“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.”
A light appeared before us, a double candle held by Betsy. “Tips, what a rude expression. With whom have you been associating who would speak in such a way?”
I asked, “That screaming is Goody Carnegie? But she’s kind and dear.”
Betsy said, “She calls through the woods, looking for someone who harmed her, they say. ’Tis also said she’s running from witches from whom she’s stolen secret poisons and potions. Or that she’s a witch herself trying to catch a fairy.”
Portia said, “I believe she’s fey, and captured herself. Not a witch. That would be evil and she does not seem evil.”
“As if you would recognize evil in anyone,” Betsy chastised. “You are too kind to see the sin in others. You think everyone is as sweet and good as yourself, sister.”
My hands shook with such trembling as if they were not part of me. While this conversation was softening my fear, I wanted light and much of it. “If you please, bring your candlestick in and light mine.” The two girls followed me. I recovered the dropped taper, found two others, and lit them all. “Why does someone not help her? Is there no medicine for her? No person to keep her? Why, she will take fever in this cold.”
“No one can help a madwoman,” Betsy said. “Though if people truly believed she was a witch they would have drowned her long ago.”
I thought of Christine Hasken. Hanged for stabbing a horse. Goody Carnegie, serving me bread and excellent cheese. I said, “What if we pray for her? Could we not do that at least?”
Both the girls looked at me with startled faces. Goody Carnegie howled again, much removed this time, so the wind carried the moaning under the eaves of the house and it no longer sounded like a human voice. Finally, Betsy placed her candlestick on my dressing table, hugged me, and said, “You are so dear, Miss Talbot. Kindness even to a madwoman. I hope you will always be our friend, even if you get home to your island.”
The wind continued for several hours, and I slept little. I thought of poor Goody Carnegie. Christine Hasken knitting stockings. Lonnie, the wee dafty one. Birgitta and the goats. When I slept, I dreamed Ma cradled me in a hammock on the leeward porch of our house, and the smell of flowers lulled me to sleep. The smell grew stronger and more pungent. I awoke with a start. One of my candles had burned to the end, layering melted wax around itself, and Rachael’s letter, moving in a draft coming through the windows, had gone over the candle and the last ember of flame had touched the corner of it. It had just begun to smolder, putting off that fragrance that replaced the flowers in my dream. I pressed the burned part and took off the ash, then smoothed the missal. It might have been moments from setting the room on fire, even burning down the house, perhaps killing me in my sleep along with all the others.
The feeling that I had looked upon my own death filled my heart with terror, filled my eyes with tears. I went to the window and pressed my hand against the leaded diamonds where now a pinhole of breeze came through all the day, air rushing in, not letting any out. How could so much air come into a place, and yet it felt as if I could not draw a breath? “Ma,” I said aloud, “spring is beginning. I will come home this year. I will come to you.”
Mr. Roberts agreed to take me once again to the solicitor’s office, where, he said, he awaited word on urgent business. There might be a letter there for me, he said, as he had instructed any correspondence from my mother to be held there.
“But, sir, why did you instruct that? Am I not a free person to receive and profit from my own correspondence?”
Mr. Roberts frowned, but cheerily, although for a moment I saw that cold glimmer of steel, keen as the blade of a cutlass, cross his features. “Of course, Miss Talbot. Of course.”
As we approached Boston, Mistress Roberts said to the air before her, as if in casual conversation with no one in particular, “I hear the Spencers are expecting young Master Wallace soon. I heard it from Anne Prescott herself.”
“Indeed?” Mr. Roberts replied.
“Yes. And he will be calling within the week.”
“Wonderful,” he said.
She spoke again to the air. “It is of course known all about that he intends proposing to our Serenity. Her dowry is larger than anyone else’s one could name. Now that he is landed, too, there should be no impediments to that path, which has been laid for five years at least.”
“No, certainly. Of course,” he added.
“And, have I your permission, sir, to call upon the dressmaker regarding some silk for a wedding gown for our most precious daughter?”
