The Rebellion of Jane Clarke

by Sally Gunning

But Phinnie had continued. “I thought you should like to know that Mr. Adams has won his case.”

  So disjointed was Jane’s mind that she thought first of Mein—that Phinnie should come from Satucket to tell her about Mein—and no doubt her confusion showed.

  Phinnie said, “The qui tam?”

  “Oh! Yes.”

  “ ’Tis good news for your father, then.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I knew you to be worried over it. I thought you should like to hear.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  They fell silent again until Jane realized they stood yet, just inside the door. She said, “Would you care to sit down?”

  Phinnie looked around, spotted the pair of chairs near the fire, crossed to the distant one, and sat down. Jane sat down opposite him and stood again. “May I get you some cider?”

  “No. No, thank you.”

  Jane sat down again. “Have you other news of home?”

  “Your family is well. As I trust you are.”

  “I am. And you?”

  He made a crescent-shaped move with his head—neither up nor down. He said, “I was surprised to see you at the play.”

  “And I you.”

  “You are well acquainted with Mr. Knox, then.”

  As it was not a question, Jane made no answer. After a time Phinnie’s mouth did what Phinnie’s mouth did. “Perhaps you’re not so well acquainted with Mr. Shaw.”

  “You know the man?”

  “Well enough.”

  Again, an answer that could be taken two ways. Jane said, “Did you enjoy the play?”

  “I couldn’t follow beyond the first line.”

  “Well, you must read it for yourself then.”

  His eye traveled to the table where Jane had set down Wheatley. “Get myself a copy from Mr. Knox?”

  “If you patronize that shop. Or were you a customer of Mein’s?”

  “I have patronized Mr. Knox from time to time. Perhaps not as often as you.”

  Ah, thought Jane. So this was to be the game. Well, she would not play it. She stood up. “Should you like a cider?”

  Phinnie’s mouth twitched. “No thank you. Again.”

  Jane flushed, sat down. Phinnie did not move or speak. But then, it was not his turn. She searched about for something presentable among her thoughts. “I’m indeed happy to see my father vindicated at last.”

  “Or to see Mr. Adams vindicated.”

  “So you think my father guilty yet?”

  “I don’t speak of your father’s guilt or innocence; I speak only of the splendid argument of his lawyer, which I happened to witness, being at Barnstable at the time.”

  “And I don’t ask what you speak of at all, I ask what you think. Knowing my father as you do, do you think him capable of cutting off a horse’s ears?”

  She heard her mistake before she saw it in Phinnie’s lifted brows. He said, “So we’ve turned fish to horses now?”

  It was the usual Phinnie-answer, clever and to the purpose, or at least to Phinnie’s purpose, which was to turn away her question once again.

  Jane stood up. She said, “Thank you for delivering the news of my father’s verdict.”

  Phinnie stood too. He dipped his head, executed a smart turnabout, turned around again. He pointed at the Wheatley book on the table. “Before I go, I wonder if you would satisfy my curiosity on a small point. Do you take that note as a compliment, considering it contains so great a slur upon your sex as a whole?”

  Jane whirled around. The note Henry had sent with the book lay exposed where she’d left it on the table. Henry had copied out one of Pope’s shorter poems—“On a Certain Lady at Court,” and written across the top “For a Certain Lady from Satucket.”

  I know a thing that’s most uncommon;

  (Envy, be silent and attend!)

  I know a reasonable woman,

  Handsome and witty, yet a friend.

  She whirled again. That Phinnie should dare to read her personal note, that he of sum over parts should question how a man should pay a compliment!

  He said, “It has been my personal observation that reasonable women are no rarer than reasonable men. It has been my further observation that if man or woman should lose his reason for a time it is always possible to regain it again.”

  He exited the room, banging his hat against his thigh.

  IT TOOK JANE SEVERAL days to recover from Phinnie’s visit. She went back over it and around it and under it again and again. What impulse could possibly have driven him to come? To ease her concern over the case did not hold water beyond the point where he had mentioned Adams’s name. And who was he accusing of losing his or her reason? Henry? Phinnie? Jane? She had not understood Phinnie in Satucket, and she did not understand him in town. She was tired out with Phinnie. Tired of Phinnie.

