Such was Jane’s idea of town life, but it was close to a week before she actually stepped outside Aunt Gill’s home to see it for herself. The opportunity came on a day when Martha was deep into the laundry and Prince was in Dorchester after a new kind of purgative Aunt Gill had seen advertised in the newspaper. After Prince had left, the old woman called from above-stairs for Jane. Jane found her in her room at the little table by the bed, pen and ink laid out beside a blank sheet of paper.
“I have but this one sheet of paper, Jane. I don’t know how this happened that I let it run so low; I need you to make a purchase for me. Not Mein’s bookshop—you must never use Mein’s! Tory! You must go to Wharton & Bowes at the southwest corner of King and Main and request my usual order with them. Do you know the place?”
Of course Jane could not know it, but she knew King, and she knew southwest, and despite what she’d read in the papers she was in an itch to get out and see something of the place. Aunt Gill’s voice had to follow her out the door.
“King and Main! And keep wide of the soldiers before the Main Guard! And speak to no one but Mr. Knox, the bookseller!”
Jane supposed if she’d been allowed out and about the town her first day there she might have stepped out with greater hesitation; as it was, she leaped so precipitously through the door she almost landed in the gutter, a construction not found in Satucket. She took a deep breath and received her second surprise—this was no Satucket air, but a thing full of too-old food, too-new chamber dung, and too many kitchen fires set too close together.
It being early in the day, the tavern on the corner was almost quiet, but King Street was busy with the usual traffic Jane had come to know from her window. She looked left toward the Custom House as she entered the road, having learned since her first trip past that this was where the king’s duty money was stored; as she looked she happened to catch the sentry’s eye. She looked away but soon met another eye, and another and another, all looking the wrong kind of question at her. After a time Jane sensed her mistake; in Satucket she looked at everyone as she passed because they were sure to know each other; in Boston if she looked at someone as she passed it could only be taken as either an inappropriate invitation or an unwanted intrusion. The moment Jane became acquainted with her mistake she fixed her gaze hard on the ground, but she found herself unable to keep it there. She wanted to keep an eye out for all the novelties of town. And its dangers. And Phinnie Paine.
Phinnie’s business involved barrel staves and shingles, things that came first to the port of Boston and next from there to the other parts of the colony. He was often in town, traveling by ship or horseback, depending on the required stops along the way. Disembarking from the ship Jane had been occupied with other concerns, and while trapped indoors at Aunt Gill’s there had been no cause to worry, but now, out in the street, all was changed. He could be anywhere. She heard that singular laugh from across the road; she saw his unique nose coming toward her through the crowd; she spied the long triangle of his back walking away from her down an alley. It made no difference that in actual fact none of them were Phinnie—at each sighting her mind turned into knots, chasing after an acceptable greeting, as if by chance he would even greet her. What could she possibly say? A letter was difficult enough; a conversation was an impossibility.
Jane continued along King Street. Just before the Town House she spied a small crowd gathered around what turned out to be the whipping post; Jane peered between two pairs of shoulders and caught a glimpse of the fleecy black head of a Negro, eyes rolling in either a state of intoxication or swooning. Beyond the whipping post she was forced to pass two sentries at the Main Guard, but she kept her eyes straight ahead as Aunt Gill had directed. She felt free enough to look in the shop windows, however, and although the butcher’s window was bursting with more meat than she’d see in a month at Satucket and the goldsmith’s wares blinded her eyes it was as if she’d seen nothing—nothing—till she stepped through the door at Wharton & Bowes.
So many books lined the walls it seemed the bookshop had been built of them; more filled the tables and even parts of the floor. Jane picked a book off the nearest table and opened it to its title page: PAMELA: Or Virtue Rewarded. IN a SERIES of FAMILIAR LETTERS from a Beautiful Young
DAMSEL to her PARENTS.
A young man near her age but far too tall and broad for the size of the store emerged from between the shelves. “Good-day to you, Miss. Henry Knox, bookseller. How may I assist you?”
