The Rebellion of Jane Clarke

by Sally Gunning

  THE REBELLION

  OF JANE CLARKE

  Sally Gunning

  FOR ANDREA

  The seeming truth which cunning times put on

  To entrap the wisest.

  —The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene 2

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Satucket

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Royal Exchange Lane

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Water Street

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Satucket

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Sally Gunning

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Satucket

  Chapter One

  May 6, 1769

  JANE CLARKE STOOD in the sedge growth on the lip of the dune and looked out over the half-drained bay, the ribbons of sand rising up through the retreating water. Her cousin’s sloop, the Betsey, had slipped in ahead of the falling tide and lay canted sideways in the channel, keel nestled in the mud. Already, the oxcarts rumbled over the sand loaded with barrels and crates full of salt, rum, molasses, and other more worldly goods—most of them legal—come to Satucket from Boston, but Jane wasn’t there for goods. Jane was there for letters. Even at her distance Jane could identify the mail sack in the foremost oxcart, but she stayed where she was, half-camouflaged by the sedge, because Joseph Woollen was the one driving it shoreward. Was it worth facing Woollen’s unblinking fish eyes just to get to the letters first?

  Yes, she decided. She slid down the bluff and saw Woollen’s head lift at the sight of her, saw him dive at the sack; by the time she’d reached the cart he had her letters sorted and ready. He thrust them at her with a formal, “Good-day, miss,” as if he didn’t know her name, as if at his cousin’s wedding he hadn’t pressed lips like cold chicken livers up and down her neck. Jane gave one nod to cover both greeting and good-bye, took the handful of letters, and hurried off toward the landing road, as if she were in a great rush to get them to her father, which she should have been, of course, as most of them were his. She proceeded along the landing road onto the King’s road at an even pace, but at the cartway that led from the road to her father’s house she walked faster, keeping one eye on alert for family or servants. She should go straight home—her father’s letters aside, the day’s work sat waiting—but two of the letters were for Jane, and the minute she stepped inside the house she would lose all chance of reading them in peace. The plan was to take the path along the millstream to her favorite rock above the millpond, where she might, for a time, keep her news to herself.

  Such was the plan, but as Jane rounded the bend she came up against a knot of men standing in front of Thacher’s tavern, their voices hot and sharp, the words flying back and forth like training-day musket shot.

  “The ears?”

  “Lopped off!”

  “The devil! When?”

  “Last night. Bangs Inn. Winslow paid a call after supper, tied his horse out front, left around ten and found the creature cut up.”

  “Bloody hell! Who did it?”

  “Who did it! God’s breath, man, who do you think? Name me another who’d carry an argument to a man’s horse. Name me—” Whatever the speaker had in mind, it was cut short when he spied Jane. He snapped his jaw shut; the rest of the group turned, saw Jane, and likewise fell silent.

  The talk had been bad enough, but the silence was worse. Jane might have pretended their silence had nothing to do with her, that the talk had cut short at her approach out of nothing but a gentleman’s desire to shield a lady from an unpleasant subject, but the looks back and forth, the shifting feet, the sharp edge to the silence itself told her what she’d already guessed the minute the speaker had closed his mouth.

  They blamed her father for the horse.

  Griffith, her father’s neighbor, braved the silence first. “Good-day, Jane.”

  “Good-day, sir.”

  The other men touched their hats or dipped their heads; Jane cricked her neck in response; but after she’d walked past she heard the steady pock-pock-pock of their lowered voices at her back. What cowards they were! Her rage began to pump her feet, but once she felt the ground rushing by underneath she checked her stride—they would not catch her in flight. She waited till she’d left the road and was out of sight before she picked up her skirts and bolted, following the millstream black with fish, past Winslow’s fulling mill, all the way up to the milldam. Beyond the dam the millpond lay sleek and calm; below it the alewives pooled, resting for their final thrust through the turbulent floodgate into the pond to spawn; there Jane decided to rest as well, letting her heart catch up with her legs.

  While Jane rested, she peered down into the vortex of circling fish. The annual spring migration of the alewives had long puzzled Jane—what was it that convinced generation upon generation of fish to fight their way around so many rocks and against such a powerful current to the millpond to shed their eggs? What did that particular pond offer over the bays and inlets and tide pools below that could be worth such injury and exhaustion, even death? Jane could not, would not ever, understand it.

  After she had collected her breath, Jane pulled her skirt tight and continued along the wilder portion of path, used now only by a handful of children or the few remaining Indians who camped beyond the millpond. A large rock lay ahead, the water lipping at three sides of it, creating the illusion of a fortress; Jane hitched up her skirt and climbed on top of it. The dark rock had already stored up some of the fleeting May sun, and now that the clouds had returned Jane was glad enough for the heat of it; she settled as comfortably as she could on the warm stone and crossed her legs, spreading the letters in the basket her skirt had formed between her knees.

