The Rebellion of Jane Clarke

by Sally Gunning

  “Would you be so kind as to describe for me, Miss Clarke, what you observed at the corner of Exchange and King on the night of March the fifth?”

  Jane began. The boys pestering the sentry, the name-calling, the challenge over the bill. She described Hugh White striking the boy, the increasing crowd, the chunks of ice being thrown, the appearance of clubs, one club being thrown and striking a soldier. Adams never stopped her, even as she described the attack by the crowd, until she described the man in a dark cloak moving behind the soldiers.

  “Can you better describe this cloak, Miss Clarke?”

  “It was blue or black. A material like velvet or plush.” As she said it Jane saw that the jury saw it, and Jane saw exactly why Adams had brought up so many witnesses to testify to Preston’s uniform. There was the red and the silver and the yellow on the one hand, and the blue or black velvet or plush on the other; they could not be confused.

  “And what did this gentleman do when he moved behind the soldiers?”

  “He walked back and forth behind them, encouraging them to fire. The captain was at least three yards distant and for most of that time standing in front of his men. It was only when Captain Preston was struck that he stepped back. This was at the same time that the man in the cloak touched one of the soldiers on the back and said ‘Fire, by God I’ll stand by you,’ and immediately upon his speaking the soldiers fired. That is to say the main of the soldiers fired. There had been a single shot fired previously at the time the soldier had been knocked to the ground.”

  “And you’re positive this man who touched the soldier and spoke these words was not Captain Preston?”

  “I am. He was at a good distance from the captain. He wore a dark cloak, as I said. He worked his way out of the crowd and behind the soldiers, no doubt with such intention in mind.” She had gone too far, to even it up for Henry Knox having gone too far, but again, no one objected. Indeed, around the courtroom skirts and shoes and coat sleeves scraped and rustled and an involuntary murmur broke loose; inside the noise Jane heard for the first time the very great importance of her testimony for Preston. This or that or the other one could say that Preston had not given the order to fire, but if he hadn’t, who had? Jane was the only one thus far who had been able to offer an alternative. She was the only one who had spoken out loud the obvious motive of some in that crowd, to incite the very incident that some had prayed for, the incident that would get the soldiers removed.

  Adams said, “And after this unfortunate incident, after citizens and soldiers alike had been brought to the ground, what happened then, Miss Clarke? Tell us, please. Tell us, what did you do?”

  “I tended to the wounded inhabitants.”

  “And among the inhabitants, did you find anyone you knew?”

  My brother.

  “I found my brother.”

  “You found your brother wounded by these British soldiers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You found your brother wounded by these British soldiers,” Adams repeated. He walked the length of the jury box, and returned to Jane again. “You found your brother lying bloodied in the street, and yet you came here to testify on Captain Preston’s behalf. Why, Miss Clarke?”

  “Because the truth of it should be known.”

  “Because the truth of it should be known. Thank you, Miss Clarke. For your testimony, and for the human decency that brought you here. We all thank you.”

  Jane stepped back and waited for the pleasure that was to overcome her there on her lofty vantage-ground of truth, but the only thing that overcame her was an exhaustion so complete she could barely stand.

  THERE WAS MORE TESTIMONY. To Jane’s great relief a sailor named James Waddell now remembered that he had also seen the man in the dark cloak slip behind the soldiers. A Richard Palmes testified that at the time of the command to fire he stood next to Preston with his hand on his shoulder, and although he couldn’t say for certain the captain hadn’t given the order, he had not heard the words. A slave testified to the general unruliness of the crowd, their threats and assaults on the soldiers; the slave’s owner testified to the trustworthiness of the slave. Two more slaves and their owners testified in like manner. Several more witnesses, military and civilian, testified to Preston’s mild-tempered, prudent, and discreet nature. No doubt all of these witnesses greatly aided Preston’s cause, but Jane had felt and heard what had happened in the courtroom when she spoke and knew that her words had effected the great turn. The thought made her feel lighter and heavier in one.

