The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (18 page)

Jane’s grandmother had been talking since Jane had burst in—hard, clipped words that Jane hadn’t managed to sort out till now. “ ’Tis what happens when you quarter two poorly paid regiments in amongst the inhabitants. The winter’s been a hard one; the soldiers need wood and a meal the same as anyone. They take any work, and I don’t mind saying they’ve been known to work harder than some. Such it is all over town.”

“I should have walked on. I should have walked on.”

“ ’Tis over now.”

Jane set down her empty cup and looked at her grandmother. “Is it?”

Jane’s grandmother sat abruptly in the chair across from Jane. “No.”

BY EVENING JANE’S EYE
had begun its journey to black, her ankle had swelled, the scratches of strangers’ nails had made vivid red streaks along both arms. Aunt Gill’s horror at the sight of her was soon overcome by her horror at the tale; not that Jane had been handled so but that she’d dared to walk about that part of town alone, dared to walk about the
ropewalks
alone. She clutched Jane’s arms, if not digging new trails in Jane’s flesh then sufficiently aggravating the ones that were already there till they felt new, and extracted promise after promise that Jane would never do so foolish a thing again.

Henry Knox called late, on his first hearing of the news, after an exhausted Aunt Gill had retired. He exclaimed at the sight of her, “Good God! This isn’t to be borne!” but from there he turned into another Aunt Gill. “What are you thinking, wandering about the ropewalks? Do you have the least idea—”

Jane held out her arm, her ankle. “I do.”

“I can’t fathom it! In truth, I cannot! You’re not without your wits, Jane.”

“Nor are you. At
this
visit.”

Henry took her meaning at once, if not her intention to divert him, and swung into a fine apology for his liquored call, but he seemed to have no recollection of its details, a fact Jane found suspect, since in no long time he’d found his way there again. Soon a breast escaped its lacing and a petticoat rose to the thigh; Jane stopped him there, but even as she stopped him she couldn’t think
why
she did so. Suppose it ended in a swollen belly? Henry would do by her as he should. Henry would keep her safe. And she must marry somebody, after all.

THAT NIGHT JANE OPENED
her letter book and wrote,
Honored Father, This day I was caught up in a melee at Gray’s ropewalks and mauled by the soldiers—I write you this so that when you read of such an occurrence in your newspaper you may count on its being true.

Jane set down her pen and sat back, looking at the black words on the white paper—the words of a child. She scratched them through.

T
HE NIGHT AFTER
the incident at the ropewalk it began to snow; during the next day and that next night over a foot of the stuff fell. On Monday the sun came out just long enough to melt the top layer in preparation for that night’s chill; on the evening of the fifth of March King Street was glazed all over with moonlit ice and snow.

Henry Knox had prevailed upon Aunt Gill to be allowed to take Jane to another play-reading, this one to be held at his store, convincing the old woman that Jane would be at no risk as long as she remained under his substantial wing. Indeed, Jane clung hard enough to that wing, her ankle in some doubt, the frozen drippings from the eaves having thoroughly iced the edges of the road; they walked arm in arm to the store. There were no soldiers in attendance—such was the changed mood in town since the ropewalk—and the evening began dull and stayed so. Henry locked up the store and escorted Jane into the street soon after eight o’clock, arm in arm again, the brilliant moon helping them pick their way along. Soon ahead of them the sentry appeared—Hugh White again—and a pack of boys shouting the usual names.
Bloody lobster! Son of a whore-bitch! Flea-bit dog!

At the word
whore
Jane reflexively clutched harder at Henry’s arm, but White took it as he’d taken all the rest. When another boy stepped into the street and began shouting something about a Captain Goldfinch—that he was mean, that he never paid what he owed—Jane hardly turned. That the insult to his captain would pull White off his post where the insult to his mother would not, Jane could never have foretold.

White left the box and came up to the boy in the street. “Let me see your face!”

The boy stepped up to the sentry, chin in air; White brought his musket around and smashed it into the side of the boy’s head.

Jane saw it,
heard
it, and didn’t believe. She looked at the staggering, crying boy and still didn’t believe. A crowd began to form around the boy, and soon enough they turned their attention to the sentry—the usual names, the usual missiles began to fly, only this time made of ice, not mud. When the first one cracked against White’s boot like a lead ball, he fixed his bayonet, lowered his musket. Henry dropped Jane’s arm and hurried toward the sentry. “Here, now do you wish to die? I promise you, fire and you shall!”

“Damn them!” White shouted. “If they molest me I’ll fire!”

Henry turned to the boys. “Get on home! Get on! Stop molesting the sentry!”

No one moved. Jane noticed there were more of them now and that they weren’t all boys, weren’t even boy-men; some of the men she recognized from the affray at the ropewalks. Too many of the men. From somewhere nearby a church bell began to ring, the call for fire; another bell took it up and another. More men began to appear out of the alleys, some carrying buckets, some clubs. They swarmed around the sentry; he looked wildly left and right; he screamed, “Call out the Main Guard!”

