Toliver's Secret (5 page)

Ellen could feel her mother's hands tremble as she tied back the hair and snipped at the long pigtail.

“It will grow back,” Ellen said to her. “How do I look?” Jumping up from the chair she stepped over the hair on the floor and stared at herself in the mirror.

“Why, I favor my father with my hair tied back!” she exclaimed. Her brown eyes were just like her father's eyes although not stern like his. Her face was
thin like his, too. She stared at herself. Suddenly the person staring back at her didn't look like Ellen Toliver, and for a minute it frightened her to look so changed. Glancing sideways she could see her grandfather smiling his old cheerful smile.

Mother had given him the loaf of bread which he was wrapping in a blue kerchief and tying with a good strong knot.

“Where shall I hide the bread?” Ellen asked him.

“Don't hide it,” he told her. “Don't think of hiding it. Just go along swinging this blue bundle as if it were nothing at all. There is only one thing to be careful about, Ellen. Be sure you give the bread to no one but Mr. Shannon.”

His eyes grew as hard as they had been earlier that morning, when she surprised him in the kitchen. “No one but Mr. Shannon. He and I might hang if we were caught.”

“Hang!” cried Ellen. “You mean on a gallows tree?”

Ellen's hands trembled so that she could hardly button the brass buttons on her jacket. No one had mentioned hanging before. If she had known her grandfather might hang she never would have agreed to do it. It wasn't fair. She gulped and at last the words came out. “I can't do it, Grandfather. I just can't. I'm
too scared and I might make a mistake.”

“You can do it, Ellen. Better than anyone else. No one in the world will suspect a loaf of bread in the hands of a child. If, perchance, someone found the message in the bread, just act surprised and say you don't know a thing about it!” He smiled at her to encourage her. “Just hang onto the bread good and tight until you see Mr. Shannon. That won't be hard to do, now will it?”

“But don't talk to any strangers, Ellie,” Mother pleaded.

“Now, Abby. She has common sense.”

“You're sure I won't make a mistake, Grandfather?”

“I can't see where you could go wrong, Ellen. The boatmen are kindly and they take people every day. And at the other end of the trip are my good friends the Shannons.”

“Well, then,” she said. “I think I am all ready now.”

“Good!” cried Grandfather. “When you hand the bread to Mr. Shannon say this to him, ‘I have brought you a present for your birthday.' He will understand what it means.”

Mother slipped two corncakes into her pocket. “You'll get hungry before you get there, I'm sure.” She was trying hard to sound cheerful. “I've always
heard about Mistress Shannon's good potpies, and now you can eat one.”

Grandfather slipped some coins into her pocket. Then he squeezed her hand until it hurt.

“God bless you, Ellen. I'm proud of you.”

Mother pulled the red and white striped cap down around her ears and gave her a pair of mittens as well as a hug that almost smothered her. Then she stepped to the door and opened it. “I think you are a brave girl, Ellen.”

Ellen stood at the top of the steps and looked up and down the street. She took a deep breath. Mother had said she was brave and Grandfather had said he was proud of her—well, she hoped they were right.

A
t first it felt strange to be walking down the same old street, looking like someone else. Ellen was sure people were watching her and wondering why she was dressed as a boy. What should she say if a woman walked up to her and asked, “Why is a girl wearing those clothes? It's not very seemly to show your legs.” She'd pretend the woman had mistaken her for someone else.

But after a while, in Ezra's old breeches, her legs free of skirts and petticoats, she found it was fun to
stomp along the cobblestones. She forgot what people might say. It was fun to dodge the oxcarts and the wheelbarrows and run against the wind with no cloak to hold her back. No one noticed her at all.

When she came to the pump corner she saw that Dicey and the two Brinkerhoff boys were having a snowball fight.

“That's a fair match,” Ellen said to herself. She turned her head so Dicey could not see her. “Let them fight it out.”

But she knew Dicey had seen her when she heard her call out, “Stop!” Ellen's heart almost stood still.

“New boy!” Dicey called. “What's your name?”

Why, Dicey didn't know her! It was just like being invisible. Dicey had looked at her and didn't know her.

Ellen peeped over her shoulder just in time to see Aaron Brinkerhoff push Dicey against a tree trunk and hold her there while Arnie gleefully scrubbed her face with handfuls of snow.

“Stop!” screamed Dicey. “Stop! Two against one ain't fair.” She kicked and twisted away from them. Then, to Ellen's surprise, Dicey turned and ran away, crying like a bawling calf. Ellen stood and stared at her. For a moment she even felt sorry for her.

“Well, at least she didn't know me,” Ellen said to
herself. “I feel invisible.”

“I'm invisible, I'm invisible,” she kept saying as she ran happily down the street. Already she felt better about making the trip.

And then she felt a whack on her back that sent her spinning across the slippery cobblestones. The blue kerchief with her grandfather's loaf of bread flew from her hands.

Swift as hawks after a field mouse the two Brinkerhoff boys swooped down and snatched up her blue bundle.

“Try and get it! Try and get it!” Aaron called out. He held it out to her with an impudent grin on his face. When his brother Arnie grabbed for the bundle, Aaron snatched it away and ran. They played with it as if it were a ball, tossing it back and forth and daring her to chase them.

Ellen stood frozen with fear. What if the bread was torn apart. And the snuffbox fell out. And the British officers learned that Grandfather was a spy! It was too horrible to think of. Grandfather hanging on a gallows tree.

Her hands became fists as she thought how two laughing boys could put them all in such danger.

