He spoke in a low voice, only for her ears. “If I die—and there’s some chance of that—they’ll draw lots for you. Or else all have you.”
She shuddered.
“Best go with Bart to New York,” he added, more loudly. “There you can find a job in an alehouse or passage to England somehow.” He patted her hand, and her tears fell unashamed on his face. “There, there. Charity,” he said softly. “Let’s be off in good style. Sure, I’ve always been lucky. Why should my luck desert me now?”
She bent over and kissed him, heard his muttered, “Take care, m’love. Keep her safe, Bart.” And then Bart was dragging her away and she was over the side and into the ketch, still sniffling.
The sails billowed and they were away on the wind under the fitful clouds. As Charity watched, the great ship seem to shiver and then run out to sea to be lost in the darkness that came across the moon.
She would never see him again, she told herself, the highwayman with the sunny smile. And . . . she had not been even civil to him these last days. But he would not now be lying on the deck in his own blood, dying perhaps, except for her. He had chanced two inns to get her a dress, and except for that they might be far from here, ploughing their way through the wilderness, and he’d be alive.
Tears ran down her face and were salt in her mouth and she knew bitter regret as the ketch sailed on, moving farther from the coast until the trees receded and became tiny things in the distance.
She put her head down on her arms and wept.
BOOK II
New York 1686-1687
CHAPTER 9
Charity was suddenly aware of Bart’s heavy hand on her shoulder. Looking up she saw a small secluded inlet and two men waving at them from shore. The inlet seemed to be surrounded on three sides by dense woods and she shivered as she waited for more musket balls, but none came. Their boat docked and the unloading took place quietly and swiftly, then the ketch was off again into the night.
Charity and Bart were left ashore with the two strangers who had been waiting, and three wagons piled high with hay—and under that hay, contraband. Only two of the wagons had drivers, so Bart, as agreed, drove the other wagon, with Charity on the seat beside him.
“What are we carrying?” she asked Bart uneasily, hoping there was no gunpowder under that pile of hay.
“Bales of cloth mainly,” he said. “I asked. Laces, ribbons. Try to look more like a farmer’s wife, Charity. If we’re stopped, let me do the talking. Just bob your head.”
She looked at him resentfully. He was very cheerful and seemed to have forgotten all about Tom.
“Why didn’t you go to Barbadoes?” she challenged. “I know you have gold for your passage—I saw you counting it.”
“Because I’m wanted in Barbadoes,” he said equably, turning the team of horses to avoid a rock in the road.
“Is Tom?” she asked fearfully, wondering if the light-hearted highwayman was sailing into a death trap.
“Tom? Wanted in Barbadoes? No, he’s never been there far as I know.”
“What did you do that you’re wanted?”
He gave her an impatient look, his dark face suddenly evil. “I killed a man there,” he said and laughed.
She shivered and sat back, sorry she’d asked.
“We’ll go as far as need be to deliver this load,” he said, making his plans aloud. “Then we’ll drift toward the waterfront and find us an inn—that way we’ll be far from the trouble, if trouble there be after this stuff’s unloaded.”
“Why would there be trouble? Nobody saw us, did they?”
“They’ll be selling these goods,” he explained patiently. “And could be some who buy are the king’s men, checking on such as us.”
“Oh,” said Charity.
She sat back. She wasn’t ready for a life of crime.
The unloading was done on the outskirts of town at an empty barn with big rafters and a strong odor of manure. It went off without a hitch, and Bart muttered, “Let’s be taking our leave before there’s any who come in to inspect the goods.” Bart inquired the way upriver before they sauntered away.
“Why’d you do that?” asked Charity, once they were out of earshot, walking down a street just pinking with dawn. “We’re not going upriver, are we?”
He gave her a look. “That’s just why,” he said coldly. “Then if they chance to look for us, it’s upriver they’ll be searching.”
