Chesapeake (60 page)

‘He offered it.’

‘How many acres?’

‘Sixty-seven.’

‘Do you now own, in your name, not the church’s, a total of three hundred and seventy acres of the best Choptank farmland?’

‘The rector of any parish has the right to live in a comfortable house and farm his land.’

‘Three hundred and seventy acres’ worth?’

‘It’s land that has come to me honorably.’

‘Did you propose last year that I cede you fifty-three acres west of Dividing Creek?’

‘You owed it to me.’

‘And how large will your holdings be at the end of this year?’

The rector appealed to the court, and the justices agreed that this was inflammatory, whereupon Steed started a new tack. ‘What charities have you paid for in the last twelve months?’

‘If anyone had come to me—’

‘Didn’t Peter Willis come to you?’

‘He was notorious. To have given him aid—’

‘Whom did you aid?’ Steed’s fastidious use of the word
whom
irritated the clergyman, who railed, ‘Whom? Whom? And whom are you to question me in this way?’

Very quietly Steed said, ‘I merely wanted to know what charities.’

The fat clergyman appealed again to the court, and again they sustained him. ‘Mr. Steed, the Rector of Wrentham is not on trial. You are.’

‘I apologize,’ Steed said humbly. ‘But I must ask one more question, which is perhaps even more intrusive than the preceding.’

‘Watch your deportment,’ the presiding judge warned.

‘Rector Wilcok, these are difficult years. Strange voices are being raised in the land—’

‘He speaks sedition!’ the rector warned.

‘The time may soon be at hand when England will need every champion—’

‘He speaks French sedition!’

‘Do you not think it might be prudent if, in such difficult times, when you already own so much property—’

‘Sedition! Sedition! I will not listen to such questioning.’

The justices agreed. ‘Mr. Steed, you have far exceeded the proprieties. You have raised questions of the most pernicious tendency and have sought to bring into the quiet precincts of this court the passions which excite the multitudes outside. You must sit down.’

‘Those passions, sir—’

‘Constable, sit him down.’

That officer was not required; Steed bowed to the justices, bowed to
the rector, and with a grace that could only be called exquisite, wheeled and bowed to the farm couple whose lands had been stolen from them. Then he returned to his chair with the other prisoners, where Levin Paxmore clasped his hand.

‘The prisoners will rise,’ the presiding judge intoned, and when they were before him he said gravely, ‘Especially in these troublous times is it necessary that the traditions on which our colony is based be observed with extra diligence. Time out of mind good men have paid part of their increase to the church which protects and guides them. Now more than ever we need that protection and guidance, and for anyone, Catholic or Quaker, to deny that obligation is a shocking breach of citizenship. Simon Steed and Levin Paxmore, you are each ordered to deliver to the church at Wrentham three hundred pounds of tobacco well and truly casked.’

The dissidents nodded.

‘And as for you, Teach Turlock …’ At this portentous opening, the disheveled waterman turned to the spectators and grinned, as if to say, ‘It’s me they’re talking of.’ The judge continued, ‘You have no tobacco, nor any means of acquiring any. You have no personal goods worth the taking, but you do have a deficit of three hundred pounds, so this court orders that you cede to the Rector of Wrentham eighty acres of the fast land you hold north of the marsh.’

The grin vanished. The scrawny waterman looked in dismay at the bank of justices, appealing silently this terrible verdict: they were wresting from him land which he cherished, which his ancestors had acquired from Indians and protected with their lives against wolves and mosquitoes and tax collectors and Steeds who had wanted to plant it in tobacco. A strangled cry rose from his throat. Throwing himself toward the bench, he cried, ‘No!’ The constable pulled him away, but in doing so, thrust him in the direction of the rector, who was at the moment hauling his ponderous bulk out of his chair.

Without considering the wrongful thing he was doing, Turlock leaped at the fat man and started beating him about the face. The court became an uproar, and after the constable and two farmers had quieted the fiery waterman, the presiding judge said balefully, ‘In jail, six weeks.’ And the waterman was dragged away.

