This gripping, shocking, and exquisitely crafted survival story reveals the truth of America's colonial history in a powerful new way—visceral and breathtaking.
After the long journey from England, Ellis arrives in America full of hope. James Fort is where a better life will begin for her: where she will work as an indentured servant to Henry Collins and his pregnant wife, gain financial security, and fall deeply in love with bold, glorious Jane Eddowes.
But as summer turns to fall, Ellis begins to notice the cracks in this new life—the viciousness of the colonists toward the Indigenous people and the terrifying anger Henry uses to control his wife and Ellis—leaving her to wonder if she has sentenced herself to a prison rather than a new home.
Then winter arrives and hunger grips the Fort. Ellis is about to learn that people will do whatever it takes to survive.
To the Bone is a riveting story of survival and horror that forcefully overturns the mythos of the American settler. It will stay with you, forever.
Release date:
September 10, 2024
Publisher:
Rocky Pond Books
Print pages:
256
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ONE M aster Collins says I can call him Henry, though yet it feels strange to say it. He says will I get water and wait in the storehouse line for the grain. But oh it is hot. My head hurts from it and my eyes feel swollen and my skin is tight and red. It already peels like birch bark. But I go outside where the heat is sharp, with buckets banging against my legs. Henry, Master Collins, is already brown from the sun. His face and forearms. When he took off his shirt I saw the white skin of his chest and shoulders and stomach. I shouldn’t have looked, but I did. I am either white or red and peeling. In the line there is some number of whispering women ahead of me. I set my buckets down by my ankles and scratch a bite through my hose. Jane Eddowes slips through the line. She pokes her mother in the side as she passes and Mistress Eddowes jumps and smiles at Jane, who is wicked with her grin and her eyes like the deepest part of twilight. Mistress Eddowes waves Jane away from the chore of waiting for our grain. I’m standing, shifting in the hot hot sun, burning my cheeks and forehead and nose. When the cape merchant allows me inside the dark building to collect our grain, it is less again. I watch the kernels as they slide into my basket, lined with linen to save every precious grain. Another measure he pours. One and one and one and one and one and one. I don’t know how to count but I know the rhythm and he stops too soon. I look up at him but he won’t answer for it. “Go now,” he says. The Sea Venture was supposed to arrive in August. At the same time as Jane. At the same time as me. We left home at the same time in our fleet of ships. But there was a hurricane. In the humid dark, we were battered against the sweating walls of the hull, the sounds of retching, the smell of vomit, praying, crying. They said we couldn’t have any light to avoid fire but I kept my eyes closed anyway. The men on the bulwarks watch for the Sea Venture every day, their necks craning. Jane says that our food was on it. Salt pork and beef, dried peas, hard biscuits, onions, and limes. It was lost in the hurricane, but perhaps it didn’t sink. Perhaps it will come tomorrow morning. And tomorrow. And tomorrow. But it doesn’t come. Jane is in the wellhouse. “Do you know?” she says. Her hair is white from the sun and her skin is dark gold because her father is indulgent and lets her play outside though yet she’s too old for it. “What?” “Master Adam and Master Franz, they went back to the country people.” Jane pulls her bucket from the well. Her sleeves are pushed up and her muscles roll under her skin. “But they killed them.” “Who?” “The country people killed Master Adam and Master Franz. And why should they trust them, I wonder. Master Adam and Master Franz are faithless. They had their heads beaten with clubs until they were dead.” She splashes water on her flushed cheeks. “Ellis,” she says, putting her wet hand on my arm. “Upriver there is a place where the water is shallow and slow and Rowan says the country people let us be. Come with me! We can swim.” “I can’t swim,” I say, but I don’t move her hand from my arm. “We can wade. You don’t have to swim.” Her eyes are bright and I want to please her and be naked with her in the water, but I shake my head. “Master Collins says I must tend to Mistress Collins. She’s unwell.” Jane rolls her eyes. “Again?” I reproach her with my frown but then I can’t help it and smile, waving as she walks the buckets back to her house and then, I suppose, to go swim, perhaps with Rowan, though yet she is too old to be playing naked with boys. We are both too old. In a year or two we could be married and yet still she plays like a child.
