“And on you, Barnabus. I thank you, likewise.”
“I see orders undone and work unfilled. I have much to do.” He bowed over my hand and said, “You are always welcome.”
Lady Spencer allowed her coach to bear me and my trunk to the stone house on a small hill in the center of the Carnegie farm, which was now in my name. She also supplied me with a mix of odds from the kitchen, a roasting pan, a good iron cooking spider with a legged lid, four spoons of differing size, two knives, a pronged fork for meat, and a table and chair.
As I rode in the fine coach down the road toward my own house, I felt fine and well fed, contented with my own good work, happy to be on my own, and assured of my future success. With the price that linen had brought, I knew that if I made more on my loom, in just a few months I could have money to sail around the world if I chose. If I had to winter in the colony once again, I would spend it weaving and spinning, and would have a just sum of money to show for it when the first ships sailed in the spring.
For now, the late summer of 1736 had come in heady abundance. Dragonflies, attached head to tail, came in the window of the coach and swayed to and fro. As I passed Goody Carnegie’s home, I waved to her from the coach. “Hello!”
For a moment she seemed stunned, and then she called out, “Abigail!” and clapped her hands together. “I shall come for tea, dearie!” she cried. “This very day.”
While I had been gone, Goody Carnegie had had the thatching fixed. She walked me around the inside square, pointing to every new bit and tie. “It will be so snug for winter,” she said.
“It will,” I agreed. Her joy at having me there was contagious, and I took some pride in setting out the things Lady Spencer had sent with me. We supped on bread and cheese, ale and honey. When she left I found a niche under the rafters where a small stack of coin could balance upon the sturdiest beam, and not be seen from below. Only someone who knew of their existence would reach into that small place; someone with no fear of spiders.
I spent my days spinning. I sang every song I knew, keeping the wheel running. I swept my little floor twice a day. I cooked on the big hearth, hung my clean vessels on the walls where pegs had been inserted between stones, then went back to spinning. By the time Barnabus arrived with a wobbling, squeaking cart pulled by a large dog, the stone cottage was worthy of being called a house, although I had to stand the door in place, and block the entrance with barrel staves and brush each night.
When Barnabus finished assembling the loom it took up a full half of the house. I reached out to touch it and he and Goody both let out loud noises. “Wait, wait. I have spent these days fixing and waxing it. Don’t ruin it after all that work. It must be blessed before you touch it,” he said.
“Yes,” Goody said. “The weaver must not touch it until we say Beannachd Beairte.”
“I know no prayer called that. Is it a charm?” I asked.
Goody began to speak and Barnabus joined her with the second word. They took my hands in theirs, and with the ring we made, held them above the loom’s bench and treadles, saying, “Fuidheagan no corr do shnath; cha do chum ’s cha chum mo lamh.”
The two of them turned and stared at me. “I don’t think she knows the words,” Barnabus said.
“Three must say it the first time,” Goody said. “I should get Mrs. Boyne.” And she dashed out.
“While we await her,” Barnabus said, “I would ask some water for my dog.”
I fetched the animal water, and gave it a bun from my pocket. My breads were not yet as good as those Goody Carnegie made, but the dog ate it happily.
Once Mrs. Boyne arrived, the three of them went over and over chants to bless the loom again, to bless the cloth I made from it, and to bless the wearer of anything I should sew, until I could repeat them from memory. It was more difficult than learning French, for the words had combined sounds that came not easily from my lips. At least they had a rhythm, I thought. In my mind, I pictured sitting atop the weaving bench, hands and feet busy to the pulse of the chants. That made it all part of the fabric of my mind.
