“God Almighty, are ye deaf, Mother?” he growled, spitting tobacco juice into the dust of the road, just missing her dainty kid slipper. “The British ha’ come ashore. Come ashore at Ipswich, and hacked their way past Old Town Bridge. I rode over twenty dead bodies as I come from there. They’ll be at the Port now, heading this way.”
For the first time Kitty began to feel that this was not some ridiculous mistake. Her throat grew tight, and her nerves began to tingle with fear.
“Where is everyone going?” she cried.
The farmer turned to answer her. “They’re all trying to get across the river into Hampshire,” he said. “Some’s for the woods and swamps nearby. Better get along yourselves. You’ll be the safer, the further you can go.”
He urged his old horse forward again.
Gran turned back from the highroad as another half dozen wagons rattled past. “He looked like an honest lad, and he saw it with his own eyes, Nancy,” she admitted reluctantly. “You bundle up the children and whatever food you’ve got on hand, and come along in our wagon. I’m going to drive as hard as I can for Haverhill Ferry. I trust we’ll get across.”
Nance, bewildered and numb with terror, tried to follow out Granny’s instructions. Back in the kitchen she fumbled through the bin, brought out a sack of potatoes, and stood there helplessly, holding it. Gran reached past her. “Take the apples, instead,” she advised. “They’ll taste better if we have to eat them raw.”
Finally the young wife got herself, the two children, and the shawl-wrapped infant into the wagon. She sat on the seat with Granny, and Kitty and Sally Rose crouched on a sack of turnips a farmer had given them early in the afternoon. How long ago that seemed! In the gathering twilight they drove swiftly along the winding river road.
The lower Merrimack Valley above the Port was not sparsely settled country in those spring days of 1775. There were farmhouses and parish churches and crossroads villages scattered all about it, and few dwellers there who could not see their neighbor’s chimney smoke or the lights of his kitchen when they looked out at night. But now the peaceful district was overrun with strangers and refugees streaming through.
Kitty and Sally Rose huddled together on the turnip sack for warmth, looking back down the road every now and then, to see if the British were in sight, if the glare of burning towns lighted the sky. But all they could see were the frightened folk of Essex County hurrying for the swamps and the forests, for the low hills of New Hampshire Colony across the wide dark stream.