me in your visitation.” She smiled so it brought dimples to her cheeks.

“I was astounded at what just occurred,” I said.

Margaret giggled. “I loved it!” We drove to her house, then she asked her driver to take me home.

As the coach turned, I feared the girl had fallen asleep. I touched her hand. She jumped. I remembered the goat-whacking stick, that shape and size of a riding crop, and how I would often be so tired after a beating. She sat there in sullen quiet, expecting every touch to be more of the same. “Tassie?”

“Yes, Mistress?”

“Is that your name, the name you were born with?”

“You call me anyt’ing you wants, Mistress.”

“I want to call you the name you choose.” I felt stunned. I had bought a slave. I owned her. My ears made a noise as if waves from the ocean washed through them. I continued, “And, I want to set you free. I do not know how to do it yet. It must be done legally but I know a lawyer who will help us. Do you feel able to speak to him now?” I reached out and with my finger touched a red, welted line across her cheek. “If you would rather rest a few days, I will understand.”

I felt more than saw a mosaic of suspicion and joy playing upon her face. “No, Mistress. Now be plenty a good time.”

“I thought so.” I pulled the bell chain beside the coach’s window. The driver pulled the horses to a halt, and I sent him down a corner toward Daniel Charlesworth’s office. “Where will you go?” I asked.

“Don’ know, Mistress. Home?”

“Jamaica?”

“How did you know?”

“Wallace Spencer got all his slaves from Jamaica. Aren’t you the girl who dropped the wineglass?”

“If you please, I never dropped a glass, Mistress.”

“Oh. I thought I remembered you. You were but a child then. I pretended I had dropped the goblet.”

“I did not break a glass, Mistress.”

“Very well. Do you have any means to get home to Jamaica? Do you have the passage money? Do you have aught to do once you arrive? You must think on those things. You have been a slave. Once you are free, there will be no roof over your head, no matter how miserable. You will have to make your own way. The ways for a woman are few. I could arrange to pay passage for you, but I cannot protect you on the ship or ever again once you arrived there.”

“I need to t’ink on that, Mistress. You mean to let me free?”

“I do.”

“Why would you do that, Mistress?”

“I wish it.”

We stopped at the office where Daniel had worked, though he rarely came in, calling himself retired. A clerk handed me a form of freedom, a transport, an identification document, and said that if I would fill it all out, he would record it then and there. I turned to the girl. “What would you have me put down as your name?”

“Tassie is a slave name. You give me a name, Mistress. I be happy with that.”

“When I was a girl, my best friend’s name was Allsy.”

“That be good, Mistress.”

I started to write Allsy on the line given for the name of “person” and stopped. “Allsy is a slave name, too. Are you sure you want that?”

“Give me a white woman’s name, Mistress. Give me something so white that it feels like snow on glass.”

My eyes opened wider in surprise. “If I change Allsy to Alice? Does that sound good to you?”

“Alice. Alice. It’s the sound of snow.” She smiled, then turned her face from me.

I thought a moment. “It is indeed.”

She nodded, whispering, “Alice.”

I wrote “Alice” on the line. “Do you know how old you are?”

“Maybe thirty. Twenty-nine maybe. I was twelve when Master took me. I—I do not know how to count.”

I wrote on the paper. I handed it to the clerk, and he wrote again upon another form, passed it to me, and said, “That will be five shillings for filing, and one pound more for the stamp tax, madam.”

I reached into my pocket. I had nothing left in it but one of the gold Spanish doubloons I had carried to take to the Reveres’ next time I passed by. “You will have to take this,” I said.

He disappeared for several minutes. Alice held her Free Status paper as if it were a butterfly that might vanish in her hands. After a while, the man returned and counted out a few pennies into my hand, which I returned to my pocket.

Outside the door, I turned to her. “Alice? I am not cruel enough to say to you that I have done all I can for you and drive away, leaving you on these cobbles, your fate to the winds. You do not have to do anything today. You do not even have to choose what you will do in the future, today. You are free to go, free to come. I need a girl at my house. I will not own a slave, and I do not own you now. You are not bound to come home with me. If you wish to, you may. I am sorry but you may not come as a guest. You would have to work and help me, but I will pay you four pence a day, and I will not ask you to do anything that I do not do also. I have plenty of work. I have a husband, a daughter still at home, and a business weaving and spinning. You could come now, and then decide to leave, and that will be all right. You may want to leave this very moment, and that is all right, too. So I ask you, will you come home with me for a time? Come and see if you wish to stay?”

“Mistress, I want to go home to Jamaica.”

How those words twisted my very fibers. “I know. Do you have family there?”

“Maybe. Maybe they’s alive. I wish it, Mistress.”

“How long since you have seen them?”

“Seventeen years, I t’ink. If I come with you, I can go home tomorrow?”

“Yes. That paper there assures everyone you meet that you are a free woman of color. You keep that sacred as a duppy charm.”

She smiled. She was quite comely. I shuddered, thinking of why Wallace had kept her in the house. Thinking of that day he believed that because I had been kept a slave I had been used so. Alice said, “I come with you, then, tonight. Tomorrow I go home to Jamaica.”

