“Well, tell me what to do,” I said, as she threaded a needle from her petticoat.
“I told you. Be clever. Make everything count. Let me fix your pocket.” When she felt satisfied, she put her own back in place.
Rafe strutted about the room and stood upon a small chair. “Line!” he called. From under his coat, he produced a long black whip. He thrashed it over our heads as if in warning, snapping it on both sides of the line. Someone behind me cried out with pain. Once in line, we trudged up the frozen road. I had felt cold inside the cave but the chill outside was bitter. My feet felt as if every step were trod across hot coals, so great did the pain shoot up from the soles. My arms, my nose, everything became numb and yet pained at the same time. I could not speak. My lips froze in place with the cold.
A collection of small wooden shacks, no more than our slave quarters, sat beyond a small hill. In the midst of the little houses, a clearing held a wooden platform that wore a covering of white dust. All the women stepped upon the platform, and Rafe began that shrill whistle again, time after time, until people emerged from the houses. They collected about us, looking upon us as if we were sheep or horses.
I peered in awe at my feet and the pressing of my steps upon the white stuff. “Patey? What is this?” I asked.
“Frost. It got so cold in the night that the wood froze and the dew upon it became ground snow.”
“Ground snow?”
“The white thing you thought was feathers falling from the sky. Snow. This kind is on wood or the ground. The kind in the air falls to the earth. Sometimes in great amounts, sometimes mere—”
“Quiet!” Rafe hollered. He stepped upon the platform, too. In ones and twos, he along with our other captors sent the men aboard the platform. People crowded up. Some stayed silent, but many jeered and called out. Some of the buyers seemed stern and some appeared gentle. Pious men in black frocks. Lordly men stepped from carriages and rough men came on foot. Men were sold for coins, for pistols, and one was traded for a horse. Then they came for the women. Rafe took Patience’s arm and pulled her to him. “I’ll see what you’ll bring. If it ain’t enough, you be mine.”
I made fists with both my hands, but he left her and took up the arm of an African woman and called to the crowd. “Fresh and sturdy stock! Fresh and sturdy stock! Trained. Hardworking. Who’ll give me fifteen pound for this one here?”
“Let’s see ’er teeth!” a man called from the people gathered.
“Open yer mouth,” Rafe said. When the man was satisfied with the captive’s teeth, he nodded and she was led away. I thought about that Saracen beaten to death under Captain Hallcroft’s orders, and though he had seemed genteel, he had stood there, watching. And August, though he protested, he, too, watched. I shuddered. Why, any sort of man could buy any other man and be kindly or be the devil himself, and the sold person had no voice in his own fate! Black spots swirled before my eyes and I nestled closer to Patience’s skirt. Very soon, they came for her.
Patience held her hands toward me in a gesture of pathos as they pulled us apart, more conjoined than if we had been two halves of a cloth rent asunder. I remembered for a long time, the feeling of her hands pulled away from me, the last touch of her upon my arms. She stood as two men bid for her, and a low and hard-looking one came up and offered seventeen pounds and nine. Rafe held out his hands to collect Patience’s earnings and dropped one of the coins, having to chase it around the planks before it quit spinning. I was incensed that he had dropped my sister’s price on the floor.
When they led her from the step, I followed on her heels. The man who bought my sister pushed me away. “Get back, ye!” he ordered, raising his hand to strike me.
“I am going, too,” I said. Without Patey I would die. I would surely die.
“I bought one. Won’t feed kin, neither; that’s trouble. Get back.” He kicked at me as if I were a dog snapping at his feet.
“Please!” I shouted. From behind me an arm wrapped around my middle and carried me like a peck of flour away from Patey’s side. I did not cry out again, or sob. I put away more feelings. Put them deep. I would give them no satisfaction with my tears.
Patience did not cry or say a word or even make a sound, but went into a wagon with a short top on it which was closed down the way you’d pack up an animal. They crowded two others in with her and drove it away. I watched her go and felt indignity, not longing or sorrow. How little I had known my own sister, my own skin, before our kidnappings, and how she had changed by the brutality and beatings she had suffered on the ship. The strange way she had of treating me, also, for I had not forgot that she had nearly unbrained me at one instance to keep me out of the hands of the Saracens. I had been orphaned indeed. That notion took hold of me while her cart made its rattly way down the path until my heart seemed as if it lay at the bottom of the sea. All was lost.