Two days later I had not touched the loom, afraid to begin. I had forgotten the blessing. The odd words would not stick in my mind in the way of the smoothness of French or the static of Latin. I had to fetch Goody, and strolled down the hillocks into the misty vale where a stream at the bottom was fed by the same waters that ran by my wall. Up the side ran a path to her house. And there for the first time, I spied a wee stone upright, in the woods. A headstone. Upon it was carved quite a detailed skull set amidst angel’s wings, round about which grew vines of ivy. Overhead a holly bush shaded it from the oak and beech, and at the other side, five maple trees stood in attendance; this was a secret glen but ten feet round, made just to encircle its habitant. Beyond the maples, a scattering of five other stones, some of whose names had long ago worn away, raked the ground like great knuckles reaching through the soil, barely showing their curved tops above piles of fallen and rotted leaves. The name upon the center stone before me was “Abigail Thankful Grace Carnegie. Born March, 1719, died January, 1721.” She had been born near the same time as I.
When I reached Goody’s house, she was in her garden. Perhaps, I thought, I might take her to the stone and remind her of the dead child. Perhaps she needed to remember I was not her daughter.
“Goody, please come with me,” I said again.
“It is not good for a girl to go alone through these woods and down into that mist. Fairies inhabit these woods. They will not let you go about for long without following you, perhaps attaching to you. Ask me not again, girl.”
“But I have found a wee grave. I think it is your Abigail.”
“That means nothing. This day, and a thousand others, have I held her upon my knee. She walks and wakes and abides with me as much as not. It is only when the wind blows that she goes with them and I must flee.”
“Do you mean, you know she is dead?”
“She’s nothing of the sort. Only buried. That means nothing. Fairies don’t stay buried. Nothing of the sort. I have cheese to press. Come with me or leave me be, but do not pass through that hollow again. Come around the path.”
“Will she come to you when I am there?”
“Abigail, now, do not vex your mother. I have cheese to press.”
* * *
By the first of September, when the air was heady with mists that parted by noon to reveal the earth, I had gotten the stone cottage quite to my purposes. It remained a rude structure, dark inside for I had no candles. Keeping out the rats and birds, squirrels, and a raccoon I had evicted from their longtime abode continued to be a constant source of aggravation. Yet I had a hearth and water, cooking implements, two spinning wheels and a loom. I warped the loom by the dim light from the window. Did my spinning in the doorway and began weaving with memory more than sight.
On Sundays, I walked the length and breadth of the land, avoiding the misty hollow between Goody’s house and this one. I did not consider this my land, rather thought of it as lent to me. However, I was free to make use of the apples, grapes, strawberries, and pears. Goody helped me gather plants for dyes and then I was able to create some browns, one a reddish hue and one a yellow-brown. I collected the berries I knew as bleuets though Goody feared they were poison. I experimented with them in making a dye, and found that I could boil a quantity with bitter apple and while it did little but gray the wool, it put a deep blue shade into my linen. I spun four or five hours a day until I had enough to warp my loom with twenty-yard strands of the dark blue linen thread. Then I set about weaving six plain strands to one blue. It made a pleasing shade, a unique look, and I knew that twenty yards of it would bring me a goodly sum.
On a hot September morning that threatened rain with large, dark clouds, a man and girl came by herding nine goats. They had some water and an apple apiece, too, and stayed a bit to rest before they went on down the road. While they stayed I heard much from him about the road from Concord to Lexington, and
what went on from the Indians about, the danger of an alliance with the French and Iroquois tribes. I gave him five shillings for an older ewe and a younger one, along with a buck.
It was the custom in this country for any laborer seeking wages to walk up and down the lanes looking for work. Goody cautioned me against tinkers and tradesmen alike, for a young woman alone was prey to any who might throw her down, she said. Always say there was a man about. Anyone who lived nearby would soon learn otherwise, but a stranger from some other town might be less likely to hurt me if they thought so. I was not afraid. The goats made a racket when any person approached, and Goody insisted I have geese, too, for that very reason. Soon, during the warm hours my yard was full of the sounds of a country home.
On the last day of September, in the birdsong-laced coolness of an early morn, I pushed the shutters open at the window to find a grizzled face staring in at me. I screamed and banged the rickety shutter back into place, latching the dogs. “Go away!” I shouted.
“I come for to do your work,” the man said. His accent was thick, the r’s rolling like a syllable of their own.