“Tomorrow.”

Alice did not leave the next day. She spent a tentative week, terrified of Cullah, terrified of Roland, even afraid of Benjamin when he visited, and Brendan, too. She scurried about, cleaning, baking breads, sweeping, and washing clothes. She asked me about how she could get passage home to Jamaica. I told her what I knew, and how to find out more later on, should she decide to leave, about what the fare was, and where the boats landed. She was so frightened that it made Cullah troublesome.

He asked me one morning after she left the kitchen with a basket to collect eggs, “What does she think I am? A goat?”

“She thinks you are like Wallace Spencer.”

“I don’t want to have a woman that foolish in the house.”

“She is not foolish. She has been a slave a long time. I told her she is free. If you want her to leave, we are free, too, to send her away.”

He gave a great sigh. “Every other time I come home you have brought in some poor soul. Are we to be an inn for the desperate from now on?”

I thought a long moment. At length I said, “Yes.” He smiled.

After two weeks, I came in from hanging linen outside to dry, to find the kitchen empty and the front door wide open.

“Alice?” I called. No answer. I called up the stairs. “Alice?”

She was not in any of the bedrooms, nor in the attic. The comb I had given her, the extra skirt and apron, the cloak, all had been removed from Dolly’s old bedroom where Alice slept. The bed had been made up neatly. I went down, and down again, to the loom. By the time I reached the front door again, I was winded. I sat upon the bench outside the door. She was gone.

I went back to my chores feeling lonely. I sat at the kitchen table shelling dried beans into a bowl. The door behind me creaked open. A dark-skinned hand came around the door, pushing it slowly. Alice stepped in. “Mistress?”

“Yes, Alice?”

“I walked near all the way to Boston town.”

“Did you?”

“All that way, I thought more than I could t’ink before when you asked me to stay or go, to make up my mind. All my life I go where I am told. I didn’t know I could do it. If I am by myself for a while, I can t’ink up and down a t’ing from both sides and I can make up a decision in my mind. If I am free, here is what I made up my mind to do. I come to ask you to hire me to keep house for pay. If you like my work, as you have seen it up to now, I make up my mind I have need of pay as a free woman. If you hire me I ask one pound a month.”

“That is less than I pay you now.”

“Only a little. That is what free housemaids in town gets. One pound a month. I don’t aim to be fancy, I want what they gets. I want to be a housemaid in my own shoes.”

I knew what she meant. I had not heard that expression since I was small. “I happen to be in need of a housemaid. I believe I will hire you, Alice. You will work as the family does, five in the morning until eight at night. You may have every other Saturday afternoon off to do whatever you please as long as it is in good moral character. And if you decide you wish to leave, and you have done a good job, I will recommend you to other households providing you give me half a month’s notice. Agreed?”

“Agreed, Mistress.”

“Put your things away. You will find a room at the top of the stairs where the, the previous housemaid stayed. It is all ready for you.”

She smiled. “T’ank you, Mistress.”

*   *   *

Fall of 1767 settled in with its gales and flutters of snow followed by warmer days. The garden lay exposed, pumpkins strewn amid dried vines, yellowed beans clinging to poles and cornstalks, dead at the foot but still recklessly in bloom on the tips. Harvest meant constant work. One day as Alice and I picked through cooked pumpkin chunks to crush for pies, testing them with a fork to see if they were done, a wagoner came up our road stirring dust that floated in the misty air. It made a cloud that traveled to where Dolly sat reading aloud the newest pamphlets from Boston, by the doorway under the climbing vines. There were two men. I said, “Go inside. If anything happens, bar the door quick as you can and run upstairs. Alice, ring the bell in the kitchen window with the mallet by it, five rings, to call Gwyneth and Roland and tell them it is dire. Then get yourself upstairs, too. There is another bar on our bedroom door up the stairs. Use it, if you must, and wait in the hidden stairwell.”

The driver came to me just as she got within the house. He tipped his battered hat, which once had been cocked all around but was lapping behind and gave him a comical look. In case that was meant to be one of August’s “high signs” I put my left hand against my chin and touched my elbow with my right fist, changing it as if I had started to cross my arms and changed my mind. “David Cross, to see Jacob Lamont.”

I hesitated. Was that a signal? And was Cross his name or was that also a sign? “I am sorry, Mr. Cross. I do not know a Jacob Lamont.” And I did not, for Jacob’s Lamont name was Brendan like our son’s. “Perhaps you have gotten the wrong instructions.” His hands did not move. I touched my cap, wondering if he would respond with the sign that August and all our family and friends used and never told to strangers.

He did not touch his hat again, but said, “No, no, Mistress. I have been this way before. Ain’t there a man living here name of Eadan Lamont, then?”

I meant to let my face freeze in its expression. I know not whether it was successful. No one was supposed to know of Cullah’s real name. No doubt our children heard me call him “Eadan” now and then, but never those two names together. “You ask too many questions, sir, for a stranger at my gate. Good day.” I made as if to go into the house. When I turned, from the corner of my eye I saw that something or someone moved under a tarpaulin in the wagon bed.