When in 1735 I was sixteen, after the flax harvest I was almost glad to return to the peace of the great loom. The huge apparatus filled one end of the building, had rhythm and harmony in its beams. As I dusted the bench, I realized that the baskets and bolts that seemed tossed here and there made sense to me. If something tumbled against another stack, it was easy to see where it ought to have been. Everything had a place.
Winter came early that year and cold, wet winds blew as soon as September, bringing frost in the mornings. At breakfast on a stormy morning, I found in the bottom of my plate, under thin gravy, a piece of bread. Cut into the bread was a word that had grown so stale in my mind I nearly cried out at the sight of it. “Gumboo.”
Patience cleared plates without a look in my direction. I might have thought it some accident in the baking, save when I handed her the platter, her eyes turned away but her fingers gripped mine under the plate and squeezed. “Thank you,” I said.
“Not at all. What God provides, we will cherish.”
My mind raced. I made mistakes in my weaving, causing three inches to have to be taken out. I dropped a shuttle and made a splintered notch on the end, broke a warp thread; almost fell from the bench when someone behind me let the door slam in a stout breeze. I told Sister Beatrice that I felt ill and she sent me to bed.
I patched my cloak, a rough black handed down, stitched layers of fabric together to hide what I meant to take inside my skirt and petticoat, and kept my feet upon a stool so that they would be rested for the march before them. While my weaving suffered from anticipation, my sewing did not and I finished everything, including bundling it, in short order. I folded it so that the pile beneath my cot appeared nothing out of the ordinary but it would be available in the dark of night.
As supper finished and chapel commenced, I thought of all the times Patience had told me before to meet her, even to make ready. There had always been something that got in the way. I expected that something would again break our progress, yet because she said it, I believed that the Abenaki warriors, many of whom were the same men who brought me here, were on their way with more captured slaves. What made today different from those other days, I could not ask.
After evening prayers, rain fell anew. I made a dash between our door and the older girls’ dormitory. The nuns at the entrance were just putting wood in their stove, and told me Patience was working in the kitchen that night for our guests. Sister évangélique said, “You know how travel is in this weather. They might not get here until tomorrow. She’ll sleep in the kitchen.”
“Merci, ma soeur,” I said, and made for the kitchen, fighting against the wind.
I found Patience standing upon a stool, reaching into a basket on a shelf high overhead. No one else was in the room. I whispered, lest others were just in the shadows. “Patience?”
“What!” she said, and toppled off the stool, thumping on the floor and overturning a basket of potatoes with her elbow as she fell. “Marie! You startled me so!”
“Did you not hear me come in?”
“I was deep in thought. Fetch that, would you? The potato under the chopping block.” She stood and rubbed her elbow. “Glad enough the bone is not broken,” she said.
I lowered my voice and asked, “Is this night gumboo?”
She whispered in English into my ear, her breath making a sound. “It is the night. There are always so many to feed, it will be noisy. In that basket up there I have hidden a monk’s cloak much as the one you wear. No one knows I have it, however, and so it will be my disguise. I have a man’s hat and a ruff. Are you wearing the petticoat Ma made?”
“Yes, though you would not know it for at least two layers of cloth cover it. I added a new waistband and hem, else it would not have fit.”
“We shall leave when they get here. You’d best stay with me.”
I said, “I have to fetch my parcel. And Sister Joseph will check my bed. Will you come for me?”
“You must be here. We have to run when the moment is propitious. Go get your things. I will hide you in the kitchen, in that alcove by the pantry.”
“Do not leave without me, Patey.” What I saw in her eyes made me cold deep inside. I felt as miserable and shaking as I had that night in the secret stairway behind Patience’s bedroom wall. “I will have to slip out a window after Sister Joseph turns in. Promise me you will wait for me if they come while I am gone. Promise, Patience.”