Pilgrim Gothic- redux. chapters 1 &2

Reposted to fix formatting screw-ups. Fingers crossed that it works this time around.

I've been writing short stories off and on for several years, and all of them have been set in whatever time I wrote them, with a protagonist who was always, without digging very deep, ME. About a year ago I embarked on something completely different, and a hell of a lot more ambitious- a historical novel. It wasn't really something I planned on doing, it just happened. You might say the story found me, rather than the other way around.

I had some time on my hands, and decided to do some genealogy research. As anyone who has ever done this probably knows, it's an exponential sort of thing, and there are literally hundreds of names in there, most of which are, and will remain, just names. But I stumbled onto something that piqued my interest: James Claghorne and Abia Lumbart of Barnstable, MA- Plymouth Colony at the time, whose first child was born just 3 wks after their marriage. I thought to myself that surely that couldn't be right. Not in Plymouth Colony! They would have been flogged and made to wear the scarlet letter! I figured it was just the calendar confusion that was going on back then (the year used to begin in March, for anyone who didn't know this.) So I looked further and found that the dates were right, and this James was transported here in 1651 as a prisoner of war after the battle of Dunbar in Scotland, and was indentured to his future father in law:

"Plymouth Colony Records, p. 42, state: 'James Cleaguehorne and Abigaill Lumbert marryed the sixt of January, 1654.' Banks, p. 81, says that James Claghorn's time was sold to Bernard Lumbert some time before 1654. 'He retaliated on his master by taking his daughter Abiah to wife.' I have no idea why Banks phrased it like this. They moved to Yarmouth about 1662 and I have found nothing more about her until her death, although Banks says she had 'for some time been mentally afflicted.' This opinion may have derived from the fact that Abia took her own life. The story is told in the Plymouth Colony Court Records, p. 249. Her children, Elizabeth, age 19, and Robert, age 16, had found her in an upper room hanging from the collar beam. This was in October 1677. She was about 43 years old. The records do not even mention her own name - just 'wife of James Claghorne of Yarmouth.'" From the Plymouth Colony Court Records:

March 6, 1654/1655 (GC Presentments by the Grand Inquest, PCR 3:75):

wee present James Gleghorne, and Abia Lumbard, his now wife, of Barnstable, for carnall copulation before contraction. [Paied the fine.]"

Needless to say this stuff really got my attention. I've done a ton of research since and found out a lot more about them, much of it from the diary of another ancestor who was related to James, and married Abiah's cousin. (Don't bother saying it- yeah it's a shallow gene pool. I know, and that's not even the half of it.)

Since I started I've been through Scottish and English and colonial records, translated things out of Gaelic and Latin and French, researched 17th century material culture till I believe I could probably spin flax and card wool, if I ever had to do so, dug out obscure texts on 17th century Algonquin marriage customs, and so on and so forth. Eventually I decided to just start writing, and repair any inconsistencies as I went along.

The thing is, I still feel at sea, and I am, and in uncharted waters at that. I had no idea how hard it would be when I started, that I'd have to watch every word and phrase to make sure it was in keeping with the period (for instance, I just came across the word "sadistic," an obvious and stupid mistake, as the Marquis deSade was not even born yet, but it's a little bit stifling to always be on guard. My usual style is very informal, and probably a little too slangy, so it's been especially challenging and I worry that I've gone too far the other way and it's become stilted. I could really use some ideas, especially when it comes to dialogue, and how far to go with keeping the language authentic without trying to write like Milton, which would be impossible, and ridiculous.

At any rate, I wondered if I could post a few chapters and get some input? I am not overly sensitive, believe me, (I was just informed yesterday that my writing is terrific but my storytelling sucks, and I didn't burst into tears.) but I'd appreciate criticism that is constructive rather than just for the sake of criticizing. What I've been doing is writing from the POV of James and Abiah alternately, in 1st person. I know that can be clunky, and the only thing I can think of that's written that way that wasn't incoherent is Poisonwood Bible. It was also suggested to me that I float between 1st and third person, but I really cannot seem to make that work. Another theory was to use the man whose diary I have as the protagonist/narrator, since I know most about him, but he's just not a sympathetic character at all. The guy was into the slave trade, if that gives you any indication. I have a few things in his voice, where I tried that, but I'm not sure I should even be trying to make him more likable, all things considered, and I really want to have Abiah Claghorne's voice in there. I mean geez, they didn't even call her by name at her own inquest, just "wife of...."

Abiah Lumbart-Claghorne

Barnstable, Plymouth Colony

1649

I have told this story, many times, but no one heard it. My words dissipated like mist, unheard and unanswered- like my prayers. And so it was always others who spoke for me, with words more powerful and lasting than my own. 

 It may seem to you that I barely left a mark on this place where I lived and died, that my footprints were washed clean by the tides as quickly as I made them. Perhaps that is so. But I was here; silent and nearly invisible to be sure, but here nonetheless, treading cautiously among the things we could not say, holding our secrets close as though they were treasures. But now, like so many things we valued, I find that they no longer have any worth, and maybe never did, so I need keep them no longer. They are yours now, to do with as you wish. Whether I am bestowing upon you a gift or a curse I leave for you to decide.

____________________________________________________________

My mother always used to say that my head was like a sieve, that everything just ran right through. She was right, but in saying that as though it were a bad thing, she was forgetting what a sieve was for. It separated bigger things from smaller ones. My memory was like that, letting the smaller, more mundane bits fall through so that the truly significant things could be seen clearly. Perhaps this is why when I look back over the earliest years of my life it's difficult for me to separate one moment or one day from another, or even one year from the next. Most days were just like the one before, and the one that followed. But the moments that were significant, I remember, and my recollection of them is better than anyone else's, because my memory isn't filled up with chaff.