The Main Guard was barracked no great distance down King Street. In no time a column of grenadiers, the tallest of the king’s soldiers, marched into view, their high bearskin hats making them taller still. Jane recognized Captain Preston marching beside the column; she recognized one of the soldiers who had been knocked to the ground at the ropewalks. A boy stepped into the road in front of the column, and one of the lead soldiers shouted at him, “Stand out of our way!” The boy didn’t move. A bayonet gleamed—all the bayonets gleamed—like ice under the moon, but the column parted calmly around the boy and continued on.

In the meantime Henry had been working hard on the crowd, urging them to go home, but no one paid him any mind. When he saw Preston he crossed the road and caught hold of his sleeve. “For God’s sake, Captain, take care of your men! If they fire, you die!”

Preston shook him off. “I am sensible of it, sir!” The grenadiers marched on to the sentry box; Preston ordered White to fall in with the line and attempted to swing it around, to march it back as it had come, but the crowd had pressed in too tight; it would have taken the bayonets to make room to move.

The press of the crowd had also separated Jane from Henry. She looked for him as Preston gave up on marching and fanned out his men in a semicircle, backs to the Custom House, bayonets to the crowd. Hugh White had taken up a position nearest Jane; he saw her and called out, “Miss Clarke! For God’s sake, go home or you’ll be killed!”

Jane would have liked to go home—she would have very much liked it—but she had better chance of getting to Satucket than she did of getting through the crowd that blocked the entrance to Royal Exchange Lane. She pulled back as near as she could to the tavern wall and watched in horror as Preston’s pleas to disperse the crowd were met by curses, chunks of ice, even rocks now. Bodies in the back pushed against bodies in the front to see what went on; the press against the soldiers grew. Jane was so close she could see Hugh White trembling, but whether from rage or fear she couldn’t know.

A cry went up from the street: “Damn you, you sons of bitches, fire! You can’t kill us all!” The cry was taken up through the crowd.
Fire! Why do you not fire? Fire and be damned!
So close were the two sides that Jane could hear the smack of sticks and clubs against musket barrels, but by now the two sides had become less well defined. A townsman in a dark-colored cloak slipped out of the crowd and behind the soldiers’ line; he began to pace up and down behind the soldiers, calling to them, “Fire! Fire! Be the consequence what it will!” Jane looked back and found Preston standing in front of his men, his mouth fixed in a hard line. A club sailed over the crowd and out into the moonlight, catching one of the soldiers dead on; he went down on his hindquarters, the musket clattering to the ground. He struggled up in visible rage. “Damn you, fire!” he shouted to his fellow soldiers and discharged his musket. Jane looked again at Preston, still standing between his men and the mob. She thought,
If they fire, he dies,
but unbelievably, the soldiers held. Someone from the crowd swung a club, and it glanced off Preston; if it had found its mark his head would have been a match for Otis’s. He stepped back and the cry rang out loud from behind the soldiers: “Fire by God, I’ll stand by you!”

And there the soldiers fired. It came in no concerted volley but in random bursts—a muzzle-flare here, another there, the flash of powder bright against the red coats, the sound bouncing off the stone in the street and the brick in the walls. The bodies began to fall. There followed the kind of silence that comes with disbelief, with horrified wonder; the next sound Jane heard was the
click-click-click
of the soldiers’ muskets as they were loaded and cocked all around.

The crowd heard the sound too. It drew back. Preston heard it and ran along the line of men, knocking up their guns. “Stop firing!” he shouted. “Do not fire!”

That fast, it ended. Preston ordered his soldiers to fall in and began to march them back down King Street; the crowd saw the soldiers moving off and stepped in to see to their dead and wounded. Jane found Henry leaning over the body of a big mulatto, but he stood up and left the body to lie, pulling Jane back under his arm. She could feel his heart thrumming, thrumming, thrumming. Or was it her own? “For the love of God,” he said. “Come. I must get you home.”

Too late. Henry was too late. And besides, lying there in the street was, at last, something Jane could do. She twisted free of Henry; someone called to him from the outskirts of the crowd; he slipped out of her field of vision, and she thought of him no more. She moved swiftly to the nearest motionless form lying in the snow; she leaned over and felt for life—none. She straightened and moved to the next, this one struggling to sit up, and Jane helped him, steadied him, until two men came forward to lead him off. The next victim had suffered a head wound that bled freely, which meant life; Jane took her teeth to the lining of her cloak and ripped out enough cloth to compress it against the gash; after a time more men came and carried that victim off as well. Next she found a weeping boy, apparently unharmed but too frightened to move, and Jane knelt and comforted him until a young woman came and took him away. Next she found her brother.

