I turned to Wallace and forced a lighthearted lilt to my voice. “What sort of plantation? What will be grown there?”
“What has always grown there, I suspect. Sugarcane and rice, but we are wasting Virginia soil not growing tobacco. Everyone else has. That is the future in the colonies. I plan to put in extra fields of tobacco immediately.”
Sugarcane. When he said those words the future bloomed before me, Wallace becoming a man like Pa, a warm and loving man, hardworking but gentle. My heart thudded yet I turned toward Serenity to see if his plan might affect her.
Serenity fought back tears. “A farmer? You are to become a farmer?”
“Not at all, Miss Roberts,” he said. “I shall own a plantation. Others will do the work. Better you concern yourself with your fine embroidery and the ladies’ arts.”
Serenity’s hand went to her embroidered collar, fingering my stitches there.
*
In March, snow became rain. Roads became mud. Serenity sang “Greensleeves” relentlessly, not realizing, I think, that the words of it depicted a jilted lover never to return. It filled me with guilt. I supposed that Wallace might write to me, or to her, and I would know his meaning by who received the first letter.
On a howling evening in late March, when the wind beat at the barren trees as if it would uproot them and gusts tormented the house so that the leaded windows bowed inward, I lit a candle in my room and said a prayer for my birthday. I knew not an exact date, only that between Michaelmas and Easter I was a year older. Seventeen thirty-six. I turned seventeen. Though they knew not my age, I knew that at sixteen a girl could enter betrothal. I was not betrothed to Wallace Spencer, I reminded myself.
I wrote a letter to Rachael Johansen. A few weeks later a letter came from her. She said as a sanctified person she was allowed correspondence. Then she told me news of everyone I had known. Her sister Christine had made her way in Montréal as a prostituée until she had been found raving and was locked in stocks. When she was released, she tried to stab a doctor conversing in the street with a priest, but managed only to damage his horse. Her father had tried to intervene and take her but she stabbed him, too. He was arrested for disturbing the peace but freed later, to disappear. She was hanged within a week. Reverend Johansen had died of a fever from an infected tooth, and Rachael had felt it was God’s hand, and so had taken the vows of a sanctified woman, not a nun, never to leave the convent walls again. She planned to remain at St. Ursula to raise James and be mother to the infants left there by misused and desperate girls. I laid her letter on my bed table. I thought of girls like Patience, and their desperation.
My heart made a noise and sudden warmth shot through me. Would Wallace require of me that naked coiling as I had witnessed Patey and Lukas doing? Staring into the flame of my candle, I vowed that I would do what Wallace asked, even that, and give him children, as many as we would have. I let a vision drift before me of the one sugar plantation I knew, now removed to a place called Virginia, peopled with my children, my husband. And slaves.
I spoke aloud. “Allsy was a slave.” I had never believed that Old Poe was anything other than a trusted friend, a second mother, a dear aunt. The fact that she had “cost” Pa by her death had no meaning to me other than the grief that death cost me. Allsy was as close as any sister. Shared apples and great pox, separated by smallpox, Allsy was African and had been my slave and I never knew. How would a plantation be run without slavery? Yet, if Wallace was to be my husband, he must be told about my feelings. We would own no slaves. We would have to employ workers who had a choice and were paid for their labor and never, never beaten. That settled, I rose from my knees and lifted the candle as I turned toward the bed.
A chilling scream pierced the air. I exhaled so that I blew the candle out, and dropped it. I was engulfed in darkness before the next scream followed it, continuing on with a long wailing, a moan that seemed to come out of the storm itself. I felt my way toward the door, hearing the rush of wind but feeling as if I were in the darkened stairwell with Patience, water crashing about us, making our way to the arms of the Saracen pirates. I reached through the doorway and touched the warm softness of another human. I gave out with my own scream of purest terror, just as that person did, also.
“Miss Talbot!” Portia’s voice called. “I thought you would have a candle!”
I shuddered with relief and said, “Tipsie, thank heavens it is you. It went out. I was coming downstairs to fetch another.” The voice in the storm screamed again, screeching agony and longing all at once. “What is that horrid noise?” I asked.
“It is Goody Carnegie. Gone mad again. Sometimes when the wind blows she runs about in the night. It’s enough to scare a witch to heaven.”