by Anya Seton
A promise I never made, she thought, seeing the dark stuffy little room in Salem and on the bed the dying lady. And she thought of the letter that lay wrapped in the lawn handkerchief at the bottom of her bride chest.
Maverick crossed his legs and cleared his throat, seeing that she had finished speaking. “Admirable reasons, no doubt, and do you honor—but Mistress Phebe—”
She nodded and cut in. “I know. I’ve a plan. I want you to apply to the Salem Court for me, for license to run an ordinary.”
“An ordinary?” he repeated slowly, relieved by something practical at last. “You mean to run one in your house? But have you room? Could you do it alone? There are many considerations. Our plantation is yet small to support one.”
“I think not.” Phebe smiled. “The fishermen and the sailors will certainly welcome one. Tom Gray’ll help me. We can build a room for Mark off the kitchen, our other room to be the taproom. Mark will, some day, take an interest, I hope. He can keep the books, and there’ll be people around to divert him.”
“And how will you buy your stock?”
“From Mark’s share in the Desire.’’
Moses stared at her. He had misjudged her. She was neither deficient in feeling or character, and the color had come into her thin cheeks as she talked, and he saw that she was not deficient in comeliness either.
“You have courage, my dear,” he said.
Phebe looked puzzled. “But indeed I haven’t—” she said earnestly. “Not in myself.”
Maverick smiled, understanding why his wife was so fond of her. “Perhaps we never know ourselves, our virtues or our faults—” He uncrossed his legs and stood up. “I believe that you’ll somehow manage to keep your home together here, and your plan is good. I’ll give you what help I can.”
That May of 1637, Phebe opened her ordinary. Mark had been carried to a chair beside the beer keg in the taproom, and though his face had fallen into deep grooves and bitterness pulled his mouth, he managed to speak to the first customers, Moses Maverick and John Peach. Phebe in white apron and cap stood behind the counter, near to Mark, where sometimes, when the strain was too much for him, she touched his shoulder and whispered encouragement.
The taproom, with its rush-strewn floor, its shelves of wooden mugs, its casks of brandy and sack, its table and benches, showed little resemblance to the bedroom where the Honeywoods had spent their first years. Their bedroom now, duly built by Thomas Gray, lay off the northern side of the kitchen, and its window gave onto the Little Harbor. From it Mark could look across Phebe’s garden and watch the landings of slippery cargo at the fishing stage. He could also watch his elder son who escaped whenever possible from the chores set him by Phebe to splash in and out of the shallops.
Above the front door of the house Thomas Gray had nailed a small dried hazel bush, as was required by the law to show a licensed ordinary. But Phebe had wished a sign as well, and though her advisers had thought it an extravagance had commissioned a roving painter. The figures beneath the straggling letters were inconclusive, two rigid objects topped by spheres and between them a bird. The legend was clarifying. It said “The Hearth and Eagle,” and though the Marbleheaders ignored the sign and referred to the tavern as “Honeywoods’” it gave Phebe a secret content. Even though she must now receive strangers into her home, yet the andirons were still guardians in the kitchen and on the sign. As for the eagle—that was from the gilt figurehead on the ship Arbella.
CHAPTER 3
A DESCENDANT of the first Hearth and Eagle sign creaked and rattled on its iron bracket outside Hesper’s window, awakening her at sunrise on the morning o£ April 23, in 1858.
“Drat that sign!” she said out loud, and muffled her ears with her pillow to shut out the piercing squeal-bang, squeal-bang. Needed oiling again, or better yet take the stupid thing down, as Ma kept saying. Inns didn’t have signs like that nowadays, and Johnnie Peach had once made fun of the blurred drawings on it, called it a spitted chicken.
Only Pa wouldn’t take it down. He would never change anything. Hesper yawned and gave up trying to sleep. Ma’d be hollering for her to get up pretty soon anyway. Awful lot of chores to be done before school. The Inn was crammed full, and there’d be big doings tonight what with most of the ships crews sailing for the spring fare to the Banks tomorrow. If this fair wind held. The sign banging away like that meant a good stiff offshore breeze.
