The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (17 page)

Nate peeled back the wrapping. “Seed cake! What a good sister you are!” He hesitated. He said, “Come, you must sit down.”

Jane looked around the room. The furniture had been knocked about some, as was the way with any furniture in rented rooms, but Nate appeared to have taken surprising pains to make the place neat and clean. He waved her toward a comfortable-looking chair by a good fire, and the very look of it made Jane say before she sat, as if in reminder to herself, “I can stay but a minute.” Her brother took the chair alongside and stretched out his legs, soles to the fire, as their father was wont to do. It prompted her to ask, “Have you news of home?”

“A letter from our mother which says the usual naught. I hear more from Mr. Adams.”

“What should you hear from Mr. Adams of Satucket? The case is done.”

“That case. Winslow sues again over the horse.”

So quickly, thought Jane. So quickly could a sentence rub out all the joy from a room.

Silence fell, the kind of silence that had until then been a stranger to any room that held the two. Jane cast her eyes about in search of a more pleasing topic, but she hadn’t gotten far when Nate stood up.

“Sister, I am sorry to say I have plans that take me out this evening, but I should like to walk you home before I go.”

Jane rose. “ ’Tis no need. The cold keeps the troublemakers home.”

To her surprise Nate didn’t argue the point. He stepped to the door and held it open. She kissed his cheek and stepped through; the door closed. She was halfway down the stairs when she heard raised voices from behind the door. Her brother’s she knew well enough; of Miss Linnet’s she wasn’t entirely sure.

As abbreviated as her visit was, it was nearer to dark than Jane should have liked when she started home. More pigs roamed about now, and a collection of chickens; sties and coops must have been blown down all over town. She passed another group of off-duty soldiers and took care to cross the street and walk wide around, not out of fear but out of distaste. How altered her thoughts had become! As she turned into Royal Exchange she looked ahead and saw Prince disappearing into Dock Square at the other end of the lane, letters in hand. But when she entered her aunt’s hall she found her single missive to her sister still sitting on the post table. This, then, was how the servant would take his revenge.

I
N JANUARY BETHIAH
wrote:
Yesterday when Papa yelled for his toast I gave it first to Hitty, who had been quietly waiting, and when he said did I not hear him call for toast I said I did not know it was the rule that we must only listen to those who shout the loudest, as you once wrote me, and oh how Papa raged! Prepare yourself—I shall be sent to Aunt Gill’s soon!

Jane wrote into her letter book:
My Dearest Sister, Come to Aunt Gill’s! Come! Come!
And then crossed it out with thick black lines.

THROUGH JANUARY AND FEBRUARY
fights began to erupt outside the Royal Exchange Tavern. Jane could hear the noise from within a closed house, as could Aunt Gill, which aggravated Jane’s task of keeping her warm, calm, well. One night after her aunt was safe in bed, Jane heard a peculiar howl and leaned out her window to try to discover what could have made such a sound; she saw, or believed she saw, a pair of men disguised as Mohawk Indians bursting out the tavern door.

When Henry came the next night Jane asked him. “I saw two men disguised as Indians at the tavern. Why should anyone disguise himself so?”

“Best ask Sam Adams. He’s the one sends them out.”

“But why?”

“To stir up the crowd.”

When Jane looked her confusion he went on. “When Otis was full of his old fire there was no need of these charades. But now Adams must work at it another way.”

“Work at
what
?”

“At keeping the feeling up. These things must be fed or they die.”

Jane thought of the two faces, darkened with lampblack and sprouting feathers, which she’d seen from her window. They could have belonged to anyone. There was no reason to think one of them her brother. None.

ON A BITTER, WIND-BLASTED
afternoon in February, Jane and her aunt were sitting pressed to the fire when they heard shots in King Street; at the sound of guns being discharged the old woman crumpled in her seat like a pile of ash. Prince dashed out to discover the news and returned banging his arms against his chest to release the cold.

“A great lot of boys were attacking the importer Ebenezer Richardson. They knocked out all the windows in his house. He took out his musket and fired. A boy was killed.”

Already the bells had begun to toll. Aunt Gill sent Prince out again and again, and on each of his returns the news grew worse: the boy was but eleven years old; a mob was attacking the house; Richardson was fighting back with a sword; Richardson was secured; a noose had been brought and a signpost selected; William Molineux was working at calming the crowd. In the end Prince reported the lynching abandoned, but Richardson was beaten and hauled through the streets to Faneuil Hall.

