by Jodi Daynard
Just as we were finishing our breakfast, a messenger approached us with a letter for Lizzie. As she perused it, she stood up from her chair.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s from Colonel Quincy. My brother, Harry, is alive—and in Braintree. Eliza, we must leave at once.” Indeed, she looked as if she would leave that very moment, whether I followed or no.
We traveled till near midnight, when we reached the inn at Newburyport and stopped to catch a few hours’ sleep. We continued down the coast early the next morning and arrived in Braintree late the following day. I would have relished the opportunity to write Colonel Langdon before I left, but there simply was no time—Lizzie would not rest until she’d seen her brother with her own eyes.
I bore my suffering stoically, as Abigail did. But at least I now knew that Watkins still loved me, and that our bonds had not been irrevocably broken.
As we entered our lane off the coast road, we espied a tan young man walking down the dunes from the Quincys’. He looked hale and hearty, and his golden hair shone in the declining sun.
Lizzie cried, already rising from her seat, “Stop! Stop the carriage!”
At the sound of her voice, the young man turned. “Lizzie?”
“Harry? It is you!” She nearly tumbled out of the carriage and ran flying into the young man’s muscular brown arms. He spun her around and laughed.
“You are changed,” he remarked, holding her at arm’s length.
“Am I very ugly?”
“Not exactly.” He took another step back, the better to scrutinize her. “You’re tan.”
“We work in the fields, like slaves.” Then she turned to me to see whether her words had given offense. I smiled at her and shrugged. Words did not offend me, where the heart was loving.
“Well, I come bearing gifts that may relieve your labors—at least, for a short while.”
“Gifts?”
Harry laughed gaily. “I must return to the Quincys’ to thank them and get my things.” And off he loped, back up the hill through the dunes. Martha had stepped out to greet us holding a kitchen cloth; she followed Harry with her eyes.
“Oh, Martha,” said Lizzie, embracing her. “Eliza has so much news to tell. But first—have you met my brother?”
“Of course. He’s been here these past three days—at the Quincys’, I mean. I didn’t think it meet that he stop here—”
“No,” Lizzie agreed.
“He’s begun to help about the farm. He says it’s in a woefully feminine state.”
“Feminine state?” Lizzie smirked. “We’ll see how well he fares with all our feminine work!” I had only gotten a glimpse of Harry, but it was enough to know that Harry was a very fine specimen of a man. Five years at sea had hardened his muscles, turned him brown, and bleached his light-brown hair blond. Yet he seemed a mere boy in spirit, lighthearted and ready to laugh.
I handed Johnny down to Lizzie and then descended the carriage, my limbs having grown stiff. The colonel’s coachman brought our belongings into the cottage. It was a sweltering day, and as we had traveled since before dawn, we were quite exhausted. Johnny, who’d been asleep on my lap, woke and cried inconsolably.
Harry returned with his sacks just then—what a horrid impression the child must have made! Even I wished to cover my ears. Martha and I set about bathing and changing Johnny. We fed him a bit of mashed pea and potato. After he had bathed and eaten, he finally settled and was soon crawling toward Harry’s burlap sacks.
“Hey, there, fella!” Harry exclaimed. He bent down on one knee, and Johnny sat up to listen to whatever Harry might have to say. “Why, aren’t you a handsome little man!” Harry turned to his sister, “Dusky, though, what?” Lizzie did not reply, but merely shot him a peremptory glance. It occurred to me, however, that, having traveled from port to port—West Indies, East Indies, even Africa—Harry must have seen a myriad of humanity’s variations. Johnny crawled off to the kitchen, where we heard him banging happily on a pot.
“A cozy house, indeed,” said Harry to his sister.
“Small, you mean?” She had made us all some tea and brought it into the parlor.
“Nay, cozy. Truly.”
As there was but one chair, Harry sat himself on the floor, cross-legged. “Never mind about a chair. The floor is not heaving to and fro—that’s already an improvement.” Not to be outdone, we ladies sat ourselves upon the floor as well, giggling as we adjusted our petticoats. We no longer wore our stays about the house, so sitting in this manner was not the miserable ordeal it might once have been. Harry sipped his tea and frowned.
