“Hello, Katherine. It’s nice to see you too. You look lovely, as always. And don’t blame Richard for anything. I didn’t tell him we would be here. It was Jack’s idea. He so enjoys talking commerce and always appreciates an opportunity to pester Richard about it.”
“I see. Will you be staying long?”
“Alas, no. We must take our leave shortly. Jack needs to return to Boston.”
“What a pity,” Katherine said, smiling graciously.
The applause eased as Benjamin Lincoln offered an introduction that was hardly necessary. John Adams was a Braintree man, a South Shore man.
“We should move in closer,” Katherine said. “To hear what Mr. Adams has to say and to pay our respects to Mrs. Adams. Caleb and Pappy are there already,” she added, using the family nickname for Thomas Cutler.
“I agree. Will you join us, Anne-Marie? Agee?”
“You three go ahead,” Anne-Marie said. “I’ll find Jack and then we’ll join you.” She bowed slightly to Katherine and sent Richard a mischievous twinkle before parting.
“RICHARD, YOU SHOULD HAVE WARNED me about Anne-Marie. You know how much I hate being caught unaware.”
They were in their bedroom on the second floor of their home on South Street. Richard had taken off his waistcoat and neck stock and had cracked open the window to admit the cool autumn air. From outside they could hear a dog bark, but other than that only the small nighttime sounds of the village broke the silence.
“How could I have told you when I didn’t know, Katherine? I haven’t seen Anne-Marie in weeks. She doesn’t inform me of her every intention.”
“Surely you suspected she might be here.”
“As no doubt you did. Besides, you heard her. Coming here was Jack’s idea . . . and Adele’s.”
“Adele? What does she have to do with this?”
“Apparently she has eyes for Will.”
Katherine threw up her arms. “Oh, wonderful. That’s just perfect. That’s exactly what we need!”
Richard lit a second candle from the one he had carried into the room and came over to where Katherine stood with her arms crossed firmly over her chest. He set the candle on the table next to the bed and gripped his wife gently by the shoulders.
“Come now, Katherine. Why do you always get unhinged when Anne-Marie’s name is mentioned? She means you no harm. She has told me many times that she wants to be your friend.”
“Oh posh, Richard! Those are just words. They mean nothing. Even a dullard can see that she still has feelings for you. I heard people tittering and twittering behind my back all afternoon—the same sort of blather I hear every time Anne-Marie appears. Which is far too often for my taste.”
“You’re making a haystack from a blade of grass, Katherine. It’s just good-natured fun. Our friends and neighbors mean no harm or insult to you.”
“It may be just good-natured fun to you and Agreen and General Lincoln. But I assure you it’s not good-natured fun to me. Too many people around here are having too much fun at my expense.”
“Busybodies like that live in every town. They have nothing to crow about in their own lives and so they inquire into the lives of others, hoping to find the excitement that they lack. Pay them no mind.” He leaned in to kiss her. She let him, though she placed her palms flat against his chest, denying him full access. “Besides,” he soothed, “have you quite forgotten your own past affairs? What about the legions of handsome young men who paid court to you in Fareham? One of them, a Royal Navy captain—remind me, what was his name? Ah, yes, Horatio Nelson, that’s it—was so entranced by your charms that he asked you to marry him. And I seem to recall that you accepted his entreaty.” He kissed her again.
“That is not a fair comparison,” she protested hotly. “Horatio and I may have been betrothed, but we never allowed our relationship to . . . progress the way yours apparently did with Anne-Marie.”
“That was years ago, Katherine. I was young and impressionable, and her country and mine were not at war with each other. If anything, you should thank Anne-Marie. She made me realize once and for all where my heart truly lies. Remind me: was it not you I begged to marry me?”
She blinked once, sighed, and blinked again. Slowly she slid her hands from his chest to his hips.
“You have a glib tongue, Mr. Cutler, I’ll give you that. But don’t you go getting smug on me. I still . . .” She looked down. “Here, what are you doing?”
“I am undressing you, Mrs. Cutler, as you can plainly see.” He was loosening button under button on the front of her dress. When he had them all undone, he eased the bodice from her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. “Since my kisses aren’t having the desired effect, I find I must resort to stiffer measures.”
