Ships? August had recovered his losses, then. “Will he come here?”
“I don’t know. I do know this. There is talk of rebellion in every quarter. Your brother is planning something that might get him an appointment with the hangman.”
That, I knew, I could not change. August would do what he willed.
The Reverend Mr. Clarke came to visit and spent a long afternoon with Cullah on the bench outside by the parlor door. I knew nothing of what they spoke. The gentle rumble of men at talk felt soothing to me, same as it had when Pa had had ships’ captains in our parlor. It troubled me a great deal, though, when they lowered their voices and I could hear nothing but an odd word. I told myself the Reverend Mr. Clarke would never do anything against the law, whereas I did not believe that of my husband. Yet, the two, with heads together and voices lowered, made them seem more alike than not. I tried to go about my chores and ignore them. Was that always the way with men? Were the soothing rises and fallings of their voices indicative of plots of subterfuge and rebellion?
After Reverend Clarke left, Cullah took to his chair before the fireplace, and stayed there for five days. In pain, perhaps, or sulking, or both, perhaps. I could not guess at his malaise, and he would barely speak at all until I feared we might have to send for a doctor, that he had some sickness of heart or mind that time and clean bandages could not salve. I carried his meals to him, for he would not so much as come to the table to eat. He refused Gwenny’s invitations to their home. He stared into the fireplace whether a fire burned there or not.
*
In the warming of May, after working in the field alongside Roland one long day, James seemed exhausted. One thing I had discovered about him already was that the man could stand little in the way of nervous excitement. He was a fair farmer, but not energetic, as if he’d never known a man’s strength. He worried that the cause of distress in our household was his presence, but at last Cullah told him what had happened. He asked him, “Will you swear to keep our secrets, keep our home as if it were your own?”
I repeated it all in French. James agreed. “Of course, sir,” he said. Simply because this man was related to me, being a nephew, did not make his allegiances ours or ours his. He smiled, laughed a little, trying to make light of it. In his smiling face, I saw Rafe MacAlister’s grimace. A coldness came into me at that moment. I feared I would never look at James without seeing his father, again. I resolved to guard well my actions.
That evening as I sat to spin and he sat spellbound by the flames, I imagined Cullah standing at the great saw with its blade encircling a gear in the roof, the only control of it a brake pedal. It ran by a waterwheel, or if the stream was low, by apprentice power on a spoke. This time of year there would have been rushing water, making the blade run faster than normal. British soldiers had been searching the shop across the street, ransacking the place, and my husband had been distracted. Distracted by guilt for his part in burning the governor’s mansion? Had he stood there pretending to work, all the while terrified of them repeating the same orders at his place?
*
That summer, soldiers walked every street of Boston, every avenue of Lexington. County lanes were as often trod by Redcoats as by farmers. I created bolts and bolts of cloth. Cullah had made me a wheelbarrow with a false bottom that fit the rolls of cloth. I carried some of them to Lexington town, sold them in private homes as if I were a fishmonger, or took them to Boston under layers of ragged but clean muslin surrounding tarred canvas, and topped with old vegetables. Sometimes the vegetables, so oft used that way, grew limp and withered. Once on my way to Lexington, when stopped by a gaggle of six young soldiers who inspected my load, I told them in a rather silly voice, “Your Honors, I be just a poor goodwife. This is the best I got. It wo’ not bring me a farthing but maybe sixpence for someone’s pigs to eat.”
“What’s under the top, there? I see some cloth.” His accent was Irish.
I smiled and cocked my head as if I were simple and I mimicked Mistress Boyne’s manner of speech. “Why, it is cloth, you clever one! ’Twas once a cloth from the altar at a papist shrine. And there is something under it! I got a cat that was kill’t by a fairy down in the dell by the grave of a witch. There’s a power to that one. I have seen her meself, a-prowling the land on a winter’s eve. The cat is to keep fairies awa’ from me whilst I walk. ’Tis the only way. Would you like to touch it? Marvelous charm, it is. If ye take one of the worms and put it in your collar, you cannot be shot by elves on your journey. Tha’ knows what a pity elf-shot is.”