In the company of thirty of the king’s men, my husband and my oldest son left this house. I watched them go, the one steadfast and powerful, the other slender and jaunty in his new kilt, a musket over his shoulder as if it were a fishing pole. I knew that the army would have paid our way if I had chosen to go with him. I could have abandoned my children to America’s care and gone as a camp wife, but the thought of that was too pitiful to entertain for more than a moment. I had a two-year-old babe; I had Gwyneth and Benjamin, still too small to apprentice for at least five years. Would my man find another woman to wash for him? To do other things for him? To lie down for him? My heart sank. My prayers were not for his life, then, but for his heart. His life, I believed, was safe in hand. I went out to the road. I feared not that Brendan would forever remember his mother, for what child forgets her? I trembled. I would not stop trembling, I vowed, until they both rested before my fire again.
I held in my hand the snow-white cockade Cullah had taken from his good hat. He gave it me as he left. A spot of white was a signal, a sign of a Jacobite. I set it upon the mantel board over the hearth and leaned it against the clock August had sent to us for Hogmanay this year. I had never had a clock before, though I remembered one similar in my parents’ home. Now and then I stood watching the gears move, the links on the weighted chains rising and falling as it worked its way around the hours. I loved the ticking of it, like a heart. Alive. The white cockade seemed to watch me in return.
Wee Dorothy Ann called me back to her side with a plaintive wail that a child has for a short time. When I looked into her eyes I saw Patience staring back. As I pulled my bodice open, I felt guilty for I was glad that Jacob was now blind and I was free to nurse her before my own fire as if he were not there. Soon enough she must be weaned, I knew. I counted on America’s help at both the loom and for the care and schooling of the children, but nothing filled up the emptiness I felt. Nothing I did kept me from staring down the road. Terrifying dreams plagued me, until I resorted to asking Jacob about signs and portents from the old ways. On his advice I kept onions over the baby’s bed. I kept two knives crossed on the kitchen table while I worked and put horseshoes over every door. I crushed the shells of every egg I cracked, small enough that no witch could write our names upon the fragments. Still my dreams tortured me with images of Cullah and Brendan fallen in battle, their bloody faces looming toward me from behind trees. Sometimes in the dreams, I heard babies crying so that I got up to see what was amiss with Dorothy, only to find her deep in slumber.
I did not visit the graves of my babes in any weather other than bonny and sunny and bright. I did not visit them when even was setting or dawn just broken. I went there just in the bright of a clear midday, when all of nature seemed lit with God’s grace. As summer wore on, we were often surprised with quick rain showers, as if a single cloud came upon a place and began to weep, then, finished with its mourning, moved on. It was on such a day I had gone to the graves, leaving America watching over the sleeping Dorothy, who was at last weaned, and the other children who were at their books.
At the headstones of my dear ones, I said a prayer for each and I paused at Goody’s grave. I knew not what to think of the old woman who carried so much lunacy, and kindness, and guilt within her. I felt a darkness come over me, and paused, wondering if it were the presence of evil. It was simply a cloud hiding the sun, changing the angles of the light in a way I had not before seen in brightest noon. Prickling ran up the sides of my neck to my hair. I finished my prayer with my eyes open.
At the edge of the small clearing, where trees and brush met with a rise in the ground on one side and a granite outcropping on another, forming a V, I saw another stone. A headstone. Overgrown with ivy, it seemed to face the hillock, rather than the flat. I went toward it to see if aught were writ on the opposite side. The sky darkened yet more. A mist of rain sprinkled down upon me, speckling my gown.
I bent over the stone. Nothing was there. It was old indeed. A forgotten grave. I straightened. The rain had quit, and I turned to leave when I brushed against a man. A tricorn hat he wore upon his head. His ankle-length cape of black wool brushed against my skirt, my hand, my arm. I saw the cloth flutter. I opened my mouth to beg his pardon before I felt the shock of meeting someone in so isolated a place. But, there was no one there. It had been a specter. I looked toward the footpath I had traversed to get there. The rain had dampened the ground, but I saw no treads upon the speckled soil other than my own. I remembered no face, nothing corporal at all, save the fact that he was walking quite resolvedly toward me and his cloak touching my own.