SH03_Sparrowhawk: Caxton

by Edward Cline

  “Was that a gang, too?”

  “The Crown viewed it as such,” Hugh said. “No, it was not a gang. It was a club of freethinkers.”

  Jack smiled tentatively. “I see. Well, when you have settled into Brougham Hall, we will have many stories to tell each other.”

  The ballroom door opened then, and Etáin McRae came into the hall. She stopped when she saw Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick standing together. She smiled and said, “You have met.”

  Jack’s welcoming smile vanished. He remembered her words from earlier in the evening. “Were you expecting us to, Miss McRae?”

  “In time, Mr. Frake,” the girl answered, placing a special stress on time. “I knew that you must.” She paused. “Excuse me for interrupting, sirs, but has either of you seen my father? My mother has not seen him in a while, and she is concerned.”

  “He is fast asleep in the gaming room, Miss McRae,” Hugh said. “Shall I rouse him?”

  Etáin shook her head. “No. That won’t be necessary. Let him be. I was certain that he must be in there.” She came closer and glanced from one man to the other. “I see here a compass, gentlemen. One of you is the needle, and one of you the north.”

  Jack’s face remained impassive. Hugh grinned and asked, “Whatever you may mean by that, Miss McRae — which of us is which?”

  “I cannot yet decide, Mr. Kenrick,” Etáin said. “It is something that will become apparent — in time.” Then she took a small step back and performed a short curtsy. She smiled an odd smile, and went back into the ballroom.

  For a moment, the two men stared in silence at the closed door. Then Hugh asked, “What did she mean by that riddle?”

  Jack said nothing for a moment. He was still staring at the space where Etáin had stood. “I do not know,” he answered almost woodenly.

  “She was not teasing us with it, I’m certain of that,” Hugh essayed. “She appeared to be happy to have invented it. It is a secret riddle, which she alone will ponder.”

  Jack said, “Yes, perhaps that is it.” He paused. “But, before tonight, I did not know her ever to speak in riddles.”

  The gaming room doors opened and Thomas Reisdale emerged. He nodded to the two men, then addressed Jack Frake. “I wish to speak with you, sir, if you have the time. I have written a fragment on the very matters you raised tonight, and would be honored if you could read it some time. I could bring it to Morland tomorrow.”

  Hugh said, “Mr. Frake, I look forward to speaking with you again.” He bowed slightly to the two men. “I leave you gentlemen to your intrigues.” He turned and strode to the ballroom doors.

  * * *

  Hugh Kenrick did not see Jack Frake again that night. His future neighbor disappeared. Hugh did not realize this until a few hours had passed. When he asked Ian McRae, he was told that Jack Frake had left early with Thomas Reisdale, and had already bid his family goodnight. He went to the gaming room and caught a few hours of sleep. When Otis Talbot woke him up, it was dawn, and half the guests had already departed, including the McRaes.

  After breakfast at the Gramatan Inn with Arthur Stannard and Ian McRae, Otis Talbot put his signature on several pieces of paper, including a draft on Swire’s Bank for the purchase of Brougham Hall. Hugh Kenrick signed his name beneath his companion’s.

  At one o’clock in the afternoon, the two men boarded the Amelia. When the sloop gained the middle of the York River, a brisk wind filled her sails and the vessel cut swiftly through the water, leaving Caxton to quickly diminish astern.

  Hugh remained on deck and watched the town diminish until he could no longer distinguish it from the trees ashore. The town vanished in the haze that enveloped the entire river and the western horizon beyond.

  Chapter 6: The Empty Houses

  It was to an empty house that Jack Frake returned in a chilly dawn. Upon leaving the ball, he and Thomas Reisdale claimed their mounts and ventured down the dark roads beyond Enderly, guided by a threequarter moon, to the attorney’s house across Hove Creek. There he drank coffee and read some of Reisdale’s “fragments,” learned commentaries on a variety of political subjects, which included the British constitution and colonial charters, with copious citations of authorities as late as John Milton, John Locke, and Hugo Grotius, and as ancient as Tacitus and Cicero. They had talked for a while, speculating on the weal and bane of a British North America. Then Jack thanked his host, remounted his horse, and rode home in the darkness as dew formed on the leaves and grass, and as birds awoke to greet a sun that had not yet risen.