The world that I grew up in was quite small- hemmed in on three sides by the sea and on the other by the darkness of an unknown continent. We were a beacon of light in all of that unknown darkness- a city upon a hill. In the Bible it tells, God said ‘Let there be light,' and there was light. As we are made in His image, I suppose we too sought to illuminate the darkness. But it is not those words of Genesis 1:3 that move me, so much as the verse that precedes it. When I was young I used to slip away to the still wild places: to the vast green salt marshes, or the shore, or the secret glades of the forest where even on the hottest summer day at high noon it was always cool and shaded.

Sometimes I would run barefoot up the dunes to sit and watch the storms roll in over the sea, and at those times I would always think of Genesis 1:2- "and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." The Indians knew this too, even before we came here with our Bibles- that the waters had once covered all the earth until Keihtánit the creator caused the waters to part from the land.

Most people feared the wildness of the country, and did not like to stray far beyond the settled places. The homesteads clustered around our villages like a family bunched before the warmth of a hearth, seeking protection against the wilderness and the dark. But there was nothing strange or frightening out there- not to me. It was my place, and I knew no other. My parents always referred to England as "back home," but while it may have been their home it was not mine. The country across the sea where my parents and the rest of them had come from was as foreign to me as it was to the Indians. England. I understood that I was "English," but that appellation sat uneasily upon me. It was a hand-me-down identity that never did quite fit. For me England was just a word on a map and had no particular meaning to it, and a word should mean something.

The Indians who lived nearest to us were the Pokanoket- a name that meant people of the bays. Their neighbours called them Wampanoag- eastern people, or more accurately- people of the first light. These names made sense. I was of the people of the Land of Eng, evidently. though of course we were not content with them. We changed the names of the people we found here, just as we did the land and the animals, as if we were Adam and Eve and God had charged us with that job. So we named the people Indians, though they were not, and had nothing to do with India. My brother Thomas told me that it was a name borne out of a mistake made by the Spanish when they first landed, as if that made sense of things. Whatever the cause of it, it had stuck, and even the Indians called themselves as such. They called us English, even those among us who weren't. I had always thought that Wampanoag would have been a fitting title for my own tribe, in light of where we'd come from. We were people of the east for certain, having come from beyond the horizon itself, but that name was already taken.

The English name for my place was Barnstable. It seemed to imply barn and stable, of which there were none until we arrived and built them. It did not say anything of the sea or the forests or the lazily winding river or the sharp and lovely fragrance of the green salt marshes. The Pokanoket called our place Mattakeese, which meant cleared fields, because that was where they had always grown their crops. We had built our village among those fields, which had been largely cleared of the Pokanoket by the smallpox and measles that came to them from fishing and trading vessels. It was Alazne, who told me that. She was my closest friend,

In many ways I felt most at home among the Pokanoket. They didn't think I was strange as my own people did. Even my family thought I was unsuitable as a girl and as a daughter, though they did not say so, not until much later. I was always being cautioned to be more ladylike, to think before I spoke, to not draw so much attention to myself, to fix up my hair and straighten my apron. I always felt that I was wrong in some elemental way, that I didn't fit properly. I was sick much of the time as a child, because I was born too early, but it was more than just that.

There were too many things I just could not explain to my family, things that set me too far apart- like the way I could sometimes know a thing before it happened. I didn't speak of this with anyone except for my friend Alazne, but she was Indian, and understood. She was always the one I told my dreams to, or the feelings I'd sometimes get of knowing things. I'd never tell anyone else, as they'd think I was lying, or that I was mentally afflicted in some way, and enough people seem to think that as it is. Worse yet, they might believe me. 'Twas usually silly things anyway, rarely anything that could be of any practical use, although Alazne could sometimes glean more from it than I could. She says that it is a misfortune that I am white. Otherwise maybe I could be a pauwausq, a medicine woman, like her mother Sooleawa, and her Grandmother Nashotah. Like Alazne would be one day. Among my own kind, I would simply be called a witch and dealt with accordingly, so I kept my own counsel when it came to this subject, as I did so many others.

I met Alazne the night her mother came to help deliver my sister Martha, when I was five years old. I was very excited to be up out of bed in the dead of night that way, and by all the activity and visitors and getting a new baby. I wanted another sister, like Mary. Mary was pretty and blonde-headed, with big blue eyes. She looked like a doll I'd seen once in Boston. I'd cried and cried for that doll, and I'd cried even more when my cousin Elisheba told me gloatingly that her father had bought it for her. I'd pulled her hair and got a whipping. But when Mary and Joshua were born, I had something to gloat over myself. Elisheba wanted a baby sister more than anything else in the world. Soon I'd have two of them, and she'd have none. So I was in a very cheerful sort of humour that night.

My father had taken my elder brother with him and gone to Grandfather's. It was only women in our house, except for my brother Joshua, but he was only two. Father tried to take him to the inn with them, but he held onto my leg and cried. Father got angry and said if Joshua was going to cry like a girl he could stay behind with the women, and then he slapped him hard and stomped away. I had to hold onto Joshua in lap and soother him a very long time before he'd stop screaming, and when I looked up there was another little girl sitting next to me.

I'd never seen her before, but we had just finished moving there from Scituate, and I didn't always know all of the people I saw, the way I had before. I knew she was an Indian girl by her hair and the things she was wearing, but that was the only way I would have been certain. I reckoned she must be the daughter of the midwife who had come. She was an Indian too.

The girl was watching me and Joshua curiously, and I was embarrassed that she'd seen my brother pitching such a fit. She didn't seem to mind though. She took off one of her bracelets and shook it where Joshua could see. It was made all of shells, and it rattled prettily. Joshua stopped crying right away and reached out for it. I was surprised when she let him have it, thinking that maybe she didn't know about babies and how they break all of your things and it's your own fault for not being more careful in the first place.

"He'll tear that up," I told her.

"He might," she said, like it didn't matter, "I won't let him eat it." She spoke English like a regular person, only more carefully.

