Baby Ezekiel died. Sickly little James did not. In fact, if he changed at all, once the fever left him, it was that he seemed a little more peaceful than before. Rachael grieved, though she was not ill, for she had had the red sickness as a child. In the weeks before Christmas, she held James and rocked him, even nursed him. Patience spent no time with him at all then. I decided Rachael was not a bad person. I felt pity for her. I began to take her little things as gifts, including my first bit of thread that was fit to weave. I considered it recompense for having stolen her mother’s thread. Only now did I see the value of it and appreciate what labor it took to produce it.
After Christmas rather than Hogmanay we celebrated Mary, Mother of God Day. It was curious to me how that day happened upon the same day as the ancient holy day, but so it fell and I cared not to question it. We had no gifts at all, no games. Just more prayers than normal, more ritual. All our gifts were for the Virgin, who, of course, had no need of them whether she were indeed Queen of Heaven, or simply a woman dead. I felt peevish about being again denied my father’s pleasantries and my mother’s feast.
The days and nights of winter blended into one long, gray funnel of time. I spun linen thread, ever finer, until mine compared with any around. I was the youngest, the sisters declared, to make such thread.
At Michaelmas in 1731, when I turned twelve, I was taken to a new room and introduced to the great loom, a machine of clunking, banging, slamming parts, woven with miles of thread and moving things that seemed enchanted. I was also introduced to Sister Beatrice, the master weaver, and Brother Marcus, who had come to the convent as a captive but stayed when he found the life to his liking. By Good Friday, I had learned how to wind the warping board and had watched them warp a loom three times. Each time I put my hands to it, the thread grew tighter with every wrap, broke, or made sags. I lost count. I dropped pegs. I cursed aloud.
Sister Beatrice threw her hands in the air and left the room. Brother Marcus shook his head and said, “Take it off and start over. Warping the loom is the hardest part of weaving. Yet it is the first thing you must learn. She has little patience left. See if you can learn so that when you are old, you will not have to leave the room in exasperation over a little girl. Peace is in the fabric and fabric must have peace. The loom will not work for you without it. Once you can do this, the rest is more simple. People say one day you will surpass Sister Beatrice, and she knows it. Now, try again.”
Patience was sent back to the kitchen. I stayed at the loom. I seemed to be always growing out of my clothes, and I tied my hair with a kerchief like the older girls and women did, rather than plaiting two braids as the children did. There were days I forgot to look for a moon by which to make our escape. One day we found two girls had run from the convent under cover of night, in a bleak rain, helped out by two men cloaked in black. The nuns shut all dormitories for a whole night and day for prayer, they said, but imprisonment was truer. When the morning came and we went to chapel then to breakfast, we heard the names of the runaways.
I sat with Rachael at times, when my work hours were finished. She confessed to me that she had joined the runaways in meeting her husband and her father at the gate at two in the morning. She had brought with her one bundle. Baby James.
Her husband was incensed that she thought he would replace their son, she said. He told her to leave him at the gate and someone would find him in the morning. She would not, she said. For the sake of her own dead child, she would not abandon this one. Her husband fretted with great words at her, she said, yet given following them or staying behind with this child who so needed her, she believed she had no choice but to return to the convent. I patted her wrist, and to my surprise, she hugged me just for a moment. “You are a kind and loving person, Mistress Johansen,” I said.
April passed, blown out by gales and rain. Then came summer and the flax.
*
Life at St. Ursula’s was an unceasing parade of work, prayer, and poverty. My hands chapped and bled in the summers as well as winters. Sister Joseph was kind, as was Donatienne. I longed to go home, although for days at a time I forgot about Jamaica and thought only of warping and weaving and learning my Latin.
In 1732, I turned thirteen years old. That spring mold crawled up the walls inside the convent rooms. Donatienne coughed. A little at first, then a great deal, struggling for breath. I brought her broths and rum toddies from the kitchen. Every two or three weeks, a piece of paper and a small vial of ink appeared in the branches of the yew tree, like a Christmas trinket. I wrote another letter to Ma. I warped the loom. I had nightmares about shuttles flying at me and piercing me like arrows. I dreamed about being caught in the treadles and tangled in thread at the bottom where the weaver worked the hooks with feet tapping a rhythm like a jig. I dreamed the countermarche was a terrible dance that required me to keep my feet in perfect time with bobbins that bounced like rubber balls, falling out of their shuttles. The dance proceeded with words rather than music: beams, bars, beaters, heddles and threadles and racks. Tangled in thread, choking, I awoke, thrashing in my blankets, uncovered and cold.
In the morning, I found blood in my bed. I cried out, believing I would die.