  Morland was an empty house, emptied swiftly and completely in a handful of years. To Jack, those years seemed like a lifetime ago. The contrast between the present and past was jarring. He had difficulty reconciling the contrast. Years ago he was an indentured felon, sold to John Massie by John Ramshaw for a penny. He never learned what Captain Ramshaw had told his new master about him. Later, by the time his indenture had expired, he had become virtually a fourth son to the planter, and a special, mutual affection grew between them that did not exist between Massie and his sons. Jack supposed it was because John Massie was something of an adventurer and renegade himself, when he was a youth, the son of a smaller planter who had wooed and married the daughter of Archibald Morland, the original owner of the plantation. He later was a lieutenant in a Virginia militia company and had taken part in the capture of Louisbourg, and after that, had commanded a company of volunteers during a punitive expedition against marauding Indians in the western part of the colony.

  Massie, he learned later, had developed a special arrangement with Ramshaw to import and export commodities taxed and regulated by the Crown. The illegal imports — from Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Spain — were in turn sold to distributors and merchants in Yorktown, Williamsburg, and Fredericksburg. Massie had not forced Jack to labor in the fields with other servants whose indentures he owned, but allowed Jack to be tutored with his own children. Jack eventually became the man’s scrupulous and confidential clerk.

  Morland, like the other large plantations, had its own private graveyard. Jack passed this on his way home, and paused for a moment to look down on the flat, roughly chiseled stone markers. There was John Massie, the last of the family to go, buried next to his wife, Grace. There was his oldest son, John, heir apparent to the plantation, killed in a senseless, impromptu duel outside a Williamsburg tavern after an exchange of drunken insults with a stranger from the Carolinas over each other’s honesty and pedigrees.

  Two of the markers rested on graves that contained no remains. The youngest and middle sons of Massie were both casualties of the Braddock disaster. William, aged sixteen, was killed outright in the first minutes of that battle; his body was never recovered. Rufus, aged nineteen, was also cut down, but was saved by Jack from the raised tomahawk of an Ottawa who rushed from cover to collect a scalp. It was in furious hand-to-hand combat with the determined Indian, and then with another who followed the first, that Jack received the scar from a war club that had nearly brained him. After felling the two Ottawas, he had managed to get Rufus to his feet and walk him to the rear of the confused and panicked column of British regulars. After pushing Rufus into the river to make his own way back across it, he ran back through the unending hail of bullets, stumbling over the growing matte of downed redcoats. He paused only once, to hold the reins of a frightened horse, whose rider, a British major, had been shot out of the saddle, so that a tall Virginian, Colonel George Washington, could mount it. He made his way back to Captain Massie and his Queen Anne militia only to find that his benefactor was wounded while leading a sally into the woods to rout the French and Indians there. Whether he was struck in the hip by a British or enemy ball, no one could say.

  Half of Massie’s small company of Virginians was felled, he learned later, by that same volley from British ranks, whose officers mistook the militia men for French or Indians, simply because they saw irregularly dressed men using the thicket as cover and loading and firing from kneeling
positions. This method of frontier fighting was alien to the sensibilities of men trained to fight in Europe. The perception and fatal error occurred up and down the column as its officers struggled to preserve order in the ranks and their own presence of mind, more often than not losing their ranks to bullets and desertion, and then their own lives to a well-aimed ball.

  Jack saw one British officer dismount and lead the remnants of his company in a bayonet charge into the surrounding thicket — the sole intelligent action he witnessed a regular officer take that terrible day — and begin to drive the bayonet-fearing Indians back into the forest, only to find himself alone after another British volley brought down most of the redcoats behind him. As the survivors bolted back to the column, the officer flailed away with his sword at the returning Indians, until he was surrounded and struck in the head and back by war clubs. One of the black, orange, and red painted creatures dipped down out of sight, and a moment later rose again over the bushes with a shrill, prolonged whoop, holding aloft the officer’s bloody scalp and silver gorget. Jack raised his musket, fired, and placed a ball directly into the screaming, undulating mouth.

