She smiled. “I would almost think you acted full grown, so stern you are, little sister, except that a woman of cunning would not be so forthright in asking.”
I replied, “In devices I am not lacking, sister. There is no bridge between us that must be carpeted for either a footman or a caravan.”
Patience turned to me and yet turned her head away as she spoke. “Not only are you taller. My sister has grown inside. Here is my mind, then. Since I lay in childbed, the thought has come often to me that there is a way of escape from this place. We must speak quickly. There must be signs between us. A password. One word that will mean ‘we must speak’ and one that means ‘it is time to act.’”
“What words?”
“Something the two of us know that will work into speech without halt, so that none know it for a sign. The signal to meet and talk shall be ‘candlestick.’ Collect anything you wish to take and keep your shoes ready. The other word is more secret and therefore more sinister. We will leave when you hear the word ‘gumboo.’ Meet that night by the graveyard’s west gate.”
“The graveyard? Why must we meet there?”
“It is not a place they would expect us to choose. You saw that there were new girls in the barn with us? While I was allowed to rest and tend to James, I watched the selfsame Indians who brought us here deliver these new conscripts. The man whose wounds I tended with bear grease recognized me. If people may come in, people may go out. Rachael Johansen will deliver in a couple of months; the Indians return then, too.”
“Do you not think Reverend Johansen will return for her?”
“I know not. But she could not travel so soon. I plan only for you and me.”
“We should take some food. I do not want to go on a ship in a cage. I want to go as ladies. Fed ladies.”
“I would sell my gold rings for our passage home. I have asked to attend Rachael. I will be free to come and go in carrying out my duties for her. You do not need to do anything but wait for my word. I shall watch the moon after her babe is come. We will travel by bright moonlight. Do nothing unless you hear gumboo.”
“And we could slip away?”
A voice behind us said, “Shall you slip away? Where to?”
I turned to see Christine Hasken there, and said, “To the privy, for we both have soured stomachs from the food we had to eat.” I squeezed Patience’s arm.
Christine said, “Leaving? Why, I thought you were a good little pope’s child, Mary.” She clucked her tongue. “What would Sister Joseph do if she knew? She delivered Thea Newham to one of the priests to be used as a doxy. Perhaps that would suit you?”
Patey shuddered against my side. “I don’t believe that. None of us have been treated so.”
I remembered Lukas’s sister. “Thea Newham was a tart when she came here.” I knew not if it were true; I meant to scald her. She bristled, but she did not try to slap me.
Christine said, “I care not whether you believe it. You are both stupid slaves.”
I added, “Your sister Rachael’s husband has run away and left her heavy with child. Fine minister of God, he is. You suppose he will come back for her?”
“He left with my father,” she said. “The two of them will come back. They will take us away.”
Sister Agathe approached.
“I am sure,” said Patience, “that you mean yourself and your sister? You do not mean we three standing here?”
Christine closed her mouth and glared at Sister Agathe. I smiled at the nun, and said, “Good evening, Sister.”
“Return to your rooms now, children,” Sister said, and continued on her way.
Christine hissed, “There is nothing more savage than a Roman Catholic.” She whirled around so that her skirt brushed ours, and left.
“How, Ressie, do you come to know what a tart or a doxy is?” Patience whispered.
“What is it?”
“Better you forget those words. The less you know of that the better.” She pinched my cheek, but did not smile.
From my cot I whispered to Donatienne, “I heard the Indians came back with more children recently.”
“Did they have feathers and make whooping sounds?”
“No.”
“Then they were not Indians.”
I did not want to argue with her. “I heard two men escaped from here.”
She lay on her back. I could see the profile of her face in reflected light coming in a window. “Men sometimes find a way to leave.”
“Would you leave, if you got the chance?”
“Where would I go? This place is my home.”
“But if you had a home somewhere, would you not go?”
“We are not prisoners, Marie. This is an orphanage. We have no place to go to, and no one else who will feed an orphaned girl. Why, if they held the doors wide open I would not go through.”
I wanted to say, “I was sold like an animal in a room by the outer wall. I still remember the old man, Brother Christophe, who wrote down my name and paid the Indians money,” but all I said was, “Oh.”
Donatienne was silent. I heard her sigh. She said, “Girls who leave here, the ones without castles and coaches, come to a bad end, you know?”
“What end? Do they starve? I would not want to starve.”
“You know what I mean.” Someone across the room snored. Two girls coughed.
“No, I do not.”
“Lean close to me.” She whispered, “They go to a bawdy house and take money to let men press desires upon them.”
“What does that mean?”
“I am not sure.”
“Oh. What is a doxy?”
She clasped her hand over her mouth with an audible gasp. “An English word. That is what they call those girls. Sometimes ‘tart’ or ‘whore’ or ‘prostituée.’”
“Christine Hasken told me that her friend Thea was given to the priests for a doxy.” I lay on the cot when I said it. I was still uncertain of the meaning but I knew it was terrible. Something in the image reminded me of being on the ship, and that brought Patience’s and Cora’s nightly disappearances up the ladder to mind. Cake was their payment. I put my hand to my mouth and bit my thumb. Patey had said James was Rafe MacAlister’s baby. “Does it make you have a baby? Having men’s desires, I mean?”