Johnnie’d be tickled pink, couldn’t wait to sail again now he’d be full sharesman on the Diana.
Hesper sighed. Silly to think about Johnnie when he didn’t pay her any mind now she was a great girl of sixteen, nor for a long time before that either. Not since she’d gone to dame school and he’d given up schooling and sailed off on his first fare to the Grand Banks as a “cut-tail.” That was five years ago when he was fourteen, and he’d suddenly gotten ashamed of playing with a girl, even when the rest of the boys in the Barnegat gang didn’t know about it.
I wish I was a boy, thought Hesper passionately. Johnnie’d taught her to sail, and she could handle a dory almost as well as any boy, and once when she was ten, Johnnie’d lent her some of his clothes and smuggled her on the Balance when the ship went down to Boston for the salt. They’d been gone two days, and there was a terrible hullabaloo when they got back. Ma’d tanned her backside so she couldn’t sit for a week, but it was worth it.
She heard her mother’s heavy tread on the old boards outside in the hall, and there was a sharp rap. “Hurry up, Hes. It’s gone six.”
Hesper said, “Yes, Ma—” and reluctantly slid out of bed onto the braided rag rug. It had been made by poor old Gran just before she died, out of scraps of sprigged calico and homespun and torn stockings Gran had hoarded like a magpie. It kept the floor’s chill off the feet and it was pretty enough and spotless clean because Ma made her wash it once a month, but Hesper despised it. Charity Trevercombe had a red turkey rug so thick you could sink your fingers in it at her bedside. But then the Trevercombes were still rich. They’d made a fortune in the China trade and kept some of it too, which was more than the Honeywoods had done. The Honeywoods had only been rich for a while in the middle of the last century, when Moses Honeywood, the shipowner, had built the great new wing to the house, and married off his daughters into some of the foremost families: the Hoopers and the Ornes and the Gerrys. Then the Revolution came and he lost every penny. Charity was pretty too, the prettiest girl in Marblehead.
Hesper slipped off her long flannel nightgown and shivered. She poured water from a dented pewter pitcher into a chinaware basin, moistened her arms and face and neck, deciding with relief that there wasn’t time to wash all over. I wish I wasn’t so big, she thought, her discontent growing. She had only recently become conscious of her body, and the consciousness brought nothing but disappointment. She was taller than any other girl at the Academy, five and a half feet—near as tall as Johnnie. And suddenly in the last year, a lot of—well, bosom. She dried herself and flung on her underclothes. She brushed her hair with violence. Red. Brick-carrot-red, curly and springy as wood shavings, and so much of it, below the waist and thick enough when braided to make a hawser, and she had been teased about it since she was a baby. She skinned it all back from her face and slicked the wiry little tendrils down with water, and she stared into the small mirror, exasperated by a new reminder. It was bad enough to have the Lord afflict her with tallness and that hair, and a squarish face with high cheekbones, and a wide mouth, and light hazel eyes that looked almost green in some lights, but why must He refine still further upon an effect already so far removed from prettiness, by endowing her with thick dark eyebrows? She flung the brush and comb onto her bureau, buttoned herself into her brown serge school dress. Well, anyway, the Lord spared me freckles, she thought forlornly. Ma and some of the Dollibers who had sandy hair had the freckles too. Hesper’s skin was a thick, dense cream, like, as a schoolmate had once remarked, “the insides of a clam shell.” Hesper had tried to believe it a compliment.
She threw her bed together, not bothering to untuck the sheets and hoping Ma would be too busy to look. She slapped on the counterpane and paused at the sound of hoofs and the rumble of heavy wheels outside. She peered through the tiny-paned window at the street and saw that it was the delivery dray from Medford. Two men were unloading casks of molasses and rum and carrying them into the taproom. Early, thought Hesper, surprised. They must have driven the team all night. And she hurried downstairs to the kitchen.
Susan called from the taproom where she was supervising the delivery of the casks, “Turn the sausages, start the fish cakes, and the milk’s ready for skimming in the butt’ry, and hurry for once. The two drummers’ve to be off for Lynn.”
