Mistress held the coins, dropped them into the box, and closed it, shaking it, listening to the satisfying rattle of money. She wheeled around and loomed over me, saying, “Where did it come from?” Mistress shook the casket at me. “Speak up, Mary. You never have a want of words. Let’s hear where you got this.”
“My mother gave it me,” I said, never taking my eyes off it. “When we were captured by Saracens. I have kept it in my pocket. It will help buy my price, when I can earn some other coin to go with it. I shall have it now, if you please.”
Mistress said, “In your pocket? All this time? I don’t believe you. Why did you not present it to us to keep for you if it was honest gain? No, you hid it like a thief.”
“The box is worth some, too,” Birgitta said. “This has gold.”
I waved away the thought. “Gold? I think not. Pure brass. Who would give gold to a child? It was just an old casket Ma threw some coins in as I was taken from her. If there were gold in it, the Saracens would have had it. The English privateers did not want it when I offered it in trade for food. Why, they laughed in my face and threw it back at me. They had trunks full of gold doubloons. Why would they want an old box with brass corners? They would have kept it, if it were gold.” I held my hand closer to the box, ready to snatch it from her fingers.
Mistress raised it up before I reached it. “You are a liar and a thief. You stole this. Perhaps from your last mistress. And you intend keeping it from me, who has provided you food and a home all these days? I’ll take you to the magistrate to be hung if you so much as say another word about it.” Mistress Hasken gripped Ma’s casket in her fat, greasy fist and stormed into the house.
A stinging thud hit my shoulders as Birgitta brought her stick down upon my back. “You spider. You misbegotten pisspot! I ought to hang you myself.”
“I did not steal it. It was my ma’s.”
“Liar! Liar! Liar!” she shouted with each swing of her arm. “I’ll beat you so you never forget it.”
I shrank to the ground under her blows. I counted them until I lost count. Later, when Birgitta had gone into the house, later, when I was alone, later, later, did I weep for Ma’s casket and the two pounds of my price lost.
The next day, sore of body and soul as I was, Birgitta took me by the arm and stood me, sending me to work. I fixed my face like stone, barely moving my lips to speak. I muttered Birgitta’s name without “mother” attached and said “yes, Mistress” when spoken to. I worked carelessly, spilling things, dragging clothing across the dirt floor, forgetting what I’d been sent for so that every errand took two trips.
Mistress insisted on inspecting my petticoat again, and I clutched the back of my chair as she raised my skirt and squeezed at it, terrified that her hands would find the treasures hidden and I would have no hope, completely adrift. But her hands were no more clever than her eyes, and she did not test the thickness. “This padding? What is it?”
“Woolen, madam.”
“Woven? Carded? Think, Mary. Pah. You’re as dull as a stump.”
I shook my head, trying to remember anything at all of my mother’s evenings spent on this petticoat. “It is two layers with a mat of woolen lint between them. The two are made into one by the rows of sewing.”
“Not carded well, I think. Your mother wasn’t good at it, was she? If indeed she did make this. You and Birgitta will make a petticoat like this for Rachael.”
Mistress produced a hopsack full of goat hair that she wanted used to pad Rachael’s petticoat, and we began matting it out, spreading the hair and pressing it in as evenly as possible. In the bottom of the sack, I found remnants of goat dung, dark and crumbling, fallen from the hairs at some earlier time. When Birgitta’s attention waned, all of the dung found its way between the layers of linen, under the hair, so that it would add a certain air of elegance to Mistress-Rachael-the-Reverend’s-wife.
Birgitta insisted I sleep with her to keep her warm. Fighting angry tears, I lay there as I was told. Soon as she snored, I crept from her bed and went to my own place up the stairs by the chimney under the bearskin. She said nothing of my absence in the morning. This I would use, I promised myself, my fists in tight balls, the knowledge that she was both forgetful and somehow longed for my affection.
CHAPTER 8
March 17, 1730