“Yes!”
From across the room a girl’s voice said, “Be quiet over there, you two.”
I lowered my voice. “Christine is lying. Thea is not with child.” Tears formed at the corners of my eyes, thinking Patience was a doxy. “Must they go to hell? Would God forgive a doxy?”
“If confession is made.”
“That is good. Yes,” I said, picturing Patience, “that is very good.”
* * *
Raking and seeding, combing and scutching, beating flax with wooden bars, this was our festive outdoor work. The whole compound joined in. Baskets of tow and boon joined in long lines that formed a work route. The most experienced men did the hackling, bringing the flax across the board of nails to comb it into a long horse’s tail they called “strick.” The flax that had been spread in the field left a fiber that was a light silvery color. The other that had retted in the marsh by the river’s edge was golden, and I saw what Sister Agathe meant about its value.
I counted every day, looking forward to the day when Patience and I would leave this place. As I imagined our journey home, my hands fumbled more; I dropped things. I mashed my finger in the scutching mangle when Patience walked past me carrying a large basket to the barn and whispered, “Father William has a new candlestick.” I snapped up the next basket of tow from a man loading people’s arms with baskets, and followed her. I had been there enough to see that there was order in the heaps and mounds of wool and flax, whether spun or woven or still in the hanks called “rovings.” I could not suppress a smile when handing our baskets to the men stacking the work. “He has a candlestick?”
She brushed her sleeves and shook off her apron, her eyes downcast. �
�It will not be lit tonight. Tomorrow night seems likely.” Her eyes moved to someone behind me and she said, “Nary you mind. Now, let us have those empty baskets to return to the field.”
My feet moved as if they did not touch the ground. We were going at last! That night at supper, I asked Sister Joseph if I might have an extra piece of bread, but to my surprise, everyone had two pieces instead of one. I pretended to eat mine, turning the second into my sleeve for our journey. I hoped it would not be long before we would be dining someplace on lovely food. When I folded my clothes for sleep that night, I left my shoes close by.
Donatienne watched me. At length she said, “There is a rumor that two girls are planning to leave the convent. The nuns asked us who are your compagnes to question and to beg of them not to go to a life of great peril.”
A chill swept over me as if winter had come into the room. “I know nothing of such a plan,” I said. “I am so tired. Please let us sleep.”
“Please don’t go, Marie.”
“The only place I am going is to bed,” I said. I was glad the candles had been put out so she could not see my face.
“Sister Agathe said she will be watching for someone to try to leave.”
“Did you tell her it was me?”
“No.”
“Well, she had better watch someone else. Good night.”
Though exhausted to my core, I lay awake for hours. At last, when sleep found me I dreamed of home, of running on the beach, but not with Allsy. I was running from nuns and priests and leering men like Rafe MacAlister who reached for me with clawlike hands. Their low voices called, “Doxy! Doxy!” as if it were my name.
In the morning, Donatienne said, “You cried out last night. You said, ‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone!’ in English.”
“I had dreams. How do you say ‘nightmares’? Cauchemars. Sometimes it happens.” I was aware that today was the day of our leaving. I must not show anything on my face. “Did they catch those girls?”
“We will find out when everyone is seated for breakfast and they call the roll.”
I pictured the roll call tomorrow. Patience and I would be gone. I smiled.
“Are you happy someone left? Don’t you know how terrible their lives will be?”
“No, I am smiling because I think it is not true. I think that someone made up the rumor to make trouble for the nuns so one of them will have to watch all night long.”
For the next three nights, I heard nothing from Patience, even when she had a chance to tell me it was time to leave. When I found her stacking roving and sorting it for color dyeing, I asked her, “Any candlesticks need polishing in here?”
“Yes,” she said. “Take that one over there by the wall.”
I was dismayed to find there was indeed a candlestick by the wall, much abused with soot from poorly made candles. One thing I had learned from living at the Haskens’ house was that a candle could be made less of a mess by careful wicking. “Very well, then,” I said. “You will tell me if there are any others?”
“Of course” she said. “Sometimes one moon is not as good as the next.” She nodded at me, and turned to her work. I knitted my brows. It was meant to be a message. We would wait another month.
Now that the flax was in, I was put to spinning all the day. I spun not wool but flax, which filled a different distaff and a different wheel, and had to be done with a cup of water at my side. I learned to guide the tow onto the spindle, often so frustrated I groaned, wanting to pull the stuff and throw the water cup. When the nuns let me get up from the spinning wheel, I went outside and ran through the fields until the anger and frustration subsided. At times I ran with my eyes closed, wishing I would fall into a duppy’s house and disappear from this place.
Another week passed and Rachael took to her childbed. She suffered a few hours and brought forth a son. It was only upon seeing the new baby, named Ezekiel, that I could tell the difference between Patience’s baby and Rachael’s. For all I had expected that Patience would produce a superior child, I saw that James was no bigger than Ezekiel, though he was some months older. Ezekiel ate and slept, fat and contented. James did not nurse without coaxing, and what went down him rarely stayed down. He was plagued with raw skin under his clouties, so that he was kept naked in a hamper placed in the sun. Patience was often not in the baby room when I went to visit her; she left James with the nurse.