At home I was lost. I had lost everybody and everybody was lost to me. Here, I have food to eat. Some complain it is not enough, but it is enough for me. Here, I have a home with Master and Mistress Collins. I have Jane. Here, it is beautiful. I don’t know if we had a good life when I was small. I know that the things I worry about now, like food and warmth, are not things I worried about when I was small. Then, I only knew about the things they told me, and they didn’t tell me much. I remember once that Papa brought me with him to haggle at the meat market, and he bought me roasted chestnuts and said not to tell Mama. When I asked why not, he didn’t answer. He only smiled and tugged me along the quay to look at the birds riding the wind. I know now that we didn’t have the money for chestnuts and he didn’t want Mama to be angry with him. I don’t know why Papa had to leave to come here. I don’t know why he believed it was his only choice. Sometimes we bought the good flour, the fine white sugar. Sometimes we made marzipan or cakes. Sometimes Papa brought home mutton instead of fish or salt beef. Mama had time to play. She would kneel on the floor with me and play kings and queens with the small toy people Papa whittled. Or she would play cracht cradle. I remember when she taught me Jacob’s ladder. I tied my finger in a knot by accident and Mama giggled at me like she was small. But then Mama would never play. We never had honey or cream for our porridge anymore. Mama took in the little girls from the room above us for pay, and she bent over her bone lace by the rushlight late, after I was supposed to be asleep. And though yet there were times she wasn’t doing work, she would only sit and stare and rub her calloused fingers together. Papa said there was a place for him on a ship. He said we could follow him later when he had land and a house. He said it was the only place we could ever hope to own land and not always pay rent. He said maybe he could get out from under debt, finally finally. Mama cried. She didn’t want him to go. She was afraid to be without him. What if something happened to him? What would she do? Where would we go? I would push my cold toes into Franny’s legs and listened to them argue. Franny slept through it, like she always did. She slept deep and hard, even when I had bad dreams and woke up screaming. And then, some number of months later, Papa was gone.
*** Our house has no roof yet, only walls. A length of canvas covers the frame, but sun streams through gaping corners. We have only been here for two weeks. When we came, there were row houses and a small wooden church and the storehouse. We stayed on the ship and some of the families stayed in tents. Already there have been settlers here for some number of years. All the families who come, some of us stay in the row houses, some of us have gone to stay with the country people, and some smaller number, we build houses for ourselves. Some men build and some thatch and others gather reeds. When I am not attending Mistress Collins, Master Collins bids me to help with the building. Mostly, I gather reeds. Mistress Collins is moaning and her arm is over her face. I pinch my skin, just above my elbow. I tell myself that I am glad to be here. The rushes are thick and soft beneath my feet. I gathered them when we first landed, when Henry started framing the walls. They smelled sweet and fragrant. Now I keep them sweet with ferns and holly, dried and scattered. Rowan says the winters here are so cold that a person can’t find any green things growing. It’s all brown and dead until spring again. Mistress Collins smells like vomit. I help her sit up. I hate the way her oily hair feels, and her head, lolling against my arm. I hold the wooden cup to her dry lips and I close my eyes as she drinks. After, I grind the grain and I check the ale. A warm sour smell wafts up and I know it’s almost ready. If it smells sweet, it will be too strong. Mistress Collins, who I am not allowed to call by her Christian name of Blythe and who Master Collins calls Birdie, is unwell. She was unwell the whole way here. I remember most the smell of her vomit as she retched, all the way over. Henry comes in through the doorway with no door yet, carrying one of the baskets that was still on the ship. He goes to Mistress Collins and kneels by her. Their pallet is in the corner of the unfinished house. The sun beats on her face, her skin sweating and her eyes clenched tight shut. He murmurs close to her ear and then he stands up and gestures to me. “Ellis, come help,” he says. I can see his sweat through his shirt and where the white linen sticks to his skin. His face is pretty and fine with delicate bones and bright eyes, intense and captivating, hooded by heavy dark brows. He pushes his dark curling hair out of his face and pulls a coverlet out of the basket. The fine stitching swirls and flows over the layers of different kinds of cloth. “We’ll use it for privacy,” Henry says. I hold the coverlet as high as I can, stretching my arms over my head. He ties it to corner posts of the half-finished house and a shadow falls across Mistress Collins’s face. She sighs and Henry puts his hand on her cheek and I let the coverlet fall so I can’t see them anymore. Even in the shade it is still stifling hot. “We’ll finish the roof as soon as we can get outside the walls,” Henry says.
