Jacob took my hands, and as tenderly as he could look through his one eye, he nodded and said, “You yourself said the plantation went to the Crown. No English king is going to give it back to you, a girl, who can neither prove its ownership nor work it if you did. Providence has placed you here, in this land. I am not asking you to have my son, that’s a matter for your heart. But I am asking you, as would a father, an uncle, a friend, to think on staying here. You have means to work and live. Risking everything to go to some far isle on the hope of finding someone who is probably long dead is foolish.”
Having his son? Was that what Cullah meant by a marriage chest? Had I not seen it in his eyes or heard it in his words? “My mother is not dead.” Yet as I said those words, the image of Rafe MacAlister squirming on top of me, the image of him doing the same thing to Ma became blurred until I thought they were one and the same. I felt the demon’s weight again, saw Ma’s face close-up, covered with tears and blood, her own blood. I pulled my hands from Jacob’s and rushed to the hidden stairwell, feeling the stony wall of the chimney, its warm rocks, except for the drip of water, the same temperature as long ago those had been as Patience and I descended them. I looked down into the rocky room below where the loom awaited me.
I saw her. Ma. Sprawled on the floor, the dagger to her own bosom, the vile and rough hands upon hers, raking it back and forth, crosshatching her bodice with blood. And the ripping of her skirt, the crying out for Pa. I saw her in my lower room, dragged toward the hole in the wall, then drawn back, limp and unmoving. I saw Patience’s bodice, crushed against my face, her hands forcing my eyes away from rape and murder, suffocating me until I fainted. Patience crushing me again in the hold of the Saracen ship, ready to kill me to keep me from a fate such as our mother suffered. And that wee redheaded girl who insulted me on the boat. And the other woman. And all who perished.
I awoke with a man’s arm across my body, holding my shoulders down. I screamed and scratched at his face. “Miss Talbot, Miss Talbot,” called Jacob. The man, yes, I knew him, the one-eyed woodsman and murderer. His son, slasher of tendons and poser of corpses. Had they raped me or were they about to? Had I fallen into their perfidy by my own ignorance? Had they plotted treachery with Rafe MacAlister?
Jacob clutched my hands to keep them from his face. I burst into tears. “Ma! Oh, my ma!” I know not how long I wept. I know that I awoke again and it was dark, the snores of men round about me, filling the air. I awoke again, painfully thirsty, my tongue stiff and hardened, split in the center and dry, but when I stood I could not tell where I was. The hold of some ship? I felt the walls, all unfamiliar, as if someone had spirited me away. There was no water. No fresh water unless they let you up from the hold. The floor rocked. Dolphins cried and gulls answered. I found my way to the side as the vessel pitched and turned. At the side was a stairway, and down it, my mother cut and bloodied, holding an empty cup. My thirst o’erwhelmed me but I could not drink. She called my name but so afraid was I to go to her that I could not move. Then Patience tried to smother me, and I awoke.
“Miss Talbot?” A gentle hand brushed hair from my face. “You fell here, and we let you sleep, but maybe you would rather get to your bed? Look, I have made you a real bed, not just a pallet on the floor. Let me help you.”
I opened my eyes. Who was this man? Yes. This was the son. The one sliced across the back for refusing to be abused and abased. “Cullah?” I asked. “Is there water?”
“Ah, you know me at last. Good. I will fetch you water.”
“Where is my—” I started to ask for Ma, but I knew. Oh, I knew. So I asked instead, “My cloak? I am cold.”
“Would you sit by the fire?”
“Yes.” While we sat there, Cullah and I, I told him my other secrets. Of Patience. How she had run away with the Indian man. How she had broken my heart and spirit so many times before, but that I believed I had not understood her, with the understanding I now had of life. I told him of August, whom I never expected to see again. Told him of living on hardtack and rum. Of picking flax until my hands became great mitts of pain. Of thinking all this time Ma lived and waited for me. Of being punished for eating a single carrot.
“Many’s the lad,” Cullah said, “hanged at London town for stealing a rabbit.”
“My mother is dead,” I said, tears brimming anew.
“Mine is, too.”
At that, I gave myself completely to weeping and sorrow. He told me of how it happened with her. How they’d fled, him barely a lad, and her swollen, carrying another baby. Soldiers had caught them and she began to miscarry. They put her in prison where she bled to death. He said, “Never would I have believed a person, any person, could hold or lose so much blood. I have bled people since then. Seen animals slaughtered. But Pa said, because she was with child it was life’s blood, that it comes from heaven itself, and so the bleeding was two people slaughtered because the wee one bled to death, too.”
For a long time, then, we held each other, not as lovers but as friends, as brother and sister might, our tears wetting both our shoulders.
At last I said, “The way Jacob told it, I thought you were one of the fighters. I watched you against those three. You are a warrior.”