The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (15 page)

“Do you see?” said the girl. “He’s nonsensical.”

Jane said, “ ’Tis not a great bird, sir, ’tis a great wound in your scalp. If you drink some more you might sleep and that will heal you best.”

Otis drank in obedience and closed his eyes, but even the task of dropping his lids drew a wince, and looking down at him something of Nate’s fine, hot rage burned into Jane at last.

Five bludgeons. A sword.

BY AFTERNOON THE MOB
had formed. Henry Knox came to call that evening and described it in more detail than Jane would have liked, considering Aunt Gill’s pallor. The crowd had found the civilian who had broken Gridley’s arm and carted him to Faneuil Hall to receive his charge, but because they’d been unable to vent their rage against Robinson or the officers at the scene, they took out their disappointment on the
Chronicle
’s John Mein, by painting his bookshop and newspaper office with chamber dung. Jane looked for the sense in this act and found none, but she also found it troubled her less than it might have done a week before.

BY THE NEXT DAY
Otis’s fever had dissipated, the wound appeared clean, and he was better ordered in his senses. He touched Jane’s hand. “I’m told I owe you my sincerest thanks.”

“ ’Twas nothing.”

“Then you count the contents of this poor skull as nothing.”

“I didn’t mean—”

She felt, again, like the herring in the millstream; it was perhaps fitting that John Adams should arrive to release her.

As she left the room she heard the pair talking of the civil charges they planned to file against Robinson, and to hear Otis’s strength and sense returning gave her greater ease than she’d felt in three days. Jane’s grandfather appeared as Jane was leaving, and his relief over her report of the patient’s progress took a year of wear off his features too.

Jane said, “You leave now for Satucket?”

Jane’s grandfather looked up the stairs. “Soon.”

EACH DAY JANE ASKED
and was given permission to visit Otis, and she did so for more days than reason could account for. After the first few days Otis needed little if any nursing and it never could be said he lacked for company, but the nature of his company did not sit well with Jane. To most of Otis’s guests he was the cause, not the man; even in her grandfather Jane saw a dual motive in his attentions. Many times when Jane visited a third man was also present—Samuel Adams—they clumped together and spoke in hushed tones in the hall. Samuel Adams had a large head, bulging eyes, and arms that were too short for his form. Jane would not have called herself a person who judged another by his looks, but she took an instant dislike to the man. He made no direct inquiry of Otis’s health, only asking over and over, “When will he be back?
Will
he be back? Well? Well?”

Jane’s other objection to Otis’s list of visitors was that it was short by one—the wife didn’t come. How bitter or disappointed could the woman be to leave her husband lying in such a state alone? It was perhaps the lack of the wife that prompted Jane to continue her visits. She never stayed long—she checked his wound and his general health and shared in a brief, quiet, almost apologetic conversation over nothing, but always somewhere in it she could see the struggle in him that went beyond the condition of his wounds. When Jane returned to her aunt’s she suspected her own distress showed, for Aunt Gill always called her into the front room, sent for tea, and allowed her to talk over her visit; that one small gesture warmed Jane’s heart almost as much as the invitations to her brother had done.

Jane continued her visits until Otis’s wife finally returned from the country, and there she left off.

KNOX TOOK JANE
to
a fine dinner at John Hancock’s, where the hall was lit with so many candles it turned the room to daylight. Knox paid her the usual attention, but Jane returned it poorly—she was too busy looking around at the officers in attendance and wondering.
Whose bludgeons? Whose sword?
When Colonel Dalrymple came up to greet them Jane could barely make her neck bend, even in its country curtsey. If Dalrymple had indeed been at the Coffee House and seen Otis beaten so excessively, why hadn’t he intervened?

Perhaps it was Jane’s new anger that heated her. Or perhaps it was her fear of dying like Clarissa, untouched, unopened. Or perhaps it was the specter of Aunt Gill sitting in solitude each evening, waiting on Jane’s return. When Knox walked her home and leaned down to drop his usual kiss on her temple, Jane turned just so, lifted just so, and took his mouth flush on her own.