Outside the walls there are others. The country people. They were here first. Sometimes it is safe to leave the walls and sometimes it is not. I never know when is which and I am not permitted to leave. One of them, his name is Mark, is sitting in the dirt against a wall. I pass him as I walk to the wellhouse. He’s working on something with his hands, something close to his body that I can’t see. I feel his eyes on my peeling skin. I rub salve on my skin every night because the sun hurts me here. Mark doesn’t have to. My skin doesn’t belong here but his does. I am the stranger here. He was here when we came. He and his people. Back home, they told us there were already people here but that they are simple and live in a state of nature and that they want to learn from us. They told us that the people here would welcome our knowledge and our ways of life and our god. They told us that the people here would love our god, if only we would teach them. But Mark, who is a little older than me, I think, he seems angry. He seems afraid. He is compelled to live here, within our walls. The council traded some of our young men for him. He is here to learn our language. Some of our young men, like Thomas Savage, went to live with his people to learn their language. Rowan says Thomas Savage loves them like his own family and they love him. Thomas Savage says they are kinder and more gentle to their children. He says it is so because look atus, look at me and Rowan and others like Robert Poole and Henry Spelman. We are all young and yet working alone here in this place where we are strangers. He says the children of the country people live with their parents until they are older, because they love them and want them to be close and to care for them. The walls, they’re made of wood, some whole timbers, some split. They are all crooked so there are gaps in between, where eyes can peer or the barrels of guns can slide or arrows can fly. When we first came, even before I came, we started naming things. The country people already had names for everything, of course. But we named everything on top of those names. It makes things ours. It means we’re taking over. We make the house from things we find here. Henry has never made a house before. His hands were not used to that kind of work and so they cracked and bled and scabbed over and cracked and bled again. He used mud and straw and reeds and wood. Here, it is warm all night and I’ve never seen so many stars. Last night I heard Mistress Collins crying, quiet as though she didn’t want anybody to know it. Jane can read and write. She has a slate she is supposed to practice on but instead she draws funny pictures. She sits in the square outside the church where the settlers gather and sometimes trade with the country people. She draws Master Percy, slouched and thin. She draws him shaking his finger at Master Smith, broad and stern and not listening. She draws a bird on Master Percy’s head. The space between the walls is small. We’ve half built so many small houses that walking through them to the storehouse or the church is like dodging through a maze, walls and corners and the posts of unfinished rooves jutting into the sky like dead trees, and mud underneath my feet that bakes and cracks in the hot hot sun. I set my buckets on the ground and squat next to Jane, watching her quick fingers. Rowan leans over her shoulder and laughs at the picture and asks, “What does it say?” “You’re supposed to be dead by now,” she says. Master Percy is saying it to Master Smith. Master Smith is president of the colony but Jane says some of the men don’t like him. He sent home for all his rich clothes and he looks ridiculous here in the mud wearing his ruff and silk hose and purple velvet gown. “Master Percy should be dead by now more like,” Rowan says. Master Percy is ill. Always wheezing and sometimes he has coughing fits, hacking and choking like he can’t breathe. Jane squints at me and scribbles with her chalk on her slate. I look down but she touches my chin. “Hold still,” she says. I close my eyes and let the sun sit warm on my face. I let it settle into my skin. I let Jane’s gaze touch me. I let it fill me up with something I don’t know, something that makes my heart beat harder. “You may look now,” she says. It’s me, I think. My image. I haven’t seen my face for a long time but there is my bottom lip, the dimple that I feel when I touch it. Jane draws me older than the last time I saw my face, when my sister shared her looking glass with me. My face is thinner. My eyes are open. Though yet I sat with my eyes closed, she drew them open. My image looks back at me, deep and serious but I am smiling just a little. A secret smile. “Is that how you see me?” I say. “Yes,” she says, and her gaze flickers to my mouth and then she looks down and scrubs the picture away with her sleeve. My face is a white smear on the slate. Jane is supposed to be writing verse. Small Mary comes running, ready for a lesson. She has time to learn and Jane is sweet to her.
