The Rebellion of Jane Clarke

by Sally Gunning

  “You may count on it,” Jane’s father said, “any news of a disaster at sea will reach you long before any of Jane’s letters,” and he went outside to call for the cart, but as soon as the Negro Jot arrived with it, Jane’s father returned to his office.

  The babe began to fuss, so Mehitable could only hug and kiss Jane around the damp, yeasty smell of the infant. Neddy had disappeared again, and so the group that followed her out to the cart was made up of only the three girls. Quiet tears streaked the little girls’ faces, but Bethiah scowled at her, as if she were Wing’s dog, about to bite her on the ankles. The only one who spoke was Jot, as he urged the horse forward.

  The gentle warmth of June settled over them, and on another day, in another circumstance, Jane might have better felt its favor—now she felt only the unwelcome tug of it, pulling her toward an unseen future. As they turned onto the landing road and passed her grandmother’s house Jane tamped down a wild urge to leap out of the cart and hide in its lee, but then the bay rose ahead, as if coming at her in a huge wave, and she saw the foolishness of hiding anywhere. If her future lay beyond that sea, then best to get herself there and get on with it.

  THE DECK OF THE Betsey crawled with life, some of the crew at the lines, some heaving up last-minute barrels and crates from the longboat tied to the ship’s gunwale; Jot tossed her trunk down onto the sand and Jane followed it. Someone shouted from down the beach and she turned around; the longboat had returned to shore and Ned Crowe and Joseph Woollen were standing by it, waiting. She crossed the sand to the boat, then crossed to the far side of the boat, so it might be Ned Crowe and not Joseph Woollen who handed her in. The men ran the boat out again, leaped aboard, and thrust their backs at the oars. Jane sat in the bow, facing shoreward, scouring the beach in hope of fixing its details, to be recalled at will at a later time. A figure appeared on the bluff: her grandmother standing with her hand lifted, not in a wave but in something flat and still, as if she were making a pledge; Jane lifted her hand in mirror answer.

  THROUGHOUT JANE’S LIFE SHE’D not thought one way or the other about the sea—it was there, filling her days with the sound and smell and stickiness that traveled everywhere the air did—but she hadn’t thought of it as a thing to love or hate or fear until that day, as she climbed on top of it. The sea had drowned her Grandfather Berry, it was true, but it had also helped to feed her family and carry them trade goods from Boston and England and the West Indies and even China. She tried to remember that as she made her way over the gunwale with the assistance of a few well-placed and misplaced hands and began to think how low the rail that separated her from many fathoms of oblivion. But as she looked down through the water she realized she could see the sand bottom, even a horseshoe crab, some weeds, a shattered piece of whale bone; not so many fathoms, then. No doubt if she were to slip over the side she’d be able to walk to shore, continue up the landing road, down the King’s road, up the cartway to her father’s house, make her apology, write her letter . . .

  There Jane remembered her father’s parting words, not even spoken to her, but to Mehitable. She lifted her head and turned her back on the shore. A cry went up from the crew; the sails rose and stiffened; the ground fell away beneath her; she pitched forward and cracked her head on the capstan.

  JANE IMAGINED A MARINER might be used to seeing a little blood here and there, but the commotion caused by the red stream running down the side of her face caused almost as much activity as had the preparation for sail. Woollen was first at her, helping her down onto a nearby crate, pulling a yellowed shirttail out of his breeches and poking it at her temple. Cousin Shubael got there next. He was in fact her grandmother’s first cousin by marriage and therefore not young or indeed agile by appearance, but he swung along the gunwale as if he were the age of Crowe or Woollen. He replaced Woollen’s yellow shirttail with a gray handkerchief and pressed it to the wound.

  “Well, lass, you don’t make such a fair start to your voyage, do you? Nye! Where’s my surgeon, Nye? Nye, get yourself out here where you’re needed!”

  And there was Harry Nye’s sun-blacked face in front of her, square white teeth exposed and grinning. He lifted the shipmaster’s handkerchief and clamped it down again; with the other hand he grabbed Jane’s elbow, pulled her to her feet, and pushed her down the companionway. A pair of bunks farthest forward had been curtained to separate them from the rest; Nye took her to them, ran back the curtain, and set her down on the right-hand one.

