Peter Wicked

by Broos Campbell

  I didn’t ask her how she knew; it was enough that she did. I didn’t know whether to be proud I’d kept my britches on or feel stupid that I hadn’t taken them off.

  “I couldn’t go through with it, that’s all.” I shrugged. “I thought it was wicked.”

  “Of course it is! Women are entirely wicked. Have you never been to church? Often the sermon is about nothing else. But men are much wickeder, otherwise what’s the point? What’s the point of being a man if you do not take advantage of your capacity for deviltry?”

  The dimples were deep in her cheeks and her lips were flushed a rich pink, and she smiled with such impishness that I had to smile back.

  “There, that’s better,” she said. “Well, I knew Elver was a fool when I married him, so it should not surprise me now that he still is a fool and that he has a fool for a daughter, too.”

  “She’s not so foolish, Mrs. Towson. She knows she’s marrying for money, but she offered to . . . you know.”

  She examined her charcoal, and then smiled brightly. “Do I?”

  “She—she intimated a continued liaison.”

  “Did she! Then she is even more foolish than I thought. An affaire de coeur must be sudden, glorious, and soon ended. Otherwise one is found out, and that is unpleasant for everybody.”

  She set her charcoal down. “There now, I think I have got enough of you into this sketch that I can finish it without you, Mr. Graves. Thank you so much for sitting for me. I think Dickie has got the boat—” She looked out the window. “Yes, I can see Jubal has fetched the pony cart and has put your baggage in it. And oh, look, see! Your silly kitty has perched atop the pile.”

  She took my hand. Her fingers were cool and dry.

  “Do visit us again some day, won’t you?” She smiled sadly, as if I’d hurt her or was going to.

  As I walked ahead of Jubal down the oyster-shell path, I saw Dick waiting on the dock to run me across to Baltimore in his boat. I felt low and mean, with the sword knot hidden in my pocket. Mrs. Towson had slipped it off her husband’s saber and insisted I take it. It wasn’t the only thing I wanted, neither, and I hoped to sweet God almighty that Dick wouldn’t wonder why I was walking with one hand in my britches pocket.

  SIX

  A military band was playing “Roslin Castle” on the waterfront as we tied up at Bowley’s Wharf in Baltimore. It’s a jaunty air despite being solemn as Sunday, but the bandsmen in their gaudy red musician’s uniforms were playing it fit to bust out crying. The sergeant that led them was sweating a river as he marched backwards in front of them along Pratt Street. He was getting dished out the devil’s own portion in keeping the hornsmen tootling their cornets and serpents in time with the funeral pace that the drummers were marching them to, and the company just about fell apart when he executed a starboard tack to head up toward Baltimore Street, which is where your mobs of any consequence assemble. Half the band was in tears. The tune had been one of General Washington’s favorites, and he’d only been moldering in his crypt these seven months. But the old man was entitled, whether I liked it or no, and because of the mood I was in I sang the last verse low to myself:

  O hither haste, and with thee bring

  That beauty blooming like the spring,

  Those graces that divinely shine,

  And charm this ravish’d breast of mine.

  My breast felt ravish’d, all right, and I had aimed to do something about it, but sure as certain I’d be thwarted in my intentions that day. I’d known it was a Friday and that it was the fourth day of July, but I’d forgotten it was also Independence Day. Bawdy houses might contrive to stay open on Jesus’ birthday, but there’d be tar and feathers if they dared to engage in commerce on the Nation’s.

  The bandsmen passed out of sight between the rows of narrow brick houses, followed by a fleet of children and a handful of old soaks in Continental uniforms they’d filched from somewhere, but you could still hear them honking and thumping as they traipsed along. Then twenty-one guns roared out down the Patapsco at Fort McHenry, one after another. Such a thing commands your attention, and we sat and gloried in it till the guns fell silent and a gloom of smoke cloaked the point.

