The widow Richardson was left the farm to manage until Richardson’s two children were of age: she managed the indentured servants and the slaves, and brought in the tobacco crop, year in, year out; she poured cider on the roots of the apple trees on New Year’s Eve, and placed a loaf of new-baked bread in the fields at harvest time, and she always left a saucer of milk at the back door. The farm flourished, and the widow Richardson gained a reputation as a hard bargainer, but one whose crop was always good, and who never sold shoddy for better merchandise.
So all went well for another ten years; but after that was a bad year, for Anthony, her son, slew Johnnie, his half brother, in a furious quarrel over the future of the farm and the disposition of Phyllida’s hand; and some said he had not meant to kill his brother, and that it was a foolish blow that struck too deep, and some said otherwise. Anthony fled, leaving Essie to bury her youngest son beside’his father. Now, some said Anthony fled to Boston, and some said he went south, and his mother was of the opinion that he had taken ship to England, to enlist in George’s army and fight the rebel Scots. But with both sons gone thfe farm was an empty place, and a sad one, and Phyllida pined and plained as if her heart had been broken, while nothing that her stepmother could say or do would put a smile back on her lips again.
But heartbroken or not, they needed a man about the farm, and so Phyllida married Harry Soames, a ship’s carpenter by profession, who had tired of the sea and who dreamed of a life on land on a farm like the Lincolnshire farm upon which he had grown up. And although the Richardsons’ farm was little enough like that, Harry Soames found correspondences enough to make him happy. Five children were born to Phyllida and Harry, three of whom lived.
The widow Richardson missed her sons, and she missed her husband, although he was now little more than a memory of a fair man who treated her kindly. Phyllida’s children would come to Essie for tales, and she would tell them of the Black Dog of the Moors, and of Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones, or the Apple Tree Man, but they were not interested; they only wanted tales of Jack—Jack up the Beanstalk, or Jack Giant-killer, or Jack and his Cat and the King. She loved those children as if they were her own flesh and blood, although sometimes she would call them by the names of those long dead.
It was May, and she took her chair out into the kitchen garden to pick peas and to shuck them in the sunlight, for even in the lush heat of Virginia the cold had entered her bones as the frost had entered her hair, and a little warmth was a fine thing.
As the widow Richardson shucked the peas with her old hands, she got to thinking about how fine it would be to walk once more on the moors and the salty cliffs of her native Cornwall, and she thought of sitting on the shingle as a little girl, waiting for her father’s ship to return from the gray seas. Her hands, blue-knuckled and clumsy, opened the pea pods, forced the full peas into an earthenware bowl, and dropped the empty pea pods onto her aproned lap. And then she found herself remembering, as she had not remembered for a long time, a life well lost: how she had twitched purses and filched silks with her clever fingers; and now she remembers the warden of Newgate telling her that it will be a good twelve weeks before her case would be heard, and that she could escape the gallows if she could plead her belly, and what a pretty thing she was—and how she had turned to the wall and bravely lifted her skirts, hating herself and hating him, but knowing he was right; and the feel of the life quickening inside her that meant that she could cheat death for a little longer ...
“Essie Tregowan?” said the stranger.
The widow Richardson looked up, shading her eyes in the May sunshine. “Do I know you?” she asked. She had not heard him approach.
The man was dressed all in green: dusty green trews, green jacket, and a dark green coat. His hair was a carroty red, and he grinned at her all lopsided. There was something about the man that made her happy to look at him, and something else that whispered of danger. “You might say that you know me,” he said.
He squinted down at her, and she squinted right back up at him, searching his moon-face for a clue to his identity. He looked as young as one of her own grandchildren, yet he had called her by her old name, and there was a burr in his voice she knew from her childhood, from the rocks and the moors of her home.
“You’re a Cornishman?” she asked.
“That I am, a Cousin Jack,” said the red:haired man. “Or rather, that I was, but now I’m here in this new world, where nobody puts out ale or milk for an honest fellow, or a loaf of bread come harvest time.”
The old woman steadied the bowl of peas upon her lap. “If you’re who I think you are,” she said, “then I’ve no quarrel with you.” In the house, she could hear Phyllida grumbling to the housekeeper.
“Nor I with you,” said the red-haired fellow, a little sadly, “although it was you that brought me here, you and a few like you, into this land with no time for magic and no place for piskies and such folk.”
“You’ve done me many a good turn,” she said.
“Good and ill,” said the squinting stranger. “We’re like the wind. We blows both ways.”