We borrowed the ladder from the other Smiths and Henry says I can frame the roof just as well as him and I am smaller and lighter and so I will be safer. I ignore my shame as I kirtle up my smock and climb. From up here I can see over the walls of the fort. I have never seen so much. Before it was always only dingy walls and only as far as the alley twisted and only a dirty gray grin of sky. “Are you ready?” Henry asks, and hands timber up to me. The wood is already notched so it balances on the ridge, the highest part of the roof. Over and over he hands me timbers until my shoulders and arms are aching and my hands are raw and there are splinters woven into my skin. Then he climbs up and straddles the ridge in front of me. “You’re a good girl, Ellis,” he says. I shade the sun out of my eyes. I can smell him when he’s so close. He smells grown-up, an adult man. I can feel his heat. He smiles at me and I hold the timber while he bores a hole into it. Below us is Mistress Collins. She lies facing the wall while the roof goes up above her. “I’m worried about her,” Henry says, low and close. “She should be better by now.” She only gets up from her dusty dirty bed when one of us makes her. He hammers the wooden peg into the hole. It jolts my hands, my arms, my whole body, each blow of the mallet. When it’s done, he says, “Do you see?You can carry on now, can’t you, Ellis?” He leaves and I work alone, except for Mistress Collins, trying not to exist beneath me. Jane comes careening around the edge of a house. Her hair is wet and curling at the ends. Clouds of white surround her clean face. “Ellis!” she calls up to me. “I can see all the way up your leg!” I wave my hand to hush her. My cheeks are hot and itchy. Jane smiles at me shamelessly. I can’t stop myself and I smile back and I feel her eyes on my skin as though she’s touching me. But then her gaze shifts and I see a shadow lengthen at her feet. It’s Henry. He looks up at my leg, bare but for my hose and garter and my skirts kirtled up. And then he looks at Jane looking at my leg. I can’t see his face anymore but I can see his expressionreflected in Jane’s. He’s angry. How dare she look at me like that? Jane says, “You’re lucky it hasn’t rained with your roof not done.” She grins like an imp and runs off. “Ellis, I want you to start collecting reeds for thatching while I finish the framework. We need to finish the roof before the weather turns. We’re lucky it hasn’t rained yet,” he says, just like Jane. He tells me to stay safe from the country people. “Never forget,” he reminds me, “they don’t want us here.”
Rowan and Jane come with me because I am afraid to go alone. Rebecca North, who is younger than me but acts older, crosses by with a basket over her arm. A trail of linen escapes, blue embroidered flowers snapping in the wind. Her eyes pass over me with no expression but she smiles at Rowan and Jane. “Where are you going?” she asks. “Can I come?” Jane glances at Rowan and giggles. “Away, wart,” she says. Rebecca flushes and turns, her neck blotchy under her cap. As she leaves I look at Jane for an explanation but she just giggles again and elbows Rowan. We slip through the back gate. This is the first time I will leave the walls since we came. It is a tiny space in here but I forgot how small. Outside, it is so wide. Swept open like the ocean. The tall grass sways in the wind and the bugs hum and the grass whispers and there are birds singing and above those noises there is nothing but sky and silence. “What?” I say, about Rebecca. “Tell her,” Jane says to Rowan. “Troll,” Rowan says to Jane. He’s embarrassed but I don’t know why. Jane rolls her eyes and threads her arms through ours, connecting us. “Miss Northfancies Rowan.” “Stop,” Rowan says. “You don’t like her?” I ask. He shrugs. “She thinks she’s so special,” Jane says. I follow birds with my eyes, quick bursts and flutters, and hereand there a flash of red. At home red is a color I only saw on rich people’s clothes. Here, this red bird wears it feather to feather, like the color red belongs to him, like it was made for him. Rowan came with a group of boys to work as laborers. He says he will have land here someday, as part of his indenture, all his own. I wonder why he doesn’t like Rebecca. Why Jane doesn’t. Rebecca thinks she’s special, Jane says. But Rebecca seems special. Special like Jane. Loved and cared for. Protected and safe. As soon as we’re in the woods we start to run. Spider runs alongside us, Rowan’s little spotted hound he brought from home. Rowan has brown hair and brown eyes and freckles and he is always jolly. I wonder if that’s