Joshua was shaking the bracelet and laughing, like nothing had ever been wrong or ever would be, though I could still see the red shape of Father's fingers on the side of his face. It showed up a lot more after he was quiet and the rest of his face went to back to the regular colour.

"He's a pretty baby. Is he your brother?" she asked me, reaching her hand out to tickle Joshua's back. He'd always liked that, and I wondered how she knew.

"He is. He's a twin. The other one is Mary. She's asleep in the upper room with the servant girl. I have an elder brother too- Thomas. He went away to the inn with my father," I explained to her.

"I don't have any brothers and sisters," she said, "I have cousins who are twins. They're look the same twins though."

"Joshua and Mary look just the same, except for Mary being a girl." I wanted to let her know our twins were as special as her own. Besides, it was true, They did look alike, at least the parts of them you could see most of the time. People often confused the two of them.

Joshua knew we were speaking about him, and he looked up from the beads to smile at the new girl. I was surprised to see that. He was shy of people, strange people especially. He usually hid his face in Mother's skirts and cried when someone new came. It made Father very angry.

"What's your name?" the girl asked me.

"Abigail Lumbart. I'm called Abiah though."

"Oh. I'm Alazne. I'm five years," she said to me. She did not give a surname, but the Indians didn't usually have any unless we gave one to them, "My mother is Sooleawa."

"I'm getting another sister," I told her. I was quite sure of that. "I'll have five years next month," I added, wanting her to know I wasn't an infant like Joshua. People always mistook me for being younger where I was so small and scrawny-looking. Alazne was tall, and seemed much more than five years. I thought that she was very pretty.

"Sisters are good to have," she nodded. "I'd like to have some. But my father went away two years ago, and my mother will never take another husband, or that was what she said. So I won't have any. I have many girl cousins in our house. They're netukkusq to me, the same as sisters, but they're all big. Maybe you could come to our house and see me," she suggested.

"I would like that," I said, " But they don't let me go places very much, because I have a delicate constitution."

"What is that?" she asked, wrinkling her nose at the long words. "It sounds bad. Is it like smallpox?"

"I don't think so. I take sick if I go abroad in the cold. I was born too early, and Thomas says my lungs weren't finished yet when I came out, so they don't work properly," I explained.

"Oh. My little cousin Kenecompit is that way. He cannot run about with the other little boys or he can't breathe and he sounds like the wind coming through a hole. Mother makes tea for him to drink when he gets that way."

"What kind of tea?" This was just what was wrong with me, so I was curious. Thomas always said I sounded like a rusty hinge, but the Indians did not have doors.

"It has different things in it: mamatchwuttamagon, weenwásog, sasôksek- different things. I can make it. My mother is pauwausq. She taught me."

I didn't bother to ask about those long words she'd said about the tea. "What is pauwausq? Is that a midwife?" That word seemed manageable.

"It's much more than that," she said, rather importantly I thought.

"Oh. Is she like a physician?" I asked, hoping this wouldn't insult her too. I didn't want her to go away. A line formed betwixt her eyes as she thought about my question.

"I think so, yes. A physician heals people who are sick, yes?"

"Yes. But our doctors are all men." I had never heard of a woman being a doctor, or of one being in class of profession. But the Indians weren't Christians, and they had their own ways of doing things, so perhaps this was not unusual- a lady physician.

"That is what I will be, when I'm big," Alazne informed me proudly.

"I'm going to be a mother." I said in reply.

"My mother is a mother," Alazne said. It seemed like sound enough logic. I did not know of any women who had jobs, except for Goody Hinckley who taught at the reading school, but that was not a genuine job, like being a physician, or a merchant like Father. But of course Alazne's mother was an Indian. Their women did all kinds of things that ours did not. I had seen them out harvesting their fields and milling corn. My Mama had a garden, but she didn't grow corn or grain in it. My father and brothers did that.

"Maybe you could come here and see me," I said to her, scared she'd say no. I didn't have any friends besides my cousins and sisters. The other girls didn't like me, though I'd never known why. But Alazne was nice, and seemed to like well enough.

"I'd like that," she said, and then she smiled and squeezed my hand and I had my first friend.

After that, Alazne often tagged on with her mother, who was a frequent visitor to our home because I was so often sick. In those early days when we were new here we had no physician among us, so Sooleawa saw to our people as well as her own. Oftentimes Alazne would stay behind with me after her mother left, and would sit with me so I wouldn't be alone while my mother was busy with running our house, and my brothers and sisters were at the reading school. My brother Thomas or my sister Mary would always come to my bedchamber to teach to Alazne and myself what they'd learned of a day: 2 x 2 is 4, 2 x 3 is 6; and how to answer the catechism questions-

"What is sin?" Thomas would ask of me.

"Sin is a transgression of the law," I would say back to him.

"What are the wages of sin?"

"Death and damnation."

" How then look you to be saved?" was next, and always seemed to me a very personal question, with many possible answers, but only one answer was the right one, just like the math problems.
" Only by Jesus Christ," was that answer.

After that, it got more difficult, with questions about baptism and ingrafting, and the answers were so long they left me out of breath at the end if I got through them. Alazne was better at it- she was smart and she always remembered. Before we came the Pokanoket had had no written language in the way that we had- so they were well-accustomed to knowing everything to heart.

The school lessons were one reason Sooleawa left Alazne with me so often. Sooleawa had said once to my father that the time of her people was passing away, as all things did sooner or later- the sea drew back after the flood tide, the sun reached it's high point at noon and then declined until it fell behind the mountains to the west, and the time of the Pokanoket was likewise waning. One day the same would happen to my people- it was the way of things, and it couldn't be changed any more than the course of the sun or the tides. Our tide was waxing, but that would not be the case forever. I had been unable to hear what, if any response my father made to that.

