Jane continued her visits until Otis’s wife finally returned from the country, and there she left off.
KNOX TOOK JANE to a fine dinner at John Hancock’s, where the hall was lit with so many candles it turned the room to daylight. Knox paid her the usual attention, but Jane returned it poorly—she was too busy looking around at the officers in attendance and wondering. Whose bludgeons? Whose sword? When Colonel Dalrymple came up to greet them Jane could barely make her neck bend, even in its country curtsey. If Dalrymple had indeed been at the Coffee House and seen Otis beaten so excessively, why hadn’t he intervened?
Perhaps it was Jane’s new anger that heated her. Or perhaps it was her fear of dying like Clarissa, untouched, unopened. Or perhaps it was the specter of Aunt Gill sitting in solitude each evening, waiting on Jane’s return. When Knox walked her home and leaned down to drop his usual kiss on her temple, Jane turned just so, lifted just so, and took his mouth flush on her own.
Chapter Eighteen
SEPTEMBER WORE ALONG. Every day in town there came news of another altercation of some kind between the inhabitants and the soldiers, but Jane could no longer think each account a lie; she could only think of Otis lying on his bed with a ravine cut into his scalp and bruises rising like plums all over his face, neck, and arms. She chased no more boys away from the sentry; she no longer nodded to Hugh White when she passed—Hugh White, who had done nothing to Otis or to anyone. She longed to see her brother, longed to discover if this new rage in her would allow them to see each other as of old; she sent around a note, but he didn’t come.
If the attack on Otis could make Jane feel so, it could hardly surprise her that the state of affairs in town should become too much for Aunt Gill. She began keeping to her house again, refusing Jane’s grandfather’s invitations, starting up at the odd noise much as she’d done when Jane first arrived, even objecting to any invitations for Jane that took her from home.
So Jane stayed home, not because she feared for her safety in the streets, but because more and more she found herself unwilling to leave her aunt alone. The old woman’s concern for Jane was no doubt part of this surge of feeling, but a part of it had to do with the way Prince disappeared and reappeared at will, and the sidelong glances she continually intercepted from Martha. Who watched whom? What might those two get up to if she were gone? Jane imagined small thefts going on daily behind her aunt’s back; she imagined a great one planned for that time when she would be out of the house and Aunt Gill asleep, alone. She imagined her aunt waking to a bludgeon or a sword. But underneath those fears lay a simpler reason for Jane to stay at home, formed out of all the bricks that had been piling up all along the way—her affection for her aunt. Aunt Gill might not have taken the place of the family Jane had left at Satucket, but she had at least begun to fill up the empty spaces that letters could not, that a distracted and distant brother could not.
As Jane stayed at home more, Henry Knox came to call more, an arrangement that seemed to please Aunt Gill as much as it did Jane, although the aunt took care not to hover too long below-stairs. They fell into something of a routine—Aunt Gill would make her inquiry after Henry’s health and receive his in turn; she would next inquire after the health of his family and, always, of Otis; she would ask what books he’d sold that day in his store; Henry always answered the last with a heavy list full of philosophers and political pamphleteers that sooner or later sent Aunt Gill calling for Martha to assist her up the stairs.
Jane and Henry would then continue on with the subjects of books for a time. Jane had confessed her aversion to Clarissa and vindicated Henry’s judgment with the kind of grace that should have come to her with ease and nonsensically did not. The only excuse she could make for herself was that it was one thing to strive to discover everything about someone to whom she was about to be married; it was quite another to be herself discovered by someone to whom she was not. And she was discovered. Henry knew to bring plays by Dryden and Shakespeare and odes by Pope—he even knew which bits to read aloud to her and which to not. Some nights Jane found herself looking at him through her father’s eyes—or Clarissa’s—but her father was in Satucket, and Clarissa was in a vapid bit of fiction. Most nights, at the end of the night, Jane gave over easily enough to the comfort of his arms; long ago she had stopped comparing him to either a Woollen or a Paine.
AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER a lull dropped down, broken in October by John Adams filing suit against John Mein for unpaid bills, forcing the closing of the Chronicle. The Gazette had only just stopped trumpeting that bit of news when thick clouds muffled the sun and Prince reported a rumor around the docks of a great storm at sea. The next morning it began to blow hard from the southeast; Jane looked out the window and saw objects whirling by so fast as to be unrecognizable; by noon the rain was sheeting down so thickly she could not see out the windows at all; it might have been eight o’clock in the evening for all the light the sky held. Jane, Prince, and Martha ran about hooking shutters, moving delicate objects away from the windows, stopping up the sills and thresholds with old flannels and toweling. Judging by the sound it made—louder than the wind and rain—something of considerable size crashed against the house, but not even Prince dared open the door to look outside.
At one o’clock Prince said, “ ’Tis high water, now.” Jane looked at Aunt Gill, but she seemed to be taking the storm with unnatural calm. An hour or two after Prince’s announcement regarding the tide, the wind veered to the northwest, but if it lessened in strength Jane couldn’t detect it. The household retired early, like rabbits into their burrows, but Jane doubted anyone slept. She lay listening to the wind beating against the shutters, to the rain scouring the roof, thinking of Satucket and what the storm might have done as it crossed so fragile and low-lying a spit of land; her father’s house sat high on a hill, but her grandparents’ sat too near the landing for Jane to feel easy. The night crept on.
By morning the rain had turned to a sputter and the heart of the wind had grown soft. Martha checked the cellar and found it dry; Jane and Martha sopped up what water had managed to creep in around the doors and sills; Prince went out to repair two loose shutters. Jane stepped out into the street to look at the debris that had blown and washed into it—sodden newspapers, a man’s hat, dirty straw, more leaves and branches than she had imagined remained in so deforested a town—and there Jane remembered her grandparents’ other house, their house in town, the house that sat at the end of Water Street, too appropriately named.
She went back inside and found Aunt Gill, out of all the things she might be doing, sorting the thread in her work basket. Jane said, “I worry over my grandfather, so near the harbor. I wonder if you might spare me while I call around.”
Aunt Gill looked up. “Of course, of course. If he’s flooded out he must come and stay here.” She gripped Jane’s hand. “I insist on it, you tell him. He must come and stay here.” Jane squeezed her aunt’s hand in return.
THE AIR REMAINED HEAVY, but the sky had lightened from pewter to silver. Half King Street was silted over with mud and littered worse than Exchange, with branches, boards, shingles, broken shutters, old papers, leaves, straw, and manure fetched up in doorways and corners all along the way. Shopkeepers and residents armed with rakes, shovels, brooms, hammers, nails, and shingles worked at clearing away and replacing what had been lost; Jane could not help but think of the new business the storm meant for Phinnie. She picked her way down Quaker Lane and onto Water Street; she’d covered the greater part of the distance when she came upon the wrack line formed by the swollen tide, seaweed and driftwood and rope and the detritus of shattered boats deposited in a wavering line across the width of the road. She looked ahead and spied several masts askew, a wharf in shambles. A solitary man was struggling to right an overturned cart; a brace of off-duty soldiers passed by but made no effort to lend a hand. She heard one of them laugh, the other take it up and carry it until they drew abreast of Jane.
The nearest soldier dof
fed his hat. “Good-day, miss.”
Jane moved on without reply. Soon she found herself standing beside her grandfather’s house before she quite recognized it—she’d been looking for the old elm, but it had been sheared by the wind, half its height and most of its leaves now spread along the ground. In addition to the damage to the elm, the vegetation on each side of the door had been stripped, a pair of shutters ripped off, and eight panes of glass smashed.
