Ashes

Meanwhile, Ruth urgently needs to go to the bathroom. Searching for a privy, Isabel and Ruth are mistaken for a laundry service by a woman working in an overcrowded hospital. Isabel plays along, not knowing what to make of this woman: “Was she good-hearted or evil? You could not tell that just by looking at the outside of a person, that was a sad truth” (130). The woman tells her of the overcrowded, filthy conditions in the hospital, and sends her and Ruth with the load of dirty laundry off to Widow Hallahan.

Isabel and Ruth go up and down the one main street of Williamsburg, looking for the laundry and not finding it. Isabel is overwhelmed by the bustle and smells of the town, but her mind is elsewhere: She’s on the alert for unscrupulous people who might try to capture them despite their free papers, and she’s wondering if Curzon might have finally decided to take off without them. A woman with a Jamaican accent offers them directions, and warns them that this isn’t a safe place to be a free black woman, advising them to take their chances with the British instead. She disappears before Isabel can ask her name.

Following the woman’s directions, Isabel and Ruth find the Widow Hallahan, whose laundry is overwhelmed with work. Isabel tentatively offers that she and Ruth could help. Widow Hallahan is dubious, wondering how Isabel got the brand on her cheek; Isabel explains it away as an accident with a hot poker. Widow Hallahan agrees to take them on in exchange for room and board, saying that Isabel can do laundry and Ruth can deliver it in the cart. 

Isabel and Ruth labor all day in the service of Widow Hallahan. She treats them much worse than her white employees, and Isabel wearily observes that the widow is “another snake-souled woman: happy enough to take our labor, but too evil to treat us fair” (146). The two girls lie down to sleep on the widow’s floor, but Isabel is tormented with worries. At eight, the time she’s agreed to meet Curzon, she creeps out.

She finds Curzon and Aberdeen watching a wrestling match. The boys claim they’ve gotten work with a blacksmith and a butcher, but she gets the sense that they’re lying. Isabel passes along the Jamaican woman’s warning, but Curzon brushes this off: He’s seen a lot of black soldiers allied with the Patriots here, and believes that he’ll be safe from capture as a skilled laborer. Aberdeen says he’ll come and help keep Ruth company on her laundry routes, and disappears to talk to someone he’s spotted in the crowd.

To Isabel’s surprise, Aberdeen keeps his word, accompanying Ruth on her laundry rounds. She’s distressed to see very little of Curzon. She’s still worried about his odd behavior and feels that he’s keeping secrets from her. Work in the laundry is difficult and irritating: The white girls who work there, indentured servants, treat Isabel like an inferior. Isabel grits her teeth and gets on with her work, dreaming of a time when she’ll own her own land.

After a few days, the good weather breaks, and a massive storm rolls in. The next morning, Widow Hallahan arrives, uncharacteristically ruffled, and asks Isabel if she’d do tavern work in her son’s tavern. Isabel readily agrees: “I’d learn more from tavern talk than the idle gossip in the laundry, though I would be more visible to anyone seeking me out” (157). Widow Hallahan hurries her to this new employment, and tells her the news: “General Washington arrives today!” (158).

Isabel gets to work under the direction of Miss Marrow in Mister Hallahan’s tavern, which is rented out for an officers’ dinner to celebrate Washington’s arrival. Isabel works hard all day cooking and serving, but also gets properly fed for the first time in weeks. She tries to eavesdrop on the soldiers, but doesn’t gather any useful information about how safe Williamsburg will be for her and her friends. Miss Marrow is much kinder and more reasonable than Widow Hallahan, and rewards Isabel’s hard work with slices of peach pie. However, Mister Hallahan seems suspicious of Isabel’s free papers. Isabel returns to the laundry and discovers that Widow Hallahan has allowed Ruth to go out on her own. Horrified, Isabel darts out to look for her.

In the crowds of newly-arrived soldiers and the chaos they bring with them, Isabel doesn’t know where to start looking for her sister. However, she hears Thomas Boon’s familiar bray and finds Ruth and Curzon sitting together in the cart, chatting with a Continental soldier. This man turns out to be an old friend: Ebenezer Woodruff, a white soldier whom Curzon knows from the Battle of Saratoga. Isabel is irritated with Curzon for taking Ruth off without telling her, but relieved to find everyone safe and well. She’s also impressed by Ebenezer, who has grown from a rough farm boy into an elegant sergeant. She’s also touched by Curzon’s excitement at Ebenezer’s military stories: “[T]he dream proclaimed by the bigwigs in Philadelphia of a nation built on freedoms excited his mind like nothing else” (171). The boys part with a significant promise to talk later.