Jane dropped onto her knees in the hard-packed snow. Nate was sitting up, propped on the one side by an old woman clutching his jacket and on the other by a young boy gripping his elbow. His queue was untied, his jacket half off his shoulders, his stockings torn, as if all the rage inside him had finally blown outward, but where was the evidence of the soldiers’ rage that had blown him to the ground? Jane saw no blood or wound. “Are you all right?”

“Right.”

“What hurts you?”

“Right. Bloody right.”

Jane stepped closer to the old woman, signaling to her that she had taken the patient into her care now; the old woman drifted away into the remains of the crowd. Closer now, Jane could see the tear in the shoulder of her brother’s coat; she peeled it back and saw the discoloration on the shirt, dark on light; blood. The wound.

She said, “Your shoulder? It hurts?”

“Right.”

“What else? What else hurts? Can you stand?”

In answer Nate scuffled his heels across the snow, and without speaking Jane and the boy lifted; Nate was not steady on his feet, and the iced-over street helped none. The boy, however, helped greatly—he took his half of the weight and more and followed Jane’s directions well: “This way. Left. Back, now. Here. Turn.” They walked, swaying, teetering, past the tavern, up to Aunt Gill’s door. The boy freed a hand to rap on the wood hard. Jane heard steps within and the door opened to Prince, with Martha standing behind. Prince would have been out to discover the trouble, of course. Prince would have come home and told. Prince, who might have helped and had instead run home to gossip for his mistress. Jane felt the beginnings of the old rage form, but before she could feed it into flame Prince came around and took the boy’s place, leading Nate through the keeping room to the small bedroom beyond, the room nearest the central fire. Jane removed her brother’s jacket and shirt, in fear of the worst, but in truth she was relieved at the site of the wound. The flesh had been penetrated, yes, but the bleeding had already stopped, or close to; she called to Martha for water and cloth and her juniper tincture to clean the wound.

“You right,” Nate said as Jane swabbed his skin.

“I’m fine,” Jane answered.

“Bloody right,” Nate said. The words were half nonsensical, but Jane didn’t—wouldn’t—fear for his mind. “Brandy, please,” she said to anyone, and Martha returned so quickly with a mug and leaned over the bed with such attention that Jane wondered why she hadn’t forgiven her a little stolen bread, a private laugh, a smirk with Prince before now. Jane slipped a hand behind her brother’s neck and raised his head. She held the cup to his lips, and he drank it down.

So intent was Jane on her brother that she heard no knock at the door, none of the usual shuffling required for the admittance of the visitor, and Henry Knox appeared beside her as if dropped from the ceiling. “Good heavens, Jane. I’ve been combing every shadow in search of you. Are you unharmed?”

“I am. My brother has received a wound to the shoulder only.”

“Dear God. Dear God. I was so in fear of the very thing that happened; I could not prevent it; I tried and I could do naught. And then to have lost you again—”

Jane began a search for words to soothe him but gave it up before she’d gone very far. Henry, her big, strong Henry, who above all the men she might have expected to keep her safe from harm, had instead carried her into danger and left her there, left her to Hugh White to worry over.

Aunt Gill said from behind, “Perhaps we should leave the boy to rest,” and all but Jane left the room. She sat down in a chair that someone had brought her and watched over her brother, from time to time pulling back the sheet to make sure the wound had not seeped through. The second time she did it she noticed her hand trembled; she poured herself her own tot of brandy and drank it down as Harry Nye had taught her to do. It steadied her hand but it also loosened her head; when Nate spoke again she heard it as he meant it, as he’d no doubt meant it before. Not
right. White
. Hugh White.

“Hugh White. Bloody White. Looked at me. Aimed at me. Shot me down.” Nate, the boy, looked at Jane, and—unbelievably—grinned. “And he’ll hang for it too.”

JOHN ADAMS BROUGHT THE
first news the next morning when he came by to check on his clerk. As little as Jane knew Adams she recognized the look of a mind in calculation of the future even as he spoke of the recent past. He had arrived late at the scene, and seeing all in hand, hurried home to his pregnant wife to ease the alarm the bells would surely have brought on. Being Adams, the rest of the news had come to him.

“The big mulatto Attucks is dead, as are two others. Two more look to be mortally wounded. There are six others with lesser injuries, this lad to be counted among them. Preston and his grenadiers have been arrested and confined to gaol; all the town’s crying for their necks in ropes. The remaining soldiers have been ordered out of the town to Castle Island.”

And so the “horrid massacre,” as it was already being called, had accomplished that thing which two years of petitions and protests had failed to do.

Jane’s grandparents came. Jane’s grandmother went straight to her grandson, but Jane’s grandfather and Adams stepped into the front parlor for a word. Before they’d finished, two young men arrived, whose names Jane recognized from Nate’s letters from school, with Henry Knox close behind. The young men joined those in the sickroom but Henry joined the men in the parlor, and Jane could hear his voice rise and fall in equal part with the others.