send forth while singing the tale of his young life. Yet still, you may think to judge July harshly. But, reader, if your storyteller were to tell of life with July through those times, you would hear no sweet melody but forbidding discord. You would turn your head away. You would cry, lies! You would pass over those pages and beg me lead you to better days.
Shall I oblige you to read how many times Caroline Mortimer ordered that July be pinioned within the stocks as punishment for her wrongdoings after those riots? Should I paint a scene so you may conceive of how often the sizzle of the sun’s heat fried July’s skin to blisters and scorched her mouth so dry that she did not have spittle nor breath to shoo away any creature or beings that came to plague her within those long nights?
Or maybe I should find pretty words that could explain to you what befell Patience in those days? How, after the massa had been laid to rest in the churchyard, she walked from Amity in the hope of finding Godfrey in town, and returning him to his proper place; calming the fretful and arranging the duties within the kitchen. She was caught upon the road by the militia, who charged that she was a runaway rebel. She received fifty lashes for her crime. Would you like me to describe the lesions upon her back and let you hear the woebegone howl she emitted when the stinking cloth that had wrapped the wound was pulled off? Perhaps you would care to watch her die. Or see the anguish that so clouded Miss Hannah’s soul that she crawled into her grave two days after Patience. Shall we walk in the procession of these two burials? Perhaps to accompany Florence and Lucy as they hold up Molly—ragged and raging and screaming fearful that she will be sold away. Reader, would you like to hear Byron weeping?
In those dark days our July—that mischievous girl that you have come to know, that could twist her missus to any bidding and tease Molly to tears, that grinning girl who did slide the whole length of the hall upon her dirty apron, and gaily put a bed sheet upon a table and wine out of window—that July was forsaken by her ravaged spirit and soon departed. And a withered and mournful girl stumbled in, unsteady, to take her part. With eyes dulled as filthy water, this July was so fearful a young woman that the barking of a dog, the slamming of door, the clatter of a dropped spoon, would see her tremble as if the earth did wobble beneath her. Every fresh morning she puzzled over whether she had woken, for, as in her sleeping dreams, each tree she did gaze upon saw her lost-found-lost mama dangling there within the rustling leaves and sagging fruit. Every mouthful she ate tasted only of Nimrod’s blood. And always beneath her feet, a low rumbling of galloping horses menaced her.
That miserable July had no misgivings. She devised a story that told how the black-skinned baby she gave life to died rigid and grey with the very first lungful of air it breathed.
And this is why I can go no further. This is why my story is at an end. For I know that my reader does not wish to be told tales as ugly as these. And please believe your storyteller when she declares that she has no wish to pen them. It is only my son that desires it. For he believes his mama should suffer every little thing again. Him wan’ me suffer every likkle t’ing again!
CHAPTER 18
READER, MY SON IS quelled! Kindness has once more returned to his eye. Despite what you may have learned within my last pages, I beg you do not think ill of Thomas Kinsman. He is a good son and has come to his mama with his head bowed in abashed apology.
Within his hand he carried some papers which, he explained to me with childish passion, was an edition of the magazine of the Baptist mission in England. It seems that this publication has been in my son’s possession for nearly as long as his little leather boots; and it is evident that as much care has been lavished upon this document’s sadly browning and brittle pages. He desired his mama to peruse it, he said. So I did as I was bid.