Cullah raised his hand to me. “Leave this, wife. We will ask nothing and know nothing if asked. I know this kind of anger. Sir, go with our blessings, but if you change your mind and wish to leave the sea for a quieter life, you are welcome here.”
My brother smiled at my husband, and I felt sadly left out of their unspoken communication. “If I don’t come back,” August said, “open the other trunks I left upstairs. You never have, have you, Ressie? I thought not.” He looked deep into my face in a way that felt almost as if he saw something I would not recognize in my own soul. “Ever I should meet a woman like you, sister, I would come home from the sea and never let her go. Trust is the one thing in a woman I have never found, so much that I have thought it was not in women to trust or be trusted. If ever I do not return within three years, everything in the trunks is yours, and the Boston house, too. I will have a will made in Philadelphia and recorded there so it will be kept out of the hands of Tories. I’m going there to buy iron and plenty of it. I should be back in six weeks.”
I said, “Wait. We have a cannon, too. We found a small piece in a field. And the cannonballs, take them and melt them down for your purpose. They are all rusting in our barn. We meant to have them melted but that is no easy thing with something as obvious as a cannon.”
At the end of seven days, two wagons approached our house, stopped, and one man left his wagon, climbed into the other, and drove away without a word to anyone. In the back of the wagon left behind were a set of similar clothing, a slouching, misshapen hat, and boots that were more wrapping than leather. August asked Cullah to help him roll the cannon in the blanket and get it into the wagon. He also took the old rusted small gun we had found long ago, the cannonballs, and the iron ring. In the morning, looking like any poor wight off to market before daybreak, the cannon nestled hidden in a load of hay surrounded by enormous barrels of salt cod, August left us, bound for the ironworks in Pennsylvania. We spoke words of farewell with our eyes locked. A fearful silence fell over us then, and no cheery waves accompanied his going.
I took Cullah’s hand as we watched August’s squeaking wagon roll away. “I do not understand him, husband. His anger seems more than revenge upon Lord Spencer.”
“This is not about Gwyneth. It’s about your brother. If I had had everything taken from me, I might feel the same. It feels even now as if the Crown could take everything a man has, all he has worked for, take it all so a fat sow in a silk coat is not inconvenienced by the national debt. Someone somewhere is getting rich by all this confiscation.”
“Do the English not pay taxes?”
“Never enough for a king intent on ruling the world.”
“Goody Dodsil told me she heard there will be yet a new tax of five pounds per household across the whole of Massachusetts. She has no way of making five pounds.”
“Five pounds to someone who has twenty thousand a year is pittance. Five pounds, if you haven’t got it, is a fortune. Aye. We will pay her tax and ours.”
“Aye. Find a way to sell the silks before they all go to worms.” To change the subject I said, “I do miss my brother. If he would come home from the sea, he might meet a nice woman. He loved America Roberts.”
“He is a hardened man, wife. What woman wants to share a man with the sea? He wants what I have with you. He will never find it if the only women he meets are in seaports pursuing a huzzy’s trade.”
“Do you trust me as he said? I never considered myself trustworthy. I spend my days trying to make up for all the lies I have told.”
“You have done that and more.” He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it, then looked at it as if it were new to him. “These wee fingers were never meant to have such calluses. They belong to a lady born. She should have all that is gentle and beautiful about her.”
“I do. I have you.”
“I am getting old, Ressie. I will turn fifty after next year. I have not provided for you as I intended. Without America Roberts here, you have no one to help you at the house. And now there is all this messaging to Boston. I am tired. I am going to tell them I will no longer carry messages.”
“Are you ill? Is there something you have not told me?”
“No, I am not ill, though I just watched August grow old before my eyes. When your brother arrived and smiled at you, he seemed no more than a youth. When he said farewell, he looked older than Pa. I saw myself grow old with him. Perhaps we should take in another ward to help you.”
“I would like that.”
“I will ask at the town meeting next if any have a daughter ready to go out.”