“Of course. We shall make that our mission and purpose. First, Cole’s exchange for news of my trade investments, next the law office for some letters. Next, the harbormaster to see to Miss Talbot’s passage home, of course. Then, and most important, of course, the best dresser in Boston. None but the best for our daughter. Is that woman you went to before of good use? Does she make the best patterns? I insist you find out who among the trades creates the finest gowns, my dear.”
I knew something was afoot by all this foolish conversing over my head. They meant me to know that Wallace Spencer was taken. That they would stop at nothing for their daughter’s happiness and that the dresser they had taken me to was second-rate. One better must be found to supply Serenity’s gown. I stared out the window, and as I raised the curtain a bit more, the clouds overhead parted, sending a piercing ray of sunlight to my hand, reaching the depths of the ruby on my finger, giving me a warm rush with it. “I should think,” I began, “that your daughters are the luckiest young ladies in this colony or any other, with such tender parents as yourselves.” I turned to them and smiled, then returned to studying the landscape that traveled past us. Wallace had proclaimed his love for me. If he was true, if his heart was gold, their plans meant naught against his passion. My own love for him had blossomed these months of his absence—four now—into great longing that woke me at night with dreams of his visage before me.
The coach stopped before Peterson Cole’s storefront. His SEAMAN’S MERCANTILE shingle hung askew. A hasp and padlock closed the front doors, and the windows had been barred from the inside.
“What’s this?” Mr. Roberts exclaimed. He rattled at the door, shaking dust from its seams. “Open up, I say! Cole! Open these doors.”
Mr. Roberts paced for several minutes before the doors, but no soul approached from inside or out to do his bidding. He pounded the door with his fist, causing Mistress Roberts and I to turn surprised expressions to each other. That was the way a common man might expect entrance, not a gentleman. The commotion he had created drew attention. Two men approached wearing high beaver hats, both dressed in somber but fine apparel. “May we assist you, sir?” one of them asked.
“Mr. Cole. My shipping investor. Where is he? Why is his office closed?”
“You have not heard?”
They drew him closer to the coach, unaware that but a curtain separated their voices from Mistress Roberts and me. She grasped my hand. I tried not to breathe so as to hear it all. “Cole had pushed risky investments—”
Mr. Roberts interrupted. “All investments are at risk.”
“The ship Carapace went down in a hurricane, in sight of the Oswego Carrier. All hands lost, cargo sent to Davey Jones. The Oswego was lost coming into port. Fired upon by brigands in sight of the tower. Cole took his losses and absconded during the night last month. I’ve lost quite a sum, I don’t mind telling you.”
“Lost? All hands? And what, sir, do you know of the Moravia? She was armed as for war. Nothin
g or no one could take her.”
The two men kept quiet for a moment. Then one ventured, “I’m sorry, sir, but I have never heard of that vessel.”
Mr. Roberts’s voice grew tight and rose. “But you are shipping men. I can tell by the cut of your coats. You know her. The Moravia. Think, man. It’s most important.”
“Unhand me, sir. I came to offer you friendly information.”
“Yes, yes. Sorry. And Cole? You knew him?”
“Sorry to say we did. Both of us robbed by that gypsy fiend. If he is ever found he’ll swing from a gallows if he’s not tarred and feathered, first.”
The other man added, “He’s ruined four others in my acquaintance, sir.”
Mr. Roberts entered the coach, ashen-faced and trembling. His mouth dribbled as he called to the driver to make haste to the solicitor’s office. He rushed in, forgetting all propriety in seeing his wife and me through the doors. We made our own way indoors, to be seated in the anteroom for two hours while Mr. Roberts examined the lawyer and his assistants at length regarding his standings, his obligations, and his situation.
Mistress Roberts whispered to the air before her as she had done in the coach. “It seems no reason we shouldn’t go ahead to the dresser’s shop. Our appointment will be lost and I shall not be a welcome client then. He can take care of this business another day. He knew we had a most important errand today.”
