“But so long? You could have gone to Boston and back in that time. You terrified the children with talk of ghosts before you left.”
The look on his face changed and he studied my eyes. “You are afraid,” he said. “Poor wife. I terrified you, too.”
Jacob knuckled Cullah in the arm and said, “You’d a done better by her to stay with her during the storm and get me in the morning. There was no reason to rush.”
“A fellow in town was speaking on the corner near the shop where I could hear him the day long. Gave me to fright of the old ways, the fairy ways and the small people, brownies in the shadows, you know. He preached so well I thought the devil was at me.”
I rubbed my forehead, trying to hide my astonishment. “Have you eaten?”
“We did,” Jacob said.
“Well, come up to bed then. We shall have to carry all the children to their beds for they are all in ours.”
After that time, on Cullah’s insistence, Jacob lived with us. I watched my husband change somewhat. He seemed suspicious of everyone and everything outside the circle of our hearth, and began a series of changes to the house. Where there was an ample room, a new wall was built a foot or so away from the old, with shelves and notches in the paneling to lift and move things, so that every square of panel hid a secret box as if his new fears could only be assuaged by building places to hide. Some of them could have hidden one of the children, some were too small to house a thing larger than my hand. On the outside, too, he built an addition that would look to the world as if it were always part of the saltbox house, yet it enclosed a stairwell to the barn. The two of them worked through the rest of the summer on all the little secret places of this house, until it was as honeycombed as the home in which I grew up, in Jamaica.
I asked him to put a siding of rock around the original house where I worked. In it we could store all things of value which might be lost in a fire, such as the deed to this land and our marriage papers. I stored the old tattered petticoats, the pearls, the brooch, and the ruby ring, along with Ma’s other jewels in their caskets on a shelf behind the loom. All I had to do if I wished to wear them was take a piece of wood from the wall which appeared to be a brace. Behind that, a flattened piece of lead flashing could be moved, and it revealed a slot where I could push a narrow stone aside to the little crypt. Before I closed it that first night, with a satisfied smile, I also placed within it thirty-one pounds in gold coin as savings against any need in the winter to come. Cullah and I spent hours devising hiding places for things large and small.
Fall turned early so that by the third week of August we were chilled at night and needing blankets put back upon the beds. I awoke one night in September with a familiar flutter in my belly. I stood and looked out our window upon the full-moon-lit fields below. A child. A sixth child. Oh, la, I thought, and sighed, leaning my head against the panes of glass. And the little one not out of clouties, yet.
From the dark, Cullah’s voice asked, “Resolute? Where are you?”
“Here.”
In a moment he was behind me, his great hands warm on my shoulders. “Can you not sleep?” he asked.
“I felt a babe.”
“Is he not in his cradle?”
“No. Another babe. A new one. I felt the flutter.”
The thrill he used to show was gone, as this was now so familiar, but he smiled as he rested his cheek against mine, wrapping his arms about me from behind as we looked out the window. “I will have to build the tower your ladyship once asked for.”
“Well and aye,” I said, with a tired smile. “This one will come too soon and there will be two in clouties at once.”
“No matter.”
“Not to you. I wash them.”
He patted my arm and led me back to the bed. “It’s time to take in a girl, then. A maid. Apprenticed out, you know, same as with boys. There are likely girls in town. I will ask about for you.”
After he had asked throughout Boston, Cambridge, and Lexington, fate decreed that it was America Roberts came to live at my house. She was the last of the Roberts girls, all her older sisters already married. Her mother was caring still for the two boys until they could be apprenticed, yet her new husband refused money to send them to any worthy professional man, so they would have to be attached to a tradesman.
I lay awake one night, restless at having America in the room we had made for her in the attic. I wondered if she felt as I had when sold to the Haskens. At last, I could lie there no more. I got up, put a wrapper about me, and took a candle up the stairs. At the attic door, barely tall enough for me to go through without lowering my head, I paused and tapped. There was no answer. The girl was asleep. I chided myself on foolish worries. Being with child had often kept me awake with goblins of the mind. I turned on the stoop, just as the door swung inward.
“Yes, Mistress?” she asked.