An hour later, in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and twenty-nine, on the twenty-first day of November, I was sold for the first time to a black-frocked farmer and his wife. Both of them wore high-peaked black beaver felt hats such as I had seen in drawings before. Both were so homely and sallow that under those great dreary hats I would never have known the sex of one or the other were it not for madam’s frilly mobcap. As they pulled me from the platform and pushed me into a cart, I called for Patience. She was long gone away. As were they all.
Rafe MacAlister walked off with his bags jingling, filled with the solid coin of our skins. I had brought him only five pounds.
I looked like trouble, they said.
CHAPTER 6
November 21, 1729
“Resolute Catherine Eugenia Talbot,” I said.
“You’ll be Mary.”
I stared, somewhat dumbfounded, and in a quite ill-mannered way, at the old woman. “I shall not.”
“And what talent have you?” The hag sorted me with her eyes as if I had been a bowl of seeds.
“Talent? I have learnt two songs on the harpsichord.”
“I’m talking about your work, you little heathen.”
“What do you mean?” Now that I was out of the ship’s hold and in a proper lodging, I wanted a bath and a rest, and to have someone get the knots out of my hair.
She poked my arm as if I were contagion itself. “What skills? Are you a laundress? Cook?”
“I have always had a laundress,” I said. “And there were three cooks. One for meats, one for sweets, one for everything else.” I said, “I can do embroidery.” I drew myself up, saying, “Quite fine embroidery,” though my work was barely passable.
“Well, Mary, you shall carry the chamber pots each morning and fill the scuttles.”
“I would never do that. It is filthy. Have one of your slaves do it.”
She continued as if she had not heard me. “Then there’s milking and washing and any other task Mistress requires of you. You shall be allowed one afternoon each week for school. Work not and you shall know the rod of correction. You are right pinched and meager, quite scunging in your appearance. Have you other raiment?”
“Raiment, madam?”
“Where be your other clothes?”
“Stolen away by the same villain who has taken me from the bosom of my family and delivered me into your hands. Ask Rafe MacAlister. Have someone bring me a bath and a fresh gown immediately.”
She stood, grunted, giving me a slight shove, and tromped about the room as if a better answer were hanging on a peg, for there were many pegs, all filled with different hanging fabrics on the walls of this small wooden room. “No, you’ll not have a cloak,” she repeated twice. Then, “Were you raised Papist?”
“No, mum.”
“Is there anything but heresy taught on such an island?”
“As I come from, madam? I do not know what is taught there. I know only that Ma and Pa were both godly and taught us what they knew.” I felt afraid to say more. I knew by the way she asked it that she expected an answer that matched her creed. We held that the
Virgin was pure and that certain of the martyred saints followed and watched over those who loved them, yet the Talbots as far as I knew were Anglicans and not given to claiming any original sins as did Catholics. All my sins were my own creation and had come by way of my invention, of that I would swear.
“So you’ve been baptized? I’ll not have a foundling heretic under this roof. Speak up. Baptized? How?”
“Yes, madam. Baptized, indeed.” I asked myself whether I should say ’twas last spring, or say that I was christened at eight days old—neither of which was true. I hit upon a middle ground. “In the scriptural way, same as you, madam.”
She whirled at me, her hands swirling musty-smelling clothing. “Good, Mary. Now, see if this will fit you.” She tied a rough cap upon my head. She came at me with a gown, whisking my arms into the sleeves, tying it in back but not taking off my soiled things. She gave me a short and oft-patched coatlike casaque. Over that she laid a pelisse which had once been grand, but which was several inches too long. “Oh, that won’t do,” she said. “Much too big.”
The promised warmth of the clothes after these days of cold had an immediate effect and I clutched my arms across my ribs, holding on to the garment lest she take it back. I said, “Perhaps if I also had some good shoes to wear, I would be taller and it would fit better.”
