“The helm is yours, Mr. Bryant.” Richard yielded the long wooden tiller to his mate. Pemberton Point lay off the larboard quarter; Deer Island bore dead ahead. “Take her in.”
“Aye, Mr. Cutler. Thank you, sir.”
As Richard stepped below to his after cabin, he took satisfaction in the firm, confident commands of his mate directing the crew to stations that brought Lavinia close-hauled into Boston Harbor. Soon he would be rounding her into the wind to reduce sail to jib and spanker a-luff until pilot boats arrived alongside to warp her in to a vacant spot along the wharf. To Richard’s mind, the way a helmsman guided a vessel to anchorage or dockside revealed much about his seamanship. Throughout this voyage Geoffrey Bryant had not once given him pause to question his seafaring skills, and for that Richard was profoundly grateful. He resolved to talk to his father about promoting Bryant to the rank of ship’s master.
There wasn’t much for him to do down below beyond jotting down a last entry in the log—careful to note the exact time and weather conditions—and tidying up the space. Although homecoming meant as much to him as it did to any man aboard, he would not be leaving Boston right away. Duty compelled him to spend the balance of the day on Long Wharf. The process of off-loading the cargo required his full attention, to be followed by settlement of wages for his crew after they had the hogsheads of rum and molasses stacked in a Cutler warehouse. And he would need to meet with his father, if his father were in Boston this day; or, if he were not, with George Hunt, the able Bostonbased administrator of Cutler & Sons. Only when these and myriad other details had been checked off would Richard board a packet for Hingham.
As it turned out, Thomas Cutler was not present on Long Wharf. After a quick dinner alone at McMurray’s, a favorite alehouse located across from Faneuil Hall, Richard was informed by George Hunt that a boat had just departed for Hingham. Before she sailed, Hunt had requested her master to notify the Cutler family of Lavinia’s arrival. He also informed Richard that another packet should be on her way in by now and would make the return trip when Richard was ready to leave. Which he finally was, four hours later.
The passage southeast to Hingham provided a welcome relief from shipboard responsibility. He sat alone, propped up against the mast, enjoying the simple pleasures of a fresh southwesterly breeze on his face and the spectacle of a late summer sun casting a brilliant golden sheen over the long string of Boston Harbor islands that both defined and protected Hingham Bay. Richard let his mind wander as he watched one picturesque gem after another pass by to larboard, the sight of each island evoking a distant though clear memory. In their youth, he and his brother Will had sailed out to these islands in search of Indian artifacts and ruins to explore, or wild berries and shellfish to bring home for supper.
One island in particular, once owned by a prominent Hingham Tory named Elisha Leavitt, had been their favorite. Grape Island was an easy row from the Hingham docks. The boys could swim in its sheltered cove when the tide was up or, when it was low, dig for clams in the gravelly sand or wade into the shallows to wrest mussels from the barnacleinfested rocks. Years ago it had also been the scene of a local scandal, one that made Richard smile even to this day. Late one summer evening, as a warm and muggy mist crept over the colony of Massachusetts, Will Cutler had rowed his small catboat in toward the Hingham docks with pretty Sarah Fearing sitting demurely on the after thwart. They had been becalmed out in the bay, Will had told two sets of worried parents, and he had had to battle for hours against a vicious ebb tide threatening to carry them all the way to Hull Gut, a potentially dangerous gap between Peddocks Island and Pemberton Point that could suck the unwary out of Hingham Bay and into the open Atlantic. They were lucky to be alive, he had testified, and would not have made it home had the tide not gone slack just as they were about to be swept away. His explanation stood, for the moment, for indeed it had been a day of fluky winds and an unusually strong spring tide. But the jig was up the next morning when a local fisherman with perhaps an ax to grind informed Thomas Cutler and, worse, Nathan Fearing that during the previous evening, as he rowed his skiff into the harbor, he had spotted Will’s boat hauled high up on the beach on the north side of Grape Island, its passengers nowhere to be found amidst the low-lying brush. Richard had never seen his father so angry. Whether his rage was inspired by what Will had allegedly done—whenever Richard put the eternal question to him, Will had responded with a wink and a grin—or by the embarrassment he had caused the Cutler family, Richard had never known for certain.