Jane knocked, but no one answered. She pushed and it opened; she walked in. The floor was covered with mud and wet; she hallooed and heard an echo from beyond. She found Mrs. Poole in the pantry, her grandfather just coming up the ladder from the cellar, wet to the knees and carrying a pair of dripping sacks. Jane hurried forward and helped Mrs. Poole relieve him of the sacks as he dropped again below. With few words they set up a working chain, Jane’s grandfather remaining in the cellar and handing up the stores, Jane depositing them on the pantry floor, Mrs. Poole sorting them into three categories: good, gone, salvageable. When a neighbor and his son stopped by, Jane sent the boy to her aunt with a note: By her aunt’s leave, she would stop the night and help her grandfather and Mrs. Poole clean up from the storm. While the son went off on his errand the neighbor stood in the pantry and reported on conditions elsewhere: all the wharves had overflowed and three of the smaller ones had been torn to pieces, warehouses full of sugar and salt and any number of other valuable goods were lost, cellars all along the waterfront were flooded; he would measure the damage at seven thousand pounds.
The son returned with a scratched note from Aunt Gill: Of course you must stay while he needs you, but you must bring him here tomorrow to dine.
When the cellar had been emptied of all that was worthy of the labor, Jane’s grandfather went outside to board up the broken panes and do what he could with the shutters. Mrs. Poole and Jane rummaged up a cold meal of bread, cheese, mince pie, and applesauce, which tasted as fine to Jane as the feast at Aunt Gill’s. After the meal Mrs. Poole returned to her salvage and Jane attacked the floors. Supper was more bread and cheese and a good deal more cider than Jane had drunk in some time, which no doubt accounted for the fine sleep she experienced. Or perhaps it was the room, which reminded her of her room at home, simply fitted out with a maize-colored homespun coverlet, earthenware pitcher and bowl, battered case of drawers, and a small window that looked over the remains of the decapitated elm to the sea beyond.
JANE WOKE TO THE SOUNDS of hammers and saws and carts and workmen calling to one another all up and down the waterfront. She went belowstairs to find her grandfather just finishing his breakfast, but he lingered while Jane dispatched her own. As they had talked the storm through the night before, this morning’s conversation took up Mein and the closing of the Chronicle; her grandfather’s glee was poorly contained, giving rise to more of it in Jane than she’d thought she owned. She blamed the Chronicle in good part for what had befallen Otis, and should have liked to have had the chance to say so to her brother, to share such a thing with him, to share anything with him. Surely, she thought, the storm would bring him to call.
Jane’s thoughts were brought back to the room with a sound from behind; thinking again of her brother she turned and discovered her grandmother banging a large satchel through the door.
Jane’s grandfather stood up, knocking back his chair. “What the devil!”
Jane’s grandmother dropped the satchel on the floor. “Now those are the words I’ve waited five months to hear.”
“Don’t tell me you traveled through this storm!”
“Well, ’twas calm as milk when I got aboard.”
“You didn’t . . . You mean to say you came by sea?”
“I should like to know how else I was to get here. Jane, how glad I am to see you! And at least you appear glad enough to see me.” She came around the table and kissed Jane on the forehead. She continued on and grasped her husband’s face between her hands. She said, “You look like death.”
Jane’s grandfather said, “You look . . . you look—”
Indeed, this was not the grandmother Jane had left behind at Satucket. Her hair had been beaten loose and caught back up in a careless, leaking knot, her shawl was frayed—or torn—at one end, her skirt was watermarked with salt and stained with mud and something else that could have been either blood or wine. She said, “How might you expect me to look after being blown almost to Canada?”
“But you were to wait—”
“And just how long did you think me to wait? I walked to the landing day after day, looking out for the ship you were never on. I sat in my house and watched the carts go by in preparation for the next sail, and one day I said ‘enough.’ I scratched a note for my daughter, packed my bag, and climbed aboard.”
Jane’s grandfather said, “If you knew how many times I planned to come. Tried to come. The political situation has been such—”
“The political situation can go hang. At least for a day. You will grant your wife that, sir?”
Jane’s grandfather stood motionless for breath, and then he began to grin, a foolish-looking thing for so dignified a man; but in it Jane saw at once that her grandparents would not be coming to Aunt Gill’s to dine.