Bart, she decided, was ideally suited for the life he led. He had the true makings of a criminal: he was tough, he was wily, he was strong. Certainly he was strong. After they’d walked for a while she found it hard to keep up with him. Characteristically, he did not shorten his stride for her, but frowning, kept up his pace. She almost had to run to match his step.
At last they reached the waterfront, which Charity found picturesque in the morning sun. Ships of many kinds were anchored in the harbor, which bustled with activity as furs and grain and timber were loaded for export, and rum and sugar from the West Indies unloaded, as well as delft ware and loom products from Holland, and a variety of goods from England.
Charity was still looking around her curiously when Bart, taking her firmly by the arm, led her into an inn, where he engaged a room. He looked at Charity thoughtfully, but told her that he was not going up with her yet. He planned instead to drink downstairs and get the “lay of the land.” So, Charity trudged upstairs and indulged herself in a hot bath, with the door carefully latched. She looked wistfully at the inviting featherbed. She was afraid to nap there, afraid Bart would come in. She shivered at the thought of his big violent hands, the coarse bristly hair of his chest which she had seen when, on their journey, he had pulled off his shirt and splashed water on himself at streams.
She would have to find work quickly. She could not stay with as crude and violent a man as Bart.
When she arrived downstairs, looking fresh and tidy with her hair smoothed back. Charity asked a friendly-looking barmaid about work. She was startled when the girl shook her head and answered in Dutch.
“Her be from the country,” volunteered an old man who sat, drawing on a long pipe. And Charity was reminded that New York had been New Amsterdam not so long ago, and that these people were not English but Dutch.
“I wanted to ask her if she knew where I could find a job,” said Charity wistfully.
“They be few and hard to find,” he answered in a thoughtful voice. “Do ye be a good cook?”
She shook her head, too honest to lie.
“Ye look not strong enough for heavy work,” he said. “Be ye a seamstress?”
Again she shook her head.
“Then best ye marry,” he observed bluntly, “and find some strong young lad to support you.”
Charity turned away feeling hopeless and walked out to the street, determined to find some sort of job to support herself.
The sun blazed down on Manhattan Island, and seagulls and terns screeched overhead as Charity stepped out of the inn. Looking up and down at the yellow brick walls and red tiled roofs and step gables—which Bart had told her were called “crow steps” and were constructed to give the sweeps easy access to the chimneys—she decided the best chance of obtaining work lay away from the dockside, and walked along, hoping for inspiration.
Dutch burghers brushed by, well dressed men, and women in spotless white coifs and wearing big-skirted dresses of fine materials and rich laces, reminding her that Flanders grew the finest flax in Europe. Among the strollers there was a preponderance of blue eyes and fair hair, but there was also—much to Charity’s surprise, for she had thought slavery confined to the South—a spattering of black slaves, just as there had been in Boston, and she realized that just as the Puritans had black slaves, so had the Dutch.
At a cobbler’s shop, she stopped. Her father, Increase, had been a cobbler, she reminded herself. This cobbler, a sunny-faced Dutchman in worn breeches, round as a butter ball, smiled and shook his head, his eyes following her bright hair and t
rim figure as she again went out into the street.
Undaunted, she walked on, observing the shop signs which were interesting metal decorations hanging at the ends of anchoring irons. They were distinctive features of the flat-fronted row houses. Sometimes they were in the form of huge iron figures, sometimes they were large iron letters shaped into the initials of the shop’s owner—or of the residents if it were a private dwelling. She smiled at the sight of the fierce little weathercocks perched atop the steep roofs, and noted with approval the split Dutch front doors, the top half of which could be opened to let in sunlight and air, while the lower half was left closed to keep the children in, the dogs out.
At a baker’s, a hard-faced woman who spoke English turned her away.
“Could be, she’d have been good at the work,” the baker said wistfully.
“Nonsense,” said his plain-faced wife in a resentful tone. “She’d be good only to ogle the men, with a face and a figure like that. Back to the oven—your bread is burning!”
