“Six trained soldiers?” his son asked again.
Cullah appeared insulted. “What are six lobster-backs to a braw and hearty Scot? Slavering ninnies. Long as they did not have time to load a musket, I had naught to fear.” I laughed but with bitterness. I felt proud of him yet worried that he would bring more retribution upon himself. The Crown would endure no thwarting of an order of billeting.
One day as I went up to clean ashes from the hearths, I caught the corporal creeping up the stair, opening the door to my bedroom with a wary hand. “What say, there?” I called. I gripped the ash bucket with both hands, ready to throw it.
He gave a short laugh. “Pardon, Mistress. The boys have need of a stone to sharpen the cutter he gave us to make firewood with.”
“The stone is in the barn, along with the other tools.”
“Yes, Mistress,” he said, smiling, and sauntered back down the steps to return to his chores.
America became as a drifting shadow, terrified to come from the tower room without her hair under her cap and fully clothed, when before she had joined us at breakfast in a shawl and wrapper. She told me that now she lived in constant fear. I showed her how to open the wall in her tower room, to find an entire flight of stairs that would get her straight into the barn on the ground floor. The barn already looked as if it were joined to the house, but the little hallway that allowed us to care for our animals without braving the cold was narrower on the inside than it seemed from outside. I showed her the key to opening the cupboard in the kitchen, which had a room behind it from which a person could, by means of eyeholes, see the kitchen and parlor along with outside by the front door. I showed her how she could stop on the stairway to the loom, turn to her left, push aside the board, and through that opening find herself above the loom on a solid floor in the room where August had hidden. A small window that appeared as normal as any from outside lit the room. Below the window sat the locked chest where Cullah kept the pipes.
In this dark place lit by a dirty window and my single candle, I felt as if time again had rolled in upon itself, as if I stood in the hold of the Falls Greenway, the deck shifting and rolling, the low ceiling overhead dangling with cobwebs and filth from above. I heard Patience’s voice when I asked, “Were you trying to knock my brains out?” Patey had said, “If that was what it took to save you.” And I had cried and pushed her away, thinking her nothing but cruel, believing she hated me. I looked now at America, trembling, her small bosom heaving from imagined torment, for she was old enough to know what a man meant to do with a maid, whereas I had not known. Tears filled my eyes and my whole frame shook. Patience had not hated me. She had loved me. I wrapped my arms about America and held her as if I were Patience, as if she were me, patting her back, soothing with murmurs like doves’ sounds. I said, “We shall be strong of heart. Those men may be stout and more in number than we, but they are foolish and ruled by lust. We shall have the day because we shall be ruled by virtue and wits.”
“Mistress?” America asked with a whimper in her voice.
“Yes?”
“You are so kind to me, Mistress. I shall not forget you as long as I live. I shall always love you.”
Well and aye, I thought. If a lass had someone to care for her, she stood a chance in this life. I said, “Do not tell the children. They are still too young to keep this place a secret and might want to play here. If there is need of them coming here for safety, that will be soon enough for them to find it out.”
“Is there a secret place in the barn, too?”
I smiled. “You have seen the flat place on the east side? It is cold and wet, and would suit for the direst of need, but you will not need it. That place is to store old farm equipment.” There was, of course, another place above it, dry and secure. I could not have said why we built it so. It kept us both happy to know it was there, as invisible as a fairy’s breath, and large enough for our family to sleep within.
One late November evening, when a bitter wind howled outside and cries of old haunts murmured through the rafters, only five of the soldiers came to supper. “Where is Ross?” I asked, for by then I knew them.
“He claimed a fever this morning. Lazy lout.”
“Well, I am not traipsing all the way to the attic,” I said. “One of you take up his supper.” We finished eating. The soldier named Collin took a cup of ale and a trencher with a piece of venison and herbs in sauce up the stairs. In a few minutes he came down, his hands still full. “Well?” I asked. “Did he want it not?”