Will Cutler. A decade had vanished since he had been impressed by the Royal Navy off Marblehead, then whipped to a bloody pulp and strung up from a yardarm after he struck a king’s officer in defense of a shipmate. Ten years; yet those vivid memories persisted and still caused Richard’s soul to grieve.
As shapes along Hingham Harbor began to resolve into distinct forms, Richard left his perch amidships and strode forward to the jib stay, squinting ahead toward Crow Point. It took him a moment to spot them, but yes, there they were, a short distance up on Otis Hill, just where he had expected to find them. He could see Katherine crouched low beside little Jamie, pointing to the packet and waving his hand for him in its general direction. Richard’s sister Lavinia stood next to them, returning his wave with one hand while trying to restrain Will with the other. Young Will. Going on five years now, more than two years older than Jamie, he looked and acted so much like his namesake that his grandmother in her dotage often confused him with her own dead son. He had the same Anglo-Saxon hair and eyes, the same lean and tapered body, the same restless, devil-may-care approach to life that over the years had triggered any number of cuts, scrapes, and bruises—and, once, a broken fibula. He was a handful. His mother was the first to admit that. But her face glowed with pride at the notice Will received from citizens of all ages and the precociousness and free spirit that others found charming and astonishing in one so young.
As the packet was secured fore and aft at the dock, Will shook off his aunt’s grasp and bolted forward. Richard stepped onto the dock and walked toward him. Free of the docks and upon dry land, he dropped to a knee and wrapped one arm around Will while encouraging Jamie with the other. Released from his mother’s grip if not her attentive eye, Jamie toddled up to his father. At length Richard stood and smiled at his wife. They came together lovingly yet discreetly, as was their custom when in public.
“Richard,” Lavinia gushed, when it came her turn to embrace him, “welcome home! Mother and Father have invited you for supper. I know it’s getting late and you want to go home, but could you? Please? Annie and I can see to the boys,” referring to Richard’s other sister. “I promise we won’t keep you late.”
Despite his deep fatigue and longing to be alone with his wife and sons, to decline an invitation from his parents was unthinkable. Besides, Richard reasoned, it would already have passed muster with Katherine.
“I don’t see why not, Liv,” Richard replied. He raised his hat to several people passing by and welcoming him home. “Is Stephen here?”
“No. He couldn’t leave the business. But he asked me to send you his regards. I must leave tomorrow. Which is why I’m hoping to have some time with you tonight.”
“Then let’s make it so.”
IT TURNED OUT, in fact, to be a late night. These days, a Cutler family gathering of such proportions was rare. Lavinia, at age seventeen, was married to Stephen Starbuck, a shopkeeper in Duxbury, and Anne, now in her early twenties, was engaged to Frederick Seymour, a gifted Harvard graduate who had insisted on postponing matrimony until he was further along in his medical career and able to support a wife and family in proper style. And with Caleb now following in Richard’s footsteps, he too was often at sea, in the Caribbean or the Atlantic or, recently, in the Mediterranean. So Thomas and Elizabeth Cutler were delighted to have this opportunity to regale their family with a healthy round of roast beef, garden-picked vegetables, Yorkshire pudding, bottles of Burgundy, and a day-old ber
ry pie: a meal designed to keep the conversation lively.
The mahogany-veneered Longcase clock in the parlor had chimed twelve times before Richard and Katherine finally took their leave and walked outside into the sticky, cricket-orchestrated night. The whale oil street lamps lining Main Street had been extinguished two hours earlier, but the dim glow of a three-quarter lambent moon was sufficient to guide them past Old Ship’s Church to South Street, then left toward their modest two-story cedar-shingled house located a cable length down the road. At the front door, Katherine scooped Jamie up from the baby buggy and carried him inside. Richard followed close behind carrying Will.