She suppressed a smile. “The children . . .”
“Are in bed. If they’re not asleep, their doors are closed.” He scooped her up in his arms and carried her over to their four-poster bed. “So if just this once you could temper those rock-shivering moans of yours, no one will be the wiser.”
As he stretched her out on top of the red-and-yellow-checkered bedspread and began removing the remainder of her clothing, she reached in as best she could to undo the buttons of his trousers. “Richard Cutler,” she murmured, “you are a wicked man. Satan will strike you down.”
“No doubt he will, my lady,” Richard murmured in reply. He slid her last line of defense down her long, slender legs and tossed the cotton undergarment aside. Quickly he peeled off his own clothing. “And when he does, I shall rejoice in the certainty that I will be spending eternity with you.” He gave her an arch look before delving into the garden of delight planted there before him.
Four
Baltimore, Maryland November 1797
“TILGHMAN ISLAND, SIR, closing to larboard. Shall I tack her around?” Caught daydreaming, Richard Cutler cursed under his breath. It was the last thing he should be doing while sailing in these ever-narrowing waters. But as Elizabeth approached Maryland’s Eastern Shore on a close haul, Richard’s mind had been swamped by memories of a man with whom he had served on board Bonhomme Richard during the war. A Londoner by birth, a naval gunner by trade, Henry Sawyer had come over from the British side vowing that when the war was over he would leave behind everything bad in his life in Southwark and swallow the anchor somewhere among the eelgrass and cattails of the Choptank River. Sadly, it was not to be. Early on during the battle with HMS Serapis in the North Sea, Henry Sawyer’s dream of living out his days as a Marylander died the instant an 18-pounder on the lower deck misfired and exploded into shards of scalding iron.
Richard glanced down at the chart cradled in his lap. “Give it another half-cable, Mr. Wadsworth,” he called back from the mainmast chains. “The water is deep close in, eight fathoms at a minimum.”
“Another half-cable, aye, Captain.”
Richard rose and walked slowly forward past duck-trousered sailors making ready to ease off the jib sheets and lay the sloop on a northwesterly course toward the old colonial capital of Annapolis, a town made rich by the slave trade.
It was a bracing November day. A brisk northwesterly breeze persisted, but it carried little of the blustery cold it had when Richard had departed Hingham in the single-masted topsail sloop a few days earlier. Elizabeth was one of the smaller vessels in the Cutler merchant fleet, yet built seaworthy enough to withstand foul weather. He gripped the forestay and gazed out upon the thick woodland splendor of Tilghman Island and beyond, across the wide mouth of the Choptank River past Cook Point. He had been in the Chesapeake Bay before, back in ’81 during the siege of Yorktown, but the demands of war had kept him along its southern perimeter from Cape Charles to the Potomac. Never had he ventured this far north, and what he had seen thus far confirmed the lore of a place that bordered on legend for both mariners and lubbers: a coastline laced with peninsulas, coves, and inlets where fresh and salt water converged to provide excellent anchorage and hauls of bounty for the fleets of oyste
rmen, crabbers, and other watermen who worked these tidal estuaries. Geese, gulls, ducks, osprey, and terns abounded, swooping low over the water or soaring high above in flawless V formations, their calls at once piercing and pleasing to the ear.
“All hands, ready about! Stations for stays!” Wadsworth shouted the orders to eight crewmen on deck who were standing by to tack. High above, on footropes beneath the single yardarm, four other sailors had clawed in the topsail and lashed it to its spar.
“Ready! . . . Ready! . . . Helm’s a-lee!” Wadsworth shouted the signal to let fly the head sheets. Smoothly, deliberately, Elizabeth’s bow swung into the wind.
“Haul taut! Mind the boom!”
With the sloop momentarily in stays, and with her three foresails and mainsail jouncing about in the lighter breeze close to a lee shore, sailors in the bow secured the foresail sheets to larboard as others amidships heaved on the mainsheets and boom to force the gaff-topsail up into the wind, using that wide spread of canvas like a giant weathervane to help coax the sloop’s bow off the wind to leeward. In an admirable span of time Elizabeth lay on a comfortable starboard tack, her stout cutwater knifing through the bay’s light chop.