  At last Jubal heaved out the old sea chest that Dick had given me and plunked it down on the tarred planks of the pier. He hopped back into the boat and handed up my carryall. Last of all came the wicker basket with Greybar in it; the lid was open, and he sat upright, staring haughtily over the edge like a squire riding in his very own sedan chair.

  “Come with me, Dick,” I said. “Let’s have us a dram for old times’ sake. There’ll be toasts a-plenty. Free drink, too, I bet.”

  He glanced at the sun. “It’s a good four hours even if this breeze holds. I’d like to be home by suppertime.”

  “Aw, Dick, it ain’t like you to be so responsible.”

  He kind of nodded and shrugged at the same time.

  I thought guiltily of Arabella and Mrs. Towson. “C’mon, now, a little caterwauling’ll do you some good. Shake some of them frogs outta your hair.”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t suppose I will. You hoist a couple for me and say hello to your brother.”

  “My brother is Geordie, and he’s been dead these eight years. Phillip’s my half-brother, I’ll thank you to remember. At least let Jubal haul my baggage up the house. It ain’t half hot out today.”

  “Now, there, see?” said Dick. “That’s exactly why I’m not going to do it.”

  And with those last words to me he told Jubal to cast off, and they glided away across the Basin. He looked back and give me a wave, but I didn’t bother returning it. Then they rounded Fell’s Point, and he was gone.

  A great huzzah rose up from the direction of Baltimore Street, which was a few blocks north and was the main east–west thoroughfare. I guessed I might as well go that way to get to Phillip’s house in Fayette Street, after a stop at the Graves & Son offices in Commerce Street. I didn’t expect them to be open, but I’d hate to have to go all the way out to the house and find Phillip had only been a couple blocks away.

  A raggedy kid was eyeing me from his seat on a barrow in the shade.

  “Here,” I said. “Are you your own man?”

  He looked me up and down, and kind of smiled to himself. “Might be I ain’t. Might be I is. What you axin’ for?”

  “I need someone to haul this here chest and carryall.”

  “How far you goin’?”

  “Might be just around the corner on Commerce. Might be over to Fayette and Sharpe.”

  He held out his hand. “I’ll do it for half a dollar.”

  “Half a dollar! That’s kind of steep, ain’t it?”

  “It cheaper’n replacin’ all your duds, brother.”

  Which is what I’d have to do if I left them around there.

  I gave him a Spanish real. “That’s twelve and a half cents American.”

  “I knows it. I wants half a dollar.”

  I gave him my best grin. “And you’ll get it when we get where we’re going—brother.”

  The warehouses west of South Street had been rebuilt since the big fire a year ago last May, and the brickwork shown a deep red where it hadn’t been painted over. The iron-wheeled drays that usually rumbled along under loads of shad, herring, and oysters coming in from the bay and barrels of flour going out, stood idle for the holiday, and the great doors of the warehouses were closed and the windows shuttered. The fire hadn’t touched the stock exchange and counting houses on Commerce Street, but a spider had built its web across the doorway of Graves & Son. The front window was grimy, and when I wiped a clear space and pressed my hands and face against it, all I saw inside was bare walls and dusty floorboards.

  “You done come to the wrong place, brother,” said the kid, peering in beside me. “This place is full of nothin’. Maybe I better charge you a dollar.”

  “A dollar! That’s more’n a day’s wages for a white man.”

  “Yes, an’ if you can fi
nd one to be about yo’ business all day for a dollar, you show him to me.”

  He grumbled about it all the way down Water Street, which we had to take to get around the wharves and warehouses at the foot of Calvert; but he was quick and sturdy with his wheelbarrow, and I guessed a man who commanded such wages as he did could talk all he wanted. We sallied down Pratt Street again till we’d made our westing at Sharpe, where we turned north, and by and by we fetched Baltimore Street on a surging tide of mechanics, fishmongers, clerks, sailors, women, children, and a fair sprinkling of French émigrés who’d fled the slave rebellion in San Domingo. Everybody seemed to have put on their Sunday clothes, but for sheer finery the Negroes and sailors outdone them all. I felt downright dull, although I’d bathed that week and Old Jupe hadn’t let me leave White Oak without he’d brushed my coat and greased my shoes first.