  ON SATURDAY JOHN ADAMS gave his closing argument. The legal precedents he quoted were lost on Jane until he pulled something from a thing called Pleas of the Crown: “It is better five guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should die.” He followed it with a man named Blackstone: “Self-defence is the primary canon of the law of nature.” Next Adams proceeded to rip asunder each witness of the prosecution, and those he couldn’t rip apart he explained away as in error. But once he had done all that, he turned around and forgave them. “Man is a social creature,” he said. “His passions and imagination are contagious. The circumstances in King Street had a tendency to move all the passions. They have had a tendency to produce gloom and melancholy in all our minds. This may account for the variation in the testimony of honest men.”

  He next reminded the jury of all the important points of the testimony for the defense, Jane’s central among them, but now she saw better the limits of her own importance. She had helped, yes, but if Preston were to be saved, it would be Adams who had saved him. Vindicated him. Or vindicated himself.

  Jane thought—again—of Phinnie Paine.

  THE COURT BROKE for the Sabbath. For Jane, the day wore away as slowly as the cobblestones on the street, and she could only think how it must have passed for Preston in gaol, the jurors at the gaol-keeper’s. Jane’s grandfather attended meeting, but as was her usual habit even at Satucket, Jane’s grandmother stayed home. Ordinarily, Jane would have gone with her grandfather, but this day she decided to stay behind—there would be too many in the pews who disapproved of what she’d had to say in the courtroom.

  THE TRIAL, THE FIRST ever to go beyond a day, had now done the unheard of—it had gone into a second week—but when court resumed on Monday all that remained was for the prosecution to make its closing remarks and the jury to be charged. The jury retreated, but no one else left the courtroom. People began to mill about and greet their neighbors, but little of the chat had anything to do with the trial; it was as if all were afraid their talk might cast the wrong kind of spell.

  Jane saw her brother Nate working his way through the crowd toward her. He came up and gave the smallest bow. “You did well.”

  “I suppose from you that must mean I did not do well.”

  Nate gazed at her with something almost of hurt. “I mean you did a difficult thing and you did it well.”

  Jane laid a hand on his sleeve. “I suppose we shall see how well.”

  Nate smiled and shook his head, as if there were no doubt, but no doubt of which verdict? He moved off.

  Jane looked through the crowd, wondering if she might see Phinnie Paine. Surely if he were in town he would attend? She spied the kind of tapered back she had taken so often for his but refused to be fooled again. It turned and was Phinnie. The weight of her parting remark to him still heavy on her mind, she searched for some sort of greeting that might lighten it but could think of nothing fitting—to wave seemed too little, too call out seemed too much. Afterward, after he’d stared a time and turned away, she realized she’d left out the one thing that would have fitted best—a smile.

  IT TOOK THE JURY three hours to return Preston to his freedom. It took Sam Adams three minutes to begin his attempt to take it away. Jane had seen nothing of the man in the courtroom; he could not have expected John Adams, representing the defense, to have given his rebel cousin the floor, but perhaps he resented the prosecutors’ denying him a word to the c
ause. He stood now on the courthouse steps, his too-short arms waving, his voice pitched to a catcall, describing the jury’s verdict as the latest and grossest of all the recent miscarriages of justice the town had lately borne.

  Satucket

  Chapter Thirty

  AS IT HAPPENED, Jane and her grandmother were still in town when the soldiers were brought to trial and defended, again, by John Adams. Henry Knox testified again, but in another of the many queer and inexplicable twists of the trials, this time he testified for the defense. Jane heard this news from her grandfather—Henry did not call—and she puzzled over it long. The news was almost enough to bring her to attend the trial, but in the end she elected to stay at home, waiting for her grandfather to bring her the news of Henry’s testimony—the same as before—and of the verdict as well. Two of the soldiers were convicted of manslaughter, and pleading benefit of clergy proving that they could read their Bible and were therefore Christians worthy of saving, were excused the hanging and branded on the thumbs. The rest, Hugh White included, went free. Jane could only imagine how this must please Aunt Gill and enrage her brother, how strained his relationship with his mentor must have grown.