  Of the two letters addressed to Jane she recognized both hands; she also noted that one of the writers had included a letter to her father. She picked up the other letter—the letter from her brother—already away from Satucket five years now, four at Harvard College and one clerking for the lawyer John Adams in Boston. She ran her finger under the fold and cracked the seal; the letter was short, but so were all her brother’s letters.

  10 April 1769

  My Dear Sister,

  I am in hopes this finds you well and should like to report the same, although yesterday I took a fall off a horse that should have been shot before it was ever put out to let. Of course, if Father had seen fit to set me up with my own horse I’d not be confined to this bed, but if the fool who fired the musket that shied the horse had aimed lower I’d not be confined to this life.

  Jane read on in a fine alarm. Who was firing muskets so near a horse and rider? How badly was her brother hurt? He mentioned a sprained knee, a wrist—she continued reading in hopes of finding plans for her bro
ther’s recuperating in Satucket but found no hint of it. She put the letter aside and picked up the next.

  1 May 1769

  My Dearest Jane,

  I hope this letter finds you in all your usual glowing health. I write to inform you that I expect to have completed all my town business by the 16th and have written to your father acquainting him with my dual intention, the one being to stop at Satucket on my return trip to Wellfleet on the 19th or 20th of this month. You know the second intention. Or perhaps I should say the first?

  Having spent overlong on your father’s epistle, I now have time for a scant few lines to you, but suffice it to say that since I left you at your father’s you have been behind my every thought. I see your face each time I blink and yet I could not describe it to a stranger—’tis all sum over parts.

  If it makes up in any way for the insufficiency of this letter, allow me to assure you that I believe I have spent the time on your father’s letter to good effect, and that I am,

  Ever your,

  P. Paine

  Jane folded up both letters and pushed the pair into her pocket out of sight, feeling suddenly, explosively, out of sorts. That her brother’s letter should disturb she understood well enough—he made no mention of nurse or doctor, which meant any one of his sprains might indeed be a break; he seemed more interested in blaming her father for the horse than the stranger for the shot that had pitched him off it in the first place. But what of Phinnie’s letter? Halfway through the reading, she’d developed a painful bubble in her chest that felt sure to erupt through her ribs at any moment, and she had no idea what might have caused it.

  Jane took the letters out of her pocket, opened Phinnie’s, and read it through again. At the second reading she could pick out a few trouble spots; for instance, she might ask: Was she first or was she second on his list of intents? She might also like to know why she should be behind all his thoughts and not once out front. She might wonder too if she was expected to take sum over parts as compliment.

  Jane put the letters away again, threw her legs over the edge of the rock, and dropped to the earth. She headed off without remembering to haul in her skirt, and the grass and bullbriers pulled at it as she went; when she’d reached the milldam, in a quarter of the time it had taken her to walk up, the bubble in her chest had pushed into her lungs, making them feel like the overworked gills of the fish that swam in exhausted circles at her feet. She stopped, put her hands on her hips, breathed in and out, and looked out over the mill valley.

  The village of Satucket stretched east another six miles, encompassing a busy stretch around the meetinghouse that most villagers would have considered Satucket’s heart, but Jane saw this part of it, her part of it, as the true source of village life. There was Winslow’s fulling mill below her to the left; across the road were the herring men, their nets dipping and swaying under the usual cloud of gulls; below them was her father’s tannery, the tanner just setting down his scraping blade to take up his paddle and stir his vats; across the millstream from the tannery was the big wooden wheel of her father’s grist mill, rumbling under the fall of water like the village pulse. Beyond all of that lay the greening, snaking, salt marsh, and the ocean that forever pushed and pulled at the village’s edge, filling the air with the piquant smell of life and death. Just so the mill valley had spread out before Jane all twenty-two years her life, and yet this time as she looked she saw something different. Two mills. One stream. Too many lawsuits.

  For that was, of course, what lay behind the horse.

  Jane couldn’t say how many years the Clarkes and Winslows had been feuding over the millstream privilege, but she knew it dated back to a time before her birth, to the day Jane’s grandfather sold his mill to the Winslows, built a new one on the other side of the stream, and dug the gutter that drew the water to the new site. The Winslows had accused Jane’s grandfather of drawing off so much water that it hampered the operation of the old mill; Jane’s grandfather, and her father as time advanced, claimed there was plenty of water for both. The Winslows took the Clarkes to court over the diversion of the water and won their case, although the settlement was insultingly small, or so Winslow said. He sued again, accusing Jane’s father of failure to maintain his half of the milldam, blaming him for the flood that caused the fulling mill three hundred pounds in damage. The court again found for Winslow, but Jane’s father appealed and received a considerable reduction in the damages. One might think that two judgments in his favor would put Winslow to rest, but it had not; only the week before another summons had arrived, a qui tam as Jane’s father called it, two words Jane didn’t understand and didn’t dare ask to be translated, considering her father’s state when he’d received it.

