“Open yer mouth,” Rafe said. When the man was satisfied with the captive’s teeth, he nodded and she was led away. I thought about that Saracen beaten to death under Captain Hallcroft’s orders, and though he had seemed genteel, he had stood there, watching. And August, though he protested, he, too, watched. I shuddered. Why, any sort of man could buy any other man and be kindly or be the devil himself, and the sold person had no voice in his own fate! Black spots swirled before my eyes and I nestled closer to Patience’s skirt. Very soon, they came for her.
Patience held her hands toward me in a gesture of pathos as they pulled us apart, more conjoined than if we had been two halves of a cloth rent asunder. I remembered for a long time, the feeling of her hands pulled away from me, the last touch of her upon my arms. She stood as two men bid for her, and a low and hard-looking one came up and offered seventeen pounds and nine. Rafe held out his hands to collect Patience’s earnings and dropped one of the coins, having to chase it around the planks before it quit spinning. I was incensed that he had dropped my sister’s price on the floor.
When they led her from the step, I followed on her heels. The man who bought my sister pushed me away. “Get back, ye!” he ordered, raising his hand to strike me.
“I am going, too,” I said. Without Patey I would die. I would surely die.
“I bought one. Won’t feed kin, neither; that’s trouble. Get back.” He kicked at me as if I were a dog snapping at his feet.
“Please!” I shouted. From behind me an arm wrapped around my middle and carried me like a peck of flour away from Patey’s side. I did not cry out again, or sob. I put away more feelings. Put them deep. I would give them no satisfaction with my tears.
Patience did not cry or say a word or even make a sound, but went into a wagon with a short top on it which was closed down the way you’d pack up an animal. They crowded two others in with her and drove it away. I watched her go and felt indignity, not longing or sorrow. How little I had known my own sister, my own skin, before our kidnappings, and how she had changed by the brutality and beatings she had suffered on the ship. The strange way she had of treating me, also, for I had not forgot that she had nearly unbrained me at one instance to keep me out of the hands of the Saracens. I had been orphaned indeed. That notion took hold of me while her cart made its rattly way down the path until my heart seemed as if it lay at the bottom of the sea. All was lost.
An hour later, in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and twenty-nine, on the twenty-first day of November, I was sold for the first time to a black-frocked farmer and his wife. Both of them wore high-peaked black beaver felt hats such as I had seen in drawings before. Both were so homely and sallow that under those great dreary hats I would never have known the sex of one or the other were it not for madam’s frilly mobcap. As they pulled me from the platform and pushed me into a cart, I called for Patience. She was long gone away. As were they all.
Rafe MacAlister walked off with his bags jingling, filled with the solid coin of our skins. I had brought him only five pounds.
I looked like trouble, they said.
CHAPTER 6
November 21, 1729
“Resolute Catherine Eugenia Talbot,” I said.
“You’ll be Mary.”
I stared, somewhat dumbfounded, and in a quite ill-mannered way, at the old woman. “I shall not.”
“And what talent have you?” The hag sorted me with her eyes as if I had been a bowl of seeds.
“Talent? I have learnt two songs on the harpsichord.”
“I’m talking about your work, you little heathen.”
“What do you mean?” Now that I was out of the ship’s hold and in a proper lodging, I wanted a bath and a rest, and to have someone get the knots out of my hair.
She poked my arm as if I were contagion itself. “What skills? Are you a laundress? Cook?”
“I have always had a laundress,” I said. “And there were three cooks. One for meats, one for sweets, one for everything else.” I said, “I can do embroidery.” I drew myself up, saying, “Quite fine embroidery,” though my work was barely passable.
“Well, Mary, you shall carry the chamber pots each morning and fill the scuttles.”
“I would never do that. It is filthy. Have one of your slaves do it.”
She continued as if she had not heard me. “Then there’s milking and washing and any other task Mistress requires of you. You shall be allowed one afternoon each week for school. Work not and you shall know the rod of correction. You are right pinched and meager, quite scunging in your appearance. Have you other raiment?”
“Raiment, madam?”
“Where be your other clothes?”
“Stolen away by the same villain who has taken me from the bosom of my family and delivered me into your hands. Ask Rafe MacAlister. Have someone bring me a bath and a fresh gown immediately.”
She stood, grunted, giving me a slight shove, and tromped about the room as if a better answer were hanging on a peg, for there were many pegs, all filled with different hanging fabrics on the walls of this small wooden room. “No, you’ll not have a cloak,” she repeated twice. Then, “Were you raised Papist?”
“No, mum.”