  Baltimore Street was a mighty tangle of militia in their trim new uniforms and veterans in their quaint Continental ones, all long-skirted vests and oversized coats that looked mighty sweltering in the sun; and dogs and pigs darting in and out of folks’ legs, setting the girls to shrieking and the men to roaring; and boys in paper hats, waving wooden swords and following the soldiers around.

  My faithful companion eyed the crowd and then give me a look like he was about to reopen negotiations.

  “C’mon,” I said, stepping out before he could up his price again. We drifted along with the crowd, me touching my hat to the officers and the kid doing who knows what behind me. He must’ve been doing something because the people watching from the side of the road kept a-laughing, but the couple times I turned around quick to catch him, he was just trundling along with his barrow and not bothering anybody. Maybe we just looked funny, I don’t know.

  The current shoved us down the long block back to Charles Street, where we finally forded the stream. There we turned north again and then west by north up Fayette, till at last we stood in front of a tall yellow house with pale green shutters and white marble steps. The kid stared up at it and whistled.

  “Man,” he said, “this here’s a regular castle. I ought to charge you two dollars.”

  “What for?” The house wasn’t notably larger than any of the others on the street, and smaller than many. The marble steps were cracked and stained, and the bricks had begun to show through the paint.

  He ducked his head and kept his voice low. “This a white man’s house, brother. Is you sure you can pass?”

  “Just you watch if you don’t believe it—brother.” I put a silver dollar in his hand.

  He hid a grin. “Naw, sah. For that kind of money, I believe you.”

  He rolled his wheelbarrow away, whistling. I waited till my heart had stopped pounding before I lifted the tarnished brass knocker.

  “It will be hard on us, having another mouth to feed,” said Phillip, setting down his fork. He crossed his knife on top of it and pushed his plate away. “But however it may be that God finds for us to be of service, we must turn our hands to it and give thanks.”

  “Amen,” said Constance. She had a girlish look to her, though she kept her long, dark hair tucked up in her mobcap, and kept her high collar and her cuffs fastened, and though she must’ve been in her thirties by then. She made a brushing gesture at her chin.

  “Whatsover thy hand findeth to do, let it do with all thy might,” Phillip was saying. “Who said—”

  “Husband, thee has a bit of mustard in thy beard.”

  He dabbed at his chin whiskers with his wipe. His beard was shot with gray. So was his hair, cut off blunt at the shoulders. Despite his clean-shaven cheeks and naked upper lip, he looked older than he was.

  I stole a glance at myself in the mirror on the sideboard behind him, trying to see a resemblance between us. We’d had different mothers, but surely we had a father in common.

  “So tell us, then, Matthew—” He got the nod from Constance and put down his wipe. “How long does thee intend to stay?”

  I shrugged. His thin lips tightened at the gesture, and I changed it to a shake of my head.

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Unless I can get another berth or find some other way of situating myself, I don’t know what I’m going to do. You got an open berth?”

  “Thee is a lieutenant now.”

  “I could go as supercargo. I done it before. I know my bills of lading—”

  “I have no doubt being a lieutenant counts for something.”

  I held my arms open, as if to show him the difference between the uniform I was wearing and the one I no longer had a right to. Not that he’d be able to tell them apart, I didn’t guess.

  “It was only an acting lieutenancy,” I said. “My official rank is midshipman, and I’ve been put on the beach.”

  He nodded. “I see. But although this enforced idleness is vexing, it carries some remuneration, I believe.”

  “If you mean half pay, that’s for lieutenants and captains. And by lieutenants, I mean lieutenants with actual commissions.”

  He looked at Constance, who gave him a sharp look. “I see,” he said. “Thee will attend Meeting, of course.”

  “Or whatever service thee wishes,” said Constance. “Or none at all, if thy conscience directs thee so.”

