“It is a dinner for certain people. So that we are all in one accord. It is done.”
“Even if I spend the entire evening in the kitchen with our baby in my lap and my breasts ogled by every butler and servant?”
Cullah bristled. “I’ll kill ’em. Anyway, Brendan will not misbehave. He’s a bonny good laddie.”
“He is neither good nor bad, he is six months old. There is throat distemper and influenza in Boston, and consumption and measles. Why did you do this to me?”
He leaned back in his chair. “That’s a fine thing. What, are you too highborn for the likes of them? You are invited to dine with the best of society, decent people who would take you right in, and you think it is a sentence.”
“It could well be. And I said it not because they are not worthy. I am nursing!”
“I am going to work.” He stood up, and moving angrily, took his belt and slapped his hat on his head. It landed wrong and he straightened it.
“That is a good thing, Cullah MacLammond,” I snapped.
“Well and aye,” he said, and slammed the door.
Jacob sat at the table and after a while he raised his one eye carefully to peer in my direction. I pointed to the door and said, “You had better go find some work, too, for this boy is going to school and if you just wagered Harvard—yes, I know about Harvard—if you just wagered Harvard on some daft, worm-eaten, bowlegged king-in-a-kilt, you had better get it back by the time the boy is old enough to need it.”
“Woman, you’ve got a tongue on you like a fishwife.”
“Well and aye. You knew that before you moved in. Go to work. Out with you.”
He slammed the door, too, but called through the wooden barrier, “I have had no breakfast but the sharp end of your tongue!”
“Forty pounds,” I shouted in reply, which woke up Brendan, who cried, and I sighed, changed his clouties, and rocked him again. I did not spin or weave the whole day through. I wandered the house, the yard, the small barn. I thought and thought about what had gone on. To what kind of man was I married? Was there a charm for a man who had lost his senses?
The morrow came and I found with some dismay that I did not fit well into my lavender gown. I left the panniers on a hook and loosened the stomacher, and still no help. I wore a simpler gown, still well made, but not lavish, and I put a parcel of extra clouties for Brendan in our small wagon. Jacob stayed at the house. I barely spoke to Cullah all the way to Boston. To say I faced this evening with strangers and a nursing babe at my breast with dread would be too soft.
What I discovered, however, was that Monsieur Rivoire was glad to have someone to whom to speak French, though his wife was English and they had long ago Anglicized their name to Revere. Their tiny lad was but two and was named Paul. Though they were stern Protestants, their loyalties lay not in their religion but in Masonic code. So this was what drew my Cullah and his father together with these odd fellows, I marveled. While their little Paul did his best to play peek-at-me with Brendan, who dutifully laughed at his new playmate, I talked with Deborah, Paul’s mother, and other women there.
So we were part of a new society. Making our way home at nearly midnight, my babe close in and warm under many blankets and a great rug, I watched our breaths mingle before us. The night was crisp and the cold hurt my cheeks.
After a long silence, Cullah said, “When they ask of us, we give. And if we ever have need, we have to but ask of them and they will give.”
I said, “Deborah Revere came from a very wealthy family. Easy for her to give.”
“He married well.”
“No one can say you married me for money.”
“I married you to have someone to cuff me about.”
“This society, these people, they have secrets.”
“Aye.”
“And you acted as if I were an outsider. As if you have secrets from me. I am on your side, Cullah MacLammond. Did you not know that?”
“You would not have agreed to what Pa and I did.”
“Of course not. You do not ask why, you just want blind obedience?”
“Certainly. That makes life easier.” He smiled then, and turned to me and winked.
I said, “You should have married a horse, then.”
“Hear that, Sam?” he called to the horse. “Sam says no, that he cannot make a hasty pudding to save his life. No. Had to marry you. Bewitched by a wee fairy.”
I made my voice stern as I could. “If ever something is amiss, if you need me to meet you in secret, or you need me to understand something, you must give me a word.”
“What word?”
“My sister used ‘gumboo.’”
“That’s likely enough.”
“She cut it into a piece of bread. That was when I knew we were leaving the convent. Before that, if we were to meet to talk, she said ‘candlestick.’”
“If I use the word ‘cross’ and it seems out of place, that will be a signal and you will meet me in our parlor, or our kitchen; that is better.”
“All right.”
“And if I use the word ‘sword’ you will immediately go to our bedroom.”