“There are soldiers there but my brother is escaped. I saw him go.”
Two days later, a man with black gauze over his face knocked on my door at midnight. He did not give me a signal I could trust. I did not open the door. When the sun arose I saw at the doorway my father’s old trunk.
It took me three days to discover the secret to getting the hidden panel open in the trunk’s bottom. It held the deed to August’s house in Boston. It held the license granted to him by the Crown to privateer Dutch, Spanish, and French ships and commandeer them for the British navy, and it held a single peacock feather, long and slender, shimmering with blue-green and light; at the top the colors formed into an eye shape, as if the bird could see from it. This was the one thing August had taken to remind himself of our childhood, our beginnings. I saw him anew; that gruff, perhaps hard man had indeed once been a boy who played, carelessly gamboling as I had done. He had gone back to Jamaica and fetched this chest after the place was ransacked. Had walked among the ruins and found a trace of the peacocks. The feather brought to mind the cry—almost a woman’s scream—of the peafowl wandering the grounds at Two Crowns Plantation. I took it to my bedroom and placed it upon two nails above my bed. Every night when I put out the light, I would see the eye of it, and look into that, to my first home.
Alice and I lugged the chest up to my bedroom. I put the secret things in their secret place, and I put on top of them, as if all were innocent and calm, old and ragged winter bed linens for the upstairs. All the good ones, I hid beneath the beds themselves in case a search party should seize my linens, again.
*
Brendan, August, Benjamin, and Bertie had set out with their officers, to fetch the cannons left at Fort Ticonderoga. On their return, Benjamin had promised they would also take the two their uncle had sent, from my barn. They returned by the first of June, moving at night through dismal rain over the roughest of ground. I packed them food in knapsacks, and I covered their shoulders with shirts and their legs with new britches. The cannons rolled away just two days before my house was searched again. It was so full of bolts and bolts of cloth I had woven, baskets of tow and spun wool, there was barely room for them, and the Redcoats found little to confiscate. So they took a rug August had sent me from the Orient. It was battered and threadbare, I said, to console myself.
Many nights, I could not sleep. Every night I thought I heard a distant drumming, a distant firing of guns, like distant thunder, so much so that rain surprised me when it actually fell. I heard Goody Carnegie wailing with sorrow, and I heard Cullah’s voice saying, “War is coming. War is coming.”
And then it came. June seventeenth.
Breed’s Hill, they called the place. Later the name would be forgotten and the taller mound, Bunker Hill, remembered.
My Cullah fell there and I will never forget that place. It was said by a man who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him that when he’d fired five shots that old fowling piece jammed. After that, he fought with claymore in hand like a vicious fighting machine, boldly fending off soldiers three and four at a time, while behind him, Dr. Warren loaded and primed a musket. The ball that felled Dr. Warren pierced Cullah through the heart first.
Something told me, as I washed him, lying naked on my kitchen table, that he had always been meant to die this way. That there were indeed better and worse ways to die, and that he deserved a death both valiant and quick rather than the slow torment of disease or aging’s loss of mind. I pictured him standing there, reloading that fowling piece, finally giving up and resorting to fighting the way the Scots at Culloden had done and died, swinging that claymore against an overpowering enemy bearing powder and shot. “My Cullah, my Eadan. My Scottish Highlander. Your mind always hearing the echoing drums of war from centuries past, in which you might have been a valiant hero. You were not meant for this time, were you?”
Alice helped me dress him. The hardest part was putting onto his feet the old boots that used to smell of beeswax. It took us an hour but I could not bring myself to bury him barefooted. We laid him beside Jacob, next to Gwyneth. As Reverend Clarke read the words, my heart, so often hollowed by loss, had always known Eadan Lamont was alive even when he was not with me. Now the emptiness I felt was a vast ocean. I closed my eyes. A stiff gust of wind moved my hair and bonnet, and I felt myself holding to the swaying gunwale of a great ship moving through stormy seas. I inhaled and held my breath. Then I knelt at the grave as men I knew not filled the earth in upon my love.
“Widow?” one of them called. “I say, Widow MacLammond?”
“Do you mean me, sir?”
“Yes, Mistress. Have you a sixpence for us?”
In my pocket, Margaret’s shilling. I placed it in his hand. “Take this.”