  “He must attend to some spiritual guidance.”

  “He must find God as he will.”

  “My gun and head money ought to be ready by now,” I said. “We took a couple of prizes in the old Rattle-Snake before I—before she sank. Our agents are here in town. I’ll get a draft on Monday.”

  “Gun and head money?” said Phillip. “That is thy word for blood money?”

  I pushed a piece of ham rind across my plate. It hadn’t been much of a holiday meal—just the shank end of some mummified pork and a few boiled potatoes.

  “It means the prizes we took weren’t national ships. You know, proper men-o’-war. When you take a man-o’-war and she’s condemned, she and everything in her gets sold and the proceeds are divvied up between the captors and the government. That’s called prize money. With a private armed vessel you only get paid for the number of men and guns she carries, and the government takes everything else. Then there’s more rules about salvage and pirates, which as a shipowner I guess you know all about already.”

  There was a little lump of potato left on his plate. He sliced it into quarters and put one of the pieces into his mouth. From around it he said, “Is it a sufficient sum?”

  “For a while. I’ll give more than I take.”

  “That will be well.” He scratched at the hairs beneath his chin. When he realized what he was doing, he pulled the ends of his neckcloth a little tighter.

  Constance began gathering the dishes. “It’s a disgrace, asking kin for money.”

  “Does thee like doing the washing up for thyself?” he called as she marched off to the kitchen. “Does thee like to eat? Does thee like a roof over thy head?”

  “Does thee prefer thy bed to a chair in the parlor?” she retorted, and he ducked his head so low it near about disappeared into his collar.

  Constance Graves was happy to have me underfoot, but it was hard to tell with Phillip. I’d been hoping to indulge my natural laziness for a few months, except that Phillip despised inactivity in others. He spent most of his time at coffee houses, trying to drum up business to reopen Graves & Son, the concern he ran with my father—who, of course, was two hundred and fifty miles away in Pittsburgh—and I rarely saw my half-brother except at dinner and at Sunday worship.

  Attending the Pacific Brotherhood meeting with Phillip and Constance had seemed convenient and obvious. The Brethren were good folk, but there was a brusqueness in their speech that made me entirely too aware of my errors, and among the Elders there was an unshakeable self-certainty that made me want to catch them in something just so’s I wouldn’t feel so wanting. Besides, I had no clothes but my uniforms, and the Brothers and Sisters were Quakerish in their belief that no problem ever merits a violent sol
ution. Even my plain blue workaday frock coat, with no insignia on it at all, made me conspicuous among the congregation’s gray and brown and black; and if looks could kill, I calculated some of them good folk would have problems in the hereafter that they hadn’t expected.

  The meetinghouse stood away across town in Fell’s Point, on Pitt Street where Harris’s Creek runs across the road above the York Street bridge. Few houses had been built that far north yet—a couple dozen shacks lined the next street south on the other side of the creek, but most of the building in the Fifth and Sixth wards was down by the Basin and on Fell’s Point. Although Pitt Street had been laid out properly straight, it had more the feel of a country lane than a city street, and the Brotherhood Meetinghouse looked more like a barn than a church.

  The Brotherhood had no preacher, no deacons—no officials of any sort. There were officers elected every solstice, but they were more in the line of servants than leaders. They lit the fires in winter—more a concession to the needs of the building than to the comfort of the parishioners, I guessed—and washed the windows in spring, and swept up after meetings, and made minor repairs, and collected tithes; they could wield shame like a bludgeon or a dagger, but in theory they had no power.

  The pews didn’t face an altar; there wasn’t one. Instead, they were arranged in three concentric squares around the center of the room, which was empty to my eyes, but to the Brethren it contained the Holy Spirit. Or perhaps the Spirit was in all of us, except in those it wasn’t; I was never quite sure what they were on about. What I was sure of was that the arrangement gave the younger men and women plenty of time to eye each other when the elders weren’t looking.