  Whether the creature was an Ottawa or an Ojibwa, Jack could not tell, and from that day onward he saw no reason to make a distinction between any of the numerous tribes. And, it was the last act of respect he would ever pay a British officer.

  The person who helped him carry John Massie to the rear, as other Queen Anne militiamen escorted them under fire, was another Indian, John Proudlocks, a lad only a few years younger than Jack. Proudlocks was adopted as a boy by Massie during the Louisbourg campaign and had acted as the man’s valet and cook ever since. His Oneida tribe was wiped out by Mohawks, and he and a few others kept alive as slaves. Proudlocks escaped, and appeared one morning in camp before Massie’s tent with some rabbits he had trapped and killed. Other militiamen had wanted to shoot him, suspecting him of being a spy for the French, but Massie stopped them. Proudlocks and Jack Frake matured together under the strict but benevolent regime of their mutual master.

  In the retreat across the Monongahela River and through the forests beyond with what was left of the shamed army, Jack and Proudlocks nursed John and Rufus Massie the best they could. Rufus, hit twice in his upper torso, died en route, and was buried in a meadow somewhere near the Pennsylvania border. John Massie, back in Caxton, lived long enough to lose his last son, to see Jack marry his daughter, Jane, and then to lose her, too, to childbirth. He died in his sleep about a month after Jack and Jane’s own son succumbed to what Mrs. Rittles, the midwife and wet nurse, called “the chills.”

  Jack Frake looked down on the markers of Jane Frake and their onemonth-old son, Augustus, and wondered how his life might have been different, had they lived. He sat in his saddle for a long time, contemplating the imponderable. The years between the passing of so many he had been close to and the present were subsequently filled with a ruthless determination to make the plantation pay for itself — as a means of trying to forget.

  After a while, he looked up when the first full ray of the sunrise filtered through the trees and touched his forehead. For a reason he could not explain to himself, he felt that some new phase of his life was about to begin. By the time he stabled his mount and stepped inside his house, he was smiling in amusement at the thought that it might have something to do with Hugh Kenrick. The younger man had impressed him; that is, surprised him with his agreement with the sentiments he had expressed in the gaming room; had pleased him with the ease with which Kenrick had made his acquaintance; had given him some strange hope of friendship. He had been dubbed a solitary man ever since he was brought to Caxton, and a near-hermit ever since the deaths of his wife and father-in-law. Well, he thought, solitary men are solitary only because they have not met their companions in character.

  Yes, he admitted to himself; he was impressed by Hugh Kenrick. So had been Etáin McRae. “You are very much like him,” she had said.

  He tried to imagine Hugh Kenrick as a rival for her affections, and ultimately for her hand; as a neighbor; perhaps as a political ally. He chuckled to himself as he lay down in bed to take a short nap — on any other day, he would have been awake and busy for an hour by now — when he realized that Hugh Kenrick was occupying his thoughts and concerns almost as much as had Halley’s comet and Wolfe’s victory in Quebec. When the man returned to take possession of Brougham Hall, what difference would the newcomer make in the lives of the people here, in the life of Caxton itself?

  A few hours later Jack rose and had a breakfast prepared for him by Mary Beck, the cook, an older woman whose indenture John Massie had bought but who stayed on years after its expiration. “How was the ball, sir?” she asked him in the sunlit breakfast room.

  “Fancy enough and fine, Mary,” said Jack.

  “Pardon me for sayin’ so, sir,” she said as she set his meal before him, “but you ought to attend those things more often. You look bright and cheery this morning, more than usual, if I might make the observation.”

  “Thank you, Mary. I even feel brighter and cheerier than usual.”

  “You spoke with Miss McRae, I’m betting.”

  “Yes. She enchanted the company.”

  Mary Beck stood for a moment, holding an empty tray, before leaving the room. “Pardon me again for the observation, sir, but you looked darkly there for a moment, when I mentioned the young lady. All I can say is, you’d better pick the apple before it’s poached. Miss McRae is fillin’ out in all sorts of ways, and other gentlemen, bein’ men half the likes of you, can’t help notice it, too, and that devil of a father of hers might make other arrangements before you stakes your claim.”