S
EPTEMBER WORE ALONG.
Every day in town there came news of another altercation of some kind between the inhabitants and the soldiers, but Jane could no longer think each account a lie; she could only think of Otis lying on his bed with a ravine cut into his scalp and bruises rising like plums all over his face, neck, and arms. She chased no more boys away from the sentry; she no longer nodded to Hugh White when she passed—Hugh White, who had done nothing to Otis or to anyone. She longed to see her brother, longed to discover if this new rage in her would allow them to see each other as of old; she sent around a note, but he didn’t come.

If the attack on Otis could make Jane feel so, it could hardly surprise her that the state of affairs in town should become too much for Aunt Gill. She began keeping to her house again, refusing Jane’s grandfather’s invitations, starting up at the odd noise much as she’d done when Jane first arrived, even objecting to any invitations for Jane that took her from home.

So Jane stayed home, not because she feared for her safety in the streets, but because more and more she found herself unwilling to leave her aunt alone. The old woman’s concern for Jane was no doubt part of this surge of feeling, but a part of it had to do with the way Prince disappeared and reappeared at will, and the sidelong glances she continually intercepted from Martha. Who watched whom? What might those two get up to if she were gone? Jane imagined small thefts going on daily behind her aunt’s back; she imagined a great one planned for that time when she would be out of the house and Aunt Gill asleep, alone. She imagined her aunt waking to a bludgeon or a sword. But underneath those fears lay a simpler reason for Jane to stay at home, formed out of all the bricks that had been piling up all along the way—her affection for her aunt. Aunt Gill might not have taken the place of the family Jane had left at Satucket, but she had at least begun to fill up the empty spaces that letters could not, that a distracted and distant brother could not.

As Jane stayed at home more, Henry Knox came to call more, an arrangement that seemed to please Aunt Gill as much as it did Jane, although the aunt took care not to hover too long below-stairs. They fell into something of a routine—Aunt Gill would make her inquiry after Henry’s health and receive his in turn; she would next inquire after the health of his family and, always, of Otis; she would ask what books he’d sold that day in his store; Henry always answered the last with a heavy list full of philosophers and political pamphleteers that sooner or later sent Aunt Gill calling for Martha to assist her up the stairs.

Jane and Henry would then continue on with the subjects of books for a time. Jane had confessed her aversion to
Clarissa
and vindicated Henry’s judgment with the kind of grace that should have come to her with ease and nonsensically did not. The only excuse she could make for herself was that it was one thing to strive to discover everything about someone to whom she was about to be married; it was quite another to be herself discovered by someone to whom she was not. And she
was
discovered. Henry knew to bring plays by Dryden and Shakespeare and odes by Pope—he even knew which bits to read aloud to her and which to not. Some nights Jane found herself looking at him through her father’s eyes—or Clarissa’s—but her father was in Satucket, and Clarissa was in a vapid bit of fiction. Most nights, at the end of the night, Jane gave over easily enough to the comfort of his arms; long ago she had stopped comparing him to either a Woollen or a Paine.

AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER
a lull dropped down, broken in October by John Adams filing suit against John Mein for unpaid bills, forcing the closing of the
Chronicle.
The
Gazette
had only just stopped trumpeting that bit of news when thick clouds muffled the sun and Prince reported a rumor around the docks of a great storm at sea. The next morning it began to blow hard from the southeast; Jane looked out the window and saw objects whirling by so fast as to be unrecognizable; by noon the rain was sheeting down so thickly she could not see out the windows at all; it might have been eight o’clock in the evening for all the light the sky held. Jane, Prince, and Martha ran about hooking shutters, moving delicate objects away from the windows, stopping up the sills and thresholds with old flannels and toweling. Judging by the sound it made—louder than the wind and rain—something of considerable size crashed against the house, but not even Prince dared open the door to look outside.

