The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (2 page)

W
HEN JANE ENTERED
the keeping room her father was sitting at table, reading a month-old
Boston Gazette.
When Jane had once commented to her brother on their father’s tendency to read the radical
Gazette
more often than the conservative
Chronicle
Nate had said, “He would know his enemies better than his friends.” As her father seldom read a paper in silence Jane took a quick glance over his shoulder to prepare herself for that morning’s topic. The choices appeared to be three: the activities of the British troops stationed at Boston the past fall to keep the peace; the unruliness of the Boston inhabitants; the governor’s speech. Jane predicted today’s topic would be the unruly inhabitants—a mob had broken the windows of a loyalist merchant who had continued to import the British goods that the rebels had proscribed—and so it was.

“
This
they call defending a man’s right to his life?” Jane’s father cried. “
This
they call defending his liberty, his property?”

As Jane’s father continued, it occurred to Jane that she might have predicted the rest: her stepmother, Mehitable, turning her face to her husband in that closed openness that meant he had her attention if not her understanding, her stepbrother Neddy slipping out the door to the barn like a starved cat, her stepsister Bethiah charging into the room in the full flood of a mindless jabber that drew her a swat, the little ones staring at their father like a pair of big-eyed, cornered foxes. After Bethiah’s interruption there followed a brief calm where the only sound to be heard was her father’s voice ratcheting up and down over the meaning of
liberty
versus
liberties
until the infant began to cry, at which her father broke off to ask why it was that a mother four times over had not yet learned how to stop up a babe’s mouth with a tit.

All of it Jane might have announced in advance of the event except for one thing: the return of the bubble in her chest. She didn’t know what should distress her in any of it, for none of it was any different from what she’d seen and heard every day of her life. Her father spoke as he thought; her stepmother did neither; Neddy would live in the barn if he could; the little ones froze to their seats whenever their father sneezed; Bethiah—fourteen now and old enough to know better—never did take the mood of a room before she charged into it.

Jane, who did know better, laid her father’s letters down next to his right fist, picked up his mug, and refilled it in silence.

Jane’s father looked up. “What’s took you?”

“Some excitement in the road.”

“Excitement in the road!”

She looked at her father. The room had already grown hot from the cooking fire and his long lip and short forehead shimmered with damp. She said, “Some kind of injury to Winslow’s horse.”

Jane’s father leaped up. “You may spare me the rest! I’ve heard enough of Winslow for the week!” He picked up the pile of letters and the mug and retreated to his office.

THE SHOUT CAME JUST
as Jane had put the vinegar to boil; she handed Bethiah the spoon and turned for the office. Jane’s father sat at his desk. He was not an impressive man when standing—his proportions reminding Jane much of the cider keg in the cellar—but when sitting his chest and head took on the more inspiring lines of a marble bust. He looked up as Jane entered and smiled at her as he smiled only at her; if her brother Nate had grown into a more compliant boy Jane was sure that the son would have held first place in their father’s heart, but as Nate had chosen another road, it was left to Jane to bask in the happy if sporadic warmth that shone on the most favored.

Jane stood before her father and waited, his attention already gone back to something in one of his letters, but Jane didn’t mind the waiting. She had always liked her father’s office—the look of the great rows of books on the shelves, the feel of the heavy wood desk, even the odor of musty paper and pipe smoke and her father’s sweat. When Jane was younger and jealous of her brother’s attention to his primer she’d once snuck into the room, climbed up on her father’s desk, and removed one of the books from his shelf, but she’d found it a large disappointment—the “books” as she’d thought them were in fact account ledgers full of nothing but names and numbers marked off in pounds, shillings, pence. But an addition of a few years had added to the significance of the ledgers, teaching Jane something new about the man with whom she’d lived her entire life. Up to then she’d known that his rule was law, that when he was not to be bothered it was best not to bother him, and that when he wasn’t bothered he loved her as well as any father should. But inside the account books Jane discovered the names of nearly every man in the village, and the numbers alongside each name represented considerable sums of money, either paid or owed; from this Jane learned that her father was also successful, important, smart.

Which was no doubt why men who were none of those things talked about him the way they did around the village.

Jane’s father finished his second examination of the letter in question and raised it in the air. He smiled at Jane. “Well, daughter, my congratulations to you—Paine has made his offer. How many visits has it been now, ten? A dozen?”

“Not near a dozen. And most on business with you.”

“Hah! Business with me! Here is all his business with me: he’ll have a house across the road as I promised for your marriage portion, half interest in the mill, full charge of both mill and tannery. You’ve picked yourself an able man, Jane; and an agreeable one; a clever man I’d even call him. I can talk politics with him without fear of disrupting my digestion as always happens whenever your brother engages me on the subject. But I expect you need no essay from me on Phinnie Paine’s character; let me say, however, if I’d got this letter from Joseph Woollen he’d have got another answer. You’re not planning to argue Woollen to me, are you?”

So her father had seen them at the wedding. “No, Papa,” Jane said.

Jane’s father leaned across and patted her cheek. “So we are agreed. I had little doubt of it. Paine says that pending my approval he’ll speak to you when he arrives, but I’m not the fool he takes me; I know the modern way. No doubt ’tis all settled between you.”

“Only as far as I could trust in your good opinion of him.”

“Hah! Yes! Very pretty! You’re a good child. Now leave me be. I’ve a letter to answer.”

Jane left him.

AFTER DINNER THE MIDWIFE
Granny Hall’s neighbor boy came for Jane. It was a thing the old woman had begun to do of late, ever since an epidemic of dysentery had brought her to her bed along with the rest of the village, and Mehitable had offered Jane to go about delivering her cathartics. Since that time Granny Hall had got in the habit of calling on Jane for the more mundane tasks that occupied her practice—digging roots, planting herbs, brewing her decoctions—and Mehitable, a steady customer, had been willing enough to spare Jane from any household task in exchange for a poultice, an ointment, a tincture in payment.

