Goody Carnegie pushed the milk pan to the ground, wrenching it from my fingers. “Abigail, listen to me. Where are the woodsmen?”
“In the house.” I felt before I heard the concussion that stopped her speech. I thought perhaps I had imagined it. That she had taken a fit. Had had a shock. Frozen in place, she had become a pillar of salt, a Lot’s wife to mark the way to my door. “Goody?”
Her mouth moved. A whimper escaped her lips. Goody fell to the ground, a fountain of blood sheeting across her back. I screamed. Ran toward my door. On the lower level, the stone walls had been filled in—the ample window was now but an air hole. The door had a bar but it was heavy and hard to place. I heard a man’s voice in the woods. Another answered it back. The timbre was wrong, for Jacob’s or Cullah’s voices. In the darkened inside, I looked up the staircase. Any who might circle the house could come in. I looked upon my loom, my spinning wheels and baskets. If Indians intended to steal me away again, I would not be found.
I crept into the fireplace, still warm as it was, and pulled baskets of thread behind me. There were too many embers. It would light the baskets and burn me alive. I sought to crawl beneath the loom, but had not got under when a hand, strong as iron bands, took my ankles and pulled me forth. It was no Indian, though, but a white man. I cried out with all my strength, and the wretched fellow laughed, hoisted me up, crushing the breath from me, and started up the stair. My strength was no match for him, but I could kick against the wall and knock him off balance and I did, four steps up. We tumbled down the stairs, him cursing and furious. At that moment another man came down, but this one saw the barred door and opened it, shoving me through to the outside.
There, a third man joined the two. Rafe MacAlister. He had grown grizzled and fat. He missed more teeth and had a cotton eye. The three of them dressed in seamen’s motley, though Rafe wore a new-looking cocked hat with a cockade of red satin.
I screamed and had to fight my feeling of faint. “You! What do you mean by this? Your ruffians have—”
He cuffed my face with the back of his hand. “Quiet. Yes, that’s you. That’s who I been looking for. I’ll have you this time, I will. And growed right up, hain’t you? No one to stop me but the old one and she’s not really feeling up to it.” He laughed, that same old sound I remembered so many times in our parlor.
“What do you want with me?” I asked.
“You are mine. For a debt long unmet. You think your father was some kind of walking saint, don’t you? Well, the wretch Jacobite owed me, cheated me out of my position, my land, crawled over the necks of my family to get where he was. Him and the lot of ’em. Caused my sisters to be transported, my mother and brother hanged, my wife run through by the queen’s guard. My children slaughtered and fed to the pigs.”
“My father would never do such as that.”
“Not now. He’s keeping Davey Jones company at whist, I hear.” He took my wrist in an agonizing grip.
“Unhand me, you pirate.”
Rafe laughed, low and menacing, the stench from his mouth more vile than before, and he leaned toward me. “Not until we’ve had the sweets we come for.” He ran his free hand under my skirt and between my legs. I kicked at him as he did but he was too strong. He hissed, close to my face, his breath that of something long dead, “I swore to myself I would have your father’s head on a pike and your mother’s eyes on my shoe buckles. I swore I would kill him and destroy his children and his children’s children. You are the last. You’ll get what’s coming to all of ’em.”
I cried out with the roughness, pain, fear. His brigands stood on either side of me, holding my arms, and commenced to tearing my workday gown to shreds in their hurry to get at me. I begged Rafe to stop. I screamed, prayed, cursed him. The villain tore open his trousers and was upon me and I nearly naked, squirming beneath him, when at once he gave a loud grunt and fell from me.