The paper Alice’s father hung around her neck read:
This indenture made the twentieth day of May one thousand seven hundred fifty-six between John Morton of Dedham in the County of Suffolk on the one part and Simeon Cole of London in the County of Middlesex on the other part that the said Simeon Cole has bound and does hereby bind minor child Alice Cole his daughter to any lawful work for and to reside with the said John Morton until the twenty-first day of March one thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven at which time said minor child will have reached the age of eighteen years during which time said John Morton covenants to use all means in his power to provide for said Alice Cole suitable boarding lodging clothing and such attendance as necessary to her comfortable support in sickness and in health and further shall cause her to be taught to read her Bible as she is capable and the said John Morton shall furnish her with two good sets of clothes at such time as her term of indenture shall be canceled.
The paper had been signed by John Morton and Simeon Cole. John Morton began his name with a wavering, feathery spiral. Simeon Cole began his with a thick, sideways wave. When Alice first took the paper out to look at it, the spiral and the wave were all she could make of it, although she ran her fingers over the rest of the letters many times.
At first the Morton household contained Mr. Morton and Mrs. Morton, a son nearing manhood named Elisha, and one daughter three years older than Alice named Abigail whom they called Nabby. Mr. Morton was the one with the locked knee, but Mrs. Morton was the one always in bed with an ail, which she put sometimes to her lungs and sometimes to her stomach. A tall, bony Negro named Jerubah tended Mrs. Morton and ordered the kitchen, working her tasks in dark silence, but the girl Nabby chattered and bounced from one piece of work to another without a care for what was left to Alice to finish. Alice didn’t mind the girl’s chatter—in fact she took great interest in it—and Alice didn’t mind the work, as it was much the same as the work she had done alongside her mother back in London: beating, bleaching and boiling clothes, sanding floors, oiling woodwork, spinning, weeding, and picking the garden; but now Alice worked under a new kind of sky that might shed bright sun and thick snow in a single day, or remain all sun or all snow for weeks together. And space! So much space! The land ran like the ocean, wave after wave of it, and off into a distance nothing but more waves, until it faded into a soft green haze.
Alice hadn’t been very long at the Mortons when Mrs. Morton died of something to do with neither her lungs nor her stomach, and the son, Elisha, married and left to settle in the westward part of the colony. With each change in the household the work changed, perhaps less washing but more spinning, or less cleaning and more weeding, but it didn’t matter to Alice what kind of work it was—it took up all the daylight hours no matter what it was made of.
Mr. Morton saw to it that Alice was fed, clothed, and attended in illness as her paper demanded, and himself taught her to read, remarking many times on her quickness. By her eighth birthday Alice could read the paper that still hung around her neck, and she had stopped going to the window to look for her father in any of the wagons that rumbled along the road. By Alice’s ninth birthday she was reading to Mr. Morton out of Pope and Dryden and had come to understand her life as made up of two parts, divided by the paper. Taken together she didn’t think of the second part as greatly worse than the other. Mr. Morton called her his “sweet, good girl,” sat her next to Nabby at table, and quizzed them out of the Bible together. He smiled at her and patted her cheek each time he passed her in the house or yard and only struck her when she dropped an onion soup in his lap or tipped his pipe into the fire or scorched his stock with the iron.
Nabby Morton in her turn treated Alice as one might treat a younger sister, or a younger sister as Alice had been taught it by her brothers, which meant she was to follow around when allowed and keep away when she wasn’t, yet with Nabby it also meant that when she wanted someone to share a stolen pie or run bare-legged in the creek in the heat of summer it was Alice she called, and when she needed to cry over her mother, she did it into Alice’s apron.
That didn’t mean that Alice forgot her old family altogether. After the day of the spilled soup Alice curled up in the bed she shared with Jerubah, closed her eyes, and conjured up a big, new house in Philadelphia, with her mother in a blue dress trimmed with lace just like a favorite dress of Mrs. Morton’s. She dreamed her father came in from work to smile at her and pat her cheek and give her an orange.
On Alice’s arrival at Mr. Morton’s he had offered to keep her indenture paper safe for her in a drawer in a desk in his study, but as Alice’s father had told her to keep hold of it, she’d been loath to give it over. As time went on, however, and as repeated reading of the paper told her nothing more of her father’s whereabouts, and as she remembered nothing more of her mother than a pair of limp feet dangling from sharp-boned ankles as she went over the ship’s rail into the water, the cord around her neck began to chafe more than it comforted.
At Alice’s tenth birthday Mr. Morton called her into his study and gave her a twopence; Alice put it in her father’s money pouch and at the same time took out the indenture paper, giving it to Mr. Morton to lock up in his drawer.
Alice didn’t see the paper again until the year she turned fifteen and Mr. Morton gave her to Nabby on the occasion of Nabby’s marriage to Emery Verley of Medfield.