  “That’s not likely, Mary,” Jack said. “I’ve got things in hand. Please, don’t concern yourself.”

  Mary Beck broke off her scrutiny, turned, and walked to the door. “I’m just lookin’ after your natural interests, that’s all, sir,” she threw over her shoulder.

  Jack wondered for a moment what about himself had emboldened the usually reticent woman to volunteer her comments. All he was able to conclude was that attending the ball at Enderly had noticeably altered his demeanor.

  After breakfast, he went to the stable, saddled another horse, and rode out to inspect the progress of the corn and barley harvests. He stopped at the tobacco barns first, though, and saw that the prizing was nearly finished. Six Negro men were busy at the weighted levers that pressed the cured leaves into the hogsheads. Though they were slaves, he paid them laborers’ wages for the work. He had convinced John Massie, even before the Braddock expedition, to begin selling his slaves, when he could, to Quakers in the west and north, who in turn freed them as Virginians could by law not. Massie had detested the institution and did not need much persuasion. “If you pay a man to perform a task,” Jack had told him years ago, “then you may depend on one of two things: he will perform it, or botch it. Then you are free to retain him, or dismiss him. A slave, who has no stake in the task done or undone, will perform it only in an approximate manner, just enough to avoid punishment. And then, unless you choose to resort to the whip, you are as bonded to him as he is to you.”

  John Massie’s eyes had lit up in comprehension. “You make a point that’s eluded me, Jack,” he said. “By your reasoning, we slave-owners are as much enslaved by the practice as are the slaves.”

  “And no amount of kindness to a slave will lessen the evil, sir,” Jack continued. “Kindness is an affection one shows a prize pig, or a resourceful dog. Kindness is a kind of slavery, too, if it is practiced by men who ought to think better of themselves. It is mistaken for humaneness.”

  The six slaves were the last slaves at Morland. They were the last, because they were the best and hardest working. They were as devoted to Jack as they had been to John Massie. They did not wish to be sold. Mouse, the oldest of them, told him once, “Sir, you try to get us a new master, we run away. You put irons on us to hold our feet, we stop work. You are a good man, and treat us so. Le
ave it alone.” Mouse and his five companions each had the freedom of Caxton and the county; each carried a safe conduct pass to deter arrest by slave patrols and bounty hunters.

  Mouse and his companions behaved like freedmen and took their freedom for granted. They could do anything but vote and own property. They were content with the purgatory of their liberty. Jack, for his part, both needed them and hated his need of them.

  The tobacco crops — as well as all of Morland’s other crops — were raised by tenants, whose little wood-frame cottages ringed the Morland plantation. The tenants were not actually tenants, but employees. Jack paid them a small retainer, and then percentages from the profits of the harvests. Each tenant was responsible for a certain amount of acreage and the crops on them, once the seeds were planted. There were six Morland tenants, three of them indentured servants left over from John Massie’s day: George Passmore, Caleb Threap, and Timothy Bigelow. Isaac Zimmerman and James and Dorothy Moffet were originally employed by John Massie, Moffet as an overseer. As the slaves were sold off, first by Massie, then by Jack, the need for an overseer diminished, then vanished. Jack retained the overlooker, William Hurry, who saw to it that crops were properly cared for, harvested, and stored. His business agent, Obedience Robins, oversaw the details of the sale of all the crops. Robins also filled the position of steward for Morland, ensuring that especially the main house was stocked with necessities.

  Then there was John Proudlocks. Jack had persuaded him to become a tenant in charge of the livestock, swine and fowl, and to help the other tenants when they needed extra hands in the fields. For years, and even now, Proudlocks was the closest thing to a friend Jack had since coming to Caxton. He could not pronounce the long string of incompatible consonants and vowels that was Proudlocks’s Oneidan name. John Massie had simply named the boy after himself. Later, the boy appended a surname of his own invention, inspired by the portrait of Archibald Morland that still hung in the main house’s library. “John Who is Proud of His Locks” was eventually shortened to John Proudlocks. He was a tall, slim man now with black hair that fell in curled rivulets over his shoulders. He wore English clothes, except for shoes, which his feet could not tolerate. In their stead, he wore moccasins, which he made himself.