The Indians had an expression they used about how one shelter kept a man dryer in a storm than a hundred complaints- rather like our own adage about lighting a candle and not cursing the dark. My own people were the coming storm, and the things Alazne learned from us were the things she would need to weather it, to help her people weather it when Sooleawa and Nashotah were gone and Alazne was pauwausq, as most people assumed that she would be, though it was not a hereditary office the way being the Sachem was. No one ever told me any of this straight out- it was just a thing that I knew. And whatever the reason, I was glad Sooleawa put her daughter with me to be my friend.

Alazne taught me different sorts of things than what came from the school, like the Massachusett words for the stars and trees and animals around us. She taught me the purposes of all of these things, and the way they all fit together. These lessons were much easier for me to grasp than the abstract ideas of justification and sanctification and election in the catechism. I knew those things were important but it was much easier to remember that weenwásog were the wild onions that sprung up in our ploughed fields and that the soup made from them was wonderful when I had a cough; I could smell the new, early spring-green scent of them when I said the word. I could remember that medasibs were the pretty black and white loons, whose voices I loved to listen to on summer nights; and muckko-wheese was the bird we called a whippoorwill- the Indian word was much more like the voice of that shy brown bird that was so often heard, but rarely seen. A bird just in general was psuk, a sound like the rustling of a flock of them taking to wing when you startled them in the woods. The word for meadow was wompashkeht- a combination of the word for bright light, and a word that meant growing- this made such perfect sense it was easy to recall.

My brother never could keep it straight and gave up trying to learn very early on. He said it was senseless to have a dozen different words for rain and even more for storm, and no one could be expected to remember all of that. Rain was rain, wind was wind, and a storm was a storm, and all a person needed to know was to go indoors when they came. But he was wrong- it was perfectly sensible: Nashquttin was the cold and deadly storm from the northeast- coming in swift and angry to break up ships and bring trees crashing down onto the roof, while sowanīsshin was the gentler storm that came out of the south on warm, steady, sweet-scented winds: softer, like the lovely swishing sound of the word. These were not the same things at all. And how could it not make sense to call the months after things one could see, like the Herring Moon, or the Acorn Moon. The little silver herring always ran thick in April, and I could see that the acorns fell in September for the animals to fatten on for winter, just as we spent that month preparing for the harvest so we'd have food through the winter. September was from some Latin word and had no meaning to me, and our months did not really divide the year properly anyway. They were always adjusting the calendar back in England and Rome and faraway places like that. The Indians did not have to adjust the moon, which did just what it was supposed to do, faithfully, year after year.

In the summer time I was mostly well and could attend school, but it was hard because I was always behind the others despite the best efforts of my brothers and sisters. I would follow along as best I could, sharing a little horn-book with Mary, trying to be small and unseen so I would not be called upon to give any answers. Even when I knew what I was supposed to say I would get anxious and muddle it and then everyone would look. Lucky for me I was good at not being seen. I could go perfectly still and blend in with the things around me, like a chipmunk when a hawk passes over. It was a very useful skill to have, not just at school, but at home too. Especially at home.

After they let us loose from school I would go with Alazne wherever she went and that was much better. My mother was happy to let me go because I always brought back things that were useful- quahogs and oysters from the estuary, bayberries to make candles and scouring rush to clean the pots from along the shore, cat-tails from the ponds and low swampy places to make baskets and poultices, diverse herbs from the marsh and forest and the bogs where the best ones grew- like the strange little sundew that ate bugs. That one was good for my asthma and so I fed them when I had leisure. I brought sassafras leaves to thicken Mother's pottages and soups with, and the bark of that tree to dye cloth a pretty yellow-orange colour like marigolds; I brought her poke greens in the spring to make salads and pokeberries in the late summer to mix with alum and make the crimson dye that I loved so much, though my little sister Mary said I should not wear that colour with my red hair. My hair was not red. It was auburn and Mary knew that very well She just liked to be contrary about things.

Often we would go to the Pokanoket village and Alazne's mother would teach us about the plants we'd collected and how to prepare them. She let us come with her sometimes when she tended to people's ailments if it wasn't serious and she showed us how to set broken bones and how to treat cuts and punctures to keep them from festering, and the medicines to give children with catarrh, or elders with rheumatic joints. No one objected to me and I was even allowed to help on occasion. Sooleawa said I had a gift for healing and she wasn't the only one who thought so. The mother of the mugwomp- he was the one in charge of their particular village, told Nashotah she liked me best. She was so old her skin felt like wrapping paper, as if time was wearing it off of her. She had rheumatism, which was easily treated, but she also took spells where she forgot everything and she said that I was the best one to help her remember because my spirit knew how to reach out to hers and draw it back. Nashotah took note of that and started tutoring me as she did Alazne- not just at healing but other things as well, like how to dream and how to remember the things that came to me and divine what they meant.

She showed me how you could sometimes see what was inside of people if you were patient, and knew how. It wasn't the way people thought when they spoke of witches and sorcerers being able to do that- it didn't come in words, or images or even in feelings exactly. It was all of those things, but none of them. It was as if there were little fragments of thought and memory and feeling that people let fly loose, and I could sometimes catch them. I would let everything else fade out and just wait until I felt myself connect with something, the way you feel a fish tug at your line, and then at just the right moment I would close my eyes and pull it in. I didn't try to think about what I reeled in, I had to just wait quietly and let it fall into place. It was much like trying to remember a dream or catch an eel. If you tried to grasp it too hard it would slip away. Sooleawa had found out about that and had made her stop teaching me such things, She said that I was just a little girl and that it was dangerous to teach me such powerful things; and that if my parents found out they might be angry and frightened and not let me come back anymore. So that was an end to it, for the most part.

