Paxton's War (2 page)

The house that she and her father shared stood at the base of the hill. It was a simple structure, yet spoke volumes of its master. The front rooms were for sitting and dining, and the spacious back room, which faced the great hill, was used as the doctor's study. In between were two bedrooms. Colleen's faced the open sea and her father's looked toward their farmland to the west. The entire house was dominated by Roy's profession, and smelled of an apothecary. Dozens of jars of ointments and salves stood on shelves in the hallway and along window ledges. Medical tomes lay open on every available surface—tables and stools, desks and chairs. A large variety of anatomical diagrams hung from the walls of his study, the hallways, even the small kitchen. Portia, their loquacious housekeeper, complained constantly about the macabre figures, but to no avail. Dr. McClagan was a man obsessed with his work, and his work followed him from room to room. Because he was a physician of greater instinct than organization, his surgical tools—pewter syringes, tortoiseshell tweezers, scalpels, screw tourniquets—might be found anywhere.

Colleen appreciated her father's impassioned relationship to his work. His compelling concern to broaden his knowledge, hone his skills, and cure the world's ills was the finer side of his character. It was exhilarating to live in a household where learning and healing were unending preoccupations. The overwhelming presence of medical paraphernalia, however, no matter how intriguing, could also be oppressive.

In all the house, Colleen's bedroom was her refuge, a space of her own special decor and design. The room was serene and feminine, and had been decorated largely by her paternal aunt, Rianne, who in many ways served as her friend, mother, and confidante. Rianne had come to America to care for Colleen some fifteen years earlier when Sheena McClagan had shocked everyone by abandoning her husband and young daughter. Rianne hadn't been surprised. A spinster, she'd expected the worse from the moment her brother had set sail for the colonies in 1750. She knew her brother, knew that he was of a breed that seemed to attract misfortune, so she waited. When he wrote with joyous expectations of being apprenticed to a surgeon, she waited. When he told her of his marriage to a brown-eyed beauty of Scottish descent, she waited. When word reached her, in 1760, of Colleen's birth, she tempered her joy with gloomy premonitions. Her brother was too happy, things were going too well. At last, the missive summoning her to the colonies had arrived: Sheena McClagan had run off with a wild-eyed woodsman, leaving Roy to raise a daughter alone. Six months to the day after receiving the letter, Rianne arrived in Brandborough, and in short order became Roy's housekeeper, and Colleen's friend, mother, and confidante.

The new world opened new vistas for Rianne, as it had for so many others. Always a willful, independent woman, she soon had found that domestic duties couldn't satisfy her love of worldy commerce, and within a year she had become the proprietess of a dressmaking shop in Brandborough. By the time Colleen was fifteen, even Brandborough wasn't big enough for her, and she made preparations to move to Charleston, thirty miles north along the coast. Roy had roared in protest, but Rianne was convinced that Colleen no longer required her presence, and her brother's mannerisms had become less and less to her liking. She loathed the smells of his medicines, she deplored his reclusive, studious ways, and found his temper intolerable. She respected his deep humanity and devotion to the sick and wounded, but that wasn't enough.

For Colleen, the lure of moving to Charleston was almost overwhelming, but Roy had refused her permission to accompany her aunt because the big city was too sophisticated and rife with pretense and decadence. Even more than his daughter's beauty, he treasured her natural, untarnished personality. He thought of her as a lovely country lass, an innocent farm girl who shouldn't be exposed to the sinful society of city life. What frightened him the most, however, was that Rianne had become a Patriot, and he wasn't about to let his darling daughter get involved with politics. “Mark me well,” he'd warned his younger sister as her carriage, loaded with all her earthly possessions, pulled out of the yard. “Those half-crazed notions of yours will get you shot.”

“Say what you will, brother,” Rianne had called back, “but no dim-witted Tory will intimidate the likes of me or keep me from making a pretty pound.”