Jane looked at the book in her hand, her curiosity over the beautiful young damsel driving the real purpose of her errand from her mind. She looked at the book again. A series of familiar letters . . . “Letter paper. ’Tis to go to the account of Miss Gill of Royal Exchange Lane. Her usual order.”
Knox possessed one of those wide, shining faces that would no doubt look happy under tears, but Jane’s request made it shine even more broadly. “Ah! You’ve arrived! The niece! Miss Clarke, is it?”
Jane dipped her head.
Knox disappeared behind the counter and returned with a packet of paper, setting it down in front of Jane. “And you’d like Pamela as well?”
“No! Oh, no.” Jane set the book back on the table.
“Not Pamela? Well, then, what of Cleomira Supposed Dead, or The Nun the Fair Vow Breaker, or The Reformed Coquet?”
“No, no thank you.”
“In truth I’m partial to The Nun. Such an exotic, scandalous convent! But Pamela! One daren’t leave that poor girl alone a minute. Perhaps if you tell me what you’ve last read I’ll know better how to advise you.”
Jane’s last reading had been a few snips out of the Gazette. She said, “Perhaps if you tell me what you’ve last read I’ll know better what to think of your judgment.”
The happy moon-face glowed. “Ah! Clever you are! In that case I have no qualm in telling you that I’m reading Mr. Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. ‘Men being by nature all free, equal and independent, no man can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent.’ At the same time I’m undertaking a detailed study of artillery.”
He peered at Jane to see if she took his point. She did. And if Aunt Gill told true of her chatting about Jane’s father around town, she also guessed why the bookseller felt the need to make it. Something like resentment on her father’s behalf began to tickle her tongue; she said, “I’d not have thought the words consent and artillery would make such compatible reading.”
Knox’s eyebrows rose in clear surprise, which would have been insulting if the eyes beneath weren’t so filled with delight. “Then I must lend my books to you, Miss Clarke.”
Jane said, again, “No, thank you. But I’ll take a half-dozen sheets of letter paper to my own charge.” She looked at the books on the table. Pamela cost two shillings—two days’ wage. But Knox’s infamous Nun was only a shilling ten pence, a savings of half a day. She said, “And The Nun, please.”
JANE DECIDED TO WALK home along the other side of King Street to acquaint herself with the shops there, but as soon as she reached the other side she ran into a pack of boys outside the Brazen Head, catcalling “Importer! Importer! Importer!” She cut wide around the group, making it the rest of the way without disturbance, but coming from the west it forced her to walk within view of the sentry at the Custom House for a block or more. From the distance he looked only straight and neat; closer he looked clean and young. He watched her come; she knew this because it required him to turn his head sideways, and as she reached the corner of Royal Exchange he touched his brim to her in adieu. So he knew who she was now. He knew where she turned. And she now knew he was indeed the soldier of the dirty boot who lived two doors along.
Chapter Nine
JANE WAS WELL into her third week in town before her brother Nate finally came by. He had always been what their father had called, enraging Nate, “a pretty boy,” but now his body had grown more solid, his face more edged, and the moniker
no longer suited quite as well. He swept off his hat and kissed her cheek—a new gesture, but one he seemed comfortable enough in making, as if he’d practiced it a time or two before. She watched him as he crossed the room to make his duty to Aunt Gill and could detect nothing but the slightest limp; only as her worry for him lifted did she feel how heavy it had grown. But this new strangeness in him! He seemed to have receded farther from her than the length of the room allowed.
Nate kissed Aunt Gill and turned around. “Well, Jane, I should like to say what a fine thing it is to have my sister here in town, although I’d like to know what our father was thinking to set you loose here just now.”
At the word loose Jane looked over Nate’s shoulder toward her aunt, and Nate grinned. He understood her yet—nothing would be loose at Aunt Gill’s. Some of the hollowness that had filled Jane since she’d arrived in town evaporated. She opened her mouth to ask the first of her many questions lying in wait for her brother, but she was too late—the inquisition had begun. How like her father her aunt was, Jane thought—so uneasy over the subject of politics and yet unable to leave it alone, batting at it again and again as a cat might bat a string.