When the court was cleared of spectators, the justices accompanied the rector to the wharf, where with the aid of six men he was loaded back onto his barge. The presiding judge walked along the shore, throwing obsequious farewells to the clergyman, but his two companions stood soberly on the quay and one said, ‘Next year, believe me, I will no longer enforce the claims of that pious wretch.’

‘It’s the law.’

‘Then the law must be changed.’

‘Such thoughts are dangerous, Edward,’ and the second judge looked to see if anyone had heard the treason.

‘These are dangerous times. I’m an Englishman, born, bred and consecrated, but recently I’ve begun to fear that London …’

‘Be reasonable. Teach Turlock deserved jail … for a score of reasons.’

‘But not to have his land taken.’

‘What does he care for land?’

‘Did you see him when Arthur delivered the sentence? And Steed and Paxmore? They’re good men.’

‘They’re dissidents. The time is coming when all must pull together.’

The judge who spoke first looked toward the main street of Patamoke, then indicated that his companion must look, too. What they saw was Simon Steed and Levin Paxmore walking arm and arm, deep in conversation. ‘Do you realize,’ the first judge asked, ‘that here this day we’ve performed a miracle?’

‘A strange word,
miracle.’

‘Yes, we justices have made it inevitable that three men as unrelated as Steed, Paxmore and Turlock will unite on common ground. I warn you, we’ll see the day when those three and others like them will strip the fat Rector of Wrentham of all his lands, and after that they’ll—’

‘Edward! I pray, don’t finish that sentence.’ The second judge put his hands over his ears to blot out his associate’s final judgment.

‘Ideas will be set in motion which all the justices in this county will be powerless to halt.’

THE TWO JUSTICES WERE WRONG IF THEY ASSUMED
that Steed and Paxmore were talking treason. They were discussing commerce, and when they reached the boatyard Paxmore invited his co-defendant into the plain wood-walled office from which he conducted his business.

‘What makes thee think that vessels will be at a premium?’ Paxmore asked as they sat on chairs he had carved from oak.

‘The hatred I saw in Turlock’s eyes … when the justices took his land.’

‘The Turlocks are always savage.’

‘But this was different. This was a declaration of war, and frankly, Levin, I’m afraid.’

‘Of what? Turlock’s powerless …’

‘Of the spirit. There’s an ugly spirit abroad, Levin, and sooner or later it will engulf us all.’

‘And that’s why thee wants vessels? Against days of riot?’

‘Exactly. I think the day will come when people like you and me who want to maintain ties with England will be pushed to the wall by the canaille.’

‘Thee has the advantage of me. I didn’t study in France.’

‘The mad dogs … the Turlocks. Soon they’ll be shouting that the colonies should break away from England. England will resist, as she should. And I’m afraid there might even be war.’ He hesitated, looked nervously at the floor and whispered, ‘If war does come, we shall need ships.’

Paxmore, seeking to ignore the awful freight of those words, took refuge in nautical pedantry. ‘Friend Steed, thee uses terms carelessly. A
ship
is a very large vessel with three masts or more. Nations own ships. Businessmen own
brigs
and
sloops.’
Steed, also eager to avoid talk of war, asked, ‘Which should I build?’

‘Neither. Thee wants a
schooner.
Able to move about with speed.’ And each man sucked in his breath, for each knew that a commission had been offered and accepted, and this was no trivial matter, for if Steed was prepared to pay for a schooner, he must allocate to it a substantial portion of his wealth, and if Paxmore undertook to build it, he must put aside the lesser projects on which his normal income depended.

So the two men sat silent, contemplating the obligations they were about to assume, and finally Steed spoke. Moving briskly to the desk, he jabbed it with his forefinger. ‘Speed, Levin. Above all else, we must have speed.’

Now it was Paxmore’s turn to act decisively, and for him this was an intense process. Without rising, he began to twitch his body, turning his shoulders and edging his elbows back and forth in a performance that might have seemed grotesque to someone unfamiliar with what he was doing. Years before, Steed had told men at the store, ‘When Levin Paxmore thinks of a schooner, he becomes that schooner.’ And now the canny builder wrestled with those problems which had agitated the most ancient shipwrights. Finally, at the end of his contortions, he said, ‘Thee can have speed, but thee can’t have speed and maximum cargo. I can pull the lines out this way’—and he indicated the length of the intended vessel—‘but that means I must squeeze her in here, just where you’d want to stow the hogsheads.’