The next full moon came and went. And the next. Between long days learning to spin, having my work torn apart and recarded to try again until I got the rhythm going with my feet and my hands, the farm harvest began. School receded to one hour, three hours of working in the fields, pulling turnips and carrots, bundling onions, a meal, three hours of picking apples, three hours of spinning before supper. Lugging pears and pumpkins, peeling apples, packing potatoes and parsnips in layers in the cellars, none of the work was easy. Yet, when I saw the girls and nuns in the kitchen, boiling applesauce, pear sauce, piling ever more wood in the stoves to keep the fires hot, though the day was stifling, I did not complain about my work.
On an afternoon during the last week of September, the sky changed. I could not say what it was, but I could feel it. There came a freshening of the air early in the day, and the wind came from the northeast. Why that should put me in bad humor, I knew not. I felt as if this new wind brought with it some unfortunate change.
I had in my grip a mounded basket of overripe pears, and the basket was losing its bottom so I was forced to wrap it up with my arms as you would carry a child. The pears gave off a perfume as rich as honeysuckle to the air about me. I made my way past the rectory, turned a corner, and stood face-to-face with Lukas Newham. “Oh,” I said, “Lukas Newham. Fancy seeing you after all this time.” I did not smile.
“Yes, Miss? Ah, the little serving girl. You have grown a foot taller, I’d wager.”
I raised myself up on my toes, doing my best to look down at him. I felt conscious of my breasts brushing against the camisole. “You have also been cast into servitude, but I from a higher degree than ever your father’s father had been.”
He sneered. “You were always above your station.” Then his demeanor changed. “How fares your sister?”
“Miss Talbot fares quite well, I am sure.” At that moment a small pear, rosy and firm, slipped between the basket’s cracked splines and rolled to his feet.
“Ah, an offering,” he said, and picked up the pear, taking a great bite. “A peace offering, I wonder? The work becomes you, you know. Your cheeks have become full roses and your whole face carries a dust of freckling, just like a ripe fruit.” He took another bite, juice running down his chin, his lips moist with it.
I liked the sound of that, yet I was not sure what my reply should be. Donatienne knew much about men and romantic overtures, and told me always to be cool toward them. “Your words are too impertinent. Now that you have taken a pear from my bundle, though, you may repay me a deed.”
“What shall it be, little Rosy?”
I felt my face flush. “I beg you not to call me other than my name, Master Newham, as I shall yours. I saw you coming from the priests’ door just now, and that means you have access to their quarters. I am told that in their quarters is the only place here to find paper and ink. Is that true?”
“It is. And you will not speak of where you have seen me.”
“It is not a secret meeting, is it?”
It was Lukas’s turn to blush, and he did, with great coloring. “You keep your tongue, if you know what’s good for you.”
“I do know all that is good for me, Master Lukas.” I cocked my head and tried a guess. “You have met with a priest? Have you been baptized against your father’s will? Have you consorted with papists?”
“You know nothing of which you speak.”
“I know it is easier to live here when you take on their mantle as your own. I, too, have been baptized. Let us speak in English.”
He did. “I have naught against my father. I believe ther
e is more than what he sees in the Bible. There is much that is worthy here, and very old.”
I thought for a moment, not knowing how to reply to him, yet not wanting to leave his presence. I asked the one thing that might be of mutual interest. “Have they surrendered your sister to the priests for a doxy?”
“No!” He threw the pear against the building, smashed pieces flying. “None of these fellows would! If they hold aught in their hearts, it is well reined and, and—”
“And yet you do not want it known that you have become a Catholic? Others of your community would condemn you.”
“As would your sister.”
I shifted the weight of the basket. “Why do you care?” My own heart leaped at the potency of that thought. It might be that he would wish for me to be near him, to long for my kiss upon his cheek. If I held my breath he might see in me some true beauty I might become. Perhaps if he did not, I could convince him of it. “Reverend Johansen and Master Hasken escaped with their souls intact, I suppose.”
“I must go,” he said, adjusting his hat.
“If you come here, taking instruction, others might hear of it.”
“Not if you don’t tell them,” he said, but this time without a sneer, it was more a look of pleading.
“I carry a thousand secrets already. What is one more?” As I saw his face relax and his shoulders drop into their normal place, I added, “I have need of paper and ink. If you are engaged in study with priests, you might find paper and ink. And a post.”
“They send out a post every month. Some to Rome, some to Paris, some to the colonies in New France.”
“One more post is a small thing. I might keep your secret.”
“I will get you the things to write a letter. When you have it, place it in that black-painted wooden box, there. Put the ink vial under this bayberry next to the wall.”
“When?”
“You will have to trust me. I will get it to you.”
I half closed my eyes, saying, “You will have to trust me, too.”
He did not look happy as he strolled away. Myself, I had quite a grin. All I had to do was wait for the paper to appear. It was a change of the prevailing wind.
My Name Is Resolute Page 20