The questions went on and on. What did Nate think of Mr. John Adams? What case did he work on? Had he met any of the other influential people in town—James Otis, perhaps, or John Adams’s cousin Sam, or the wealthy John Hancock, the one they called the rebels’ milch cow? Nate answered it all, sounding like the lawyer he’d not quite become, so much so that Jane found herself looking at him again and again, losing the brother again and again; the talk went on so long she itched to send her aunt from the room, her aunt whose kindness alone could account for her brother’s being there at all. But just as she feared her impatience had begun to show, Aunt Gill called for Martha, pleaded an old woman’s fatigue, and asked to be taken to her room. Intentional or no, it was a double gift the old woman left Jane—to have the long-absent brother to herself at last, and to have been excused her nightly duty besides. For the first time, something of Jane’s heart went after the old woman as she left the room.
Jane’s trouble now lay in the fact that she’d built up such a great store of questions for her brother that they’d dammed up in her throat. She wanted to know of her brother’s health, of course; she wanted to know how he liked his rooms on Cold Lane; she wanted to know if he knew the John Adams that she felt she knew—the man who could cradle another man’s messy babe in his arms. She wanted to know if there was a lady in his life, and what about the qui tam, and whether he’d heard about Winslow’s horse. She wanted to know what he knew of Phinnie Paine.
Such were Jane’s thoughts, but as well as she knew her brother it shouldn’t have surprised her—in truth it didn’t surprise her—that his thoughts would still be on the politics of the town.
“Well, Jane, I suppose by now you’ve been able to observe for yourself what a fine prison these bloody soldiers have us in.”
“I’ve only observed a few at their posts.”
“ ’Tis enough, then. But we’ll get them gone.”
“So you’re a ‘we’ now?”
“And you’re not? Don’t tell me you take up our father’s view. But why shouldn’t you? You eat his food, why not his words? He won’t. Hah!”
Jane smiled, not at the poor joke but at the hah, a perfect copy of their father’s. “You must give our father some credit, Nate. After all, he sent you to clerk for a man whose view he must strongly oppose.”
“He sent me to clerk for the man he believes the best lawyer in town. He has his plans for me.”
“He wants things for you, yes.”
“He wants things from me.”
Jane peered at her brother. How bitter he sounded! But then again, Jane might join him in that bitterness now. She need only tell him what their father had done to her over Phinnie and they’d be together again. But where to begin it? Jane thought back over the recent events and could think of nothing but the horse, which had nothing to do with Phinnie at all. But she said, because she couldn’t seem to move it out of the way, “Someone cut off the ears of Winslow’s horse.”
It was as if Nate hadn’t heard. Was Satucket of so little concern to him now? He stood up. “Adams is on the circuit at Maine. I’ve his work and mine to tend. I must go. Keep away from the soldiers, Jane.” He was gone.
JANE’S WORK WITH GRANNY Hall had taught her successful remedies for any number of things that were known to lay the elderly low, but at the end of that third week Jane had yet to find a symptom in her aunt that she could name. She’d witnessed the sporadic unsteadiness in foot and hand, the remarkable sensitivity to noise, an overreaction to the least change in the air from either cold to hot or hot to cold, but nothing that she knew how to treat, like catarrh or fever or boils. Instead Jane spent her days fetching neck cloths and shawls and thicker stockings, helping her aunt to the boiled rice puddings and meat jellies and chicken broth that she claimed were all her digestion could put down.