“I have no work for you. Now go. You will wake my husband and he’s a cruel giant of a man. He will break your bones if you wake him.” Only then did I hear the geese awaken and the goats begin their plaintive call that warmed me as if a child called “Ma-ma.”
With shaking hands, I put water in my kettle and stirred the coals. I needed more wood from outside, but I got a flame going and found a burned limb in the ashes to lay over it. I listened at the door and the shuttered window. I had not heard the man walk away, but neither had I heard him come, and the animals had slept through him arriving. I shuddered. His face had been savage—more frightening to me than an Indian in paint and rattles—for he was a wild-haired, dirty, one-eyed tinker with the look of a pirate if not the smell. I put my bread and a pear upon the trencher, and blessed it. The water began to boil. I had no tea or coffee, but some herbs, mint and comfrey and rosemary, and so I poured the boiling water over them. I listened again. Sipped. Took a bite of the bread and one of the pear.
The knock on my door caused the barrel staves that held it to fall from their places. I took the teakettle in hand, my skirt over the handle, intending to throw boiling water at the man, and picked up an iron rod from the fire. “Who is that?” I called.
“I have business with the man of the house, woman. Tell him the carpenter he sent for awaits.”
“He sent for no carpenter.”
“I’ll talk with the husband, Winnie.”
I gasped. Unless a shortening of Winifred, on our island that was a name called to unknown peddlers’ children and stray dogs. “Go away. We have no need for a carpenter.”
“You’ll go awaken him, I think. And you do have need, I can see.”
I beat the iron against the stones to sound threatening. “Go away, sir.”
He knocked again and the door fell in at my feet with a great dusty whomp. He said, “It seems you are in muckle need of a carpenter,” as he stepped in. His huge body emphasized the small room, half taken with the loom, my table and chair between me and him, my back to the fireplace.
I drew myself up and held out the iron. “You have not been invited. Now go on with you.” I backed against the fireplace, the terror of my last moments filling me with desperate strength. “I will not be taken easily.”
He looked about and made out that I was alone. “There was notice in Boston that Miss Talbot on Carnegie Farm had need of a woodsman. I am he. I have come with my son. Because you claimed your man asleep, I’ve waited here on your doorstep for over an hour. Since there is no man about, I’d speak to you.”
There were two of them? My throat went dry so that I could not speak. Gray clouds swam before my eyes. “Get out,” I said.
When I awoke I was outside, lying on the granite stone that made my threshold, while some other man fanned my face with a piece of a ragged woolen cape.
They muttered some strange syllables to each other, and then the younger of them came from my house with a cup of water. I was afraid he would dash it upon my face but instead he dipped his dirty fingers into it and drew a cross upon my forehead and another on my bodice. Pushing them away, I scrambled to my feet. “I say, sir. Stop that. Let go.” I had dropped the kettle and saw with a twinge that it had a dent on one side now. I picked it up, still hot, and took the iron poker and swung it at him. Patience’s words of long ago came from my mouth, “Back away from me, man, or I shall tear out your hair and cut you up for the sharks!” Then I added on my own, looking at the poker in my hand, menacing it toward the younger man. “And put out your eyes!”
At that, both men appeared so startled they dropped their hands, looked at each other, and the old man began to laugh first, carrying the younger one along in his mirth. He laughed more and more heartily, tears rolling down his cheeks, leaving clean streaks. “Well and aye, that’s a fine way for a gentlewoman to talk! It’s a Lowland rebel we have come to serve, Cullah, my boy!”
The young one’s laughter making it hard to speak, he blurted, “You’ve led us to the wrong house, Pa. Lady Spencer told us it was peerage we was to work for. Is this Granuaile or Ann Bonny we have found? Some Campbell witch?”
I laughed not. “Get off my doorstep,” I said, “or you will see how a lady may defend herself if need be.”