“Thieves!” she could hear herself shouting. “Stop
those thieves!” She surprised herself by shouting those words in a loud strong voice. She surprised herself, too, by racing after the boys, dodging in and out of the crowds, tripping over children and ducking under the noses of dray horses.

“Stop those thieves!” she screamed. “They stole my bread!”

She ran up to two redcoats who stood on the steps of a bakeshop, eating hot little pies while they flirted with a group of kitchen maids.

“Please, sirs!” she gasped, “those thieves have stolen my bread!”

The soldiers shrugged and laughed. “Plenty of bread inside. The baker has just opened his ovens.”

Now the boys were playing a game in front of a tailor's shop. They were tossing the blue bundle across his sign and hurling it between the wooden blades of a giant pair of scissors. Around them a crowd formed a circle to watch the fun.

“Give me my bread!” Ellen shouted as she leaped from one side to the other. She felt as nimble as a lamb without her long skirts and petticoats, but she never was quick enough to catch the bread.

Aaron mocked her. “Give the poor child his bread. He's starving!”

“Starving! Starving!” shrieked little Arnie. He held the bread out to her and then snatched it away when she jumped for it.

Two beggars watched with hungry eyes. Their bony fingers reached out to grab the bread. Even the public pig who ate scraps of garbage in the streets raced around them with greedy alert little eyes. The crowd laughed, but no one helped.

A little old woman who swept the steps of the tailor's shop with a broom of corn straw called out sharply. “What ails you Brinkerhoff boys? Always making trouble! Give the boy his loaf of bread!” She stepped down into the street and shook her broom at them. “Can't you see he's thin and hungry?”

Angrily she pushed her way through the crowd. Her back was so bent she was hardly as tall as Ellen, but she seemed to know what to do.

“Here,” she said as she thrust her broom handle into Ellen's hands. “Here, trip them up. Bread is precious these days.”

Ellen snatched the broomstick from the old woman. Without a moment's hesitation she raised it up and brought it down with a whack across Aaron's legs. Her eyes were blazing as she watched him duck out of her way. It made her feel good to hear him yell,
“Stop,” and see him dance away from her.

Arnie snatched the bundle from his brother's hands, and whirling it about his head, he grinned at her. “Try and get it!” he shrieked as he turned to push his way through the circle of people.

Ellen rushed after Arnie and whacked his legs, too. Her anger was so great she whacked at his legs until he fell sprawling on the ground.

Quick as a flash she scooped up the bundle, dropped her broom and looked for a way out of the circle.

“This way!” cried the little old woman gleefully. She held out her arms and made an opening for Ellen to get through. “Run like the wind, boy,” she cried. “They'll be after you.”

Ellen raced down the street. Her feet seemed to have wings. “Where to go? Where to hide?” she thought desperately as she looked over her shoulder and saw that the boys and the hungry beggars and even that awful public pig were after her.

Two boys might catch a girl who never had run on cobblestones before. But no one could catch a girl who held her grandfather's secret snuffbox in her arms.

“Stop him!” she could hear Arnie Brinkerhoff shout. “Stop the thief!”

The thief! Why, it was her loaf of bread. And why
would they want it? It was just a game to them. No more important than a snowball.

She jumped over the low stone wall of a church-yard and raced across the flat gravestones. Looking back, she could see that she must have lost the beggars and the pig. Only the boys were following her. And a church warden who ran after her flapping his arms and shouting, “Be gone! Be gone!”

Over the wall she scrambled and into a street filled with haycarts going to the officers' stables. Under one cart and around another she darted. Farmers shook their pitchforks at her as she whirled past. “Don't alarm the horses!” they cried. But Ellen didn't hear them.

She had no idea where she was now as she raced around corners and down streets filled with rubble. Everywhere there were black walls of houses with roofs that had fallen in.

Gasping for breath she darted through a doorway of a broken-down house and crept into an old fireplace to hide. She was sure she had outrun the boys, but she couldn't stop the shaking of her knees. They jerked up and down like puppets on strings.

She sat down in the old ashes of the fireplace, tucked her arms around her knees and put her head
on her arms. Her breath came in great sobs and blew the ashes up around her, covering her breeches with a fine dust.

“This must be the way rabbits feel—when the hounds chase them. If only I were back at home—I could crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head.”

Those boys! Those horrible boys! To spoil everything at the beginning. It wasn't to have been such a long walk to Front Street. She had done it before with Grandfather.

“And now I don't know where I am,” she wailed.

Grandfather had never brought her to the west side of town where the great fire burned block after block last September. It made him too sad to look at it, he said. Six hundred houses had been burned. And Trinity Church. It was lucky the whole city didn't burn up!

Slowly she began to collect her wits. Grandfather would have to find someone else to carry his message. She'd go home and tell him he had asked too much of her. She couldn't go out on the streets and roister about like a boy. She couldn't go sailing across the Bay to a place where she had never been and find a man she had never seen. That was asking too much
of a ten-year-old girl. She'd go home and tell him he must find someone else.

She waited a long time to make sure the boys had not followed her. As she waited she grew calm and a strange happy feeling came over her.

She, Ellen Toliver, had fought two boys in front of a crowd of people. She not only had raced them and beaten them but she had saved her grandfather's message. The bread was here with the snuffbox still inside. She could hardly believe it.

As she sat quietly, a new feeling of confidence came to her. “Perhaps I can try to walk to the docks after all.” She took a deep breath. “Perhaps I can go to Jersey after all. Grandfather said it wasn't hard. I can start over again from here, if I can find my way to Front Street.”

Very carefully she crept out of the fireplace and looked around. There were tents where people must be living amidst the broken-down walls. But she saw no one around. Only stray cats that slunk away in the rubble.