“Ugh. Sister, what is this? Tastes like horse dung.”
“Harry!” Lizzie scolded. “You drink our finest and most patriotic blackberry tea. We’ve had no real tea since ’75.”
Martha corrected her: “Recall you not the tea Abigail shared with us in ’76?”
“Abigail Adams, you mean? John Adams’s wife?” asked Harry, all astonishment.
“Harry,” Lizzie said with some exasperation, “I see you’re as ignorant as a newborn babe. Of course. This is Braintree. Abigail lives not two miles down the road. Colonel Quincy is her uncle. Our Eliza is related to them.”
“Oh, goodness me,” he said, affecting ignorance. “That would be the lady I met yesterday, with whom I conversed for well over an hour.”
“You met Mrs. Adams?” Lizzie cried.
Harry nodded. “And I do believe—I say this with no false modesty—she had a very great pleasure in meeting me.”
“Oh!” She hit him upon his head, at which assault he cried out and attempted to shield himself.
Harry then shifted his attention to the sacks. “Go ahead and open your gifts, Lizzie.”
“Should I?” she turned to me inquiringly.
“Oh, yes, let’s,” I said with some enthusiasm. I would not ruin this moment with my own misery, not for all the tea in China!
We set our dishes of tea aside and Harry opened the mouth of one of the sacks. Soon we were exclaiming and crying with joy: Oranges! Flour! Real wheat flour, too!
“Oh, I shall make an orange cake and invite the Quincys,” was Lizzie’s first comment. Then came Bohea tea—several boxes of it.
“You can feed your blackberry horse dung to the pigs,” Harry said to his sister as he handed the boxes to her.
“We have no pigs.”
“To the chickens, then—though I doubt whether even they shall eat it.”
There was more. Rum, ham, beans, coffee, dried fish. What bounty! Martha’s eyes moved silently from Harry to his provisions and back to Harry again, as if she couldn’t decide which to devour first.
“What think you, Martha? Is not my brother a most wonderful pirate?”
“It would seem so,” she said dryly.
“Oh, but where shall we put him?” Rising from the floor in spirited fashion, Lizzie set her hands on her hips and looked about her. Johnny and I slept in the parlor, and Martha and she were in separate chambers upstairs, as they preferred to be during the hot summer months.
“I suppose we could give him your room, Martha.”
“No, indeed,” Martha replied. “I want no man so close to us. Let us put him in the dairy, with the cheese.”
“Am I ripe, then, Miss Miller?” he roguishly cocked his head at her.
“Rather,” she agreed, twitching her nose.
“You could use a bath,” admitted Lizzie.
Harry rose up to his full height—near six feet. “Very well, then, ladies. Draw me a bath, since I have no wish to offend.” And with these words he began to unbutton his trousers. We all rose at once and ran shrieking from the room. Harry just laughed and laughed.
45
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, THE QUINCYS CAME TO dine, and we feasted on everything good, such fare as we had not tasted in years. The evening was so merry. Lizzie beamed with joy and pride. Harry regaled us all with tales of mysterious islands and primitive peoples. At one point, Johnny woke an
d would not resettle. Ann Quincy, at her queenly best, said, “Bring that child here at once.” After we set him upon her lap, she carried on with our lively conversation, cuddling him while he played with her pendant and snuggling his soft, curly head upon her breast. Then Colonel Quincy motioned to his wife to hand over the babe, and was duly granted it.
The next morning, Harry set about mending a fence whose broken slats allowed all the local cows to wander in and help themselves to our vegetables. Martha watched him, and we watched her do so—Lizzie, Abigail, and I—from the edge of the kitchen garden. Abigail had returned early that morning to fetch a pan she’d left the night before.
Martha took Harry refreshment, and when he announced his intention of clearing away the brambles in the next field, she disappeared into the house to see if perhaps Jeb had owned a pair of leather gloves. He had, and Martha returned with them to offer Harry. The sight of those gloves pained me; I could make out the creases in the leather where his finger joints had molded it.