At one o’clock Prince said, “ ’Tis high water, now.” Jane looked at Aunt Gill, but she seemed to be taking the storm with unnatural calm. An hour or two after Prince’s announcement regarding the tide, the wind veered to the northwest, but if it lessened in strength Jane couldn’t detect it. The household retired early, like rabbits into their burrows, but Jane doubted anyone slept. She lay listening to the wind beating against the shutters, to the rain scouring the roof, thinking of Satucket and what the storm might have done as it crossed so fragile and low-lying a spit of land; her father’s house sat high on a hill, but her grandparents’ sat too near the landing for Jane to feel easy. The night crept on.

By morning the rain had turned to a sputter and the heart of the wind had grown soft. Martha checked the cellar and found it dry; Jane and Martha sopped up what water had managed to creep in around the doors and sills; Prince went out to repair two loose shutters. Jane stepped out into the street to look at the debris that had blown and washed into it—sodden newspapers, a man’s hat, dirty straw, more leaves and branches than she had imagined remained in so deforested a town—and there Jane remembered her grandparents’ other house, their house in town, the house that sat at the end of Water Street, too appropriately named.

She went back inside and found Aunt Gill, out of all the things she might be doing, sorting the thread in her work basket. Jane said, “I worry over my grandfather, so near the harbor. I wonder if you might spare me while I call around.”

Aunt Gill looked up. “Of course, of course. If he’s flooded out he must come and stay here.” She gripped Jane’s hand. “I insist on it, you tell him. He must come and stay here.” Jane squeezed her aunt’s hand in return.

THE AIR REMAINED HEAVY,
but the sky had lightened from pewter to silver. Half King Street was silted over with mud and littered worse than Exchange, with branches, boards, shingles, broken shutters, old papers, leaves, straw, and manure fetched up in doorways and corners all along the way. Shopkeepers and residents armed with rakes, shovels, brooms, hammers, nails, and shingles worked at clearing away and replacing what had been lost; Jane could not help but think of the new business the storm meant for Phinnie. She picked her way down Quaker Lane and onto Water Street; she’d covered the greater part of the distance when she came upon the wrack line formed by the swollen tide, seaweed and driftwood and rope and the detritus of shattered boats deposited in a wavering line across the width of the road. She looked ahead and spied several masts askew, a wharf in shambles. A solitary man was struggling to right an overturned cart; a brace of off-duty soldiers passed by but made no effort to lend a hand. She heard one of them laugh, the other take it up and carry it until they drew abreast of Jane.

The nearest soldier doffed his hat. “Good-day, miss.”

Jane moved on without reply. Soon she found herself standing beside her grandfather’s house before she quite recognized it—she’d been looking for the old elm, but it had been sheared by the wind, half its height and most of its leaves now spread along the ground. In addition to the damage to the elm, the vegetation on each side of the door had been stripped, a pair of shutters ripped off, and eight panes of glass smashed.

Jane knocked, but no one answered. She pushed and it opened; she walked in. The floor was covered with mud and wet; she hallooed and heard an echo from beyond. She found Mrs. Poole in the pantry, her grandfather just coming up the ladder from the cellar, wet to the knees and carrying a pair of dripping sacks. Jane hurried forward and helped Mrs. Poole relieve him of the sacks as he dropped again below. With few words they set up a working chain, Jane’s grandfather remaining in the cellar and handing up the stores, Jane depositing them on the pantry floor, Mrs. Poole sorting them into three categories: good, gone, salvageable. When a neighbor and his son stopped by, Jane sent the boy to her aunt with a note: By her aunt’s leave, she would stop the night and help her grandfather and Mrs. Poole clean up from the storm. While the son went off on his errand the neighbor stood in the pantry and reported on conditions elsewhere: all the wharves had overflowed and three of the smaller ones had been torn to pieces, warehouses full of sugar and salt and any number of other valuable goods were lost, cellars all along the waterfront were flooded; he would measure the damage at seven thousand pounds.