Hesper nodded and flew to the little pot-bellied cookstove. The fire in the great fireplace would be lit later, but the brick oven was still warm from yesterday and contained pans of swollen bread dough, ready now for baking. She took them out, and put them on the table, stirred the grounds in the huge-spouted can of coffee, turned the sausages and fish cakes again, then ran into the taproom to set the table for the drummers’ breakfast. And she was amazed to find her mother standing, stock-still in the center of the floor, staring at a piece of paper.
“What is it, Ma?” Hesper tried to crane over her mother’s shoulder and saw what appeared to be a regular bill for the rum and molasses, with some lines of brownish writing across the very bottom of it.
“Mind your own business—” said Susan, folding up the paper, but she spoke with a hesitancy most unlike her. “You’re too young...” She scowled at the paper. “Today of all days with the house full, and a crowd tonight ... but it must be done ... someway....”
“What must, Ma?” cried Hesper.
Susan put the piece of paper in her apron pocket. “You’d be a blabber-mouth..."
“No, no, Ma..."
Susan shook her head, pursed her lips. “Get on with the chores, you’ll be late to school.” She walked from the taproom, through the kitchen to Roger’s study door, and threw it open without knocking. Hesper, seething with curiosity and the resentment which her mother often aroused in her, followed close. The door to her father’s study was ajar a crack; she put her ear as close as she dared and listened.
“—and it’s the U.G.,” said her mother’s voice, finishing a sentence. “Written in milk on the bill like the last time. I held it to the fire. There’s two of ’em, I guess, and they’re coming tonight.”
“I’ll have nothing to do with it!” cried her father’s voice sharply. “I absolutely forbid it.”
“Forbid—indeed!” the other voice harshened with anger. “You did it last time and you’ll do it again.”
“That was different, years ago, before they passed the act. I’ll not break the law. I told them I wouldn’t.”,
Hesper heard her mother’s heavy hand strike the desk. “Blast and domnation! Since when do Marbleheaders cringe at a law if it’s a bad one! They must be desperate or they wouldn’t be trying us. It maddens me to have you turn niminy-piminy, chicken-hearted...
“That’s enough, Susan. I disliked the last episode and after all my own ancestors were slaveowners—Moses Honeywood owned several blacks,” said Roger in his nervous, irritable voice. “I’ll not have my house used as a station again.”
Hesper gasped, pressing closer to the door. So that was it! The U.G. was the underground railroad.
“You hold with slavery, then?” shouted her mother.
“Why no, but I doubt abolitionism’s the answer, let the South take care of its problems, and remember too there are many Southern sympathizers here in Marblehead.”
“Bah! Some of the shoemen, and maybe the Cubbys, because poor Leah has no mind of her own since her man was drownded, and Nat, that young whelp of hers’d swarm to any view that’d roil decent folks.”
“There’s no use arguing, I’ve no more to say.”
Hesper heard the familiar sound of a pen scratching on paper, and drew back from the door, but not fast enough. Susan burst through, her cheeks red, and her little eyes snapping. She stared at her daughter’s guilty face, and banged the door behind her. “So you’ve been eavesdropping, miss! You heard it all?”
Hesper opened her mouth and shut it again, but oddly enough Ma wasn’t mad. She sank down in the old Windsor chair, and said very low—“Well, Hes. We’ll have to do it alone. The poor things’U be coming, and we can’t send ’em back, despite your pa.”
Hesper instantly stifled a pang of loyalty. For surely Pa was wrong in this. It was because he wouldn’t read Uncle Tom’s Cabin though nearly everyone else in Marblehead had, he wouldn’t even read any of Mr. Longfellow’s stirring poems like “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp.” He only read books by dead people who had lived across the ocean long ago. So he didn’t know how terribly the poor slaves suffered, and anyway this was so exciting.
“How can we do it, Ma—” she whispered eagerly. “The house’ll be full all evening with the ‘Bankers’ who sail tomorrow...”
“Hush—” said Susan, glancing at the banjo clock. “There’s those drummers a coming downstairs. Feed ’em their vittles, and then I’ll tell you what to do. You can skip school today.”
Hesper waited on the two men, banging plates and spilling coffee in her haste, and for once unrebuked by her mother, who moved automatically through her kitchen work, her sandy brows pulled together in a scowl of concentration.