“Thank you, Martha,” Harry said.
“It’s nothing. Those brambles can prick.”
“I’m most obliged. Indeed, these shall make the work far easier.”
Martha seemed pleased that she could be of service to him. She walked back toward the house with a satisfied smirk.
“But do you think he cares at all for her?” Abigail whispered once Martha had gone inside.
“There’s no indication that he even notices her existence,” I said plainly. “Not in that way,” I replied.
“No,” Lizzie agreed. “I wonder if I should have a word with him,” she said.
“Nay,” Abigail replied. “She is proud. That would mortify her.”
“Abigail’s right, Lizzie,” I concurred. “Either he shall fancy her or he shall not, and our urging him to do so won’t change things.”
“Yes, but it will break her heart if he does not return her affections,” said Abigail. So involved were we in our conjectures that we had not noticed Martha creep up on us from behind.
“Of what do you speak, harpies?” she asked, handing each of us a glass of cool cider.
“Oh—nothing,” we all said in unison and then blushed. Originality is hard to come by in a pinch.
Harry, we were convinced, saw us all as his sisters. But then, one hot day, as we sat in the kitchen garden having a dish of tea, we saw something that made us revise our opinion. Harry was once again by the fence along the eastern side of our property, closest to the Quincy property. Martha handed him a cool mug of cider, as she always did. This time, however, as she turned back to the house, he reached for her hand and held it a moment, unwilling to let it go. Martha blushed and pulled away, to return to her work.
“Did you see that?” Abigail whispered to Lizzie.
“Of course.”
“What means it?” I asked.
They both turned to me with hands on their hips. “You of all people should know, Eliza.”
They began to laugh. I chased them into the fields, threatening to pour my tea on their heads.
For several weeks after this, Martha and Harry teased each other much as children who secretly like each other do: with insults and gibes. When Harry returned to the cottage in the afternoon, Martha would make a face and say, “Ugh! A pig has wandered in from the road!” When Harry caught a scent of dinner cooking, he would remark, “Oh, no. I hope Martha isn’t cooking today—I’ve run out of Glauber’s salt.”
“Oh, shut up,” she’d reply to him.
The banter didn’t fool us one bit. We knew they were falling in love, though the lovers continued to fool themselves for several more weeks.
And what of Lizzie? By all appearances, she had renounced Thomas Miller. She did not speak of him, and when Martha made mention of him—his whereabouts, or the fact of his having dined with so and so—she affected indifference.
I knew otherwise, however, for I had known what it was to pine in secret for someone others believed wholly unsuitable. I often came upon Lizzie pacing her chamber anxiously, or sitting by the window with tears in her eyes. When I asked her what was wrong she would always laugh and dismiss it with a wave of her hand and a glib word.
46
JULY 31, 1779. THE MORNING OF MARTHA’S eighteenth birthday was already hot when we woke at dawn. Lizzie insisted upon baking a cake, which turned our cottage into an inferno. I stepped into the kitchen garden with a basket to gather our blackberries, which were just then yielding a great quantity of fruit. The sea breeze felt good, and I lingered there. When I returned to the kitchen, I was shocked to find Mr. Miller standing close behind Lizzie, behind the worktable. Together, they were stirring batter in a bowl with a large wooden spoon. At the sound of my feet, Lizzie jumped so high I thought the bowl would fall off the table.
Thomas Miller turned quickly. “Mrs. Boylston has been teaching me how to bake a cake, Eliza.”
“So I see,” I said. And I did—though I knew not why he was in our cottage just then, or in Braintree. I suppose I had imagined him long since departed Boston for the South, or perhaps Connecticut, where the British had lately burned and pillaged several towns.
Johnny was sitting at their feet banging on a pot. When he saw me, he threw down the spoon, grasped the kitchen table leg, and stood up. I knelt down, grinned at him, and opened my arms wide. At that moment, Martha walked into the kitchen with Harry. They both stopped moving at the sight of Johnny, upright and poised to walk.
“Johnny! Come to Mama!” I called.