Charity wandered on, past close-set row houses of Holland brick, with their small windows.
It seemed little use to inquire at a smithy, or a wheelwright’s. She turned away, sickened, from the squeals and smells at the butcher’s.
She was about to inquire at a little dry goods shop when she saw that not one but two girls were lolling in it, looking bored. Since neither of them had anything to do, it seemed extremely doubtful that the management would add a third to join them in their idleness. With a sigh, she turned away.
By now she was tired, for she had had practically no rest in two days, but hope rose in her because she had come to a dairy. Although she was unfamiliar with cows, they had gentle eyes and milk was a clean wholesome thing. She thought she might enjoy a season of being a dairy maid.
Thankful that the owner—whom she found shoveling manure in his big spacious stone barn with its massive beams—could speak English, she inquired about work, too honest to pretend she knew anything about cows.
He thought it over, looked at her several times, seemed to consider and then nodded his head. Her heart leaped. She could get away from Bart!
“I’d take ye, if ye’d sign articles of indenture,” he said slyly, “and consent to be bound, so that I’d know ye’d not be runnin’ off with the first likely lad to walk by, leavin’ me with the time wasted I’d spent trainin’ ye.”
Charity’s heart slumped. Bound! To be a bound girl. It had a sad ring to it, almost like slavery. Still ... it might be the only way.
For how long? she asked anxiously. For seven years, she was told, at the end of which time she would receive a calf and a respectable dress and in florins she would receive—
But Charity had already fled. Even the thought of getting away from Bart did not seem so tempting that she would sign away her freedom for seven long years. Seven years! A lifetime to one who was only nineteen.
She had no way of knowing that the crafty dairyman had only meant to bargain with her; assuming she knew that three or four years was the usual period of indenture, and had hoped to strike a bargain at five. Regretfully, he saw the girl hurry away; she’d been a healthy, rosy-cheeked maid, she had, and well spoken even if it was only English she spoke—far different from his own surly vrow. He sighed. Ah, well, times being what they were, perhaps the girl would be back.
Thoroughly upset by his offer, Charity sped away.
The light was fading and so were her spirits, which had started out so resolutely. Discouraged, she plodded back to the inn, her shoulders drooping, her mind filled with worry over Tom’s fate, wondering whether he was still alive. In silence, she walked across the plank flooring and sat down to dinner with Bart, who was getting soddenly drunk in the inn’s public room. Somehow during the day, he had acquired the companionship of a foursome of trappers. The trappers were having a high time in town before they departed once again for their life in the remote forests where they trapped the woodland animals for their pelts. The noisy men were also getting very drunk and one of them kept grinning inanely and pinching Charity’s thigh under the table.
She kept edging away from him and, eventually, he took the hint and began talking to the barmaid, a buxom Dutch girl with a coarse full-bodied laugh, whose big breasts nearly popped out of her low-cut blouse as she leaned over to bang down their flagons.
Charity knew that there was no longer any hope of finding a job this day. She also knew with certainty that Bart had her staked out for a romp in the room upstairs. But she was determined not to go upstairs. She would simply sit at the table all night, seated on the hard wooden bench, and when everyone either passed out or left, she would fall asleep on the wooden table, and try again tomorrow to get a job. She had already decided that tomorrow she would take anything—even as a last resort the seven years’ indenture. Bart’s woman she would not become.
The trappers pressed drinks on her but she shook her head. She must not become giddy. She’d need her wits about her if Bart suddenly decided to drag her upstairs.
Numb with fatigue, she sat silently listening to the men talk. Sometimes she found their conversation interesting. One of the trappers told Bart that Manhattan was an Indian name which meant “the island,” and that the Iroquois had named the Albany area Ska-neh-ta-de, which meant “beyond the pine trees.”
Bart was curious about the Indians. Were they friendly?
Not always, was the reply. They blew hot and cold. Those in the Hudson Valley were the friendliest of the lot. The fiercest tribes, all agreed, roamed to the west of Albany—the Iroquois, the Five Nations.