I still practiced the things Nashotah had taught me, with Alazne's help and without it, and I did well enough on my own. Even my father listened to me when I told him it was going to storm, or that there would be a frost the next morning, or where to find deer and fowl to hunt. I made teas and poultices for the rest of them when they were sick or hurt- and for myself, and as I got older our neighbor Goody Russell, the midwife, let me help her sometimes. So I was more than just the wayward daughter, the troublesome invalid- I was the secret pauwausq of my family.

I was also the one amongst all of us who could predict my father's very unpredictable temper- I knew when his anger was going to just blow over like a summer rainstorm, like sowanīsshin; and I knew when it was going to keep swirling round and round until it broke into a howling storm of shouting and violence like nashquttin- the nor'easter. You just had to sense which direction he was blowing in from. When I could see he was dangerous I would go to my elder brother. I would lead the younger ones out to the Pokanoket camps and Thomas would stay behind with our mother. He was afraid to leave her all alone with our father on those nights- though on the very worst of nights Mother would come with us and I would lead all of us along the trails through the dark.

It's a strange thing to say, but I liked those nights when we went to Sooeleawa's family, all of us together in their little round wetu house in the warmer seasons, or in their long house at the winter hunting camp. Both sort of houses were made the same way, with a frame of bent saplings covered in bark and reed mats, but the wetu was bell-shaped, while the long house was shaped like a loaf of bread and big enough to hold the entire family, with aunts uncles and cousins and such. It was nice there- safe and warm even in January, much warmer than our own home. We would stay there wrapped in soft furs and the comforting scent of sobaheg cooking over the fire, eating roasted chestnuts and pumpkin seeds or fluffy parched corn. If the weather was fair you could fall asleep watching the stars pass across the smoke-hole in the roof. They built their beds like cots, with boughs and mats across a low wooden frame, with a deerskin for covering and heavier furs in winter time. They were very comfortable. I always shared a bed with Alazne, and we would whisper stories to one another till we fell asleep. My father never came after us there, never tried to take us home as he did when we fled to the neighbours. We were safe there.

As I got older I began to see why my father did not go to the Pokanoket camps unless he had to- he was not well liked there. He sold liquor to them on credit and then took land from them to pay the debt; he tricked them into signing contracts that said one thing and meant something else entirely. The Indians did not understand my father's convoluted way of doing things because words were important to them. Spoken words had power and it was very important to use the right ones and to use them truthfully. "Wunnétu ntá," they would say when they had spoken their piece. "My heart speaks the truth." They were, with a few notable exceptions, people who said just what they meant to say, and meant just what they said. It was hard for them to accustom themselves to a man like my father who was so sneaky, and who used his words like a hunter used rancid meat to lure animals into a snare.

I had heard them say the chant against Mattanit, the spirit of evil when my father came near. Others made prayers and offerings to a spirit they called Monéquand when my father had cheated them, hoping for some redress. This was a spirit they had not known about until the coming of the English. Some said it had always been lurking here and we had conjured it up from it‘s hiding place, while others believed that it had followed us from our own place across the sea. But wherever they thought Monéquand had come from, they knew that it was the only force my father respected enough to take heed of, and I knew they were right. On Sunday my father went to meeting and he prayed to Jesus, and he listened to the sermons with outward devotion, and he read his Bible every night and knew it nearly to heart. Father did these things to be seen of men, as Jesus said in the Book of Matthew. Most people saw only these outward things, but I could see deeper. I saw into the hidden places of his heart, where he had built his own altar to worship Monéquand, the money spirit.

I knew about my father's cruelties and sharp dealings, and the way he treated my mother, who loved him desperately. The fact that he did not love her back only seemed to make her love him more. He loved my real mother, mine and Thomas's mother, who had died when I was born. I think that many of the good parts of my father were buried on that stony hill in Scituate along with her, and often I wondered if there was any way to dig them up and give them back. I would have liked to be able to do that for him, because for all of his faults he was still my father and I still loved him.

For many years I was the one among all of us who he the liked best, the one who could soother and calm him and intervene for the others- I think because I was so like my mother. Father was the only one who didn't look uneasy when he said I was like her. When I was sick, or upset or sad he could be very kind to me. He worried and fussed over me and I knew I got away with too much. Everyone said so.

All of that changed when I was fifteen. A lot of things changed that year. No one ever spoke directly of what had happened, of what I‘d done. My father made me promise to keep silent. He said that the entire family would be ruined if it ever got out that I had done something that was such a terrible sin and abomination. So I locked it away with my other secrets and tried to forget, and most times I could. I was sent away to my Aunt and Uncle in Boston for a long time afterwards, because I was a disgrace and my father didn‘t want to have to look at me, and because the family thought it would be best, and when I returned everything was different.

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James Claghorne

Durham England-Barnstable

January 1650

I was one of over 5000 prisoners taken during and just after the battle at Dunbar, and one of fewer than 3000 to survive the 120-mile forced march to Durham. I never have been able to explain just what that was like, that long and terrible walk across a country I didn't even recognize. I felt as if I'd spent the entire war like a blindered horse, staring straight ahead at what was in front of me, seeing nothing else. Suddenly, I was looking around, and I found it hard to understand what I was seeing at all. Miles and hours and days went by, and I saw nothing that was any way familiar. It was a ravaged and alien landscape, devoid of any form of life save the carrion birds that shrewdly followed in our wake. The crops had all been burned, the buildings had all been razed, the people had all fled. If we came across a domestic beast of any kind it was invariably dead, and usually rotting in a stream or a well to poison the waters. Geographically, I was less than a hundred miles from my own lands, and I had spent much of that summer on, or in the vicinity of that same road twixt Berwick and Dunbar, doing my part to create the desolation I was so stupidly amazed by.

