“I am quite happy with our bargain,” I said. I placed the ring upon the first finger of my right hand and a warm shiver went from it through me and all the way to my feet. At that moment, I remembered Ma wearing the ring at a ball when I had been too young to see much but her hands and her face. And here I had almost lost it, trading something so precious for mere money. Never again, I told myself, should I look upon the things hidden in my petticoat as mere things.
That was to be my single triumph of the day, for at Mr. Roberts’s insistence I waited with Mistress inside the coach while he inquired first with the harbormaster, then in a successively poorer line of taverns for captains or crew of any ships heading south to the Caribbean Sea. He returned to the coach and reported, then moved us forward another street or two. Not for six or eight weeks would anyone chance hurricane season sailing against the trade winds toward Jamaica. Not until spring. Not until May. Not without a load of trade goods and who knew when that would be ready? I felt near exhaustion as he returned the fifth time. I tucked my hand with the ring on it under my arm and held it close. The mist turned to rain.
“Now, take that sad countenance away, Miss Talbot. While you have passage fare, you must write your mother—we’ll send it on the first packet south—and ask her to send you traveling money and a chaperone, and perhaps a guard. While you await her answer, you may stay with us this winter.”
“Mr. Roberts, I owe you so much already. All this time I thought only miles and coin could keep me from my mother. Now the very weather conspires against me.”
Mistress Roberts said, “Waiting is ever the hardest when one is young. But look, we will have visits and balls this winter to drive away the gloomy day. Young men with whom to dance. Would that not fill your days until a ship can be got? Write your mother immediately.”
Mr. Roberts leaned out to the coachman and said, “I say, would you know of a scrivener about?”
“Aye, sir. Up by the Tri Mount.”
“Take us there, man. There’s an extra shilling in it for you.”
The coachman whistled to his team and we jostled away from the wharves and the smell of old fish and seaweed. Through narrow streets up a hilly area, past modest two-story houses and into a street where neat shingles hung at the street level, the coach finally stopped in front of FOULKE AND HARRISON, ESQUIRES. We entered the building by a low front door which opened into a step-down. A man with black sleeve cuffs greeted us with a nod. Within three quarters of an hour, a formal letter was written to Ma and made ready to post on the next ship. Mr. Roberts paid for the attorney-at-law to dictate it and his scribe to write. The whole was an entreaty to Ma to send me plenty of passage money and a chaperone, or to come herself, how to find us on the road between Boston and Concord, and how the Robertses were happy to be in complete service to me as we awaited her reply. My heart all but stopped and I wanted to skip and dance about the room.
Mistress Roberts insisted that they purchase for me a wardrobe befitting a ward of theirs, a planter’s heiress, and one who would grace their home for the next four months. “But I cannot pay for these things, madam,” I said.
“Your mother will return it later. I am sure she will want you well treated.”
We went to a haberdashery, a milliner, a dressmaker’s, and a shoe shop, where a lady used paper and drew around my feet and Mr. Roberts himself ordered two pairs of shoes and one pair of white kid slippers to be delivered to his address every month for me.
CHAPTER 15
October 16, 1735
This was most like my true home of any place I had been in so long. My heart strained against my clothing, willing myself not to weep from homesickness that had all but disappeared in the years at St. Ursula’s. Before the Roberts family, I kept my face under scrupulous control, but alone, in my room or if they happened to be otherwise occupied—for the house had fourteen rooms and anyone might be in any of the three drawing rooms at any time—I oft gave way to my emotions. There was one thing I had learned about hard work and much of it. It kept the mind busy and the thoughts on the tasks at hand. Now that I had time to sew, or read, look out a window, or walk through their garden and pet the stable horses, I found my thoughts recaptured all I had lived through, oft with violent emotion attached.