There were times, like the time with the bolster, when Jane understood that she needed to step away. She didn’t like this thing in herself, this absence of the patience to hover unswervingly over the not ill—she disliked having to step into the hall or the yard or her room just to take a breath, but she found such trips necessary in order to continue in the same calm in which she’d begun. On one such side excursion she came upon Prince and Martha at the foot of the back stairs, and as startled as they were at the sight of Jane, Jane was the more so because she found Martha laughing. The face that would not bend or crinkle or contort for Jane was buckled up into laughter, and Prince’s simpleton mask had dissolved under the residue sparkle of some recent witticism exposed. There in that minute Jane felt again something of a sense of purpose. Who were these two really? Whoever they were they would not show themselves to Jane, and whoever they were, they worked together as a team. But as least with Jane in the house it evened up the sides.
Jane began to make abrupt stops in her work in order to walk around the house, and she began to come upon other things: a too-secretive look, an ill-disguised sneer, an excuse that didn’t entirely account for a servant’s presence in the back room or on the stairs or out of doors. But as often as Jane stood guard, as hard as she tried to believe there was a higher purpose to her attendance on her aunt, it wasn’t enough to wash away the sounds and smells and sights of Satucket. She missed her sisters and brothers. She missed her newly discovered grandmother. She even missed Nate where she had not expected to have to miss him—she had not expected to come to town and receive but a single call.
SUCH WAS THE STATE of Jane’s spirits that one night, as she settled her aunt into her bed, the aunt took up Jane’s hand and said, “What is it, Jane? You’re unhappy, I know. What might I do to cheer you? Shall we try again and ask your brother to dine?”
“He’ll only plead his work.”
“Well then, perhaps we must ask them together. Your brother and Mr. Adams.”
“Mr. Adams is out riding the circuit.”
“Then we must ask when he returns.”
Jane gazed at her aunt. The old woman had entertained no one since Jane had arrived, and listening to Martha and Prince where she could, Jane had overheard no reference to any such past events or future plans. Such an invitation to John Adams could only be done for her.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Indeed, perhaps she was not entirely alone in this town after all.
WHEN AUNT GILL NAPPED, Jane wrote more letters. Aunt Gill’s naps weren’t long, but neither were Jane’s letters, one day full of shawls and meat jellies being much the same as the other, but the writing comforted her, connected her, even though she had yet to receive any letters from home. She wrote Mehitable: How fare the little ones? Have you slaughtered the calf? How does Neddy at school? She wrote Bethiah, making much of Aunt Gill’s kind invitations to Nate, hoping to make up for the fun she’d poked at the old woman in her last letter. She wrote, surprising herself, how empty my
bed seems . . .
When Jane had finished all the letters she could possibly be expected to write she began to read The Nun, and after a few days of Aunt Gill’s naps coming to an end too soon for Jane’s liking, she began to bring a candle up to her bed at night so she might continue on. But after the promised scandal and a good deal of ill fortune the book and the nun came to an abrupt end:
She put off her mourning veil and, without anything over her face, she kneeled down, and the executioner at one blow severed her beautiful head from her delicate body, being then her seven and twentieth year. She was generally lamented and honorably buried.
Not only had The Nun cost Jane a day and a half’s wage, but it had also cost her something of her respect for Henry Knox. All the same, she kept close watch on Aunt Gill’s pile of letter paper in hope of being sent back to the shop soon. The first four pages had gone fast, but the pile sat at eight sheets for days, then went down to six and sat again, then to five. At four Jane leaped in with her offer to replenish and was surprised when Aunt Gill made no objection, even though Prince was at home.
Either the thought of the shop full of books or the rekindled alarm over perhaps running into Phinnie had overexcited Jane. That was the only thing that might have caused her mistake, or so she believed later on. As she reached the corner of King Street, the sentry of the dirty boot was just completing his march to the corner; Jane smiled and dipped her head in greeting without thinking, just as she might have done to any passerby at Satucket, and the sentry answered it with a brimming, “Good-day, miss.”
That was the whole of it. A good-day. Jane hadn’t even slowed over it and had continued into her turn when a young fellow, no longer boy but not yet man, came charging into the road from across the way.
The Rebellion of Jane Clarke Page 7