  According to town rumor, Harry Nye had left a wife behind in Maine; as he looked at Jane’s wound Jane looked at him, hunting for evidence of a black heart, but the gleaming teeth were the best she could make of him. He went away and came back with a needle and thread in one hand, a tin cup reeking of spirit in the other. He handed Jane the cup and she took a sip, but he pushed the cup back at her mouth with a snap of his head indicating what Jane was to do with it. Jane imitated the gesture and drained the cup; Nye grinned, but the next minute he was leaning over her with the needle, and suddenly the white teeth and dark face were too close for her liking. She closed her eyes, and then opened them; she had paid close attention to the stitching together of Jabez Snow’s thigh—as best she could she would watch this Harry Nye to see that he followed like procedure. He did, swabbing her temple, pinching up the skin, pulling the thread through, tying, snipping. She counted three of them. Afterward he picked up a piece of linen that she was pleased to see was neither yellow nor gray, tied it around her head, and patted her on the crown.

  “Best lie still a bit,” he said, and left her.

  Jane lay down on the bunk, the outside and inside of her head curiously numb. She looked around her at the double row of bunks, a table and benches, lockers, a pair of swinging lanterns—until her head began to swing with them. She stood up and worked her way backward through the bunks and hand over hand up the companionway.

  Once Jane hit the deck and felt the angle under her feet she stumbled again, but the second time was enough to teach her; she righted herself, spread her legs, and waddled across to the railing. She looked to shore—what had once been beach and sedge and road was nothing now but a white and green line pricked by the meetinghouse steeple. The bubble began to rise in her chest, but the breeze pushed it back, smothering her breath, flattening her skirt between her legs. She held up her hand and felt it stream over her palm and between her fingers. She looked down at the water, all dense green now, no crabs or weeds or bones beneath, and discovered that not seeing the bottom was less troubling than seeing it. It took away choices. Only one choice now remained, which of course made it no choice: Boston. Jane turned to face its general direction and there was Nye watching her, grinning. But if she couldn’t manage Nye, what else might she not manage at Boston? She turned her back on him.

  NIGHTFALL SOBERED HER. THE pair of curtained bunks was left to her, but on the other side of the curtain lay whatever men weren’t needed on deck as they slept in shifts, and their bodily noises so nearby kept her too agitated for sleeping. She’d heard her father snore, yes, but she’d never heard this gusting and grunting and thrashing of limbs so close by she might reach through the curtain and touch them. She wondered what noises Phinnie might make in his sleep. She wondered about Joseph Woollen and Harry Nye, and if those were their sounds she was hearing. She slept little.

  Jane woke with a headache, but once on deck she discovered her head ached less. She gripped the rail, turned her face into the wind, and let it pull her hair out behind her. So she stood for five hours; by the time the wind blew them into the harbor at Boston, a crust of salt, and perhaps another kind of crust, had formed on her skin. She had survived her first sea voyage. She had survived her first wound. She had survived both Nye and Woollen.

  Royal Exchange Lane

  Chapter Seven

  THE WATERFRONT WAS packed sky-deep in ships and warehouses and shops; the ground crawled with carts and carriages and more people than Jane had seen in her lifetime. At Satucket she could w
alk the length and breadth of the village and name every face she encountered; here she might count three she knew, four if she included John Adams, and the odds of finding any one of them among the hordes seemed next to nothing.

  Jane’s father had arranged with Shubael for the delivery of her trunk but had told her that her Aunt Gill lived at “an inconsiderable distance,” and she should have no trouble walking it. Jane had made sure to nod in studied calmness over her father’s directions, but she’d felt far from calm, had indeed come close to capitulating at the thought of following them, and it now appeared that had been her father’s whole intention. He had, in fact, ordered a chaise for Jane and her trunk to travel in together, but Jane’s rush of joy at the sight of the chaise couldn’t last—the chaise and the lie came together.