“I’m going below, Mr. Wadsworth,” Richard said to his mate. “Please inform me when you have Baltimore in sight.”
“Aye, Captain,” Wadsworth replied. “It won’t be long now.”
FROM A DISTANCE Baltimore appeared not unlike Boston, although its population of 20,000 was smaller. Structures of various sizes—made mostly of wood with deeply canted, shingled rooftops, but a few, those of the wealthy, of imported red brick—held sway along a complex of narrow, intersecting cobblestone streets rising up from the waterfront atop small hills under the dominion of a much larger hill to the south. As in Boston, water dominated the visual senses of those arriving by boat: the sparkling blue of the great bay, an inner harbor affording excellent anchorage, the many rivers and streams. The broad and deep Patapsco provided a waterway through the heart of Baltimore much as the Charles did in Boston, while myriad other waterways meandered among the wheat fields and pastures and orchards to the north and south. These swift-flowing streams drained the Tidewater and powered the local millstones that in earlier years had provided the wherewithal to feed General Washington’s army. Also as in Boston, white church steeples dominated within the city limits and long stone warehouses lined the quays. The latter stored the local produce of farmers and millers and fishermen that would either be sold outright at nearby Lexington Market, an area of retail commerce not unlike Faneuil Hall in Boston, or shipped off to some other port.
The city formed an imposing panorama, but that was not what commanded Richard’s attention as Elizabeth coasted inward from the outer reaches of Baltimore Harbor under mainsail and jib. He focused his glass instead on an area he estimated to be a mile downriver and to the east of Baltimore proper, down to where the Patapsco joined forces with a smaller river—Harris Creek, he recalled from Truxtun’s correspondence. There, across a narrow span of water from what the chart identified as Whetstone Point, secured broadside to him alongside a sturdy wooden structure providing dockage for the David Stodder Shipyard visible in the immediate background, lay USS Constellation.
“Bring her fifty feet off her beam, Mr. Wadsworth,” he said, the calm in his voice belying his inner excitement. “See that schooner there under sail? We’ll drop anchor where she is now.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Richard again lifted the glass to his eye. He saw no activity on board the frigate, though he could hear the distant rasp of saws, the ringing of hammers and caulking mallets, the pounding of iron on anvils—sounds emanating either from on board the ship or beyond in the shipyard, he couldn’t tell which. He placed the glass back in its becket by the binnacle and walked forward, his senses stirred by the very sight of her.
She was far from sea-ready. Only two of her three masts had been stepped, and those just the lower ones on her mizzen and mainmast: two black spars rising up aft and amidships, bereft of yards or rigging or topmasts or shrouds. Forward of the mainmast was blank space: nothing to see there beyond a rounded iron smokestack jutting up over the bulwarks like a crooked black finger pointing forward. Nor had the jib boom been adjoined to the bowsprit. One day the stubby thumb jutting out from the ship’s stem would be a long, thin, graceful arm pointing skyward at a forty-five-degree angle. The fact that the bowsprit shrouds and bobstays were in place suggested that day might come soon.
As Elizabeth came abeam of Constellation, Richard’s gaze swept down the frigate’s entire length. She was painted black except for a broad white stripe running along her gun-port strake. Her rounded bow boasted a fine sweep, her stern a jaunty undercut. But what impressed Richard most was her sheer size. She was a fifth rate, a frigate, but really she was a hybrid between a traditionally built Royal Navy frigate and a ship of the line. Except that this ship, just as he had observed on Constitution in Boston, had a flush deck: no raised quarterdeck, no forecastle, no substantial deck structure of any kind marred the perfection of her lines.
His view was temporarily lost as Elizabeth swung into the wind. His own ship’s single quadrilateral sail began to dance about as she came to a virtual stop in the face of the gentle breeze.
“Away anchor!” Wadsworth shouted. In short order, both jib and mainsail were doused and furled to their booms and the sloop was bobbing at her ease upon the sun-jeweled water of the Chesapeake.
“Shall I lower away your gig, sir?”