why Rebecca fancies him. Or is it the possibility of his owning land? He left his family at home, a father and two brothers, to come here. Spider barks up the trunk of a pine tree, so tall I can’t see the top of it. Rowan nudges Jane with his foot. “I bet I can climb higher than you,” he says. Jane jumps for the lowest branch. Rowan runs to the other side and I hear him scrabble against the bark. Jane swings her legs up and I glimpse her thigh, round and mesmerizing. “Ellis!” Jane calls down to me, her feet swinging by my head. “Come up!” “I can’t,” I say. I wish I could. “Of course you can,” she says. She reaches her hand down to me and I take it, warm and calloused. “Brace yourself on the trunk.” I skin my knee and catch my kercher on the bottom of the branch and it comes loose and I scrape my arm against the bark and then I am up, belly on the branch, dangling. Jane pulls herself to the branch above. Rowan is already some distance higher than us. Spider barks frantically, clawing the trunk. Jane follows Rowan and I follow Jane and we climb and climb until my knees shake at the height and I stop looking down. We climb so high I can feel the trunk groan and bend and I sway with it, riding the wind. We climb until I am standing in the sky, blue all around me. Jane shrieks, so loud, so right here, she is all I know. “Quiet, troll!” Rowan calls up. Jane won the bet. She is the highest. I am at her hip. Rowan is sitting below us, swinging his legs. Rowan goes back now, because he has the minding of the chickens and is expected to feed and water them and to take the goats out to graze when he is finished, but Jane and me go swimming. I leave my smock on and lay my kirtle and hose on the beach and run into the water that is warm and slow. I stop when the river is up to my knees. Jane yelps and plunges deeper and deeper where I know she can’t touch the riverbed and so I can’t follow her. I stand here frustrated, stuck. But then Jane wades back toward me. Her smock is wet and it clings and I can see her skin through it. Her belly and her breasts. We lie in the shallows, side by side, and the water eddies around my legs in a warm current. I close my eyes. The light is red and hot through my eyelids. Ifeel Jane’s body next to mine. I open my eyes and she is smiling close to my face and she touches my lip with her finger. A drop of water slides from her finger to my mouth. It tastes like salt. *** Mistress Collins is crying. She gasps and sobs behind the coverlet. I build the fire and put the bread in to bake. I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I bring Mistress Collins her beer. Her cheek is swollen and her eye is purple and she is crying into her fists. I wonder what she did, how she got the bruise. She ignores me and I set her beer on the floor and go around the coverlet again. When Henry comes home I have his bread and soup ready. I bartered with the other Smiths for a pig bone for the soup and I thickened it with ground-up biscuit and I smile as I slide the bowl to him across the table. But he doesn’t smile back at me. Mistress Collins is quiet now. “You were with Jane Eddowes,” he says. He’s angry with me but I don’t know why. Is it wicked of me, to play with Jane? How does he know? The guards might have told him, or anyone might have. We didn’t try to hide it. But there are the reeds for thatching to prove how hard I worked. They are piled up by the door. I glance at them, then back at my feet. “Jane Eddowes is not a good friend to you. You should not be spending time with her.” But why? I try to hide my thoughts from him but he sees them anyway. “Jane Eddowes is wicked. Her father does not discipline her the way he should. She runs wild all over this place and spends time alone with young men. She is not a good friend to you.” He pauses and his eyes move from my face to my stomach to my thighs. “And I didn’t like how . . .” But then he stops and rubs his mouth and I remember the way Jane looked at my bare leg and the way Henry saw her and was angry. “I do not want you associating with Jane Eddowes.” I nod. But I want to. I want to spend time with Jane. But he says I should not. He seems to be satisfied with my nod. He smiles and slurps the soup. I stand against the wall while he eats. He combs his hair back from his forehead and puts his hat on. The empty bowl is on the table. He touches my arm, nods, and leaves again. I bring Mistress Collins her soup now. She is awake, staring at the ceiling with her hands clasped on her belly. Only when she is done eating will I get what is left.
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