  And the chaise caused Jane other problems. The driver stared at her rudely and hummed a tune that she remembered from her uncle Silas as containing some questionable lyrics; he turned left from the wharf instead of straight as her father had dictated, convincing Jane she was on her way to being abducted; the rattle of wheels, the bark of dogs, and all the shouts and countershouts had set her head aching again. But soon enough they were on King Street and again in agreement with her father’s directions—she recognized the brick Town House from its description in the papers: the gold dome, with the gold unicorn and lion of the royal crest below it. She marked the other signs as she passed as if she were marking a trail in the forest: the British Coffee House, Mein’s Bookstore, the Custom House. A lone sentry stood in the box before the Custom House, the red of his jacket nearly as dazzling as the gold dome on the Town House. Jane stared and the sentry stared back and Jane looked away; thus her first encounter with the wild men she’d read of in the newspapers began and ended.

  The driver turned right immediately after the sentry box and just before the sign for the Exchange Tavern; he pulled up in front of a house so tall and flat-topped it would have been laughed at in Satucket. Jane slid to the ground and worked the knocker, but no one answered. The driver didn’t seem to care; he heaved Jane’s trunk to the ground, jumped back into his seat, and would have ridden off if Jane hadn’t grabbed the near rein to hold him. The urge to climb back into the carriage and take her chance with the driver kept her hanging on to the rein until the door behind her opened and a face empty of all expression framed itself in the narrow opening.

  Jane gave the woman her name, but before she could answer, a gonglike voice rolled over them from the interior.

  “Whatever are you doing, Martha?”

  Without livening itself in the least degree the face in the door said, “Your niece has arrived.”

  The gong answered: “Well get her in and shut the door, then!”

  JANE’S AUNT GILL WAS more bent than she remembered, and except for the strange, ringing voice, much weakened; she stood unsteadily at the top of the stairs, clinging to the railings. Jane started up to meet her, but the stairs were too narrow for her to do much but precede the old woman to cushion the fall; Aunt Gill worked her own way down by clinging to the railings with her hands while feeling ahead of her with her feet, which created the impression that she was sliding down the stairs on her behind end. Jane offered her arm at the bottom, but there Aunt Gill must have gotten her first good look at her. She let go of the railing with one hand and clapped it to the side of her face. “What! They’ve had at you already?”

  Jane stood in puzzlement until she remembered: her bandage. She explained how she’d injured herself; it took several tellings and much assurance that she felt no lingering effects before her aunt’s hand came down, but she continued to stare in a way that reminded Jane of the driver and the sentry, causing Jane to think something else of their attention. A servant appeared—a man near enough to white so that Jane was surprised to hear him called “Prince”—a slave name. Aunt Gill ordered Prince to take Jane’s trunk up the stairs and took Jane’s arm, her hand as cold as the millstream.

  “We must sit you down and get you tea,” Aunt Gill said. “You must be exhausted from your traveling. And all cut up, poor thing!”

  Jane hadn’t thought she was exhausted, but at that first kind word from her aunt she felt as if all muscle, bone, and sinew in her spine had melted. To sit down, to have tea, seemed the greatest gift she’d ever been offered. At once the old woman’s beak and pincers melted.

  “Martha!” Aunt Gill called. “Tea, please! In the back parlor away from the commotion. I should warn you, Jane, this ‘tea’ is more like the dregs of the rain barrel; your father no doubt enjoys the real brew at Satucket.”

  When Jane made no answer her aunt pulled her to a halt with surprising strength and peered hard at her. “I say, Jane, does your father drink Bohea at home?”

  “He does.”

  Aunt Gill nodded, her mouth in a line that reminded Jane of her father when his smile was most distant. As they executed the right turn out of the hall she pulled back against Jane’s arm a second time. “I think we’d best sit in the front parlor after all; we’d not hear them at the back,” and they swung in the opposite direction. The front room was stubby and square and cluttered with furniture that seemed to have little to do but to give Aunt Gill something to cling to as she moved around it. Aunt Gill felt her way to a high-backed upholstered chair that faced a summer-cold hearth and dropped herself into it, but she did not release Jane into its companion.