“Yes, do, Mr. Wadsworth. I’m going below. You may arrange shore leave for the men in two shifts. Later today I plan to have my first look around town. You’re welcome to join me if you’re so inclined.”
“I’d be delighted, Mr. Cutler. Thank you.”
When Richard reemerged on deck, he looked every bit the prosperous merchant in buff-colored knee-length trousers, stockings, and waistcoat, and a pure white cotton shirt and linen neck stock. The pale green sea coat he wore over this ensemble added an extra layer of warmth against the morning chill, and a black ribbon kept his shoulder-length blond hair tidy under a beaver-felt tricorne hat. Without fanfare he climbed down a boarding ladder into the waiting gig and took position on the after thwart. Two oarsmen on the starboard side eased off from the sloop’s hull as the two on the larboard side backed oars to turn the gig about.
“Good luck, Mr. Cutler,” a crewman named Avery called out from the sloop. His hail was taken up by others.
Richard shifted in the stern sheets to turn his head aft. “Thank you, lads,” he called back. He raised his hat high in salute, then brought his gaze back to the ship lying directly ahead, made even more majestic by his perspective at sea level. She now seemed the mightiest of sea creatures contemplating with disinterest the tiniest of water bugs.
The gig coasted in aft of Constellation, toward a ladder leading up from the waterline to the wooden platform. As Richard clambered up the ladder, he glanced over at the plain glass windows on the frigate’s stern. He saw no ornately carved balconies or large tortoiseshell glass windows as he had seen on many European men-of-war and on Bonhomme Richard. This frigate, he mused, was not built to coddle her officers.
When he reached the top rung of the ladder, he cupped a hand at his mouth. “Shove off, lads,” he shouted down to the gig. “I’ll find my way back or signal to be picked up.”
No one was there to greet Richard. Nor did anyone pay him much attention as he slowly strolled along the quay beside the frigate. He could hear activity on board her and saw plenty of it in the vast shipyard beyond, with its clusters of mast and boat sheds, joiner’s and blacksmith’s shops, lofts housing sawyers, sail-makers, coopers, rope-makers, woodcarvers, and glaziers. Closer to him, not far from where he was at the moment, he noted several of the ship’s spars submerged in a shallow, man-made pond, being properly seasoned before they were hoisted on board ship and stepped into place. He noted, too, the line of square gun ports cut out of her hull, the ports themse
lves raised up on their tricing tackle to allow free flow of air across the gun deck. That the square holes were void of black muzzles came as no surprise to him. He knew of only two foundries capable of manufacturing naval cannon within the sixteen states that now constituted the United States.
Unchallenged at the entry port, Richard walked up Constellation’s long gangway and stepped onto her weather deck. There he found a tall, stocky man dressed casually in olive-colored breeches, silver-buckled shoes, and a heavy knitted jersey. His back to Richard, he was talking in animated tones to two others, shipyard workers, presumably, and judging by the way he kept jabbing his finger at them, he was none too pleased with whatever it was they were discussing. Richard held back until the two men had been summarily dismissed and the older man wheeled around with a look of disgust.
“Excuse me, sir,” Richard said, approaching him. “Can you tell me if Captain Truxtun is on board? And if so, where I might find him?”
The man stopped short and regarded Richard with a wary eye. “Who inquires?”
“My name is Richard Cutler, sir. I have come to Baltimore from Boston at Captain Truxtun’s request.”
The man’s stern facial features relaxed into a smile. “By Jove! Is that your sloop out there?” He pointed at Elizabeth riding at anchor fifty feet away.”
“She is, sir.”
“Well damme, Mr. Cutler,” the man exclaimed, “that was handsomely done, the way you brought her in. I have always maintained that seamanship is best demonstrated by the way a vessel is brought to or from her anchorage. You, sir, measured up.” He stressed those last four words as if they bestowed the highest possible praise for a sea captain.
“Thank you, sir. I am fortunate to have a good crew.”
The smile disappeared. “Fortunate? I think not, sir. Fortune has little to do with shaping a ship’s crew. I maintain that a ship should be judged not by her crew but by her officers, who make her crew what it is—or is not—and whose first duty is to inspire confidence of leadership among the crew. Do you not agree?”
The Power and the Glory Page 5