  As for the cousin, Sam Adams, he took to the courthouse steps again, just as he had after Preston’s trial, but now that the dual verdicts were in he could additionally set about retrying them all in the newspaper as well. Unbelievably, it was his version of events that began to take hold; soon, it was as if the verdicts at the trials had never been handed down.

  NATE CAME TO SEE Jane before she left for Satucket. They talked, of course, of Hugh White. Jane said, “Are you very angry that Mr. Adams set him free?”

  Nate took his time in answering, which was a new thing in him. “Mr. Adams talked to me after the trial. He spoke of a longer view, of how worthless our words become if we can’t stand by the principles behind them while under fire.” There he lifted his eyes and grinned, the old Nate again. “But perhaps he also knew his cousin Sam would get what he needed of it. The cause is not lost with the case. In fact it is reborn.”

  Still, Jane could not quite believe her brother’s new loftiness. She said, to test him, “And Hugh White wins.”

  “What does he win? His life, no more. The true victory is mine. He’s gone from here. They’re all gone from here. ’Tis my town again.”

  My town. Jane heard the words and should not have been surprised but was so. “Do you plan to live here always, then?”

  “Where else could a lawyer wish to be in these times? Where else could I take part? Satucket?”

  No.

  Nate peered at her. “But what of you? Do you leave here forever now?”

  “I go home as guest of our grandmother and stay only till she returns to town.”

  Nate squinted at her. “And if Father begs you to come home?”

  “Father, begging?”

  Nate laughed. “All right, then. If he says to you, ‘Well, Jane, ’tis about time you came home. Now get to work mending my breeches.’ You would mend them, I suppose. God in heaven! Our father was mad for sending you here at such a time. But now ’tis different. The soldiers are gone, and I might unselfishly wish you here to keep me company.”

  Yes, thought Jane, but only now that Mrs. Lincoln is gone. And no doubt it would be someone new soon. Or perhaps Jane’s life would have filled too much to allow room for any greater number of visits between brother and sister. She tried to imagine such a life and could not. She could not imagine her life at all.

  DETERMINING TO GO to Satucket was one thing—getting there was another, especially with winter coming on. Jane’s grandfather had not recovered from the thought of his wife being caught up in the fall storm, and now December was closing in—he began to talk of hiring a carriage, but there Jane’s grandmother grew warm.

  “And spend three nights in strange inns along the road?”

  “You know the inns well enough.”

  “Yes, I do, and the last time I was in one I slept with an army of bugs and a rum bottle, or so I thought till it rolled over and puked into my hair. I’ll take my single night at sea and home.”

  Jane’s grandfather gazed on the pair of them as if they were already gone. “Then go before the ice forms.”

  THEY WERE PACKED and on board on the eleventh of December, later than all had hoped, but still well before the ice. Jane’s grandfather stood on the dock with his hands jammed in his pockets, his lips moving in some final argument no one could hear. He looked so thin and alone, despite the comings and goings of travelers and hawkers and mariners around him, that Jane was not surprised when her grandmother’s talk took a turn.

  “Mrs. Poole is a good-hearted woman,” she said, “but she does not know how to pick a bird.”

  “She’d not find one in winter anyhow,” Jane offered; it was one of her first lessons learned—that poultry did not survive a winter trip to town—but Jane’s grandmother went along as if she hadn’t heard.

  “A good chicken pie with a nice, thick gravy is all I ask. And a dinner consumed without a political maelstrom swirling around. But will he get them? Will he even—” She stopped there.