  Those were the legal actions to date, but the legal actions were only half her father’s troubles—the rest swarmed out of the busy hive of village rumor: Jane’s father had got Winslow cast out of the church for evil-speaking; he’d gone out in the dead of night and ripped up Winslow’s milldam; he’d set the fire that burned the old fulling mill to the ground; and now, supposedly, he’d cut off the ears of Winslow’s horse.

  There, again, the bubble rose upward in Jane’s chest, now disrupting her swallowing, finally revealing its true source—not Phinnie Paine’s letter, but the outrageous rumor that her father—her father—had cut off the ears of another man’s horse. Yes, the other rumors had stung, but this was separate from all the rest. What kind of man could accuse another of such an act? What kind of man, on hearing it, could believe it and repeat it publicly, in the middle of the King’s road, to anyone who happened to wander past?

  Jane pulled her eyes back from the distant valley to the alewives at her feet; some of them had completed their rest and were beginning to fling themselves into the final wall of water, which was all that lay between them and peace. Jane watched several dozen fish pass through the floodgate, but she’d already been too long at her errand; she turned and worked her way back down the stream until she’d reached the steps that led up the hill to her father’s house.

  Chapter Two

  WHEN JANE ENTERED the keeping room her father was sitting at table, reading a month-old Boston Gazette. When Jane had once commented to her brother on their father’s tendency to read the radical Gazette more often than the conservative Chronicle Nate had said, “He would know his enemies better than his friends.” As her father seldom read a paper in silence Jane took a quick glance over his shoulder to prepare herself for that morning’s topic. The choices appeared to be three: the activities of the British troops stationed at Boston the past fall to keep the peace; the unruliness of the Boston inhabitants; the governor’s speech. Jane predicted today’s topic would be the unruly inhabitants—a mob had broken the windows of a loyalist merchant who had continued to import the British goods that the rebels had proscribed—and so it was.

  “This they call defending a man’s right to his life?” Jane’s father cried. “This they call defending his liberty, his property?”

  As Jane’s father continued, it occurred to Jane that she might have predicted the rest: her stepmother, Mehitable, turning her face to her husband in that closed openness that meant he had her attention if not her understanding, her stepbrother Neddy slipping out the door to the barn like a starved cat, her stepsister Bethiah charging into the room in the full flood of a mindless jabber that drew her a swat, the little ones staring at their father like a pair of big-eyed, cornered foxes. After Bethiah’s interruption there followed a brief calm where the only sound to be heard was her father’s voice ratcheting up and down over the meaning of liberty versus liberties until the infant began to cry, at which her father broke off to ask why it was that a mother four times over had not yet learned how to stop up a babe’s mouth with a tit.

  All of it Jane might have announced in advance of the event except for one thing: the return of the bubble in her chest. She didn’t know what should distress her in any of it, for none of it was any different from what she’
d seen and heard every day of her life. Her father spoke as he thought; her stepmother did neither; Neddy would live in the barn if he could; the little ones froze to their seats whenever their father sneezed; Bethiah—fourteen now and old enough to know better—never did take the mood of a room before she charged into it.

  Jane, who did know better, laid her father’s letters down next to his right fist, picked up his mug, and refilled it in silence.

  Jane’s father looked up. “What’s took you?”

  “Some excitement in the road.”

  “Excitement in the road!”

  She looked at her father. The room had already grown hot from the cooking fire and his long lip and short forehead shimmered with damp. She said, “Some kind of injury to Winslow’s horse.”

  Jane’s father leaped up. “You may spare me the rest! I’ve heard enough of Winslow for the week!” He picked up the pile of letters and the mug and retreated to his office.

  THE SHOUT CAME JUST as Jane had put the vinegar to boil; she handed Bethiah the spoon and turned for the office. Jane’s father sat at his desk. He was not an impressive man when standing—his proportions reminding Jane much of the cider keg in the cellar—but when sitting his chest and head took on the more inspiring lines of a marble bust. He looked up as Jane entered and smiled at her as he smiled only at her; if her brother Nate had grown into a more compliant boy Jane was sure that the son would have held first place in their father’s heart, but as Nate had chosen another road, it was left to Jane to bask in the happy if sporadic warmth that shone on the most favored.