I DETERMINED THE next morning, with a sense of purpose that I had not felt in a long time, to approach Eulinda immediately after breakfast.
Of course, I gave no hint of my plan to anyone. I told them I was going directly to see Jenny, our dressmaker, for a fitting of a new dress she was making for me.
Conveniently, Jenny's room was in a private wing downstairs, where Eulinda's quarters were situated. If Martha suspected anything, she gave no sign of it. But she did accost me at the door that led to the steps downstairs.
Smiling. Martha never smiled at me like that unless she was involved in some trickery. "You never asked about Pa's and my ride the morning they left," she said to me.
I would not so much as give her the satisfaction of curiosity in my eyes. I shrugged, trying to show indifference.
"We talked," she told me blissfully. "It was so nice to get Pa away from the noise and chatter of all you younger children. We had a long conversation. We talked about everything."
My throat tightened. What did she mean by everything ?
Did she mean what I thought she meant? Or did she just want me to think so?
"You'd be surprised how understanding Pa can be sometimes," she said. "I hope I have inherited all his good qualities." Then she smiled and walked away.
***
I NEVER LIKED EULINDA. I suspect it was because she always tried to keep a protective circle around Mama when she was in her presence. She kept a distance between us children and our mother, like a guard, always asking us what we wanted when we came into the room where Mama was.
"She's resting," she would say when she opened the door of Mama's bedroom. Or, "She's reading, and she does not wish to be disturbed. Is it really important that you bother her now?" Half the time, I think Mama was not even aware of this.
Eulinda's English was perfect. I think it was one of the reasons Pa kept her around. Pa was very taken with proper speech, and he would stand for no less from us. If we complained to him about how Eulinda tried to keep us out of Mama's way, he did nothing about it.
"Your mother does need her rest," he would say.
Eulinda would report to him if we sassed her, and Pa would make us apologize to her. Imagine such! Apologizing to a Negro! But we had to do it. Because Pa said that Eulinda had a history that went all the way back to Cambridge with him and Mama. Furthermore, she had been at Mama's side for those two days when I was born.
So none of us had ever had the mettle to stand up to Eulinda, and she knew it. And when Mama was not about, she bullied us. She scolded, and bossed us around, something I knew neither Mama nor Pa would abide. But none of us wished to make trouble.
Once when my brother George was made to apologize for sassing her, he got back at her. He hid her favorite shawl. She obsessed over that shawl. It was red with threads of gold running through it. Mama said she'd had it since Valley Forge, and she swore it brought her good luck. She'd wrapped Mama in it when Mama was in labor with me. Shortly after, I was born.
It was sacred to her, that shawl. And George crept downstairs and into her quarters, took it, and hid it. Though he full well knew that if Pa found out he'd likely be punished severely. Not beaten, no. Pa never beat any of us.
Well, you would think the British had come back and attacked us again, the way Eulinda took on about missing that shawl. The whole household was in an uproar. Every room had to be searched. George even helped with the search.
I shivered in my laced-up boots for George. Where has he hidden it? How can he act so becalmed, so genuinely concerned? Especially when Eulinda pronounced that she knew it had been stolen and cursed the one who had stolen it with the most vicious curse she had.
For she believed in that sort of nonsense. She believed in and practiced black magic. Pa and Mama knew it but did not concern themselves with it as long as she did not do it in front of anyone in the family and kept her doings to herself.
After two days, George spirited the benighted shawl out from wherever he had hidden it, and Eulinda discovered it back in her room again. Soon the incident was forgotten.
George would never tell me where he'd hidden it. But my admiration for him increased. And I knew from that time on that my brother had talents and mental strengths and abilities that others had not discovered in him yet. And that he was afraid of nothing.
I tried to summon forth such attributes as I went down the stairs to Eulinda's apartment.
I knocked on the door. From within I heard her soft voice bidding me enter. I went in.
She was kneeling over her traveling chest, the very one she'd come with from Cambridge so many years ago. She was folding clothing and putting it inside the chest. She barely favored me with a glance.
Since Mama and Pa had been away, she'd not come out of her apartment at all. Her duties in the household did not go beyond seeing to the care and comfort of Mama.
"Why do you bother me?" she asked. She did not concern herself with politeness.
"I need to ask you a question."
"Ask, then, and be gone. I have no duties with you."
I sat down, uninvited, on a chair and got right to the matter. "You told Martha that General Wayne is my father," I said.
She went on folding clothes and putting them into the chest. But she stopped for a moment then and reached for the infamous shawl and put it around her shoulders, as if for protection.
"And so? If I did?"
"Is it true?"
She ceased with her folding. Then she held out one hand. I did not know for a moment why. Then I did.
Money. She wanted money. And if I had any, she would tell me things.
If I did not, she would say naught.
"I have no money," I said.
Her face was stoic, her amber eyes dead. "Then I have nothing to say."
"Do you know what you have done? To me? And possibly to my family? Don't you care?"
"Your family has everything," she said. "I have nothing. You girls have the whole future. I never had a future. What difference does it make who your father is? Your future lies waiting no matter what. I never had that possibility."
She turned from me and went about packing the trunk again.
"My mama and pa have been good to you," I reminded her. "My pa pays you wages. He doesn't treat you like a slave. And I never hurt you, have I?"
"You go now," she ordered. "Leave me be, unless you have guineas to give me for my trip home, like your sister Martha does. You don't know what I have had stolen from me since I've been living here. I might as well be a slave."
"I'm sorry for that," I said, "I honestly am. But why make me suffer?"
"Go now," she insisted, "or I will tell your father you sassed me bad, and he will believe me and you will be punished. Go!"
I went. There was no use. She would not talk.