I knew the argument was ridiculous, but the old woman put her gnarled and twisted dog-finger against her lips and pondered it. “No, no,” she said. “If one of the girls has a shoe close to the size—”
“Birgitta!” I heard from another room. “Birgitta, I need you upstairs.”
“Follow me and keep quiet,” Birgitta said. “These people are the Hasken family. Patented and Puritan. You address them as ‘Master’ and ‘Mistress,’ understand?”
“Yes, madam.”
“You call me ‘Birgitta.’ I’m the housekeeper but I am Mistress’s sister, too, full part of this household. I sleep by the door, so there’ll be no running out without my knowing.”
“Yes, madam,” I repeated, as we trundled up the poorest stack of stairs I had ever seen, more rickets than wood and less foothold than the secret stair by the waterwheel. I began to feel warm under the layered coats, yet my bare feet ached from the cold. At the top of the stair, we entered a low-ceilinged room where three beds crowded together in such tight space that there was no room betwixt them. A fireplace that had gone cold came off the chimney. Beyond, the attic was dark and drafty.
“The misses sleeps here,” Birgitta said. “You’ll find the honey pots under there. Mistress won’t allow the girls to the outdoors in this weather. You take ’em to the outdoor privy and dump ’em in the hole. Wipe ’em good and clean, after.”
“Ah, no,” I said. “I told you, I could never do that.” Birgitta rapped me on the shoulder with the rod she produced from a rope at her waist. I gasped in pain. Even the lowest pirates who stole me never whipped me. I cried out, “Do not hit me with that again!”
“Who!” came a child’s voice, from under the beds. “Who is this lady?”
Birgitta patted the bed nearest her. “You hiding again, Lonnie? Come out. This is Mary. She’s to dump the pots. You’re to find your old shoe for her.”
“There’s only one. Mother took one to save for the wall on the new house.” The girl wiggled from under the bed as she spoke. “It’s good luck to put a shoe in the wall of a new house.” She stood taller than I, with a stunted left arm and leg as if she were a doll assembled from two different patterns. “I have a long foot and a short one, a long leg and a short one, a big arm and a little. I even have a big titty and a little ’un. You can’t have my new shoe!”
“No, of course, I would not—” I began.
Fast as the strike of a snake, the old woman brought the stick down upon my forearm. “Don’t talk back to the misses. Best you learn your place quick. Now, Lonnie, give me the old shoe. You, Mary, you say ‘yes, mum’ to everything.”
I was about to insist that Mary was not my name when Lonnie reached under the bed and came out with a squashed and battered wad of leather. I thought it a dead bat and shrank from it in her hand. She shook it at my face and sang, “What are you scared of? Scary Mary! Scary Mary.”
Birgitta took the leather thing and tugged at it. It changed not at all under her hands, and she tossed it at my feet. “Well, there’s one. We’ll find you another.”
Lonnie said, “It has been squashed under the bed for a year,” as she dove back under. She came up with a worn-out larger shoe. It had a hole in the toe.
By the time the candles were put out that night, I had learned much about these people and none of it endeared them to me. The old woman made me wipe out pots and I vomited with each one, worse than seasickness. I was to sleep in a tiny alcove under the eaves, furnished with a fetid mat and a bearskin. I pulled the mat against the chimney and made myself a tent of the skin. I pilfered a rug I found rolled in a corner behind a chest, adding that to my little tent-house. Master and Mistress and Birgitta slept downstairs.
The Haskens’ three daughters ranged in age from twenty-one to fourteen. All of them snored. Lonnie was given to fits where she stuttered and stammered and sometimes fell down, spitting and foaming. Birgitta warned me to keep her from falling in the fireplace and away from all candles and lamps. When she was not taken with fits, she played at braiding and unbraiding Christine’s hair while Christine sat knitting. I longed to have my ma work the painful knots from my hair and I would have asked Lonnie to do mine had this been any other place. Lonnie’s given name was Livonah, but she could not pronounce it. Lonnie found ways at odd times to pop out of a corner or from under a bed and call out, “Scary Mary!” It kept me so uneasy that I wanted to scratch her face. She slept with Rachael and clutched a doll made of wood and dressed in miniature clothing.