One heavyset trapper who had been in the area longer than the others said that the friendly Algonquins of the Hudson Valley had given the Iroquois their name, which meant “real adders,” but that the Iroquois called themselves the Ogwanonhsioni, which meant “long-house builders.” They called their land the “Long House,” since that was the shape of their territory, presided over from east to west by the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas.
Bart had heard of the Mohawks.
The Mohawks were so fierce, they had once forced the Delawares to lay down their arms and to dress as squaws. They exacted tribute from the Hudson River tribes. And it was their enemies who had named them the Mohawks.
Bart pounced on that. What did Mohawk mean?
His informant grew grave. The Mohawks called themselves “people of the place of flint,” he informed them, which was the meaning of their musical name for themselves, Kanyengehaga, but their enemies had christened them “Mohawks” meaning “those who eat people”—as indeed they did.
Bart laughed uneasily, but Charity’s smile wavered. Cannibals!
“Ye’re scarin’ the girl,” objected another trapper. “She’ll be afraid to come along!”
Bart gave him a fierce look and he subsided.
Come along. . . . Charity was very tired. She certainly wasn’t going anywhere, she told herself. Furthermore, she intended to stay awake and make certain that nothing untoward happened.
But she was even more tired than she knew. Gradually the men’s voices became a drone in her ears and resting her head on her arms on the table, she fell fast asleep. A furtive pinch on the thigh from the trapper on her right woke her so that she stirred ever so slightly, but she didn’t raise her head from her arms.
Bart was rolling drunk by now, but not so drunk as to miss the main chance; he was having a low-voiced conversation with two of the trappers—the two who were still sober enough to talk—and the drift of that conversation froze Charity’s blood.
They were talking about her.
“That’s my lowest price,” Bart was saying. “I’ll sell her to you for that, no less, to warm your beds in the wilds.”
Charity tried not to move, not to let them know she’d heard.
“Where would you find a woman like this one?” Bart wheedled. “Look at that shiny hair, those round breasts—well, you can’t see them now, she’s lyin’ on the table, but you should s
ee her naked! Skin like silk!” He paused to let them drink that in.
“You seen her naked?” asked one of them eagerly.
Bart’s voice had sneaky laughter in it. “By the riverside,” he said. “She belonged to my friend Tom then, and they used to roll in the grass there. I seen them there more than once.”
Charity writhed inwardly. Bart had watched them!
He must have hidden in the bushes waiting for them to appear!
“But tonight? What about tonight?” cut in a hoarse voice.
“Tonight’s mine,” said Bart in a surly tone. “Tom never’d let me get near her, but tonight she’s mine. Tomorrow you can have her.”
“Where is this Tom?” asked another. “Will he come after her? And try to kill us maybe?”
“Tom’s dead for all I know,” said Bart heavily. “He were bleedin’ like a stuck pig when I saw him last. Anyway, he’s on his way to Barbadoes. If he comes back, you can sell her back to him when you’ve done with her—and make a fair profit!”
“Hell, we can always buy us a white woman from the Indians at their slave market up north on the lake. The Indians catch plenty of ’em, and they sell ’em up there—those that last that long. Some’s real good lookin’. Hard for us to get in there, but we can always make a deal to have one brought out to us by the Frenchies—”
“But this one’s English!”
“There’s lots of English women at the slave market. Thought you knew that.”
“But if the Frenchies have to go in and buy one for you,” Bart pointed out craftily, “you got no guarantee what she’ll look like. And you don’t know how many painted savages has had her. Or what they’s done to her. This girl was a virgin when my friend took her—and that was only a few days ago.”
Charity’s nerves shrieked as they digested it all. She sat tensely, her head on her arms, waiting for them to stop talking about it, so she could make her escape.
“A virgin you say?”
“Yep. And educated. You heard her talk.”
This Loving Torment Page 11