  And Jane was tired of all that went on around town. As the days wore on, her grandmother’s words pressed often on her ears: The political situation can go hang. Jane stopped reading about politics in the paper and sought out other stories: A child born at Freetown was at the time of his birth uncle to ninety-nine persons . . . Fahrenheit’s thermometer records today is the coldest of the year so far . . . Mr. Winslow of Duxbury has died aged 101 years, husband to sixteen wives and father to none.

  Jane saw and heard nothing of her grandparents for a fortnight, but at the end of that fortnight she and her aunt received an invitation to dine. Jane prepared to decline the invitation in deference to her aunt, who in addition to her usual poor nerves was nursing an abscessed tooth. Jane could at least treat the tooth with a powder of cloves, but for the nerves she could only continue her attendance at home; she was greatly surprised when her aunt urged her to go to her grandparents’ alone.

  Otis and Nate had been invited to dine as well; Otis came; Nate did not. Jane, and soon enough her grandparents, or so she suspected, might have wished the reverse. Otis sat down and leaped up and sat down and rambled from topic to topic throughout dinner, beginning with criticism of the food and moving on to criticism of his friends, until at last he landed upon the subject of the king.

  “I have one wish, one hearty wish,” Otis declared. “That King George might rule forever the father of all mankind.”

  Jane’s grandfather set down his knife. “My dear sir—”

  Otis leaped up again. “This country is in ruin!” he cried. “I wish myself never born!” He dashed for the door.

  Jane’s grandmother got up and returned with the cider jug. Jane looked at her grandfather and saw with some shock that tears stood in his eyes, but no doubt his wife saw it too; as she passed his chair she dropped a gentle hand on his arm.

  That night Jane sent a note around to her brother; she had missed him at dinner and hoped he was well. She sat and pondered on the powers of a Miss Linnet for a time but soon discovered that thoughts of her grandmother had pushed Miss Linnet aside. It had been such a quiet thing—that hand dropping down and along her husband’s arm—and yet it spoke so loud.

  AS JANE HAD PREDICTED, Aunt Gill grew worse with the cold. She glued herself to the fire, wrapped in a blanket now as well as her shawls, and started at every snap of a log. She leaned on Jane more and more heavily as she walked and seemed unable to hold a conversational thought through to the end. She ate little. Once, as Jane accompanied Henry to the door at the end of an evening, she found her aunt standing at the midpoint of the stairs as if lost, and she started so violently when she spied Jane that she nearly fell the length of them to the floor. Jane’s concern grew.

  BELATEDLY, NATE SENT an answer to Jane’s note: he had regretted missing the dinner at his grandparents’ but had been kept to his bed with a stomach complaint. That afternoon, as Jane wrote a long letter to her sister in which she was once again unable to offer up any other news of their brother than a stomach complaint, Jane decided something for herself: she would make the call. She left her sister’s letter on the post table, checked on her napping aunt, and went to the kitch
en after Martha.

  “If Aunt wakes before I return, please tell her I’m gone on a visit to my brother and will be back soon.” As Martha gave the expected blank stare Jane’s gaze fell to the seed cakes that had just been removed from the oven, a childhood favorite of her brother’s. “And I’m sure my aunt wouldn’t mind if I took a few cakes along.” Before Martha could speak, if she even intended to, Jane had wrapped up a half-dozen cakes and made for the door.

  It was late to be setting out—the sun’s winter rays had already weakened—but Jane told herself she would not be gone long. She did not look at the sentry as she passed, and either the cold or the hour seemed to have kept the boy-men at home; the worst Jane encountered were two pigs got loose from their pen. She dodged the pigs and proceeded without further disturbance to Nate’s rooms above the wig maker’s on Cold Lane. A set of stairs in a questionable state of repair hung from the side of the building, and Jane climbed up with care. She knocked on the door. She waited. In time, it opened.

  Her brother said, “Jane!”