  THEY WERE TWO HOURS out of the harbor when the weather turned. Jane’s first hint of its seriousness was when her grandmother said, “I’ve had poor luck with the sea.” The second hint was when all Harry Nye’s efforts at cleverness disappeared into the wind. Sail was taken in; the sea began to crash over the deck; the women were sent below and the hatches closed. The easiest way to avoid being tossed about was to get into their bunks, and they did so. It seemed to Jane that the thunder of the waves was louder from below, but it didn’t mask the other sounds—carefully lashed objects on deck breaking free and crashing about, the shouts of the men and the pounding of their heels. It would have been one kind of thing if the raging winds had pushed them faster toward home, but when Ned Crowe and Joseph Woollen came below for a new sail to replace one that had been torn, she heard them remark on being pushed off course. In the end the trip that should have kept them over one night kept them over three.

  On the fourth day the thunder of the waves softened, the rolling lessened, the hatches opened. Jane and her grandmother sprang onto the deck like escaped geese and could not be persuaded to go below. Soon enough Jane recognized the spit that curled out around Barnstable Harbor; next the stand of trees at Freeman’s Point; finally the marsh and inconsequential strip of beach that marked their landing at Satucket. At last the ship was brought about and anchored, the dory was lowered over the side, Jane and her grandmother were helped into it. Joseph Woollen was one of the rowers, but Jane no longer cared; indeed, it seemed a child’s version of herself who had once been so troubled by his presence. She fixed her eyes on the shore, and the images of sedge, scrub, and landing road began to erase the other images: the Boston street, the snow, the moon, the blood. Her brother.

  The boat scraped sand; the men leaped out and pulled it up on the shore. Jane’s grandmother hiked up her dress without caring for effect and climbed over the gunwale before helping hands could reach her; Jane followed her. They trudged together over the sand to the landing road and on through the mud. Jane looked sideways at her grandmother and caught all the apprehension in her face, but they rounded the turn and there was the house, appearing much as they had left it. Her grandmother caught up Jane’s hand, dragged her across the dooryard, and through the door.

  Dust and mouse nests and cobwebs and dead insects and an aching, pounding cold greeted them. How odd, thought Jane, that she could stand in the middle of a room in such a state and feel, again, that utter peace come down on her. She would have liked to stand so forever, let it curl around her forever, but her grandmother had already dropped her cloak where she stood and crossed the room to the shelf that held the tinderbox. Jane went to the wood box and laid the kindling down; her grandmother set to work with the tinder, and after a time the chimney began to draw. Jane added the first logs—pine for the quick, bright flame—and felt the heat, fi
rst on her, then in her.

  Jane’s grandmother had brought some cheese, bread, and dried apples—enough to make a supper with the blackberry tea from the tin. That night Jane shared her grandmother’s bed for warmth, and she slept deep and long, but in the morning she woke and mistook the warmth for her sister. The heart-soreness that filled her when she discovered it was not Bethiah surprised her.

  THEY FINISHED THE BREAD and cheese for their breakfast, and Jane’s grandmother set off for Sears’s store. Jane began the cleaning—first knocking down webs, next dusting walls and shelves, last sweeping up the detritus and scouring the floor. She was just finishing when her grandmother returned with salt fish and potatoes and onions and Indian meal—it would be corn bread and fish stew for their dinner. As they cut up the vegetables Jane’s grandmother said, “Your presence is already known here. Already talked of at the store. You must prepare what you wish to say if your father decides to pay a call.”

  “He won’t,” Jane said.

  “He won’t if you call there first.”

  Jane looked at her grandmother, this woman who had come in a storm and returned in one and remained uncowed by any number of other disturbances that had blown up in between. Was this the thing that made her marriage what it was, this life in her, this strength? Was this what gave her such an unfettered voice in that marriage? Perhaps, Jane thought, but part must come from a husband strong enough in himself to greet such life without attempting to beat it down, to silence it. Jane thought there of her father. Perhaps this supposed great strength in him was in fact something less than strength; perhaps it could only thrive in the fetid bog of his wife’s diminishment, her silence. And—perhaps—the no longer silent daughter’s absence.