MORE FOUL WEATHER CAME
down on Boston like hell descending—thunder, lightning, snow—a sure sign from God of his displeasure over the boy’s death, or so the
Gazette
reported. On the next Monday a huge funeral procession led by five hundred schoolboys assembled at the Liberty Tree and marched through town. Prince estimated two thousand mourners and thirty carriages trailing behind for a distance of over half a mile.

No one had seen or heard of such a spectacle in all the town’s history, and it must have shaken every inhabitant, but none could have been more distressed than Aunt Gill. The morning after the funeral she would not rise; she ate only as much as Jane spooned into her; she cried out three times through the night and the next morning again refused to rise. Jane tried any number of things to rouse her—promise of a blazing fire below, a rereading of the Wheatley poem she had much admired, new wool stockings—but nothing stirred her until more shots were heard on King Street.

Prince was again dispatched, and as soon as he was gone Aunt Gill ordered Jane to help her into her clothes. They had just gained the front room when Prince returned.

“ ’Tis Otis, full mad, shooting up the Town House windows.” Prince laughed. He had made to turn for the door again, but Jane reached out and caught his elbow hard enough to pull him around.

“Who do you mean? Which Otis?”

“The Otis they talk of. The one they call the Honorable James, the Esquire. Tying him up and carting him off now.”

Jane released him. She called to Martha to sit with the old woman, pulled her cloak off the peg, and went out into the blow.

An ocean wind ripping up the mill valley floor had never been as cold as the funnel of vaporous ice pushing against Jane as she rounded the corner into King Street. Her chest burned as she breathed, and her eyes watered so that at first she doubted what she saw. The cart sat in front of the Town House; Otis sat in the cart, bound to a chair. The crowd stood around the cart, but at a distance, as if the man were poxed; four men took their places on either side of the cart; the driver gee-ed at the team. The cart moved out. As it drew near Jane she took a step into the street, but Otis never lifted his eyes; he sat staring at his boots, his head snapping back and forth on his neck every time the wheels hit a jog in the road.

HENRY KNOX ARRIVED THAT
night with his already liquid eyes made more so by the rum that rose off him like a vapor; he kissed Aunt Gill and offered to take her up to her bed, an offer she gigglingly declined. Once Jane had got her aunt settled and returned to the parlor, Henry picked Jane up and carried her to Aunt Gill’s high-backed, thickly upholstered chair, tumbled backward into it, and pulled Jane with him into his lap. Jane had only just recovered from this first surprise when he shocked her again by tucking his face into her neck and erupting into tears. He wept as all men did—in silent gulps and grimaces meant to keep back something that had already left the barn. He didn’t cry long, but just where it ended wasn’t entirely clear; one minute she had a wet face in her neck and a heaving chest against hers; the next minute she had a hot mouth pressed into the crevice just above the lacing on her bodice and the breathing had taken another turn. Jane took him by the ears and prised his face out of her chest, but he seemed to think she only meant to direct him to her mouth.

It was a kiss full of rum and wanting and spent salt tears, and Jane stayed inside it because of one of those things and perhaps a second of her own. But when she felt his hand rucking up her skirt, she pushed against his massive chest and slid off his lap to the ground. She discovered her bodice was somehow unlaced; she turned her back, fastened it up, and fed out her petticoats till they fell back to the floor. She turned around again and realized she needn’t have bothered with the turning around—Henry’s head had fallen back against the chair, and his eyes had closed.

Jane said, “Henry, ’tis time for you to go home.”

He opened his eyes. He said, “ ’Tis a British sword did this to him.”

“Perhaps,” Jane said. “Or perhaps it was the boy who was killed. Or perhaps the times we live in.”

“Do you mean to say we shall all go mad with him?”

“I don’t know. But you must go home.”

Henry heaved himself to his feet, all the towering, rosy, gleaming physical health of him once again in something like command. He took up Jane’s hands and pressed the backs to his eyes. “You must know—surely you must know—but I must tell you now—”

Jane said, “Now, Henry, you must go home.”

WHEN THE KNOCKER SOUNDED
early the next morning, Jane expected to find a sheepish Henry on the other side of the door and beat Prince to answer it, hoping to keep any discussion of the previous night out of range of her aunt’s ears; instead she found her pale and heavy-eyed brother. She took him into the parlor and brought him a cider, which he drank down. He said, “I have news of Otis.”

“I know it.”

“ ’Tis as if they murdered him. They beat out his mind, and the whole heart went too. And they clap one another on the back and go freely all over the town. If there were murder in me—”

“There’s already been one too many murders done.”

“The more reason.”

“It was no soldier killed that boy.”

“It was one of their kind.”

Jane let it be. After a time she said, “What news of the case?”

“Case?”