I said nothing. I sensed she knew little of his business dealings, nor could she read the disharmony upon his face. When at last Mr. Roberts emerged, he looked as if he had been beaten or had consumed ale all afternoon. He swayed upon his feet, grasping desks and railings for support. He said only, “Let’s be going,” without salutation or waiting for us to proceed ahead of him.
As I reached the door, the clerk, a young man in the office with a deformed shoulder, raised a finger, blackened with ink, toward me. “Are you the Miss Talbot residing with the Roberts family? I have letters for you.” He leafed through a cubbyhole on his great desk. “Actually, one appears to be for you and one addressed through your concern to Mr. Roberts. Would you be so kind?”
“Of course,” I said. The letters in my hands charged the air as if lightning had struck nearby. “Would you pardon my haste in reading them immediately, sir?”
He smiled at the use of “sir” and nodded, pointing with his good right arm to a small chair. I had barely sat when I tore loose the wax seal. The salutation concerned all the typical “most gracious majesty’s servant,” and I brushed through that with my eyes, looking for word of my mother. Then I had to go back and read it again, for nothing in the heart of the letter was from her or about her at all. This was from the king’s solicitor, now master of Two Crowns Plantation among six others in the West Indies, and concerned fighting off French and Dutch usurpers who would steal the land, and in the last phrase of the last sentence, “due to the inconvenient loss of His Majesty Charles the II’s previous conservator, the Right Honorable Allan Talbot.” Inconvenient? How the loss of my pa was inconvenient to the king troubled me not at all. Where was my mother? What of her escape? Had she found help among other plantation owners? Had he not looked or inquired of all the great houses in the parish? I slipped the seal of the other letter, and holding them side by side, at first they appeared identical, naught but the address was different. The one addressed to Mr. Roberts explained more than mine did, but it was significant, in that “with all souls lost” and “the difficulty in defending the separate plantations from villainy, the plantation would escheat to the Crown. No compensation would be made to any claim on behalf of heirs.”
The coachman rapped at the doorjamb. “Miss Talbot? Mr. Roberts insists you make haste.”
“Oh, indeed,” I said, and followed him, having to bow under his upheld cloak. I climbed in, the close dampness adding to the crushed feeling in my heart. Mr. Roberts’s face was so deep scarlet he seemed to be emanating steam from the damp curls of his wig. Mistress Roberts appeared concerned but confused. I bowed my head to be within my own thoughts, hiding my eyes behind the rim of my bonnet as the coach moved.
Mistress Roberts, after a great deal of throat clearing and fluttering behind a handkerchief, said, “May we continue to the dresser’s, then?”
His answer was as much in sputter as it was in words. “What—of course—it cannot be—we are finished—this day—oh rue it. No.”
Her face wore her disappointment as would a child’s. In silence we rode for near an hour. I was not sure when I began to weep, but tears coursed my face freely, thinking of Jamaica. Of Ma. Of Pa and August. Patey. I raised my head to catch my breath and upon seeing me so encumbered with grief, Mr. Roberts himself burst into tears, sobbing and sighing. Perhaps he thought my grief was for his misfortune, though I knew it not fully, only that something had gone wrong with his shipping plans. Mistress Roberts wept also. When we arrived at their home, Mr. Roberts spoke to his wife as if she were a servant, saying, “Bring me port. Plenty of it. I must think.” Then he closed himself in his study room, and while the rest of us supped, he called for another bottle of port.
Serenity and Portia chattered about Wallace, upset that their mother had not returned with samples of silks for a gown. I decided I must write another letter. I must inquire, perhaps through that solicitor, to the other great houses, and find to which my mother had retreated. I read the letters again at my dressing table. I should deliver the letter to Mr. Roberts, as that had been my intention before curiosity overtook me. “I opened it!” I said, startled at myself. The sealing wax was broken, half of it gone. Not enough remained to reseal it. There was no way to conceal that I had read it. The wax was still present on my letter, having been applied so that the bulk of it remained when I pulled the sheet open. I pried it loose with my fingernail, and holding it between two fingers over the candle flame, softened the back of it. Soon my fingers blistered, and I dropped the dab of wax. “Oh, la!” Now it was deformed and stuck to the table.