  “I ask about your father and his tea for a reason,” Aunt Gill said. “I think it best we clear these things up at the beginning. I don’t wish you to mistake me—I’ve looked forward with great pleasure to having you here. So great a pleasure that I’ve spoken about it around town. It was in that manner that I came to learn something of your father’s business. His views. Perhaps I should say his politics. ’Tis apparently well known about town that he sides with the Crown, even trades with importers.”

  Jane said nothing.

  “And speaks free against these persons he would call rebels, or even traitors.”

  “I don’t know what my father does in town. I know he speaks free enough in Satucket.”

  Aunt Gill had little chin and more nose, which might after all suggest something of a beak. She said, “And do you share your father’s view, Jane?”

  “I don’t know enough of the thing to hold a view, Aunt.”

  Aunt Gill’s face relaxed, allowing comforting half-moons to form below her eyes and chin. “I’m pleased to hear so, Jane. Very pleased. There was a day when you’d not dream of a young woman’s offering a political opinion, but now they serve it up with the pudding. I believe you understand me. My sympathies being different from your father’s, I’d rather not have rocks thrown at my windows simply because his daughter’s come to live here.”

  There Aunt Gill paused with head cocked, as if waiting for Jane to answer, so Jane said, “I’ll take care,” but it turned out Aunt Gill had been straining after a new noise from the street. She said, “Look out there, Jane, and tell me what goes on.”

  Jane got up and moved toward the door, but Aunt Gill said, “No, no, the window! And don’t open the sash!”

  Jane went to the window and craned left and right; to the right she could see nothing but a number of walkers and carts and carriages crossing the mouth of Royal Exchange Lane as they traveled along King Street, but to the left she saw a British soldier scraping some dung off his boot against the cobbles. She turned back to her aunt. “ ’Tis naught but a soldier cleaning his boot.” The soldier lifted the latch of the next door but one and disappeared inside. “Why, he lives near you!”

  “And where did you think they’d keep them? They’re quartered all over town, wherever they can squeeze them. You can’t empty your night jar without it landing on one of them, and then what a stink they make.” Aunt Gill laughed, peering at Jane until she managed a weak laugh with her.

  Martha arrived with the tea, and there at last Aunt Gill remembered that Jane was still standing—she waved her into the chair opposite. The “te
a” she poured out was the putrid yellow labrador, brewed from the herb of that name, sometimes called “swamp tea,” either after the place where the herb was harvested or the actual swamp water it resembled. Still, it comforted Jane, as did the simple bread and butter, and her aunt’s good sense in leaving her to eat it in silence.

  Aunt Gill also seemed to notice Jane’s fatigue—as soon as the dishes were cleared, she said, “A sea voyage is so very trying. No doubt by now you long for your bed as much as this old woman does.” She made as if to rise, but fell back; Jane leaped up to help her, and they set off as slowly as they’d entered. At the door Jane spied the first looking glass she’d encountered since she’d left home, and gave a start. No wonder her aunt and the driver and the sentry had stared at her. Her bandage was discolored with old blood and new grime, her hair looked like winter grass after a punishing storm, and she was so short of sleep that the lavender blue of her eyes appeared to have bled into the skin below. She thought how lucky she was that Phinnie couldn’t see her, until she remembered it didn’t matter what Phinnie thought anymore.

  AUNT GILL’S ROOM SAT next to the second-floor landing, and Jane’s first job began right there. Aunt Gill leaned close and squeezed Jane’s arm. “T’was Martha settled me each night before you came,” she whispered, “but I must say to you she did so with a great lack of efficiency.”

  Jane would have said the word efficiency implied no wasted time or movement, and set about to act accordingly, but this was difficult to do, as Aunt Gill had a habit of frequently changing her mind. The candle was moved twice, the bell three times, and the Bible three again. The shutters were to be pulled to and latched; no, the shutters were to be half pulled but not latched until Jane finished helping Aunt Gill out of her shoes, stockings, cap, and gown, at which time the shutters were to be latched and rattled a number of times until Aunt Gill could feel sure the latches had taken hold. Then came the bed. First the ropes that supported the bed tick were to be twisted tight; but no—first the bed tick should be punched up, and two stiff bolsters positioned exactly even to each other at the head of the bed. But no again! The under sheet was to be smoothed until it looked like pond ice before the bolsters were ever touched!