She had proven to be right. Her shop was soon deemed one of Charleston's finest. Her designs were copied from the latest fashion dolls laboriously acquired from London and Paris, and her needlework was unparalleled. Even during the war years, with fabrics scarce and the value of currency uncertain, Rianne managed to prosper. She caught the attention of the most socially prominent, and within less than a year found herself an accepted member of Charleston's artistic elite. That she was a shameless but discreet gossip did her little harm. Her female customers loved her not only for her speed and craftsmanship, but for her titillating news as well. Her acquaintances numbered beyond mere society. She seemed to be on intimate terms with every artisan and artist in the city. Her passion for the arts—for music and painting, for cabinetry and poetry—was insatiable and sincere. And because she refused to return to Brandborough and its provincial ways, Roy and Colleen, at Colleen's insistence, were forced to visit her in Charleston.

The trips became the highlights of Colleen's year. On one such stay, Colleen met Ephraim Kramer, a master printer with whom she would later collaborate politically. And on another trip, Rianne arranged for Josiah Claypool, a craftsman whose skills rivaled those of the great Thomas Chippendale himself, to design for her niece a four-poster bed and secretary-wardrobe of rare beauty.

Of all Colleen's possessions, from great to small, she loved the furniture the most. Fashioned from gleaming cedar and cypress, the two pieces were perfectly matched. Neatly tied chaffs of wheat had been delicately, painstakingly sculpted along the thin posters, which sat upon carved claw feet. It was there, beneath a floral canopy, where she dreamed, but it was at her desk where she wrote and read.

And what a magnificent desk it was! With a chest of drawers below and a wardrobe above, the writing surface folded out from the furniture's center and contained a dozen tiny compartments and miniature drawers that Colleen kept filled with the deepest expressions of her secret heart. There was room for books:
Tom Jones
and
Pamela
, recently devoured with a passion that surprised even herself, had been presents from Rianne; Pope's wicked
Rape of the Lock
sat at the bottom of the pile, so that her father might not notice.

That she was reading such literature might well upset him, but, even if discovered, she was sure he would grudgingly understand because he knew that, as much as she loved the farm, she loved words, ideas, and poetic images even more. He was aware that she invented verse of her own, and though he considered such endeavors foolish and inappropriate for young ladies, he realized that there was little he could do to stop her: like his sister, his daughter had a flair for the artistic.

If Colleen could explain the presence of Alexander Pope's risqué rhymes to her father, there was also, in her possession, a small packet of tracts and broadsides for which she could not so easily account. The pamphlets had been written by people whom Roy considered dangerous, and the broadsides were political satires that Colleen had written herself, and kept hidden deep in the bottom drawer of her dresser, beneath her most intimate undergarments. Her passion for the fiery words of freedom had flowered four years earlier, when she was sixteen. Her heart had been broken because Jason Paxton had departed for Europe to study music. Without romance's golden fantasies, she was devastated. All this she had confessed to her aunt. In fact, she'd gone so far as to show her a poem she'd written about Jason. “I can see that you're an artist,” Rianne had responded sympathetically, “but art won't bring him back. Art sends the soul soaring, but politics is the pudding of daily life. Have a taste of pudding, my dear. Look around and see what these English fools are foisting upon us. Wake up from your poetic fantasies!” And with that, Rianne gave her niece Thomas Paine's
Common Sense
.

Young and impressionable, Colleen read the tract in one fevered sitting, and learned in the following weeks to recite many lines by heart: “Examine the passions and feelings of mankind; bring the doctrine of reconciliation to the touchstone of nature, and then tell me whether you can hereafter love, honor, and faithfully serve the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land.” No, she decided; she could not serve that power. It was plain and simple, it was common sense as the title itself said. The British were tyrants who robbed the colonists of what was rightfully theirs—their fair share of commerce and trade, and, most precious of all, their personal freedom.

In the months that followed, and as America's armies of the North were beaten and ran and were beaten again, she became convinced that duty demanded she contribute to the cause so eloquently expressed and in such great danger. In a style at first strained and turgid, then more and more cutting and eloquent, she wielded the only weapon she had—her pen. For the last year, the name Sandpiper, the songbird of the coast and a natural pseudonym, had begun showing up on an occasional broadside displayed aroud the countryside and in Charleston, whose recent surrender to the hated British sword chilled Colleen's heart and redoubled her patriotic convictions.