The son returned with a scratched note from Aunt Gill:
Of course you must stay while he needs you, but you must bring him here tomorrow to dine.

When the cellar had been emptied of all that was worthy of the labor, Jane’s grandfather went outside to board up the broken panes and do what he could with the shutters. Mrs. Poole and Jane rummaged up a cold meal of bread, cheese, mince pie, and applesauce, which tasted as fine to Jane as the feast at Aunt Gill’s. After the meal Mrs. Poole returned to her salvage and Jane attacked the floors. Supper was more bread and cheese and a good deal more cider than Jane had drunk in some time, which no doubt accounted for the fine sleep she experienced. Or perhaps it was the room, which reminded her of her room at home, simply fitted out with a maize-colored homespun coverlet, earthenware pitcher and bowl, battered case of drawers, and a small window that looked over the remains of the decapitated elm to the sea beyond.

JANE WOKE TO THE SOUNDS
of hammers and saws and carts and workmen calling to one another all up and down the waterfront. She went belowstairs to find her grandfather just finishing his breakfast, but he lingered while Jane dispatched her own. As they had talked the storm through the night before, this morning’s conversation took up Mein and the closing of the
Chronicle
; her grandfather’s glee was poorly contained, giving rise to more of it in Jane than she’d thought she owned
.
She blamed the
Chronicle
in good part for what had befallen Otis, and should have liked to have had the chance to say so to her brother, to share such a thing with him, to share anything with him. Surely, she thought, the storm would bring him to call.

Jane’s thoughts were brought back to the room with a sound from behind; thinking again of her brother she turned and discovered her grandmother banging a large satchel through the door.

Jane’s grandfather stood up, knocking back his chair. “What the devil!”

Jane’s grandmother dropped the satchel on the floor. “Now those are the words I’ve waited five months to hear.”

“Don’t tell me you traveled through this storm!”

“Well, ’twas calm as milk when I got aboard.”

“You didn’t . . . You mean to say you came by
sea
?”

“I should like to know how else I was to get here. Jane, how glad I am to see you! And at least
you
appear glad enough to see me.” She came around the table and kissed Jane on the forehead. She continued on and grasped her husband’s face between her hands. She said, “You look like death.”

Jane’s grandfather said, “You look . . . you look—”

Indeed, this was not the grandmother Jane had left behind at Satucket. Her hair had been beaten loose and caught back up in a careless, leaking knot, her shawl was frayed—or torn—at one end, her skirt was watermarked with salt and stained with mud and something else that could have been either blood or wine. She said, “How might you expect me to look after being blown almost to Canada?”

“But you were to wait—”

“And just how long did you think me to wait? I walked to the landing day after day, looking out for the ship you were never on. I sat in my house and watched the carts go by in preparation for the next sail, and one day I said ‘enough.’ I scratched a note for my daughter, packed my bag, and climbed aboard.”

Jane’s grandfather said, “If you knew how many times I planned to come.
Tried
to come. The political situation has been such—”

“The political situation can go hang. At least for a day. You will grant your wife that, sir?”

Jane’s grandfather stood motionless for breath, and then he began to grin, a foolish-looking thing for so dignified a man; but in it Jane saw at once that her grandparents would not be coming to Aunt Gill’s to dine.

Jane made her own departure as soon as grace allowed. Once outside she discovered another world than the one she’d left the day before—the sun shone unfiltered through a brilliant blue sky as if the heavens had been washed clean and the tub of dirty water that had washed them had been dumped below. The cart across the way had been righted and moved off, but the foul taste of the episode lingered behind; a glazier and shopkeeper called back and forth the names of the damaged shops and warehouses looted by the soldiers in the early hours after the storm. Where Jane might once have doubted the truth of such rumors, she now found that with little struggle she could swallow it whole.