The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles (41 page)

Adams himself penned a
State of Rights of the Colonists.
Dr. Joseph Warren, perhaps the most popular physician—as well as the most eligible and handsome bachelor—in all the town contributed a
List of Infringements and Violations of Those Rights.
Soon reports began to filter back into Boston that other committees were indeed being set up throughout Massachusetts, as well as in the large cities down the coast.

The men who tramped through the early winter snowfalls to meet up in Edes’ Long Room were elated that they had opened permanent communications with men of like temperament in other colonies. Their excitement brought to mind Warren’s quotation of Franklin’s remark about thirteen clocks striking as one. If the clocks were not yet chiming in harmony, certainly they were all ticking.

Besides keeping track of political developments, Philip had more personal interests. He hoarded his shillings, visited tailor shops to price merchandise and finally, impatient, asked Edes for an advance against wages that would put him in the printer’s debt for nearly half a year.

A few days after the bells in the steeple of Christ’s Church had rung the New Year of 1773, he was suitably outfitted in a modest but neat brown suit of broadcloth, his outfit complete with snowy neckcloth, hose and buckled shoes. On a Sunday afternoon of thaw and mellow sunshine, he turned into Launder Street to call the bluff—if bluff it had been—of Mistress Anne Ware.

As he climbed the stoop of the handsome house, a cloud crossed the January sun. In the brief, chilly shadow, he thought of Alicia. He thought of her with sadness—and a question.

Was his interest in the attractive and somehow formidable lawyer’s daughter only a convoluted way of circumventing memories of Alicia? Memories that still disturbed him?

Finding no ready answer within himself, he knocked at the Wares’ front door.

L
OOKING SERENE AND BEAUTIFUL
in a white gown, Anne Ware sat waiting in the parlor to which Lawyer Ware ushered the young caller. The afternoon sunlight slanting through the front bays from Launder Street lit her skin and made it glow like dark amber.

She gave Philip a cordial smile that might have concealed just a tiny bit of amusement at his expense. Philip’s new clothing itched. His fidgeting showed it.

“Good afternoon, Mistress Ware,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse.

She inclined her head. “Good afternoon, Mr. Kent. Won’t you be seated?”

He rushed to one of the chairs with embroidered cushions placed around the room. Lawyer Ware acted almost as nervous as Philip himself, rubbing his hands, shifting his weight from foot to foot and blinking his pop eyes. He hurried to the hall door, saying:

“I’ll see whether the tea’s ready. We serve nothing stronger in this house on the Lord’s day.” With that, he vanished.

Dust motes swirled slowly in the sunbeams falling athwart Anne’s white lap, where her hands lay folded, composed. She continued to regard Philip with that faintly amused expression.

“Your suit is quite handsome,” she said finally. “I did wonder whether you’d keep your vow.”

“When the goal’s worth gaining—always.” Damn, how the girl unsettled him!

Was this merely a charade on her part? A little diversion, to be joked about with friends later? He could almost hear her describing how a bumpkin of a printer’s boy had twitched and quivered in her parlor, ill at ease and more than slightly red-faced. The angering thought produced a rash promise. He’d see that tanned and softly rounded body revealed—and submissive to him—before he was done.

Matching her smile as best he could, he asked, “I trust you had a pleasant Sabbath morning?”

“If you call a one-hour prayer and a four-hour sermon pleasant,” she sighed. “We’re Congregationalists. I think our preachers don’t believe in overcoming sin so much as in making the faithful too exhausted to be able to think about it. Do you profess or practice a faith?”

“No, neither. My mother was French. Born Catholic. But because of her—her early career, she was excluded from the rites of the church. She was an actress in Paris,” he added, with unmistakable pride.

“An actress! How fascinating. I’ve begged Papa to let me go see the traveling troupes that play Boston. But such entertainments are considered wicked worldliness in our denomination—”

“I thought you did as you pleased, Mistress Anne.”

She colored just a little. “So I do—up to a certain point.”

“And what determines that point, may I ask?”