Checking to make certain her bedroom door was closed, she quickly opened the drawer and there, beneath hosiery and chemises, found the well-worn broadsides—sheets of paper containing revolutionary lyrics—and pamphlets that reflected the passion of the patriots. And among them, there was another sheet that meant nearly as much to her as all the others combined—a letter from Jason Paxton.

The paper he had touched, the words that his hands had penned! Whenever she held it, he seemed close to her, so close that she could imagine the sound of his voice and picture his soft lips as he might have said the words himself.

Emilia, Italy

January 8, 1780

My dear friend,

I trust this finds you in robust health. I'm deeply grateful for your several letters, the last of which I received before leaving England for the Continent. News of the war distresses me, as always, and were it not for my music, my mood would be exceedingly melancholy. I suppose it fair to say that music enables me to escape the pressing reality of worldy affairs—at least for a while.

After three years in England, I'm finally seeing the rest of Europe, and for the last several months have been traveling and absorbing the sights. Autumn here is incredibly beautiful. The colors are magnificent, and as one sits a fine horse alone at the crack of day and watches the sun sparkle on the frost and bring the rainbow palette of the landscape to flaming life, one can only revel in life. For one glorious week, my companions and I stalked the nimble chamois, a deerlike creature of the mountains here. How good it felt to be outdoors and at one with nature again! As important and as glorious as music is, I must never forget that part of me that loved to tramp the woods, to scale cliffs and swing from ropes, to ride and hunt and shoot. Before art, there was the struggle to survive, and though I believe art to be the crowning glory of mankind, I also believe that the man who lives for art and art alone, and expects the harsh realities of life to somehow take care of themselves, is, no matter what his achievements, only half a man.

Philosophy aside, I must report that the art is glorious. There is a whole universe of painting and sculpture here that Americans can only imagine. And the music? Ah, the music! In Salzburg, I sat in a chamber surrounded by cherubim of glittering gold and listened to
concerti
written and performed on pianoforte, that most marvelous of modern inventions, by a man, I'm ashamed to say, younger than myself. His name is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and if I tell you that his genius for technical perfection and lofty elevation of sentiment exceeds even the great Bach, I exaggerate not in the least.

In Vienna, I was privileged to hear the
divertimenti
of Josef Haydn, Mozart's teacher, a strangely introverted man whose work rivals the ethereal joys of his extraordinary student.

I've now reached my destination. I write you from Emilia, a section of the Italian peninsula wedged between Bologna and Milan. I'm in the city of Parma, at the Conservatorio di Musica, where, with the gracious help of my Charleston patrons Robin Courtenay and Piero Sebastiano Ponti, doors and opportunities have been opened to me. I'm studying composition with the masters of
opera seria
and
opera buffa
while also spending much time in the nearby city of Cremona, where the sons of Antonio Stradavari craft violins, the sweet sounds of which fill my eyes with tears.

Yet amid such lovely and lofty strands, why is my heart so heavy? For days a fog has covered this mysterious city. This morning is bitterly cold and uncomfortably humid, and how I long for the fragrance of magnolia! These years away from home seem an eternity. I've been living a long, beautiful dream, but one that soon must come to an end. I can escape no longer. I've arranged passage back to America. Look for me in the spring, Colleen.

My various motives can and will be explained later. Suffice it to say that I'm not unaware of the terrible ways in which my homeland has suffered. From afar, I've felt the pain inflicted from every quarter. Even the sublime genius of Herr Mozart cannot assuage my pain. I've learned that though I dearly love the music of this ancient continent, there is an even deeper love within my soul … for the place of my birth.

Your letters and lines of poesy, my loyal friend, have been of comfort to me, and I only wish I could have found the time to write more often. This will have to be my final word to you before we see one another again in Brandborough. Please convey my regards to your distinguished father and your kind aunt.