In truth, the word create doesn’t seem quite right, unless you consider ashes, carcases and rubble to be the end products of some worthwhile creative endeavour. In every direction, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing and no one. We were walking through a wasteland- a land so broken I couldn't imagine how it would ever be restored. We were walking through the valley of the shadow of death. As I looked upon this scene of endless ruin, I came to a jarring and unpleasant realization: those scorched fields and tumbled storehouses were the only material evidence of my having been alive on this earth. They were my Sistine Chapel, my Great Pyramid. They were nothing less and nothing more than my life's work. All along that march- the thirst, the ever-present stench of death, the hunger, and most of all the sheer misery of trudging through that blighted landscape- it was Almighty God giving me an illustration of how much the worse His creation was for my having inhabited it.

This point was not lost on our captors, who had made their way up the very same road a month or two earlier, famished, exhausted, and in constant fear of being set upon by the enemy, by me. The tide had certainly turned. The English who were guarding us had nothing left to fear, and they had such a gross oversupply of everything they couldn't carry even half of it, having captured the entire baggage train of our army. We stood there watching in starving and murderous silence as they gathered up all the excess and put the torch to it. We'd been made to scavenge the wood for this bonfire, no easy task in a place where everything burnable had already been burnt to a crisp, and then burnt again. Among the spoils of war was an enormous amount of whisky, so our guards were in a very festive humour as they basked in the warmth of our deprivation.

During those first few days after the battle already becoming known as The Run of Dunbar, those of us who’d been captured had immediately clustered into smaller groups based on one kind of affinity or another. It was the same way we’d been organized during the fighting, or most of it. Men from Atholl sought out others from Atholl. Those from East Lothian or Glasgow or the Borders found others of their ilk, Campbells or MacLeans and such like bunched up with their kinsmen. I had likewise found others of my own kind. Andrew and Alasdair were there, along with William and Rory MacDonnell from Glencoe, who were my first cousins. I could have got Andrew, Rory and myself out of there with no trouble, but Alasdair and William were barely able to walk, let alone run. I couldn’t leave them there. I did consider it, because I knew that neither of them was likely to survive being marched all the way to Berwick, whether I was there or not. At that time Berwick was as far as I thought we were going. The practical part of my mind did the arithmetic, and knew that it was better to lose two than four- but then I would imagine myself explaining to their wives and their mothers how I’d left them there to die, and I just couldn’t do it. Aside from those two, there were others who had been put under my command those last few days who were likewise in no shape to go gallivanting into the hills- Mackenzies and MacLeods mostly. Some I knew, some I didn't, but I was responsible for all of them to one extent or another.

I had considered it a joke, albeit a bad one, when I was suddenly made a Captain. I still wasn't entirely convinced that I hadn't been promoted by mistake, but nonetheless there I was. I couldn't just cut and run. So I pulled Andrew, Rory, Angus MacLeod, and Brian Ross aside. Brian and Angus had both been put under me as Lieutenants- fellow beneficiaries of the slew of battlefield promotions on Doon Hill. They had been captured in the same manner as I had- trying to gather up their own people. Both were older than I was, and neither was likely to take orders from me, but I thought we should all get together and try to hatch some sort of plan, or at least bring some semblance of order to our predicament. Since I'd most recently held the highest rank, I did the talking, laying out the facts of the situation as I saw them. I told them that anyone too sick or too injured to escape probably would not survive the march, no matter what anyone else did or didn't do, and there was no sense in all of us ending up dead. Rory had actually laughed at that, declaring with perfect confidence that if they meant to kill us they'd have done so already.

Rory MacDonnell was not a stupid person, far from it. He'd been studying the law at Oxford when the war broke out, having already graduated with honours from St. Andrews. He had commanded a troop of mounted infantry ever since Inverlochy and done so brilliantly. So I was unsure of how to respond to such a patently stupid remark from him, and I was horrified when Andrew seconded it. I tried again to make things clear.

"They are doing it already Rory, can you not see that?" I gestured around us, but he didn't look. "If they were only concerned with lightening their load they could have left those stores lying here. They're under strict orders to get us out of Scotland, and away from whatever might be left of our army, as swiftly as possible. You heard them given those orders. So why are they wasting time setting fire to hardtack and salt-pork?" I demanded. My cousins both just stared at me, though I could see that Brian and Angus understood the significance of that bloody fire well enough.

"What have you had to eat these past few days Rory? Anything?" Rory looked at the ground, and Andrew did likewise when I posed the same question to him.

"Never mind, I know the answer. You've had nothing, nor will you have anything. None of us will. That's the whole purpose of yon bonfire and you both know it. You were all standing there when I asked their fucking officers about rations and you all heard what that fat bastard said to me." Even Rory was sobered by that. The fat bastard in question was an English quartermaster- never trust a fat quartermaster nor a fat priest I say, What he'd said to me was that his orders were to see that his own troops were amply provisioned, and that was where his responsibilities began and ended. He’d then given me a triumphant smirk and suggested we feast off the fat of the land. He'd then turned on his heel, chuckling happily at his own wit. I was left standing there like a servant who‘d been dismissed. It was hard to believe anyone could have misunderstood that.

After a moment or two Andrew finally spoke up. “I heard him. But James...they can’t just let us all starve to death. Why would they go to all of that trouble when they could just kill us outright, as they did the Irish at Drogheda and Wexford? It doesn’t make any sense...”

Brian cut him off. "This is not Ireland, and we're not the Irish. There'd be too much outcry over it if they slaughtered us wholesale that way. Secondly, that quartermaster can submit requests to his superiors for money to feed us, and he and his can divide it betwixt them, and no one is going to know the difference, let alone care. The powers that be were worried over powder and shot and artillery pieces and hard currency when they captured our supplies- not biscuits. I doubt anyone will realize they had enough to feed an entire army and destroyed it for spite, which brings me to my next point. We kept them bottled up there at Dunbar for over a week hoping to starve them into submission, and I don’t know about your lot, but we’ve been slashing at their supply lines all summer long. They’re paying us in kind. And make no mistake, this isn’t like getting snatched up for a little reiving by your neighbours. Oliver Cromwell isn’t going to ransom you to James Mor for a few head of cattle,” Brian said markedly. Apparently Brian and Angus had been chatting together. Shane, Andrew and myself had been grabbed by Angus’ father during a rather ill-advised raid a few years prior, and the MacDonalds had parted with some rather choice beasts to get us home. Andrew looked to me.