“Winslow’s horse.”

“Winslow’s horse! I’d not be likely to know.”

“But Mr. Adams—”

“Mr. Adams declined the case. Did I not say so?”

“No! But . . . why decline? Did he tell you his reason?”

Again, Nate made no answer. After a time he looked at Jane anew. “When Father was here he went on about Paine, again. About how you disobeyed him over Paine.”

“Father was here?”

Nate looked his surprise. “A fortnight past. Did he not stop and see you?”

“No.”

“Hah! Who would think I should turn up the favorite! I must say, Phinnie Paine seems a fine enough fellow, but I’m not about to argue him to you. ’Tis Knox, then? There you’ll get your argument—from Father—though I’d like to know what worse he could do to you. I’ll do what I can, but it might hinder more than help, you know. At the least I could create a diversion, provide someone worse for him to take his fit over.” He fell silent. Miss Linnet, thought Jane, thinking of the raised voices she’d left behind in Nate’s rooms. But Jane couldn’t think about Miss Linnet for long. Her father, who had sent her into this roiling, raging madness, had himself traveled all the way to town and not even troubled to see how she fared.

When Jane looked again at her brother she saw that he was looking at her with the kind of fellow feeling she’d almost forgotten he owned. He said, “I told Father what happened to you at the hand of that sentry.”

“ ’Twas nothing happened to me by that sentry’s hand! How many times must you hear me say it? I tripped and—”

“I showed him the piece in the paper. He’d seen it, of course, and had been going on in his usual rant about the paper being full of lies. I picked up that paper and showed him. I said ’twas his daughter was accosted and what did he think now?”

“He wouldn’t believe it.”

Nate looked at her.

“Well, he
shouldn’t
believe it.”

Nate said, “He’s been to town three times now. Has he once called on you?”

No.

HER FATHER, THREE TIMES
in town and not once come to call. Her father, being told she’d been accosted by a sentry and
still
not come to call. As soon as dinner was over and Aunt Gill at her nap, Jane took over an errand to the butcher’s from Martha just so she could walk her mind into quiet, but the butcher’s was not far enough away for such an undertaking. She kept on, making her turns at random, until she came out of her fumes to discover herself on Hutchinson Street, before Gray’s ropewalks; Jane had never seen the making of rope before and paused. Thick cables, many hundreds of feet of them, hung in the air, with walkways constructed on each side; men lined the walkways, using long wooden sticks to twist the cables into rope.

Jane made to continue, but as she returned her eyes to the road she discovered a soldier standing in the way before her, staring at the ropeworkers; he took a step toward them, paused. Jane had heard from her grandfather of a growing problem in town—the underpaid soldiers hunting for extra jobs and taking up the work that the inhabitants felt was their own. The ropewalks were, no doubt, a popular place for such job searching, and indeed, one of the ropeworkers now called out to the soldier in the road, “Are you looking for work, man?”

The soldier brightened. “Faith, I am!”

“Then you may clean my shithouse!”

The line of men on the ropewalks collapsed into laughter. The soldier’s face suffused till it matched his coat; he took three long strides and pulled the nearest ropeworker off the walk and onto the ground. The ropeworker was strong; in no little time he had the soldier down and landed a blow to his face; a pair of soldiers passing by leaped in. Foolish, foolish men! How many ropeworkers were there at hand? Even as Jane thought it they began to pile off the walks and into the melee, pummeling the soldiers with fists, sticks, even tar pots; the noise of it drew more soldiers, and soon the street ahead was filled with grunting, swearing, grappling men.

And Jane? Foolish, foolish, woman! She stood like a stuck pig through the whole, and was still standing there when the defeated soldiers scrambled to their feet and ran, swarming past her on either side. She caught a shoulder in the cheek and a boot in the ankle and only kept her feet because one of the soldiers caught her elbow and dragged her along. Another soldier caught her up and shoved her into a third; that soldier took her and shook her till her head snapped back, his mad, blind, raging eyes inches from hers; she drew back and kicked as hard and as high as she could; he let go; she ran. She started to run for home but was too rattled to remember all the turns she had taken to get there; at last she spied a familiar corner—the corner of Water Street—her grandparents’ corner. She began to shake. She turned down.

JANE’S GRANDMOTHER PUT CAMPHOR
poultices on Jane’s swelling cheek and ankle; she swabbed the scratches on her arms with balsam. She took up the brandy bottle and poured it into a steaming cup of what smelled like but couldn’t possibly have been real tea; Jane’s fingers still shook as she gripped the cup, but she took as long a swallow as the heat allowed. It
tasted
real. She took another.