Her decision once taken, Susan had not the slightest scruple in deceiving Roger. She had many times before this had to take command, ignoring his uncertainties and evasions, allowing, though with scant tolerance for his increasing retreat from life. For fifteen years he had been engaged on a rhymed metrical account of the town tided “Marblehead Memorabilia,” but as his treatment of the work entailed so many classical allusions and consequent detours into reference books and source material, he had progressed no further than the French and Indian Wars.
That this poem was to be apology and justification for a life of outward failure, both his wife and child dimly understood, but to Susan the fecklessness of the project was added exasperation. All his life it had been the same story. As a matter of course, he had been sent to sea on a banker as cook, when he was twelve. During the whole of that six weeks’ fare he had lain in his bunk in the fo’c’sle seasick and entirely useless.
“I doubt he’ll ever make a seaman—” the skipper had said contemptuously on returning him to his father. Nor did he. He was a clumsy unwilling fisherman, he had no knack for boats.
Thomas Honeywood, his father, finally accepted these strange shortcomings, though there had never been a Honeywood since the days of Mark and Phebe who had not spent a great part of his life at sea. Thomas decided on a new course. The boy was brilliant at the Academy and was forever piddling about with ink and quill, when he was not hidden in the attic with a book. Let him be a scholar then. No matter the money, young Roger should go to Harvard. But nothing came of that either. At Cambridge he made no friends. The other students thought him a queer fish and mimicked his Marblehead dialect, which in fact he hadn’t known he had. He responded with anger, and secretly practiced many hours to rid himself of it. He studied little, cut many classes, spent all the time he dared in the Library, and then he fell ill; he had dull headaches and sudden spasms of unexplained terror in which he sweated and vomited. At the end of his fourth term he failed all his examinations.
Home he came to Marblehead, and the illness ceased. His father, though bitterly disappointed, said little but tried to make him useful in the business end of innkeeping. Here, too, Roger was vague and inattentive, having no interest in figures. Then when he was twenty, attracted both of them by the law of opposites, he married Susan Dolliber, and all Marblehead agreed that it was the only piece of gumption he ever showed.
“Ma—they’ve gone...” whispered Hesper coming into the kitchen with a tray piled high with dirty dishes. “Have you planned?”
Susan cast a sharp look over the
tray, picked up the two quarters which were payment for the breakfasts, and put them in a hinged lacquer box which she kept in a drawer of the old dresser.
“Come in here—” she said very low. She pulled her daughter to the left of the great fireplace and through the door of the “Borning Room”—the kitchen bedroom, unused since Gran died, because it was sacred to birth and death and grave illness. She shut the wide-planked oak door. “You’d best read the message—” she said, taking the Medford bill from her pocket, “ ’fore I burn it.”
Hesper peered eagerly at the faint brown letters at the extreme bottom of the page. They said—“2 packages tonight by nine P.X. Brig off Cat. Cat.”
“What’s it mean, Ma?”
Susan took the paper back. “It means—” she said dryly, “two runaway slaves’ll be dumped here tonight by some means, that the pursuit is hot behind ’em, that we’re to keep ’em until we can get ’em aboard a brig that’ll be waiting off Cat Island to run ’em to Canada, and the password is ‘Cat.’ ” She took a small pair of scissors from her pocket, cut off the bottom of the bill, lit a match, and burned the sliver of paper.
“But where could we hide them—” asked Hesper, suddenly a little frightened.
Susan shrugged. “Same place as we did before. No, you didn’t know about it. I doubt you’ve sense enough now to be mixed up in a thing like this, but I’ve got to risk it.”
“Oh Ma—I have sense—I’ll not breathe a word....”
Her mother snorted. “You’d better not. You don’t want us jailed, do you? You don’t want the dom copperheads setting fire to the house?”
Hesper’s jaw dropped.
Susan snorted again, but now there was a twinkle in her eye. “You look as scairt as though you’d heard the Screechin’ Woman. All you need is a bit of spunk, and you’ve got that, I should hope.
“Now listen—you know the long cupboard next the brick oven in the kitchen?”