“He’s right. They’re taking us to England to be tried, possibly for treason, and they may well hang us. They mean to make an object lesson of us, make no mistake about that. If we make it to Berwick, ad that's by no means assured, the best we can hope for is to be transported or imprisoned, though I believe I'd rather die quickly at the end of a rope than slowly in the Tolbooth or Barbadoes. That's what's coming, unless we can get away." I could see that I finally had Rory’s full attention, and Andrew was looking suitably frightened as well- his wife was due to have their first child at any moment. He had no interest in travelling to the Indies. So I made my offer: I would stay behind with William and Alasdair- who was Andrew’s brother in law. Rory and Andrew would go. I was the one who’d been put in command, it was my responsibility to see the thing through- I sill had some rather high-flown notions about duty and honour and that sort of claptrap at the time. What Brian and Angus wanted to do was for them to decide, but we would look after one another's people on both ends, and those of us staying would create a distraction for the escapees.

There was a lot of hemming and hawing, but in the end, Rory and Brian decided to go. I managed to convince Rory that it would kill his mother to lose him and William both, as they were her only children. Brian would not only destroy his immediate family if his lands were forfeit at a trial, but do serious, if not irreparable harm to all of Clan Ross, and more to the point, the few of his people who'd been captured were still able enough to run. Andrew said there was no way he could go home and tell his wife he'd left her brother to die, nor was he anxious to face my sister and his mother and tell them he'd let me stay behind in his stead. He was absolutely intractable. Angus had two brothers in law and a nephew there who were too badly off to go and he wouldn't leave them. Andrew was only eighteen and had some rather lofty ideas about things himself. So that was that.

It was almost too easy, something I thought about often later on. Those of us who'd chosen to stay staged a fray, shoving and shouting angrily at one another in Gaelic, which none of our captors understood. What we were really shouting was orders. Rory's bunch went first, and we pulled the same stunt the next night to cover the exodus of Brian with his Rosses and Mackenzies. It was fortunate we acted when we did, because the English took on reinforcements the next day and started keeping watch over us in earnest. There were a few more escapes after that, but most of them were unsuccessful and before long most of us were in too wretched a condition to even try. Alasdair and William were both dead before we ever got to Berwick. Angus MacLeod died two days after we got to Durham. I owe my own survival to a simple twist of fate. Some might call it Providence, but that would imply I was in some way deserving of a reprieve, and I know that I wasn't.

We'd been near Corstorphine not long before Dunbar, and I had managed to rush home to see to my sister and to get her out of there. I think we all sensed the impending disaster. Isobel & I had quickly collected what movable property we could carry and divided it betwixt us, and then I sent her to the comparative safety of Slèite in the company of some of my father's tenants and my cousin Alan, the youngest of my Uncle Alasdair's four sons. Alan was naught but fourteen, and I was glad of any excuse to send him out of harm's way.

I had meant to secure my part of our valuables somewhere after leaving Corstorphine, not that it was all that much, but somehow I just never did it, and so I rather accidentally carried everything I had with me to Dunbar, Because of that seemingly minor oversight, later on when I needed it I had something to bargain with: for water, for food, for my life. I had expected we'd be taken to Berwick and put on trial there, but instead they took us all the way to Durham, where were immediately locked up in their ancient and beautiful Cathedral, and then left there to starve. Ostensibly, the guards were to provide us with food, fuel, and other necessities, but what they really did was to sell these things- either to us, or to the local population. I had some jewellery and things that had belonged to my parents, and some money as well- in English pounds, fortunately. So I was able to keep Andrew and myself supplied with at least a little bit of food and water.

Andrew took sick after about a fortnight, and was dead within days. After that I was on my own. Most everyone left was on their own by then, and the situation had turned very ugly. I was exceedingly discreet in my dealings with the guards, and took great care to never let so much as a crumb pass my lips where anyone else could see me, but I'm sure people knew I had some sort of means in my possession, if only because I was in a slightly less desperate condition. I slept with one eye open and my back to the wall the rest of the time I was there, when I slept at all. It got so bad that I was afraid to offer anything to anyone, for fear they might realize I had more and kill me for it, as others had been killed for much less.

Being hungry and thirsty was bad, but being cold was the worst thing, at least to me. Every scrap of wood in that church had been burned for warmth within the first week or so, save the clock. It was such a beautiful thing, and carved with a thistle. That was the conventional explanation for why it went untouched- the thistle being a Scots device. That may have been true for some, but I had no great admiration for national symbols just then. For me it was a link with the world outside the walls of that wretched church, which had become the most beautiful charnel house in history. I was getting light-headed and confused from the lack of food and sleep, and there were times when if not for that clock I wouldn't have known if an hour had passed, or a week, or a year. It was a slim tether to be sure, but it was the only one I had left. I believe I'd have strangled anyone who tried to tamper with it. It would not have been the worst thing I did there.

I don’t quite know why I fought and clawed and schemed so desperately to stay alive at Durham, since at the time I fully expected to be convicted of treason and hanged, or beheaded, or worse. The heroic stories I’d heard all my life about various people, many of them relations of mine, who had gone proudly and manfully to their grisly deaths at the Tolbooth or at Tyburn took on a new and very unpleasant immediacy. We heard there was talk of hanging all officers and principle ministers, to make an example, and I really thought then that I was as good as dead. I was a commissioned officer, although not a senior one, and I was certainly no one of any real consequence. I saw this as a fatal combination of factors. But they never did hang anyone, at least not at Durham. They didn't have to.

