He pulled me to him and held me as if I were a treasure so delicate it might disappear on his touch. He said, “And how, in this dark room, did you know I rolled my eyes? Are you sure you are not fey?”
“I have lived with you these many years, husband. I did not need to see your face to know it.” I hated it when we argued. But I loved it when the harsh words gave way to reason and the anger was replaced with embrace. He chuckled, a deep, warm sound, and sang a wisp of a song to me, kissing my head. And we slept.
Cullah carried one message to Boston and then two. Sometimes word came and he walked there and back through the night, sometimes he simply put what looked like a blank sheet of paper in his work pack and left it at a public house near his shop in Lexington.
That August, Gwenny and Roland had a baby girl. She lived but three weeks, and then died. We knew not why. She was buried next to our babies down in the sleepy and misty hollow below the empty house.
My brother August arrived in September to spend a week with us, and then spend the winter in his new mansion. He was well dressed but carrying a small trunk holding, he said, no legacy of his occupation, which had turned to piracy against the British. He would dress like a simple man at our home. He had lost two ships to the British navy, now confiscating cargoes right and left of any who carried goods to the colonies in America. August asked to see the gift he had sent before. Cullah lifted the seat where the cannon lay. He leaned in and inspected the piece then moaned as he straightened. “Couple of broken ribs, that. Hard for me to bend, still.”
Cullah said, “Soldiers arrived with a tax order two days after this new seat was finished. More came for billeting a day after that. I put your crate in here and nailed the lid shut as they were coming up the road. Never thought about it again.”
August took a pouch from his coat. “I cannot keep it in town for my house is searched regularly.” He opened the pouch. “Here. Doubloons. Spanish, mostly, but no matter.”
I opened my mouth, but Cullah spoke first. “August, how did you come by this?”
My brother made a movement that looked as if he settled his head painfully upon his shoulders. “It came from a Tory hold after being stolen from an honest privateer. One minute they contract men to patrol the seas and the next they hang your whole crew for doing exactly what they’d been assigned to do. You may find it causes raised eyebrows to spend doubloons, but they’re worth more than a sovereign apiece. Melt them down. You’ll find the silversmith in Boston town willing and discreet. You know whom I mean. The time will come when it will take a bar of gold to buy a loaf of bread, mark my words. Take no paper money in exchange from now on. Only gold and silver coin. No bill will be worth the paper it is printed on in a year or two.”
“The cannon,” I whispered. “Is worth—”
August smiled with a cold hardness. “Its weight in gold. Aye. Cast iron. I will have sixty of them in a month.”
“What do you plan to do with them?” Jacob asked.
“I am outfitting a ship, that’s all.”
“Under their long noses?” I asked.
“And under their long guns,” August added. “Resolute, I have no intention of putting your family in jeopardy or even the slightest suspicion. It was wrong of me to assume we agreed upon a subject of which we have never spoken. It makes you a conspirator of sorts. I’m sure there is a lawyer somewhere with a name for it. Cullah, Jacob, you men have helped me immensely.”
Cullah said, “I thought you to be a contracted privateer.”
“Until the Limeys began to waylay their own contracted captains like myself, and using the word ‘tax’ rifled our trade goods so that we were left with only half of them to show. The East India Company controlled every grain of spice, every inch of silk, and had doubled and tripled the prices. Once I got back into port, I owed the port taxes on the whole of it and they’d gone up fivefold. What they left me with, after three voyages, was debt that would sink a fleet. All I have left is that house of Lady Spencer’s and the trifles I have stored here.”
“August, you are not planning to take on the British navy?” I began. If he had lost his ships, he must be in terrible straits. That would be as if Cullah lost his shop and tools, his house and family. How lonely my brother seemed. How sad, too. “Wait. If you have lost all, how are you buying a ship and forging guns?”