‘Forget the hogsheads. This schooner will be hauling compressed cargo of treble value.’

‘We should keep the freeboard low, but the masts must be extra tall. We’ll need a spread of canvas.’

‘I’ll want a very stout superstructure.’

‘That’ll decrease speed.’

‘But I must have it. For the cannon.’

At this word Paxmore placed both hands on his desk. ‘I can’t agree to put cannon aboard one of my vessels, Simon.’

‘I wouldn’t ask you to. But you build stoutly, so that when you’re through I can place the cannon.’

‘I could not agree—’

‘You leave the spaces—four of them.’

‘But that would make it top-heavy,’ Paxmore warned, and as soon as he spoke these words he realized that Steed had tricked him into connivance on a military matter, and he drew back. ‘I am not building some great ship of war,’ he warned, and quickly Steed assented, ‘Never! Ours is to be a small schooner of peace.’

For two days the men planned the vessel that was to become the hallmark of the Paxmore yards: sleek, swift, maximum canvas, minimum beam, sharply formed bottom, lively tiller, fantastically protruding bow-sprit.
It was to be a schooner defined by a businessman, executed by a poet, and at every critical point each man made his decisions in reference to a view of the future that he had constructed after the most careful analysis of what he saw happening in the colonies.

Simon Steed saw that hotheads like Teach Turlock were going to nudge the colonies closer and closer to a confrontation with the mother country and that agitations of vast dimension were going to disrupt trade and the normal use of oceans. This probability influenced him in two ways. He knew that in time of turmoil adventurous traders prospered, for they were willing to buy and sell when others were immobilized by anxiety. And he was also spurred to daring ventures by remembrance of his grandmother’s stubborn fight against pirates; like her, he believed that the seas must be kept free. He was therefore willing to take risks and was prepared to pay not only for the vessel he and Paxmore were planning, but for three others in swift succession, for he saw that with a fleet of four he could trade in these troubled times with sharp advantage. But that he would do so under the British flag, now and forever, he had not the slightest doubt.

Levin Paxmore, in his forty years at Patamoke, had built many oceangoing vessels, but they had been stodgy affairs: snows with ridiculous paired masts, and brigs with stumpy ones. He had always known that better craft lay waiting to be built among the oaks and pines of his forests, and sometimes when he had seen a large British ship putting into the harbor outside his boatyard, her lines trim and her three masts justly proportioned, he had felt pangs of artistic regret: I could build better than that, if anyone would buy. Now he had his customer, a man with insights at least as profound as his own, and he was eager to start. He would do so as a Quaker pacifist who abhorred war, and it never occurred to him that cooperating with Steed would lead him step by step to compromise those convictions.

So these two men of good intention launched their project believing that they could pursue it without surrendering past allegiances. Dimensions of their schooner had not been agreed upon, but at the close of that second day they proposed that on the morrow they would lay out the specific measurements; however, shortly after dawn two slaves sailed to the ramp at the boatyard with the exciting news that a trading vessel had put into Devon from London, bringing Guy Fithian and his wife on an inspection tour.

‘Were they made welcome?’

‘Master Isham’s wife, she said come in.’

Simon Steed had never married and at forty-three had no interest in doing so; he ran the family business, read speculative books sent over from Paris, and allowed his younger brother Isham and his wife to supervise the social life of the Steed empire. If Isham had extended the
courtesies, there was no need to quit the exciting business of laying out a great schooner, so Simon told his slaves, ‘Sail back and assure Fithian I’ll be there by nightfall.’

‘No, Master. He say come now.’ And one of the slaves handed Steed a brief note from his brother advising him that grave news had arrived from London. His presence was mandatory.

So Steed told Paxmore, ‘We have two hours to do the work of two days. What size shall our new craft be?’

The two men, in shirt sleeves even though the January day was brisk, began to step off the proposed dimensions. ‘I’ll want her longer than before,’ Paxmore said. ‘I’ve been thinking that we must go to eighty-four feet and some inches.’ And he drove two pegs to indicate that considerable distance.