I moaned aloud against my resolve to stay silent no matter what occurred. My blistered hands had bled and oozed as I wrung them in the hearing. The cloth stuck to them, forming a crust that he had torn open. They bled anew now, and it appeared to the people below that he had somehow injured me. Someone threw an egg at the man and it splattered the back of his coat with foul-smelling contents. That started a clamor, and my knees weakened, expecting that to be but the first of many such insults aimed at me.
I could see nothing but the gray boards on the platform. I heard boots upon the boards, felt the vibration of someone moving around. Was the bondsman preparing something else? Did he carry a whip? Would he remove my cap, too, revealing more shame? To be a woman without hair was to be an object of ridicule forever. No matter that the back of it was done in a roll of braids, the front was gone, blistered under the cap, making me look like an elderly man with a natural tonsure of receding hair. I panted, bracing myself. All of a sudden, the crowd quieted. Someone draped a coat or a cloak across my back. The garment had just been worn and removed by some person; it felt warm as an embrace. I waited. Silence grew until I heard my own heart beating.
Then I heard someone say, “Time is completed.”
There had been not one stone, not a potato, not a voice of derision. The bolt was opened, the tenon pulled, and the yoke raised. I lifted my head, my neck gone stiff and painful. Oh, la! I stared straight at the back of Lady Spencer herself, supported by a walking stick in one hand and Daniel Charlesworth by her other arm! She had stood on the platform in front of me so that no one dared throw a thing.
I turned around. August had kept guard of my backside. Rather than his more sober tricorn hat, he had donned his captain’s hat with its gold braid and plume, and thrown his bright red coat across my shoulders. He faced the crowd a moment more, then turned to me and smiled. Across his brocade waistcoat, two wide leather belts bristled with three pistols and a dagger. At his side hung a tasseled cutlass, partly unsheathed. His hand rested upon the hilt of it, and he cocked it, but he held the other hand out to me and I took it, marveling in the size and strength of it.
“All is well,” he said, loudly enough for the people to hear. “The people of Lexington, I find, are most congenial and quick to forgive small offenses.”
People in the crowd said, “Aye, aye,” and a few clapped. Then August held out his other arm to Lady Spencer, who took it, to the gasps of people below. Daniel Charlesworth took America Roberts’s arm, and the five of us left the place in Lady Spencer’s gig. I sat in silence, feeling stunned relief. August played the gallant with Lady Spencer with perfect deference and decorum, despite that he looked capable of rendering asunder any who stood in his way.
At Lady Spencer’s house, she called for wine to be served in the parlor, and though I sat with them, I felt separated and shattered still, as if I moved behind a gauze, as though everything were too polished and too loud, affronting my senses.
Daniel told us how he came to be a lawyer in full, now, and that Lady Spencer had sent for him to come from Boston, with little knowledge other than what August had given her on Saturday. By today, Monday, Daniel had come to my rescue. He had queried some friends and found out about the suit to take my land, as that was what had postponed Serenity’s charges as late as they were, else it would have happened in a trice.
“Why would Wallace do that?” I asked.
Daniel smiled with one corner of his mouth raised wryly. “He wants that land, as do many others who believe the old stories about it. The Carnegie place used to belong to someone named Goodman Smythe. A common enough name that it means nothing. The rumor was that the name was falsely used, that he had been a pirate and knew Edward Teach and was of the same caliber, and that Smythe had buried treasure on the place. All accounts, though, were that he worked diligently and as hard as any farmer to try to make good of it. He never lived higher than his farm allowed, which was quite modest.”
I laughed. “We found a brass ship’s bell and a couple of cannonballs, a metal ring of some sort like an ankle iron. If he was a marauding seaman, he left little behind.”
Lady Spencer said, “I always believed that rumor was false. The man was a humble yeoman and worked himself into an early grave. His son went to a trade in New York but a little while later was killed by a falling tree; his daughter married Matthew Carnegie.”
“She was Goody Carnegie?”
“Yes,” she said, “poor thing. No one knows why she went so mad. He left her after about a year, alone with the house and land. Left for the frontier and never returned. It was a wonder she lived so long, but blessed peace that she is at last in the ground.”
I nodded. I knew the reason for Goody’s madness. It would serve no one to tell it, and I was too exhausted to want the small thrill of owning some dreadful gossip. Was Matthew Carnegie the specter never at rest over the graves of his child and wife? A chill drove me to shudder, but I brushed it away.