I was charged with treason, sedition, armed rebellion, inciting others to same, and diverse minor offences I don’t even recall- mostly involving violations of the so-called conventions of warfare. Suffice to say they were careful not to leave anything out. When I was first led into the courtroom I thought I saw traces of sympathy on some of the faces arrayed behind the bench. I knew that some of my fellow prisoners had been given relatively minor sentences- some had even been let go on payment of a fine. These were substantial fines to be sure- more in the way of what you'd call a ransom, but I knew my family would pay it. So I didn't see my prospects as entirely bleak. Then one of them asked me why was I an officer in a Highland regiment, being from Midlothian as I was. So I told them who I was, and who my family were. As soon as the name Macdonald was uttered I saw all my hopes of leniency evaporate, but I'd have cut my tongue out before I denied it. And it wasn't just my family's general infamy that doomed me- apparently I had quite a fearsome reputation on my own account. There was a lot of shuffling of papers and hushed conversation from the bench, and then another of the magistrates looked very intently at me, like I was some curious sort of insect that had crawled into the courtroom.

"Captain James MacDonnell, William Stewart's regiment of horse," he stated, as though it were a very brilliant discovery, "You're one of Ian MacDonnell's lieutenants, and you commanded of a gang of moss troopers responsible for a list of depredations and butchery that beggars description. You were at Inverlochy in the company of the traitor Montrose, you were at Preston with General George Munro, and at Musselborough with Lochiel. In fact, every place where lawful authority was being opposed, you seem to have been there. I'd say you've had yourself quite a career. Call yourself what you will; I know very well who you are."

I wondered who this was addressing me as if he did indeed know me, and why there was such a powerful current of hate coming at me. I was stunned that anyone would be aware of my presence at Inverlochy. I'd been all of fifteen at the time, and hadn't been with Alasdair MacColla's troops but a fortnight when my father came and dragged Shane and me back to school. I'd never even spoken to Montrose, nor he me. I was little more than a horse boy, so I was not on terms of great familiarity with Earls. I hadn't done anything noteworthy at Preston either, had never even got near to the place. Musselborough was something else again, something I had no intention of discussing. I suspected they knew all they needed to anyway. Clearly the interrogation of prisoners had been thorough, and productive.

"I call myself by the name I was born with," I said in reply to all of it, "My father was Henry Claghorne of Corstorphine, Midlothian. My mother was a Macdonald and I was fostered by her family, but I never have used that name." That wasn't strictly true. I never called myself James Macdonald, but I answered to that name when other people called me so. It was easier than correcting everyone all of the time. I could see it was a distinction that mattered to no one but me, but I made it anyway.

"Nonetheless," another of them said, "The description of your history is accurate, is it not?"

"I was at Inverlochy, and at Musselborough, and would have been at Preston had it not ended before I could get there," I replied, and left it at that. I knew that the English were having some difficulties in straightening out the exact chain of command among our patchwork forces, and I saw no reason to assist them.

I was read quite a lengthy sermon on the error of my ways then. It was almost amusing to sit there in a courtroom being lectured on the "conventions of civilized warfare" by a gang of lawyers and bureaucrats who had never faced any threat more pressing than gout. I couldn't help but to ask under which of these "conventions" it was permissible to purposely starve thousands of prisoners to death, but the gentlemen of the court didn't seem to feel I was entitled to an answer. They finally threatened to have me gagged if I didn’t show the proper respect, and the trial went on without my assistance after that. I was, not surprisingly, convicted on all counts.

As punishment I had my property attainted, and was sentenced to between seven and ten years of servitude in the colonies. The “attainted” part was the most peculiar element of the whole strange affair. That’s not usually a term applied to someone like myself, who did not even have a title to attaint. It was more the sort of thing I’d always associated with Earls and Dukes and people of that lofty stature. I was rather looking forward to telling people that my “estates” had been “attainted.” It certainly had an impressive ring to it.

I had asked Rory to make certain and get word to my Uncle James of what had happened, so he could put in a claim to the property. Whatever disagreements he'd had with my father, and later with me, he'd see to it that Isobel wasn't left a pauper. I knew Uncle Alasdair would be livid over it, but that was his problem, not mine. It was my father's estate, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Father would want it to go to his brother, and his nephews, who bore his name- not the MacDonalds. More than that, Uncle James had a much better claim, and I wanted to make sure the place didn't end up in the hands of strangers. I owed my father that much at least. I was trying very hard not to think about my father right then, to not think of the fact that I had squandered his entire life's work for what amounted to knight errantry, which was precisely what I had done.

From what I was later able to piece together, by the time of this “trial” I, and diverse others, had already been sold off to a concern with interests in New England. It was clear that my guilt had already been determined and the trial was entirely pro forma. I had been sold into slavery. So much for the conventions of civilized warfare.

The legalities, such as they were, were dispensed with very quickly, and before I'd even had time to fully grasp what had happened to me I was in London being shoved into the hold of a waiting ship. “Ship” is an overly generous term in reference to The Unity. Floating coffin would be the more accurate description, and float was precisely what we did for several weeks, sitting at anchor in the Thames, awaiting official permission to leave for the American colonies. There were concerns that we‘d be a threat to the peace and prosperity of New England, which was laughable. I was still suffering some ill effects from several rather vigorous interrogations, not to mention being sick, exhausted and half-starved. I was hardly in a condition to threaten peace, prosperity or anything else, and I was in a far better condition than most. Finally, the powers that be seemed to have drawn a similar conclusion and we were allowed to disembark.

There was never enough food or water, I didn't see the light of day once until we reached Massachusetts, and to top it all off, I was still in the same clothing I'd been wearing when I was captured two months earlier, which by that time would likely have disintegrated but for the diverse kinds of filth holding it all together. It was not a pleasurable voyage, to say the very least- certainly an unpropitious start to whatever new life awaited me in the Americas.

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