“Prudence. Common sense. You expressed it a moment ago. Is the goal worth gaining?” Her quick glance held a meaning he didn’t fully understand. “Is it worth going beyond “the prescribed limit? Risking turmoil, disapproval—?”

As if she didn’t like the path the conversation was taking, she veered off: “You mentioned Paris. I thought I detected a touch of an accent in your speech. I recall you said you came to the colonies from France—”

“After some difficult months in England. I was trying to claim an inheritance—”

“Where did you learn the language so well?”

“In Auvergne. My mother hired a tutor. He was the one who introduced me to Locke’s writings. And Rousseau’s. The preparation was wasted, though. My father was a member of the nobility. But he—” Well, why not admit it? “—he never married my mother. So his family—” Another wary pause “—refused to honor the claim. When they caused trouble for me, I took a ship here to start a new life.”

He expected her to mock him with laughter, or at very least with the amusement which came so readily to her brown eyes. So he was unsettled even further when it didn’t happen. Instead, she clapped her hands together and cried softly:

“You’ve just explained the very cloud of mystery I said hovered around you! The way you faced that loutish grenadier—the way you strut a bit—” She extended one hand quickly. The gesture tautened the white fabric across her breasts. “Please, I don’t intend that in an insulting way. You have a pride about you that sets you apart. That’s good. I’d love to hear more about your adventures in England. How do they color your outlook toward what’s happening here? The agitation against the Crown, I mean?”

Quietly, Philip said, “I despise my father’s family and everything they stand for. They destroyed my mother’s health and peace of mind.”

“Was she with you in England?”

“Yes. She died on the ship that brought us to Boston.”

“Oh, I’m indeed sorry.”

“If I could, Mistress Anne—”

“We can use first names, can’t we, Philip?”

A stiff nod. Then: “If I could, I’d go back to England and take everything that’s mine. And I’d cause the family pain doing it.”

Anne studied his stark face a moment. All trace of her earlier amusement was gone. She asked:

“I don’t quite understand. Do you want to be one of them? Or do you simply want to see them brought down? Humiliated?”

“A little of both, I think.” It was the most honest answer he could give. And for a moment it produced troubling memories of pledges made to Marie. Pledges now almost completely forgotten.

Anne pondered his reply, said, “Even with your explanation, you’re still a puzzle, Philip.”

“In what way?”

“You work for Ben Edes, who is certainly no partisan of the aristocracy. Yet you suggest that if given the opportunity, you’d return to England—”

“Oh, there’s no real possibility of that. I’ve made up my mind to find my place here.”

“Out of desire? Or necessity?”

“I’ll give you the same answer as before. A little of both.”

“That kind of position may not be tenable much longer, you know.”

“Because of the trouble Mr. Adams keeps predicting? And trying to bring about?”

She nodded. “He’s only hastening the inevitable. The people of these colonies are going to have to make a decision. The King is determined to work his will. And for all his questionable methods, I think Mr. Adams is correct about one thing. A small oppression only precedes a larger one. A small nibbling away of liberty will only encourage King George’s ministers to take a larger bite. And another, and still another. That’s what the Committee of Correspondence is trying to impress on the other colonies—what happens in Boston could very well happen to them. So we must stand together.”

She said it all quietly. But she impressed Philip with her seriousness. He thought briefly of Alicia, contrasting Anne Ware’s calm-spoken idealism with the frank lack of it displayed by the Earl of Parkhurst’s daughter—

A tea tray rattled. Philip looked up to see Lawyer Ware entering, followed by his cook, whom Philip had met at the door on his first visit to Launder Street. The cook was a young, buxom girl with bright red hair and a cheery face. Ware introduced her as Daisy.

The cook put the tray down and began to pour tea into delicate china cups edged with pale blue. When Daisy had finished and retired, Ware hoisted his cup in a small gesture suggesting a toast.

“Will you drink with us to the resistance of tyranny, young man? I should perhaps note that we are drinking smuggled Dutch tea. We’ll have none of the damned stuff from England, so long as it still carries that intolerable threepence tax.”