“I’ll see to them,” Katherine insisted once Richard had Will stretched out on the bed next to his brother’s. “You’re exhausted, Richard. Anyone can see that. Go to bed. I’ll be in shortly.”
Richard did not protest. When Katherine crept silently into their bedroom a few minutes later, she saw what she had expected to see: her husband stretched out supine on the edge of the red-and-yellowcheckered bed cover. His breathing was already heavy, and his right leg dangled off the side, his foot on the floor, as if he had intended to snatch but a brief respite.
Settling her candle on a bedside table, she lifted his leg up onto the coverlet next to the other and removed his silver-buckled shoes. She managed to get him to move sideways a bit before repositioning the pillow under his head. She then sat quietly on the edge of the bed, gazing down at him, occasionally smoothing back his thick yellow hair and running her fingertips ever so delicately over the scar high on his forehead, the result of a riding accident years ago near her home in Fareham, England, where they met and fell in love. Thinking to make him more comfortable, she unbuttoned his waistcoat and began loosening the strings at the neck of his cotton shirt and the waist of his trousers. Her ministrations caused him to stir and to reach out for her from the deep well of sleep.
She took his hand in hers, kissed it, and laid it back down on his stomach. “No, my love,” she said, her lips close to his ear. “Sleep now. We have tomorrow, and the next day. We have so many days.”
“I want you so, Katherine,” he murmured, his tone throaty and distant, as if he were pleading not to her but to an image faraway in a dream.
“I know, Richard. I know, my love. I want you just as much. But sleep is what you need now.” She unrolled a blanket, tucked one end under the foot of the bed and drew the other up over his chest. She gave him a final look as he drifted back into the deep abyss and then blew out the candle.
“Sleep well, my darling. You’re home. With me. Safe.”
SLEEP HE DID, until almost 10:00 the next morning. He awoke with a start, feeling remarkably refreshed. His first coherent thought was not how absurdly late the hour must be but how quiet the house was. How had Katherine managed that? As a ship’s master he was, as much by definition as by nature, a light sleeper, ever susceptible to a sudden heel in a gust of wind, a whine of warning in the rigging, a sudden patter of bare feet on the deck above. If such fleeting phenomena could awaken him, how could two little boys playing downstairs not?
As much as Richard would have preferred to linger at home that morning, he knew his father was expecting him at the Cutler & Sons office at Baker Yard to itemize the accounts of cargo off-loaded in Bridgetown and Boston. Richard planned to tell him some of what he and Robin had discussed, but he would save the finer details for an upcoming family conference that would include Thomas’ brother, William Cutler. Richard had learned to his great joy the previous evening that his uncle would soon be sailing from England to Boston on his first trip to America. He had also learned, to his greater joy, that Williams’s daughter Elizabeth would accompany him.
“Hard to imagine Lizzy being here,” he said to Katherine that evening. They were sitting alone in the dining room off the kitchen, the leaf of the table removed to provide greater intimacy. It was nine o’clock and their sons were a-bed, Jamie flat out from the rigors of play, Will, as usual, miffed by what he deemed too early a bedtime and not averse to voicing his opinion. On the oval teakwood table, a wedding gift from John and Cynthia Cutler, candles flickered in a silver candelabra, accentuating the delicate Wedgwood china and illuminating a bottle of claret and a platter heaped with creamed cod, whipped potatoes, and peas, a favorite meal of Richard’s ever since his wife had gathered the courage to try it out on him. Raised in the shelter of privilege and aristocracy, she had become, to her own amazement, a very good cook. Years ago, when they first settled in Hingham, Richard had resolved to hire a local woman who could cook, help with Will, and attend to other domestic chores. It was what she was accustomed to, he had explained to his bride, and he had assured her that they could afford this one luxury if they scrimped in other areas. Katherine would have none of it. She had married an American patriot, she had said, not an English peer. She would learn to be an American wife.
