Alice Cole spent her first seven years living in two smoky, crowded rooms in London with her family. But a new home and a better life waited in the colonies, or so her father promised—a bright dream that turned to ashes when her brothers and mother took ill and died during the arduous voyage. Arriving in New England unable to meet the added expenses incurred by their misfortunes at sea, her father bound Alice into servitude to pay his debts.
By the age of fifteen, Alice can barely remember the time when she was not a servant to John Morton and his daughter, Nabby. Though work fills her days, life with the Mortons is pleasant; Mr. Morton calls Alice his "sweet, good girl," and Nabby, only three years older, is her friend, companion, and now newly married, her mistress.
But Nabby's marriage is not happy, and soon Alice is caught up in its storm; seeing nothing ahead but her own destruction, she defies her new master and the law and runs away to Boston. There she meets a sympathetic widow named Lyddie Berry and her lawyer companion, Eben Freeman. Frightened and alone, Alice impulsively stows away on their ship to Satucket on Cape Cod, where the Widow Berry offers Alice a bed and a job making cloth in support of the new boycott of British wool and linen.
At Widow Berry's, Alice believes her old secret is safe, until it becomes threatened by a new one. As the days pass, the political and the personal stakes rise and intertwine, ultimately setting off a chain of events that will force Alice to question all she thought she knew. Bound by law, society, and her own heart, Alice soon discovers that freedom—as well as gratitude, friendship, trust, and love—has a price far higher than any she ever imagined.
Library Journal hailed Sally Gunning's previous novel, The Widow's War, as "historical fiction at its best." With Bound, this wonderfully talented writer returns to pre-Revolutionary New England and evokes a long-ago time filled with uncertainty, hardship, and promise.
For a time Alice remembered the good and forgot the bad, but after a while she remembered the bad and then had to forget everything to get rid of it; when it came back it came back in bits, like the pieces in a month-old stew -- all the same gray color and smelling like sick, not one thing whole in the entire kettle.
First was the ship. Alice had lived her first seven years of life in London before she got aboard the ship, and if she hadn't got aboard she imagined she might have remembered better those early years of her life, but the ship and what came after it took away all but a few brown heaps of London ash and dirt. She remembered helping her mother to hang the wash on the fence; she remembered learning to pump the foot wheel to twist fine linen fibers into thread; she remembered constantly sweeping lint and bark and wood chips from under her father's bootheels as he sat and smoked and talked about the ship.
It seemed to Alice that her father talked about the ship a long time before they ever got on it. Alice's two older brothers joined in with excited jabber about great stiff sails, sturdy beams, and wide, salted oceans, but Alice watched her mother's face and stayed quiet. Her mother's face had clouded at the word ship and stayed so through all her father's and brothers' happy clamor; Alice saw the face but didn't understand it. As her father described it, leaving two rooms full of smoke and damp for a fine house new-made by his own hand in a place called Philadelphia seemed to promise a life as big as the word. But after a time Alice stopped looking at her mother when her father and brothers began their talk of the ship, and when the cart finally came to collect them she was hanging on the windowsill in the same eagerness as her brothers.
Alice's mother held her tight on her lap through the whole cart ride; when they drew up onto the wharf and saw the ship looming in front of them, Alice's mother said, "Don't be afraid, Alice," but Alice wasn't. She squirmed out of her mother's quivering fingers and chased after her brothers up the gangway. The deck of the ship seemed nothing but a large, fenced yard covered with boards, except that it groaned and creaked and swayed back and forth like the pendulum on a clock she had once seen at the magistrate's.
A man wearing both hat and kerchief on his head led them down a narrow, laddered passage into what he called the " 'tween decks"; there Alice entertained herself looking at strange faces and listening to strange tongues as her mother hung a curtain around a row of bunks no wider than a set of dough trays. Alice had only just sorted the people around her into families when the tramp of feet overhead grew louder and the creaking and groaning of the ship grew stronger. The deck below her feet began to slant, a little and then a little more, and a collection of cries sprung up around them: "We're away! We sail!"
A small child wailed. A woman. Another. Alice looked at her mother and saw her eyes brim. Alice returned to her study of the oddly dressed, strangely gabbling people around her and felt herself well entertained until they began losing their stomachs.
Alice's mother was the first in their family to turn the color of paste and go up to the rail; by the time she returned, half a dozen small children had already washed the 'tween deck with their vomit. Alice's brothers went next, and last Alice, too sick to notice anything around her; when she returned below, the boards beneath her feet had already turned slick, the air sour and rancid, and the strange families that had amused Alice not long before now seemed too close, too loud, too familiar.
After a time Alice's mother couldn't raise herself to climb the...