Nothing, it seemed, could escape the taint of politics, Philip thought as he raised the steaming cup to his lips, not even a rather awkward Sunday visit in a dark-paneled, comfortable old room from whose chimney piece an oil portrait of a bearded man in severe black stared down.

“I’ll drink to your hospitality too, sir,” Philip said, and did.

He stayed only half an hour longer. During that time, Lawyer Ware held forth on the various abuses and, as he called them, crimes of the North ministry. At the end of a pause in the diatribe, Philip stood up quickly and announced that he had to leave.

Ware rose in turn. “Your company’s been most welcome.” He started to the door with Philip. But Anne, rising smoothly from her chair, touched Ware’s arm. “Finish your tea, Papa. I’ll see our visitor out.”

Sun through the front fanlight lit her eyes and her chestnut hair as she walked with him to the entrance. He felt embarrassed by the entire experience. He didn’t have the proper graces or training to hold his own in this kind of social encounter. He had an urge to flee as swiftly as possible, back to more suitable surroundings—the cellar room at Edes’.

Anne said, “I thank you for coming to call, Philip.”

“I enjoyed it.” His words were forced.

They stood close together for a moment, bodies nearly touching. Where was the shrew Ware had spoken of? he wondered. He saw only the whiteness of Anne’s smile—the loveliness of her brown eyes.

She said, “You’re welcome to come again.”

To his own astonishment, he found himself replying, “Thank you. I will.”

And as he set off through the slushy streets under the pale January sun, he felt exhilarated all at once. Ashamed of his earlier desire to run.

But one crucial question remained. What in heaven attracted him to the girl? Beyond the obvious physical excitement produced by too long a period of celibacy?

Anne Ware was aligned on the side of the patriots, of that there was no doubt. She had subtly but unmistakably challenged him as to where he stood. He didn’t honestly know.

Well, perhaps that explained it—

Anne Ware was a kind of mirror. One in which he might, with luck, at last discern a clear image of himself.

On top of that, she was poised, intelligent, strong-minded. He was curious as to how she’d come by her independence of thought and action. She wasn’t extreme about it—but if personal experience, her father and Edes could be believed, she was still clearly different from the typical young woman of Boston. The curiosity he felt added yet one more dimension of intrigue—

As did the fact that she was damned attractive.

Whistling, he quickened his step.
I’ll bed her before it’s done, damned if I won’t,
he thought.

Philip did not know the precise and complete implications of the word
courting,
a common term in the Americas. But in the months that followed, he gradually assumed that he was involved in the process.

He became a frequent visitor at the house in Launder Street. And the attorney’s daughter, in turn, was almost always the bearer of Ware’s essays delivered to the
Gazette.

They walked abroad in Boston a good deal as the winter waned and the mild heat of spring lay over the city. In Sabbath twilight, they would often turn into Hanover Square, where the paper lanterns of the patriots glowed on the huge Liberty oak. The lanterns were constantly torn down by the royal troops or Crown sympathizers. But new ones always appeared to illuminate thinly veiled threats against the Tories from Joyce Jun’r., or broadsides carrying news of the patriot cause.

How the Virginia House of Burgesses had established an eleven-man Correspondence Committee on the Adams model, for instance. That was important, Anne explained, because the more conservative planters of tidewater Virginia did not carry the taint of extreme radicalism that the New Englanders did. When men of property and status—she named
Henry
and
Jefferson
and
Washington
and
Richard Henry Lee,
all unfamiliar—heeded Adams’ warnings and set up machinery to maintain communication with Massachusetts, the cause of liberty had been significantly advanced.

Once, as they were strolling at the Common on a late Sunday afternoon, a half-dozen British officers galloped by; racing their splendid horses across the open grass. One man thundered past, then reined in long enough to look back and verify the identity of Anne and her companion.

Holding his snorting horse in check, Captain Stark did not speak to them. But his glance at Philip said all that was necessary. The flesh around his chin scar looked livid white as he dug in his spurs and galloped off after his hallooing companions. A small, ragged boy who had been sitting against a nearby elm scooped up a stone and flung it after the rider:

“Dirty shitting lobsterback!”