  Jane said, “I came by to see that you’d recovered from your ail.”

  “My ail! Yes, yes. Indeed so.”

  Jane handed her package across. “Then these won’t set wrong?”

  Nate peeled back the wrapping. “Seed cake! What a good sister you are!” He hesitated. He said, “Come, you must sit down.”

  Jane looked around the room. The furniture had been knocked about some, as was the way with any furniture in rented rooms, but Nate appeared to have taken surprising pains to make the place neat and clean. He waved her toward a comfortable-looking chair by a good fire, and the very look of it made Jane say before she sat, as if in reminder to herself, “I can stay but a minute.” Her brother took the chair alongside and stretched out his legs, soles to the fire, as their father was wont to do. It prompted her to ask, “Have you news of home?”

  “A letter from our mother which says the usual naught. I hear more from Mr. Adams.”

  “What should you hear from Mr. Adams of Satucket? The case is done.”

  “That case. Winslow sues again over the horse.”

  So quickly, thought Jane. So quickly could a sentence rub out all the joy from a room.

  Silence fell, the kind of silence that had until then been a stranger to any room that held the two. Jane cast her eyes about in search of a more pleasing topic, but she hadn’t gotten far when Nate stood up.

  “Sister, I am sorry to say I have plans that take me out this evening, but I should like to walk you home before I go.”

  Jane rose. “ ’Tis no need. The cold keeps the troublemakers home.”

  To her surprise Nate didn’t argue the point. He stepped to the door and held it open. She kissed his cheek and stepped through; the door closed. She was halfway down the stairs when she heard raised voices from behind the door. Her brother’s she knew well enough; of Miss Linnet’s she wasn’t entirely sure.

  As abbreviated as her visit was, it was nearer to dark than Jane should have liked when she started home. More pigs roamed about now, and a collection of chickens; sties and coops must have been blown down all over town. She passed another group of off-duty soldiers and took care to cross the street and walk wide around, not out of fear but out of distaste. How altered her thoughts had become! As she turned into Royal Exchange she looked ahead and saw Prince disappearing into Dock Square at the other end of the lane, letters in hand. But when she entered her aunt’s hall she found her single missive to her sister still sitting on the post table. This, then, was how the servant would take his revenge.

  Chapter Twenty

  IN JANUARY BETHIAH wrote: Yesterday when Papa yelled for his toast I gave it first to Hitty, who had been quietly waiting, and when he said did I not hear him call for toast I said I did not know it was the rule that we must only listen to those who shout the loudest, as you once wrote me, and oh how Papa raged! Prepare yourself—I shall be sent to Aunt Gill’s soon!

  Jane wrote into her letter book: My Dearest Sister, Come to Aunt Gill’s! Come! Come! And then crossed it out with thick black lines.

  THROUGH JANUARY AND FEBRUARY fights began to erupt outside the Royal Exchange Tavern. Jane could hear the noise from within a closed house, as could Aunt Gill, which aggravated Jane’s task of keeping her warm, calm, well. One night after her aunt was safe in bed, Jane heard a peculiar howl and leaned out her window to try to discover what could have made such a sound; she saw, or believed she saw, a pair of men disguised as Mohawk Indians bursting out the tavern door.

  When Henry came the next night Jane asked him. “I saw two men disguised as Indians at the tavern. Why should anyone disguise himself so?”

  “Best ask Sam Adams. He’s the one sends them out.”

  “But why?”

  “To stir up the crowd.”

  When Jane looked her confusion he went on. “When Otis was full of his old fire there was no need of these charades. But now Adams must work at it another way.”

  “Work at what?”

  “At keeping the feeling up. These things must be fed or they die.”

  Jane thought of the two faces, darkened with lampblack and sprouting feathers, which she’d seen from her window. They could have belonged to anyone. There was no reason to think one of them her brother. None.

  ON A BITTER, WIND-BLASTED afternoon in February, Jane and her aunt were sitting pressed to the fire when they heard shots in King Street; at the sound of guns being discharged the old woman crumpled in her seat like a pile of ash. Prince dashed out to discover the news and returned banging his arms against his chest to release the cold.