Curzon walks the girls back to the laundry, and overflows with good news from the Patriot army. Isabel is irritated with him, still believing that he’s not being honest with her. Curzon reveals that he wants to enlist again. Isabel is unimpressed. The last time he was in the army, she reminds him, his compatriots handed him over to Bellingham. They’d be safer, she believes, with the British. The two squabble until Ruth sharply tells them to stop. Curzon admits that it’s too late: He’s already enlisted. Isabel is heartbroken. Not only does she think this is a foolish idea, she admits to herself that she’s in love with Curzon, in the very moment she feels he’s torn their friendship apart forever. They part, intending never to speak again.

Isabel, heartbroken, goes back to her labors at the laundry and in the tavern: “I worked and worked and worked to quiet the sorrowful truth. He chose the war over me” (179). Meanwhile, more soldiers stream into town. Isabel occasionally manages to grab a newspaper and catch up on the progress of the war. There’s some indication that the British might try to crown one of King George III’s sons the King of America.

On Sunday, Isabel takes Ruth to church. She observes her sister closely, seeing that while Ruth sometimes seems to only have the mental capacity of a five-year-old, she’s got more going on than she reveals. Rather than go to the segregated seats inside the church, Isabel and Ruth sit down outside a window and listen to the sermon from there. Isabel is infuriated by the hypocrisy of the sermon, a lecture on mercy delivered to a bunch of slave-owners. She prays that winter might come and cut off the approaching battles, and fantasizes about advising George Washington to stay his attack over a meat pie at the tavern.

Despite Isabel’s fantasies, Washington declares it’s time to fight. Widow Hallahan sends the other laundry girls off to wish their soldier boyfriends well, and in an uncharacteristic kindness, gives Isabel and Ruth some time off and some pocket money, too. Aberdeen squires the girls around town, buying Ruth a ball-and-cup toy. Isabel protests that Ruth needs new clothes more than toys, and Ruth tells Aberdeen, “Isabel doesn’t like fun” (188).

They go down to the river together, and while Ruth plays, Aberdeen tells Isabel that Ruth is telling him all about her. He also admits that he isn’t working as a butcher’s boy, but as a spy for the British army. Isabel is appalled, but Aberdeen has a dream: After the war, he’ll take Ruth and Isabel to Scotland, to the city he’s named after. He advises the girls to go offer their services to the British army. Isabel refuses, saying she doesn’t want to choose a side, just to look out for herself and her sister. Aberdeen counters that this is an option she can no longer choose: War is coming, and she’ll be on a side whether she likes it or not.

Isabel returns exhausted from this outing and finds the laundry in disarray, with bits of burned paper in the grate and buttons and seeds scattered around the floor. She recognizes the detritus as her own possessions: seeds she had saved for her dreamed-of future farm. She rushes to her knapsack. There, she finds her worst fears confirmed: Someone has taken and burnt her free papers. She suspects the sleeping Ruth did it, and wakes her, but Ruth claims it was Mister Hallahan, and falls back asleep.

Isabel awakes early the next morning to the sound of the army on the move. Isabel is in despair: The battle is coming, her relationship with Ruth is getting even worse after their falling-out over the papers, she’s worried the Hallahans won’t keep them on after the army moves out, and she needs expensive and hard-to-find paper and ink to forge new free papers for herself and her sister.

She finds the Widow Hallahan and Miss Marrow, who seem surprised to see her, having expected Mister Hallahan to have fetched her earlier. Isabel thinks they’re lying about something, but she’s not sure what. She asks them directly about her wages and their future employment, and Widow Hallahan is mysterious with her. When she offers them sweets, Isabel remembers a very familiar scene when Ruth was kidnapped, and realizes that Mister Hallahan is “coming to kidnap us. Steal us. Sell us” (207). Pretending to go and fetch Ruth, Isabel prepares to get on the road again.

Isabel fetches Ruth and gathers their possessions, taking along with her two wooden bats from the laundry: “If captured, we’d fight as long and hard as we could” (209). Ruth at first resists her, but Isabel persuades her to run by telling her that bad men are coming. Ruth’s memories of the overseer Prentiss who used to abuse her persuade her to follow her sister, and the two prepare to flee.