“It is hard to imagine,” she enthused. “It’s been, what, six years since we last saw her in England. I often wonder about her. Her letters don’t reveal much.”
“No, especially when it comes to men.” Richard considered a portion of cod on his fork. “Is there a local lad we might introduce her to?”
Katherine hesitated, and for good reason. Elizabeth Cutler, her best friend since childhood had been engaged to Jamie Hardcastle, Katherine’s youngest brother. Through a horrible twist of Fate, Richard and Jamie had met on opposite sides in the sea battle between HMS Serapis and Bonhomme Richard in the North Sea. Wounded by a pistol shot while trying to save Richard’s life, Jamie had died in Richard’s arms and had been buried at sea. For seven years now, Lizzy had not mentioned another suitor. Her grief seemed inconsolable.
“Henry Ware comes to mind,” Katherine said, referring to a modest young man of Unitarian upbringing who was everyone’s definition of an eligible bachelor. “But let’s not put our eggs in the pudding quite yet. I’m not sure she’s ready.”
Richard thought to comment that after seven years, it was high time for Lizzy to start getting ready. But he decided from long experience not to press the point. A change of subject seemed politic. “What happened in Hingham while I was gone?”
The conversation turned to local events. Sarah Hersey, a cousin to John Hancock and formerly a prominent resident of Hingham, was returning to town. Sarah had married Richard Derby after the premature death of her physician husband in 1770. Derby, a merchant from Salem reputed to be among the wealthiest and most influential citizens of Massachusetts, died without issue, leaving the entirety of his estate to his widow, who would be returning to the hundred-acre Hersey farm in Hingham to finish out her days.
“Madame Derby,” Katherine concluded, “intended to bequeath her fortune to the Harvard Medical School. But she was somehow convinced of Hingham’s greater need for a private academy. So she intends to open a school for boys and girls in the center of town. Isn’t that a marvel? A school for boys and girls! She’s asking the leading citizens of Hingham to subscribe to it, and I should think we would . . . What is it, Richard? Why are you staring at me like that?”
“What? Oh. Sorry.” He raised his hands in mock surrender. “I admit I was distracted for a moment. I apologize.” He leaned in toward her. “But if truth be known, my lady, I was not staring. I was lusting.”
Katherine smiled. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”
“I certainly have,” he replied indignantly. “Every word.”
“Well, then, what was I saying?”
“You were describing, in detail that would make a sodomite blush, how much you have missed me these past few weeks and just what you intend to do to me tonight to prove it.”
Katherine pushed her near-empty plate forward, crossed her arms on the edge of the table, and, leaning in toward him, said softly, “Methinks my lord has been away at sea too long and is entertaining impure thoughts. Parson Gay would not approve,” referring to Ebenezer Gay, a local fire-and-brimstone preacher so obsessed with the hideous co
nsequences of original and present-day sin that Hingham citizens of both sexes scurried across to the other side of North Street when approaching the reverend’s home to lessen the odds of a Doomsday scenario erupting from the pulpit of his front porch.
“Perhaps not,” Richard agreed. “But from where I’m sitting, Parson Gay would have to be a blind man not to be entertaining impure thoughts of his own.”
There was ample cause to suggest Gay’s vulnerability. Katherine Cutler was by anyone’s standards a beautiful woman, and for this first evening at home with her husband she had, with Anne Cutler’s help, coaxed her natural beauty to its limit. The scent of rosewater with a hint of lilac drifted in the air about her, and her pale yellow dress was one she had carried with her from England to Barbados as a newlywed. It still fit her perfectly, despite the birth of two sons. Her chestnut hair had been teased, tossed, and curled with brush and comb until it rolled and flowed across her shoulders and down toward the gentle curve of her breasts. On her left wrist she wore a thin gold bracelet, the same one she had worn that evening twelve years ago when they had first met in England. The soft hazel eyes that opened wide at Richard’s last remark served as focal points in the graceful blend of her finely sculpted features.
For Love of Country Page 3
