“I offered you a bundling board. I seem to remember you preferred it not.”
“Because, husband, did you not guess my meaning? Were you so foolish as to think I might trust a bit of board to keep us apart?” I felt brazen. “Did you not know I burned with lust for you? Perhaps we are not so old, even now,” I said.
I awoke in the morning with the slight ache of body that the act of love often left me. The sun had spread from the tops of the trees across the fields in striping that ran counter to the plowed rows, so like a woven pattern. Chickens in the yard made gentle noises. I looked out and saw Alice in a warm cloak heading toward the barn with the milking pail. Wrens and finches chirruped and flapped at the berries on a bush next to the kitchen window. From across the field at Gwenny’s house, cows lowed, expecting milking. My hair was long enough to brush against my knees, and I held it back as I knelt to bring the kettle to the table. As I filled the kettle from the water bucket, Cullah arose and came behind me, his familiar smell, familiar touch, so natural that I did not stop my action but moved as if we were one. He wrapped me with his arms, his two hands crossing and each taking one of my breasts, giving a light squeeze through my shift. I murmured, “Think not that I am so easily had again, sir knight.”
“My princess,” he said. Cullah kissed the back of my head. “I am but a poor—”
His words were stopped short by a shout from outside.
“Eadan Lamont! Come forth! In the name of His Majesty, King George the Third, you are under arrest.” The voice drowned in a thunder of horses and the rattle of their riders’ sabers against boots.
Steady tramping of foot soldiers filled in the rest of my terror. “Cullah! Hide. Go for the barn through the back stairs.”
“Get my sword,” he said, fastening the button on his pants. “And my pistol.”
“No. I shall send them away. Pretend you are not here, Eadan. Hide and live.”
“I’ll not hide in my own house. I’ll not hide behind my wife and my wee daughter.” He threw wide the kitchen door, taking a meat cleaver from its hook.
I stood in the doorway. “Cullah!” I shouted. Then I screamed it.
Cullah stood in the yard. Seven soldiers in uniform pointed muskets fixed with bayonets at his midsection. Three officers on horseback stayed upon their mounts behind the foot soldiers. Behind them, a wagon, the driver that man known to us as David Cross. I could see the wagon was now loaded with things, but I could not make out the nature of the things. It looked as if they had taken down a household of furniture. I bit at my rolled fist and held to the door frame.
Cullah said, “What do you men want here?”
One of the men on horseback said, “You are under arrest, Eadan Lamont. Put down that axe and surrender.”
“Arrest for what?”
“Put down the axe.”
Cullah slipped into the guise of nonchalance I had so often seen him use. He shrugged. “This is no axe,” he said. “It is but a kitchen tool. If it were an axe, you men might be in danger of me throwing it. Put down your muskets, men. There is not any reason to try to seem so threatening.” Then he spoke to the man on the wagon seat. “You there! David Hardesty! I know you. Ah, you were my friend a month ago. Yesterday you came to threaten my wife, an innocent British citizen. What have you in the wagon?”
The British officer snarled, “Quiet, you!” He pulled a paper from his coat pocket and began to read. “… sundry acts of rebellion against His Majesty … as a treasonous act have with others ransacked, fired, and destroyed the home of the Provincial Governor of Massachusetts … and are known to this plaintiff to be an escaped, condemned prisoner of the Crown come under cover to this colony…”
My knees lost strength. From beyond, I saw Roland and Gwyneth coming this way, hurrying, their children behind them, except for the smallest, still sleeping in his crib. Still unaware of the world that had dawned this beautiful day.
Cullah shouted over the man, “You have riffled my shop! I recognize that chest, those gears of my tools. You’ve torn my saw and wheel asunder, you fool! It cannot be rebuilt. What need have you of it? You will answer for this, Hardesty. You were there! You were there! What did they pay you, Hardesty? Did it take thirty pieces of silver?”
“Be quiet and listen to the charges,” one of the foot soldiers said.
“Put down my tools, you British cur!” Cullah shouted. “I will not be quiet. You have nothing to charge me if you charge not the man beside you. I say, Corporal!”
“Major,” the man replied. “You men have witnessed it, he refused to hear the charges. Take him.”
“Cullah,” I cried.