Rachael was the eldest, cross-eyed as a baby bird, and made me most uneasy. She had a way of asking, “That, there! That one, I told you, Mary,” without pointing a finger or naming a thing, expecting me to guess which eye she had aimed at something she wanted brought to her. I could not tell what she wanted and I hated the way it made me feel stupid, as if I had left my senses behind on the voyage. I thought of her as a prating, narrow-backed, long-nosed, cross-eyed fool.
Christine was the middle girl, nineteen, plain as her mother and more dull than Birgitta, as if her mind had a hollow place in it which wanted filling. She did nothing throughout a day other than sit and knit stockings. The stockings seemed nice and there were more than enough to go around, so I smiled and remarked to her that they looked ever so nicely made, and that I should enjoy having a pair of the extra stockings to keep my feet warm, as she had a stack of nine or ten pairs in her basket. Christine flew from her chair, squalling, “Mary tried to steal our stockings!” which caused Birgitta to lay me a whipping across the back.
The next day I sneaked up to Christine and hissed into her ear, “You pathetic, defective creature. I would not touch your worm-infested, pox-ridden, goat-shit-filled stockings if I held the devil’s pitchfork in my hand.”
That got me a whipping by Master himself with a leather strap he tethered next to the fireplace and once a week used to strop his razor. Once he had laid five great whacks across my back and legs, he said to me, “You are not an equal in this house; you are a servant. You will never address this household with insult or familiarity. You will never say the name of the father of all evil aloud within these walls. It is my duty and right to train you until you understand your place. It is also within my right to take you to the deep woods and leave you for the wolves. Is this understood by you?”
I nodded that it was, though I could not speak, for the effort of weeping inside myself had left me mute. That night after hauling wood, water, and slops all day, I was sent to my corner in the upper floor without supper. I did not wake until Lonnie poked me with a broom handle the next morning.
They kept goats in a room of the house. The stench was as wretched as the hold of the S
aracen pirate ship. I suppose one might say that that goat room was in its content and purpose a barn, but they had created it by simply building a wall at one end of the house itself. The whole place smelled dismally sharp. Everything I touched and cleaned, even the food I ate, tasted of the tang of goat dung.
The flattened shoe was too tight and gave me blisters. The other one was loose and floundered upon my ankle, causing me to trip. This house where I had been lodged was somewhat bigger than our kitchen, though the whole of it including the fenced yard would have fit into the first-floor ballroom at Two Crowns. I dumped their pots and wiped them with a towel. Not in all my days had I known any such duty, and every time I performed it, I vomited everything I had eaten until at last I fainted and the old woman, Birgitta, dragged me into the house.
Birgitta talked and scolded without stop. Mary, this, Mary, that, until my ears felt as bruised as my arms. I was made to bring in snow and melt it in a pot for cooking and cleaning. Birgitta told me to peel vegetables but hit me for the result, saying I wasted too much. She constantly referred to the single table over which hung two copper kettles and a prong for meat as “the kitchen.” I did not dare ask whether there weren’t a proper kitchen. No home I knew had a kitchen in the house. Too dangerous and hot with all that cooking. Birgitta bade me to clean the master’s boots but beat me for not knowing to rub them with a lamb’s wool bob she kept in a wooden safe with tallow and old candle bits.
One morning Birgitta led me to a shed hard against the house which held a stack of logs as tall as the house and several feet thick. She lectured me in her droning, nasal voice about their last house girl who had pulled the pile down upon herself. I watched a mouse pitter around in a corner, thinking that I wished the whole pile to fall upon Birgitta. I imagined Birgitta aboard ship. I would bet my one good shoe that no becalming doldrums existed which she could not break with speeches about scrubbing, tending, sewing, and milking goats, goats, and goats, buckets and stools. What they ate. What they excreted. When to set the ewes and when to butcher the kids. Everything about goats tied itself to Lent and Easter and Passover, Midsummer Day, and the black days of the moon. How to tell if the goat had been possessed by a demon or spirit of Satan, for goats were easy prey to that Villain. If I asked a question I was as likely to get a rod as an answer, so I did not inquire as to the nature of a goat that made it Satan’s prey, after, of course, unchaste little girls.