“I will, then. As long as it is your last,” she said with a grin. “I relish that sort of extravagance.” We both laughed, knowing, I suspect, that it was no doubt true, and that it would be bittersweet in any event. “If I can find a needle I shall bring it, also.” We kissed each other’s cheeks and bade farewell.
Tuesday morning arrived and I gathered eggs earlier than usual, intending to begin whipping the whites for a light cake. Alice sat sewing, making herself a quilted petticoat in the fashion I had showed her, one with secret pockets sewn in. Cullah was in the field with Roland. I worked happily, expecting my friend, and sifted flour, then set to beating the eggs. My arms grew weary before I got the egg whites to rise up in stiff mountains, like snow in a bowl.
A heavy hand rapped at my door and a voice called, “Open up in the name of His Majesty King George.”
“Just a moment,” I called in reply, knitting my brows as I stared at Alice. I went to the door just as it came flying inward at me. “La!”
There stood a gaggle of soldiers, seven or eight of them. “Outside, woman. Who else is in here? Everyone outside, now. Look lively. Out the door!”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “You have but to ask and I will provide you food such as I have.”
“Our orders is to search this house and premises.”
“For what, sir?”
“For anything that seems amiss. Now out with you.”
I turned my head this way and that, looking at my bowl of beaten egg whites, mounded up for a cake sitting beside a crushed cone of sugar and a pile of whitest flour, sifted nine times. I took my cloak from its peg by the door, and Alice did likewise. We stood in the yard while seven soldiers ran indoors. From the yard, I heard all manner of banging and crashing, quiet periods, and then more knocking about. After a while, one of them held the door ajar while the others joined and carried out chests, dumping the contents upon the damp ground. They brought out the mahogany highboy, Cullah’s last creation for our house, pulled drawers from their places, tossing them here and there.
One of them said, “See if that has got a false bottom on it,” and kicked his foot through the back of the cabinet. “Anything suspicious, that can’t be opened, bring out here and we’ll open it that way,” he said to the others, laughing.
“I’ll be glad to open anything for you,” I called. “Please do not break my furniture.”
He pointed his finger at me and said, “Quiet.”
I heard glass breaking from inside.
“Do you not know what a window costs?” I asked. “Tell them to stop, sir, and I will open all to you.”
“I said quiet, Goody. If you impede His Majesty’s search, you will be arrested.”
“Pray tell me what His Majesty is searching for?”
“Anything amiss, I told you already. Here, boys, bring that one over here.”
He caved in the top of a small cloverleaf table with one thrust of his boot. They emptied every drawer onto the floor, opened every cupboard, and even upended the crocks of flour upon the table. One of them opened a tin where I kept precious black pepper.
“Here we go,” he said to his fellows with a grin.
“You leave that be,” I said. “It is pepper that cost me dear.”
He sneered. “It’s black powder, eh? And look at this, a silver sixpence.”
“That is to keep it fresh,” I said. Cullah came running and stood beside me.
“So you’re hiding money and black powder. We could shoot you on the spot, but as we are gentle chaps, we won’t. Long as you close your yap. Word is that you’re hiding wool and soft cloth. Where is it?”
As he said that last, one of them pitched my flax wheel into the yard where it landed with a crushing sound.
Cullah put his arms protectively about me. I shook with fury. After a while I was even more angry because I sensed he was protecting them from me. Of course, I would have suffered, but the storm raging in my ribs was the size of a hurricane.
By the time they had dragged half of the household outside to the front yard, one of them decided to search the barn. He returned, leading one of our three cows. Another man came from the house with the bowl of egg whites. He stuck in a finger and licked it, made a face, and tossed the bowl into the flowerbed where the crockery broke in three pieces and the eggs lay like a tiny snowdrift against a stand of summer daisies past their season. Alice stayed close to Cullah and me. One of them poked a dagger at her chin, which she raised defiantly, and he asked her, “We seen that spinner’s wheel. Where’s the wool from it, wench?”
“It is a flaxen wheel,” Alice said. “It does not make wool; it spins flaxen thread. It’s the stuff your underwear is made of, if you are so gentle as to wear it.”
The man’s mouth opened and his face reddened, saying, “I’ll show you, wench, who needs underwear and who don’t.” Then he laughed and ticked at the ruffle of her cap with his dagger, laughing again before he walked away.