With a metal fingernail tool, I lifted it again and passed it over the flame, setting it on the ruddy place where the previous seal had been. It looked preposterous but it was sealed, drips marring the outer appearance so the whole thing seemed splattered by someone too unfamiliar with the task to be allowed in the king’s service. Mr. Roberts, in his current state, might not notice. I would explain that in my excitement I had opened the wrong letter first. As I slipped the letter under the closed door of his study, I felt a great tug. I had betrayed my promise to myself not to be false. I tapped on the door.
“Enter.” His appearance had changed markedly. He slouched in his chair, his wig on the desk at his elbow, port stains on his vest and coat, ink stains on his hands, and a great many paper rolls tumbling before him.
I retrieved the letter from the floor. “Mr. Roberts? I have received a letter from Jamaica. I opened it in my haste, before I realized it was addressed to you. I apologize, sir. It seems the current proprietor of Two Crowns Plantation did little other than confirm his presence there, rather than search the unscathed plantations for my mother’s whereabouts—”
“Damn!”
I stiffened. “I am deeply sorry, sir. It was a lapse of my judgment.”
“I don’t want to hear about it. Close the door as you leave, Miss Talbot.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, as a servant would do.
“Wait! Hand me that! We are saved. That’s it. We are saved! Now close the door, there. Be off. Good evening, Miss Talbot.”
I placed the letter before him. My clumsy seal popped open. When I got through the door, Mistress Roberts was at my shoulder, dressed for bed and holding a candle. “What did he say?”
“Only to close the door.”
“But what had he heard? What letter had you? Is this good or bad?”
I had no answer for her. All I knew was that it contained bad news for me. I said, “I know not, madam.” She seemed so sad that I kissed her cheek as a daughter would, and bade her good night.
CHAPTER
16
May 2, 1736
The downstairs maid found Mr. Roberts first. It was noon when she braved entry into his study though he answered not at her knock upon his door. She was to be ever thankful, she told the constable and other men who came at Betsy’s bidding, that as he swung from the beam, Providence had found it expedient that his distorted face turned toward the window rather than the door, or she might have lost her mind.
On the day Mr. Roberts was buried, spring gave way to light breezes and sunshine as golden and pleasing as a still-warm pie. There was discussion about his place of rest, but it was decided that his stature in the community deigned a consecrated plot near the church, for after all, they were not Catholics who purged those who for madness or sorrow ended their own lives. The entire town processed to the funeral.
Goody Carnegie, appearing as sound as any, greeted me with a wave and a smile of recognition.
“Good morning, Goodwife Carnegie,” I said.
“Dearie! What a fine lass you are to remember me, Miss Talbot. How nice to see you, but such a sorrowful occasion. I am grieved at your loss.”
“Thank you, Goody. How goes it with you?”
“Well enough. Well enough.” She rolled her eyes a little. “Quiet, lately.” An oriole chatter-sang overhead, perched on the edge of the church roof.
I smiled at her, seeing in myself a fondness for the poor dear, as I saw her tenderness, her brokenness. “Fair winds, then, and more quiet, for your future.”
“Why, I thank you, dearie. Now, we should get back to mourning our fellow here.”
As we stood alongside the grave and listened to prayers, robins chirruped heartily, larks and finches flittered with abandon, busy at nesting, and a black crow flew overhead, from north to south. I watched it go, rather than concentrating on the coffin below my feet. If I wast a blackbird, the song went, I would fly to the ship on which he sailed, find my love, and bow at his heel. If a blackbird could cross the sea, I prayed that one to Ma while they prayed Mr. Roberts to heaven.