The ugly man set down a crate he had fixed with rope and sash upon his back as he bent to retrieve his Monmouth cap, much worn and greasy. That was proof he had been pressed aboard a ship at one time, I believed. The crate seemed heavy, near the size of a coffin, for it spanned from above his head to his knees. The younger fellow carried another nearly its size, with a broadaxe lashed to the side of it. Over one shoulder he had a leathern pouch. I stammered and said, “How would I know you meant to work when you break down a door?”
The older man said, “’Twas not a door but a failure that was knocked upon, and it wouldn’t take more’n a birdie to do’t again.” The younger one then handed me my house cap, the white linen kerchief I wore. I had not known it fell, and embarrassed, I dropped the poker, set down the kettle, put the linen on, my cheeks hot and tears rushing.
The younger man said, “Were you going to put out our eyes with that?”
Pressing my teary face against the corner of my elbow, I went to the door. Although I pushed it into place each night, I had never had to lift it from the ground. It was heavy. “I shall thank you two to put up my door.”
The old man reached down with one hand and lifted the door as if it had been a leaf. “Your ladyship, we are but yours to command.” Then he burst into laughter again.
At that the younger one took off his hat and swept it below a grand bow. “We are ready for our tea, now, mistress, and then we will begin our work for you.”
At that mocking gesture my fear flamed into rage. “Insolent fop,” I said, “you are too late. The thatcher has come and finished, and I am too poor to pay for expansion of the third-floor tower as yet. Before I spend money on the second story, I would make a trip to Jamaica and claim my mother and my estate from the Crown. And before I do that, I would make my coin by weaving the finest linen ever made in this bitter cold, godforsaken colony. Until that is sold, I am too poor to buy coffee, but if I had a single leaf of tea I would not part with it on your account.”
He bristled and his eyes flashed with anger. “Pa, we have worn thin our welcome.”
“Ah, no harm meant, lassie. Here is the letter from the Lady Spencer for our vouchsafe.” He procured a tattered and squashed bit of script from his vest and handed it to me. “Ah. Well. Can you read?”
I opened the seal. “I can, quite well, thank you. In French, in Latin, and in English.”
“There’s a vexation, son,” he said. “A woman who has been to her books will never have any sense.”
It was indeed from Lady Spencer. These louts were her prized carpenters, she said, the older one for any sort of structure, the younger f
or fine custom casework and joinery. Their names were Jacob and Cullah MacLammond. They had set out in the middle of the night to arrive here by dawn, and on her instruction bound by her for fifty pounds’ worth of repair or building on “my home” in Lexington.
I put the paper before my face to hide my expression from them and closed my eyes, trying to fathom the intent of Lady Spencer in combination with the annoyance of these two men. If she had indeed sent them to me, would she have instructed them to treat me as some savage wench? Frighten me? Or was their clumsy jest only that, a greeting en plaisantant; and perhaps they believed I had been awaiting their coming?
The young one said, “Come, Pa. We’re paid whether this Miss Talbot prefers our working for her or not. We mean you no harm, Miss Talbot. Personal charms be—”
“I know not whether you speak of your own charms, sir, or mine. However, you cannot blame me for fright on seeing a man’s hoary face in my window before the light of day. Your own mother might scream at such a sight. Now, which of you is Jacob MacLammond?”
The older man said, “That would be myself, Miss Talbot.”
“And what do you intend to do here?”
“Well, as far as a third-story tower, I doubt fifty pounds would cover that.”
I looked from him to the younger MacLammond, who was still glowering in anger, and decided to address Jacob. “What was the purpose, then, of that mascarade of speaking to a husband?” I shuddered that the French word had escaped my lips, though I knew no fitting one in English.
Jacob squinted with his one eye. The face before me I saw now was not so much born ugly as it was scarred beyond the point of human features, as if a bear or some other devastating catastrophe had raked him. When he spoke, it was evident deeper scars had fixed themselves to bone beneath skin and wrinkled his visage unnaturally; his mouth widened too far on the left side. “Just a precaution if it should prove I had the wrong house. Wouldn’t want to have some fellow come out for me with a pistol.”