  “A great lot of boys were attacking the importer Ebenezer Richardson. They knocked out all the windows in his house. He took out his musket and fired. A boy was killed.”

  Already the bells had begun to toll. Aunt Gill sent Prince out again and again, and on each of his returns the news grew worse: the boy was but eleven years old; a mob was attacking the house; Richardson was fighting back with a sword; Richardson was secured; a noose had been brought and a signpost selected; William Molineux was working at calming the crowd. In the end Prince reported the lynching abandoned, but Richardson was beaten and hauled through the streets to Faneuil Hall.

  MORE FOUL WEATHER CAME down on Boston like hell descending—thunder, lightning, snow—a sure sign from God of his displeasure over the boy’s death, or so the Gazette reported. On the next Monday a huge funeral procession led by five hundred schoolboys assembled at the Liberty Tree and marched through town. Prince estimated two thousand mourners and thirty carriages trailing behind for a distance of over half a mile.

  No one had seen or heard of such a spectacle in all the town’s history, and it must have shaken every inhabitant, but none could have been more distressed than Aunt Gill. The morning after the funeral she would not rise; she ate only as much as Jane spooned into her; she cried out three times through the night and the next morning again refused to rise. Jane tried any number of things to rouse her—promise of a blazing fire below, a rereading of the Wheatley poem she had much admired, new wool stockings—but nothing stirred her until more shots were heard on King Street.

  Prince was again dispatched, and as soon as he was gone Aunt Gill ordered Jane to help her into her clothes. They had just gained the front room when Prince returned.

  “ ’Tis Otis, full mad, shooting up the Town House windows.” Prince laughed. He had made to turn for the door again, but Jane reached out and caught his elbow hard enough to pull him around.

  “Who do you mean? Which Otis?”

  “The Otis they talk of. The one they call the Honorable James, the Esquire. Tying him up and carting him off now.”

  Jane released him. She called to Martha to sit with the old woman, pulled her cloak off the peg, and went out into the blow.

  An ocean wind ripping up the mill valley floor had never been as cold as the funnel of vaporous ice pushing against Jane as she rounded the corner into King Street. Her chest burned
as she breathed, and her eyes watered so that at first she doubted what she saw. The cart sat in front of the Town House; Otis sat in the cart, bound to a chair. The crowd stood around the cart, but at a distance, as if the man were poxed; four men took their places on either side of the cart; the driver gee-ed at the team. The cart moved out. As it drew near Jane she took a step into the street, but Otis never lifted his eyes; he sat staring at his boots, his head snapping back and forth on his neck every time the wheels hit a jog in the road.

  HENRY KNOX ARRIVED THAT night with his already liquid eyes made more so by the rum that rose off him like a vapor; he kissed Aunt Gill and offered to take her up to her bed, an offer she gigglingly declined. Once Jane had got her aunt settled and returned to the parlor, Henry picked Jane up and carried her to Aunt Gill’s high-backed, thickly upholstered chair, tumbled backward into it, and pulled Jane with him into his lap. Jane had only just recovered from this first surprise when he shocked her again by tucking his face into her neck and erupting into tears. He wept as all men did—in silent gulps and grimaces meant to keep back something that had already left the barn. He didn’t cry long, but just where it ended wasn’t entirely clear; one minute she had a wet face in her neck and a heaving chest against hers; the next minute she had a hot mouth pressed into the crevice just above the lacing on her bodice and the breathing had taken another turn. Jane took him by the ears and prised his face out of her chest, but he seemed to think she only meant to direct him to her mouth.

  It was a kiss full of rum and wanting and spent salt tears, and Jane stayed inside it because of one of those things and perhaps a second of her own. But when she felt his hand rucking up her skirt, she pushed against his massive chest and slid off his lap to the ground. She discovered her bodice was somehow unlaced; she turned her back, fastened it up, and fed out her petticoats till they fell back to the floor. She turned around again and realized she needn’t have bothered with the turning around—Henry’s head had fallen back against the chair, and his eyes had closed.