Free Bound by Sally Gunning Page A

how behind his Indian corn was. Mugs were drained and refilled, and Alice was sent to the cellar for another jug. As Alice stepped through the buttery door she heard Thacher drop his voice a token register. “So who’s the girl?”
    “She came with us from Boston where she’d just finished out her time,” the widow answered. “She takes a room here while she looks for work in the village.”
    A pause, into which Freeman spoke. “I might say a word on the girl’s behalf—”
    “Might you,” someone said, and the rest laughed.
    “She’s a hard worker.”
    “Oh, I could work her.”
    Another laugh.
    “Here now, without any joke, I could use such a girl at the tavern.”
    “I could use her there too.”
    Again, the men laughed. Alice listened for Freeman’s rich tones in it and didn’t hear them. She lifted the cellar hatch, climbed down the ladder, and collected the cider jug. When she returned to the room, Freeman had just risen to his feet. “All right, gentlemen, I’d say our work this evening is completed.” He raised his mug. “To the king!”
    The mugs came up.
    “To the king!”
    “To the king!”
    “To the king!”

ELEVEN

    A lice woke to the sight of dawn just touching up the rafters, and an unreasonable joy washed through her. She’d made it to a second waking in Satucket. She leaped out of her bed and went to the window, eager to get to know the look of the place, but already it had changed: rusty white plum blossoms sprang up like clouds over the scrub along the shore, the water pulsed more lavender than blue, a sudden breeze caught at the nearby pines, knocking clouds of chalky, yellow dust into the air. She breathed in and felt the grit in her lungs. Satucket. In her. She left the window and dressed herself with as much speed as neatness would allow, hoping to be first to the keeping room.
    She was. She’d unbanked the fire, set up the kettle, and sliced the bread when the widow and Freeman appeared, sharing a matching somber expression that immediately damped Alice’s spirits. She remembered, oh, how could she have forgotten! The man Thacher and his talk of hiring her to work at the tavern. Was this the grim news the widow bore on her features, that she was sending Alice to the tavern that morning? The little Alice knew of taverns had come from walking by Fisher’s Tavern in Dedham on her various errands for Mr. Morton; it had spilled out a constant stream of hooting men, with an occasional girl not dressed as she should be answering back from an upstairs window.
    Alice did not wish to work at the tavern. She kept her eyes down throughout breakfast in the hope that it would keep the talk away from her, and it seemed to do so; the widow and Freeman laid out their plans for the day, yet as the plans didn’t seem to include her, she began to think their talk as bad as the actual announcement she dreaded.
    But once the breakfast was cleared away, the widow’s first concern appeared to be Alice’s poultice. She sat Alice down, unwrapped her hand, examined it without change in expression, and went to the cupboard for the salve jar and a clean strip of linen. After she had swabbed and wrapped she said, “You must keep it dry. Fetch me the clothes you came in so I may wash them.”
    Alice went to the stairs, her face in flame over the state of her clothes, and over the fact that the widow had noticed them, but as her face flamed the thoughts underneath tumbled as hotly. Why should the widow care about Alice’s clothes if she only wished to send her to Thacher? Or did she only care about sending her to Thacher in clean linen? In either case, of course, the clothes must be washed and laid out to dry; a thick haze hung damp in the air, and until the sun did something better Alice couldn’t be sent anywhere. Or would the widow send Alice ahead and the clothes after?
    Alice found her dirty clothes as she’d left them, wrapped in a tight ball and pushed as far back under the eaves as she’d