*
Our house, a quarter mile off the road from Lexington to Concord, could be seen on a clear day from the road, and was sometimes sought by travelers, so it was not a great surprise one day at noon, while Cullah was in town building a warehouse for a man named Parker, that a strange fellow approached me while I pulled weeds in the garden. He watched me, saying nothing, for so long that I felt uneasy. He was rather short of stature and wore a flat parson’s hat but nothing else in his attire marked him as a cleric. At last I asked, “Are you looking for someone, sir?”
“Is this the woodsman’s house?” he asked with a very French accent that made my throat tighten.
Had someone come looking for Roland? I said, “It is. Cullah MacLammond.”
“C’est moi, James Talbot de Montréal.”
I stepped closer to him. My hands began to shake. I questioned him in French. “Tell me how old you are.”
Before he answered me, he pulled from his loose shirt the very first knitted cap I had sent him as a baby. It looked completely unworn. “I was a little too big for it when it came, Tante. Tante Rachael saved it for me to bring to you.”
I could not decide whether to embrace this strange man, but I did say, “Stay with us a while, James, please. Are you traveling farther?”
“I hoped to go to New Orleans. I can read and write, or I can work in your fields. I wouldn’t be a burden to you.”
“You will be no burden. Stay a few days at least.”
In the hours before Cullah came home, while I baked bread and roasted our supper, James and I spoke of the people I had known at the convent, how for years he had steadily made his way here, learning English as he went, working at farms for food, forever heading south, to me. He slept on our floor for two nights. Then Cullah told him about Goody Carnegie’s old house, and James asked us if he could work for us and stay in it. So rather than a girl to help in the house, at least now we had another man to help on the farm. No one said anything about how long he would stay, nor whether we should pay him, for he refused that immediately. Only that he would stay until he did not.
*
And then the king was dead.
A new monarch was enthroned in 1760, the year I turned forty-one years old.
George Second was replaced by George Third and still the word from England was, “The king is mad.” New King George’s first act toward the colonies was to levy upon us a sugar tax, making treacle as dear as thread. It forced up the cost of making rum in New England, and traders from the West Indies carrying sugarcane and treacle to us had to build new storehouses for their gold. The cost circled the ocean straight to England so the king’s proclamation cost even the British people dearly for their rum and sugar. Traders carrying rum to England returned to the colonies with their ships awash, their ballast bags of gold. The Crown would allow no sales of wool or woolen products, meaning the cloth I wove; all thread and cloth had to go to England for assemblage, just as iron had to be sent there to make implements. All of it came back to us, of course, but at twelve or more times the cost of keeping it here and doing it ourselves. I felt stunned. Now it wasn’t just the silk. I could not sell my own weaving without becoming a criminal. Cullah had built a false floor in our small wagon as if that were naturally what we would do. I wrestled with my heart. My yearning to continue as I had always done measured against the promise to myself to be honest and above reproach.
And then one day Emma Dodsil, Virtue Dodsil’s wife, tapped at my door. She carried a bushel basket of eggs. “Mistress MacLammond?” she called. She was trailed by three of her children, who ran off to see my newborn goats.
I let her in. “Oh, you poor dear. How have you done since the fire?”
“I have come to try to repay your kindness, Resolute.”
“That is not needed, you know, Emma.” In truth, I wondered what I would do with all those eggs. And how on earth could the ones on the bottom of a bushel still be whole with the weight of all the others on top of them? I poured us ale and we sat quietly for several moments as she looked about the room, guiltily.
At last Emma said, “These are boiled.”
“All right. I will make a pie of them.”
“These are not the gift.”
I lowered my head. “I do not understand, Emma.”
“I have done work. It’s nothing much.” She lifted the rag of hopsacking holding the eggs, and underneath them were folded clothes. “I made these things from our remnants.” She lifted forth an apron, a child’s pelisse, and a kirtle. “I sew, you see, and now it seems I am able to provide more than we need. I, I have heard that you sometimes go to Boston to trade. If you could sell these, I would give you half the money. That is my gift, for—”
“Stop. You know that is against the law, now.”
“Yes, Resolute.”