They were gone. Jacob and Cullah, the woodsmen. Brendan and Eadan, the rebels, the warriors, the hunted murderers. Gone to Concord. I wandered for two days, missing Cullah. I hung on a peg the shirt I’d made to his measure but for my brother. On an early afternoon when the day had been warm, I took flowers to Goody’s grave on All Hallows. I laid a sprig of yarrow upon the grave of little Abigail. Then I walked to Lexington to attend church on All Saints’ Day.
Overhearing gossip, I learned that, as Cullah had suspected, Mr. Considine had recently found three vagabonds dead in one of his fields and named the place Sad Field. He claimed they must have been drunk and fought each other due to their poverty, for they had nothing of value betwixt them but their weapons, old and worn as they were. Immediately afterward, he purchased another tract of land that met one boundary of the Carnegie Farm, having, he said, payoff of a long-forgotten but very good investment.
I collected pears and apples and dried them, storing them in rough bags hung from the rafters. On Saturdays, Cullah came to my door and brought with him some little box or shelf he had made. Wooden trenchers and spoons. The odd iron hook he said was “left behind” from some work they had done during that week. Last week he brought me two gallons of vinegar. One time he brought his father’s great tool kit, and from it drew a pile of staves from which he created for me a barrel-vat for dyeing cloth. When I told him the dye would soak into the wood and all my cloth would become the same color, he only smiled and said he would make another for every color I wished to create. I prepared supper for him on those Saturdays. We ate in the cool of the afternoon, and then he swept the crate upon his back and walked back to Concord.
On Sundays, I walked to town and went to Meeting, not for spiritual renewal but for companionship. Fall turned the night air sharp, though the days stayed pleasant.
I set about my work with renewed energy on Mondays, and by two weeks’ end had thirty yards of fine linen. I mixed dyes and tested the results on scraps. When I had just the right shade of rose—darker than the blush on a dogwood flower—I added blue to make lavender. I wrote the formula and mixed my brew. I held my breath as I plunged the length of fabric into the new barrel. Only then did I see how smoothly Cullah had planed and shaved the wood inside, so that it had no burrs to catch the thread.
When an hour had passed, I rinsed the cloth and laid it upon a rope Cullah had strung from the wall to a tree. When it had dried I laid it upon my table and took the one thing yet unused and clean, a fifth new trencher Cullah had left me, and put it upon the cloth, then drew around it, making circles. On each circle I drew a leaf on the left with a posy by it, and then with a spoon for a straight line, I made dots where I would put flowers and leaves. When I sat to embroider I decided that this would be a very fine cloth, and perhaps I would take it to Johanna the dressmaker myself, not sell it to Barnabus. I mixed threads to create subtlety of color that pleased my own eye, all the while thinking that if it pleased only me I should be out the cost and labor of creating expensive fabric. If others found it to their liking, I would charge more than I had ever asked before, for I intended to embroider every yard—all thirty—so that any lady could have the largest farthingale on this continent and still make use of it.
When my back ached so that I felt I needed to move or be forever frozen in place, I cleaned out Goody’s house, aired the blankets, and washed everything else. I stored candles, candleholders, and a little mirror, her leech book of herbs and poultices, most of which was writ in some tongue I could not read, in a rough chest. I made sure to be finished there before the sun began its descent, for I had no love of the shadows that haunted the place. If my house was really the place where she had burned her babe to death, it had no feel of it. It was Goody’s own hearth that caused me to shudder upon opening the door. I was only too glad to close it and place the largest log I could move against it, wedging it into the mud to hold it closed.
That evening I sat before my hearth stirring apples and molasses with some Indian flour into a hasty pudding. A drop bubbled and popped upon my hand but landed where calluses had toughened the skin and I licked the sweet pudding without pain. Though it was November, there had been no snow, no storms. As I thought that, tears welled and spilled down my face. Loneliness echoed in the empty house.