Johnny let go of the table leg and took two wobbly steps forward before falling on his bottom.
“He walked!” Lizzie exclaimed.
“He did,” Martha agreed.
“Oh, my brave boy!” I scooped him up in my arms.
Johnny giggled with delight.
“Well,” said Harry after a moment, “I propose we celebrate, Lizzie. As your cake will keep, and as it is very hot, let us all take a swim in the colonel’s pond.”
“A swim? I have never swum in a pond in my life,” Martha said primly.
“Nor I,” I added. “And I shan’t do so.”
“Oh, come with us, at any rate. Johnny will love the water.”
“Twenty minutes,” said Lizzie, who would not leave her batter to spoil. She poured it into a pan and cooked it, as the men waited most impatiently.
“Is it done, Sister? I’m broiling,” asked Harry after a while.
“Nearly. Be patient.”
“Aw!” he cried. “Patience is such a waste of time.”
After another ten minutes, Lizzie took the cake from the coals and set it upon a rack on the kitchen table.
“Finally,” Harry exclaimed and trotted off toward the pond. He was followed by Thomas Miller and we women. Seized with the joy of Johnny’s first steps, and the heat, and Martha’s birthday, we began to run. Arriving at the pond, the men stripped off their shirts, but at our loud protests they moved around behind the rushes. Then Johnny, who still grasped one of Lizzie’s good silver spoons, suddenly tossed it high up in the air over the pond, where it landed with a dull plunk.
“I’ll race you!” cried Harry to Mr. Miller.
“Go on!” shouted Mr. Miller, and in the next moment we saw them dive headfirst into the deep, dark pond. They were gone a long moment and then finally bounded up, crying, “Did you find it?”
“Nay.”
“Again!”
Back down they went. Lizzie, already drenched in perspiration from her baking, and looking limp with the heat, suddenly threw caution to the wind and made a mad dash into the water, her petticoats floating up over her hips as she cried, “Ah, that’s cold!” Her arms were raised above her head, her eyes squeezed shut; her mouth grimaced in painful pleasure.
“Martha, you must come, too!” she soon called from the center of the pond.
Martha frowned. Then, suddenly, she said, “Oh, hell,” and ran directly into the water, her impulse accompanied by shouts of shock and dismay. Being a tidal pond
, it was quite salty and cold—near as cold as the ocean itself. Both women flapped about screaming and shouting, at last getting their heads beneath the water. Their cheeks puffed out as they held their breath and their noses.
I laughed at their antics, allowing myself a moment of happiness, too.
Martha soon dragged her sodden skirts from the water and approached me.
“Go away,” I said, “you’re dripping on me.”
“Go in, Eliza. It’s a rare treat. One you won’t soon forget.”
“Nay. I cannot swim.”
“It’s shallow. You’ll keep to your feet. Have no fear.”
“Nay.”
Martha lifted Johnny up and dipped his toes in the water. He shrieked with delight and shook his fat little legs. Lizzie came out from the water, her petticoats trailing like a mermaid’s fin. The two fiends, drenched through, together grabbed hold of me and backed me into the water until I fell with a shriek. It was frigid!
“She-devils!” I cried.
Laughing, they splashed me until I was thoroughly wet. I could not help but wonder what Mama would have said were she to see us out in our soaking gowns.
We emerged and fell upon the ground, panting. After a few moments, however, we began to hear a sound that pulled us away from our merriment. It sounded like an agonized groan. Was it man, or beast? The men rose at once, grabbed their shirts from the rushes where they’d flung them, and set off toward the cottage. We followed hard upon them as they approached the barn. The horrible moan could be heard quite distinctly now.
“Stay back. Do not approach,” Mr. Miller warned us. Harry had fled into the house and returned with Lizzie’s musket.
“Nay, I will see what this is,” said Lizzie, and while Martha and I had halted in our tracks, Lizzie moved forward. What she saw made her cry out piteously. “Oh, no, no.”
“Move back now,” Mr. Miller fairly pushed her back toward us. “Farther,” he commanded. I ran into the house with Johnny, and, just as I did so, a deafening shot boomed out.
47