“No. Look at me. I am more Indian than English. One look at the mark upon my face and they will either turn me away or put me in jail or a lunatic hospital. If you will have me leave you, I will walk away and die as my people have died for all of time.”
Her people? How could she believe that Indians were her people? Talbots were her people. Earls and nobles were her people. I felt so distressed I was sure it came out in my voice. “What causes stones in the stomach?”
“The sachem did not know. He said I may have eaten a stone left in some beans and it grew in the place where a child should grow. Or, I may have eaten the seed of a wolf, because sometimes it feels as if I am being chewed from inside. I fear I am dying.”
“Oh, Patience. Do you feel better at all, after the bath and the soup?”
She smiled and winced. “It would make you happy if I said yes.”
I bowed my head and held her hands in mine and pressed them. How alike we were, yet no longer the same skin. We both had calluses in different places, but her hands looked tanned as if by a leather worker. The skin even on the backs of the hands was thickened. I leaned toward her, and as if I had asked her to do the same, she inclined herself toward me. We touched our faces to each other. I held Patience and wept sweet, bitter tears. So much time gone by. So many things we never shared. Yet it was her choice, I reminded myself, and that, too, brought tears to my eyes. Now that she was returned, she would soon die.
My children were both awed and terrified of her. America conquered her timidity soonest, as would be expected. Sometimes, Patey rocked the littlest ones, and that included, to his great joy, Benjamin. Unlike his uncle August expecting him to behave in a manly way, Patey petted him and let him return to baby ways as much as Dolly. After about a fortnight of that, he grew tired of babying and told her he had quite grown up.
“That is good, little Ben,” she said. “If you would like to be held, that will be good as well. You may choose.”
“Why do you do that?” I asked. “We thought it wise to prepare him to be a man by not letting him act a child.”
“But he is a child. An adult has life hard enough. Let them have their comforts when they are still soft and weak. There is no good come of beating a child but filling him with hatred and, and, I cannot remember the word. Resent.”
“Resentment? We do not beat our children, Patey.”
“Most English do. It is said they eat them in times of famine.”
“I have never heard of such atrocity. The only people who ever beat me were the Haskens. I don’t think they were English.”
“It is said.”
“Patience, there are hideous things told about Indians, too.”
“They are not true.”
“Your son said they meant to leave behind the old and the babies to be slaughtered by the soldiers.”
“The ones who stay tend the young. That is the way of the people. It saves those who can run, who can fight, who can have children to replenish the people.”
“They would have left you to die.”
“Just to mind the children. It is the way.”
A great stabbing pain shot through me. “Were you ever sorry you left me?”
She looked at me, her eyes filling with tears. “You? Always I regretted leaving you. I missed you. But, I had a good life. I was loved. Really loved. Not just by a man, but by all the people. I would never have been loved by the English here. It was my greatest sacrifice, leaving you.”
“It has taken me a long time to feel I belong here. Often I still do not feel it. How could you belong to, to, such a life?”
“I was loved,” she said again.
*
Gwyneth spent six weeks swooning and crying, and every time anyone asked her what was amiss, she said, “John Hancock has never called upon me. That horrible Lord Spencer has ruined my life. Now I am not good enough. Not rich enough. Not pretty enough.” I knew she was distressed by what had occurred at the ball, but I told her it was, after all, something in the past. I assured her that the affront by Lord Spencer could never have diminished her in John Hancock’s eyes. He was young, perhaps too young to fall in love the way she dreamed it, and she herself young enough to fall in love again. I did not say aloud that I believed if Mr. Hancock would only tell her she was not in his heart and mind and never would be, as harsh as that was, at least her heart might break and then mend. But no, because he neither wrote nor called upon Gwenny, she was convinced that he would if he could, if his studies had not hampered him, or if he could find our house, or if he had not found someone prettier.
Patience smiled at her, even laughed sometimes, and chided her with, “There are too many pretty boys around for you to only look at one. You see this mark upon my face? This was given to me when I married. It is like the ring your mother wears. It signifies to everyone for all time that once a woman marries she is never the same. You must choose carefully, for you, too, will be marked for all time when you marry.”
“Did it hurt, Auntie?”