Jane made her own departure as soon as grace allowed. Once outside she discovered another world than the one she’d left the day before—the sun shone unfiltered through a brilliant blue sky as if the heavens had been washed clean and the tub of dirty water that had washed them had been dumped below. The cart across the way had been righted and moved off, but the foul taste of the episode lingered behind; a glazier and shopkeeper called back and forth the names of the damaged shops and warehouses looted by the soldiers in the early hours after the storm. Where Jane might once have doubted the truth of such rumors, she now found that with little struggle she could swallow it whole.
Chapter Nineteen
THE FINAL EVENT of October came fast on the heels of a premature winter chill. Jane had risen that morning and gone to the window, as it had become her habit to do, and discovered an icy glaze on the gutter below. She pressed her fingers to the glass and felt them go numb; she looked over the rooftops and saw a thick slash of gray that surely held rain—no matter the cold it was far too early for snow. Perhaps it was the thought of snow, of winter in town, that put Jane out of sorts; all she knew for certain was that she turned from the window and found everything wrong: the nearness of the bed to the wall as she pulled up the coverlet, the pitch of the stairs as she worked her way down, even the color of Prince’s skin—it should have been the Negro Jot filling the wood box. Throughout the day the images of Satucket persisted, some real, some fancied: Mehitable with her head bent over the babe, the little girls winding wool, Neddy at his books, Bethiah being called into their father’s office and given some direction for the miller or the tanner—Bethiah, now the favored one.
The day dragged on like a toothache, and Aunt Gill helped none. She was cold from the minute she rose, and no amount of wraps could get her warm; she wanted the fire built up no matter how it flamed and bolsters piled around her feet to ward off the draft from the door. In the end Jane bundled her early to bed and returned below-stairs to read her latest gift from Henry—a poem by the slave Phillis Wheatley—but she couldn’t attend; the thought of the long winter ahead hung over her like the weighted sky that still refused to unleash what it held.
Such was Jane’s state when the knock sounded at the door. It would be Henry, and Jane knew herself poorly set up for his good cheer. She set Wheatley’s slim volume down, closed her eyes, and attempted to breathe herself into life; she heard the voice in the hall and her eyes flew open. She leaped to her feet. Martha called into the front room, “A Mr. Paine to see you,” and with only that much warning Phinnie stepped through the door.
They stood in silence.
Aunt Gill called from above, “Jane! Jane!”
Jane said, “Excuse me a minute, please.” She pushed past Phinnie, into the hall, up the stairs to
her aunt’s room.
The old woman sat upright in the bed, clutching an empty candlestick, but all Jane’s impatience with her aunt had evaporated on her way up the stairs; that minute to gather herself before addressing Phinnie was worth any number of annoying, unreasoned fears.
“Who’s here?” Aunt Gill cried. “Who is it? ’Tis not Mr. Knox! ’Tis not his voice I hear!”
“No, Aunt. ’Tis Mr. Paine, a friend from Satucket. No one to fear.”
“From Satucket? A friend of your father’s?”
“A friend of mine, Aunt Gill. No one the Sons would object to. Your reputation is clear.” She leaned over and removed the candlestick from her aunt’s hand. She resettled the bolster, and her aunt lay back.
“ ’Tis terribly cold.”
Jane drew the coverlet up high and tucked it tight around the old woman’s thin shoulders. She leaned over, dropped a kiss onto her aunt’s forehead, and drew herself up, or in, or out, she wasn’t sure. On her way down the stairs she recalled Phinnie Paine at the play-reading, talking to the soldier, talking about dictators, and realized she had no idea if what she’d said to her aunt about the Sons was true.
He stood in the parlor, hat still in hand. He whipped around as Jane came in. He looked changed since the play—more cautious about the eyes, more grim about the jaw. He made no bow to Jane, either country or town. He said, “I apologize for so late a call; I have news from Satucket I thought you would want to hear.”
Whatever calm Jane had managed to collect on her way down the stairs abandoned her. Her father, she thought. She had long feared his nature too excitable for his health. Or Mehitable, so often ill. And the babe not yet out of that dangerous first year.
The Rebellion of Jane Clarke Page 14