Granny Hall lived in a half house covered with honeysuckle vines along the road to the Southside near the meetinghouse; in Jane’s first remembrance of her the woman had been very old and had since only grown older. It was an irony of the old woman’s age that her white hair had come around again to yellow, but it hadn’t youthened her. Nor did the way she pulled out the chair and dropped into it, as if in doubt of ever rising. Indeed, she must have weakened, because for the first time, she allowed Jane to pay her calls with her. At the Snow house Jane administered the brandy while Granny Hall put three stitches in Jabez Snow’s thigh where the bull had got him, but at Crowell’s Jane was allowed to give a puke for a stomach complaint, and at the Bakers it was left to Jane to gargle the putrid malignant sore throats of all five of their children. To Jane’s surprise and pleasure everyone except Jabez Snow felt better after her ministrations; as she worked her way home she made note to herself that next time she’d be more generous with the brandy.

JANE WALKED INTO THE HOUSE
to the sound of her father barking in his office. She paused at the door long enough to identify the recipient of the bark as the nephew he’d taken on as his tanner’s apprentice. Any such noise always brought on Mehitable’s sick headache—Jane looked for her in her bed and found her there, eager for an application of the midwife’s headache decoction, given to Jane in her last payment.

Jane returned below-stairs to find the apprentice gone and her father on his way to the tavern in no fine mood; Jane hurried the children’s supper so she might have them in bed before he returned, it being her experience that the tavern had never improved a bad mood and indeed often ate up a good one. Bethiah—sometimes not so great a fool—followed the children to bed soon after they’d finished the clearing up, but Jane stayed below. If she made haste she might have time enough in the peace and quiet to answer her brother’s letter.

Jane settled herself at the keeping room table, brought the candle close, and picked up her pen, but she watched the candle lose an inch of grease before she was able to make a single mark on the paper. She’d thought first to tell Nate of Phinnie Paine’s letter to their father, but on reconsideration she decided it was better to wait till Phinnie had come and gone and they had, indeed, “settled the matter.” She next thought to tell Nate of Winslow’s horse, but Nate hadn’t leaped as eagerly as his cousins into the next generation of feuding, and she worried that this last rumor might push him, if not to some regrettable action, then at least to some regrettable words. Nate had grown quite talented at regrettable words, especially around Jane’s father. Or perhaps Jane should say he’d grown quite talented at words
Jane
regretted.

In the end Jane did as she so often did in her letters—she asked Nate a string of questions that he would no doubt ignore when he wrote his answer. Had he seen a doctor for his injuries? Wouldn’t he like to take the next ship home to Satucket and recover under the care of a sister who’d been lately cultivating her skills at nursing? What was a
qui tam
? She folded the letter, sealed it, addressed it, and left it on the post table near the door to await the next likely conveyor.

JANE’S STEPMOTHER REMAINED IN BED
the next day; Bethiah took over the babe, and Jane took the two little girls with her on her errand to the cobbler’s. Both girls were in the high spirits that came with such a rare unleashing until they turned onto the King’s road and saw the horse. Winslow had reined up at the side of the road in order to speak to the Indian Sam Cowett, and the horse bobbed and tossed its head, as if bothered by flies, or pain, or the whistling of the wind across the exposed stumps. Jane pulled the girls close and clucked them along the far side of the road as fast as she was able. She looked once more as she passed and noted that in contrast to the fretful horse its rider sat still and calm with his head held high; he saw Jane and tipped his hat to her as politely as if her name were Snow or Doane or Baker. Jane dipped her head in answer.

THE LITTLE GIRLS COULD
not recover from the sight of it. They tugged at Jane’s skirt and peppered her with questions that she attempted to push away by pointing out every distraction along the road.
Look there, the miller’s cart . . . See here, the strawberries in blossom . . . Watch out for that rut . . .
They’d gotten so little satisfaction from her that as they entered the house they overcame their usual timidity and began to pester their father, who sat at table being served a plate by Bethiah.
What happened to the horse’s ears, Papa? Where are the ears, Papa? Can it hear if we call it? Can it hear a wolf? A crow?

Throughout the questions the only sounds the girls received in answer were Jane’s orders to hush until Hitty braved one last question. “Would you ride a horse with no ears, Papa?”

To Jane’s surprise, her father chose to answer that one. “I would not.”

“Why not, Papa?”

“Because such a man can have no dignity.”

There, at last, the little girls quieted; they would not know what
dignity
was, but they knew enough of their father’s face to know all questioning had ended. Jane, thinking of Winslow tipping his hat, thought she did know what dignity was, and that her father was wrong about it. She’d known her father to be wrong about a thing before, but for some reason she found this instance of it more troubling. It made her want to ask her own question. It made her not want to ask the question. It made her look away as she collected the empty plate in front of him.

BY THE TIME JANE
reached the bed she shared with Bethiah she found that her sister’s musty body had already dampened the sheets and she’d locked her elbows around both bolsters. Jane eased in beside her and lay as still as a pan of milk; it wasn’t worth waking the girl and risking a stream of chat just to reclaim a bolster. She lay listening to the house: the tick of the clock in the front room, the
choonk
of a log settling into the fire, the breeze rattling her window. On another night these sounds might have soothed her into sleep, but tonight each one attacked her ears like a dog’s bark. Thinking of dogs, she began to wonder if in her new house across the road she’d hear Paul Wing’s dog, who barked every time a leaf dropped. Or did Phinnie have his own dog? Jane didn’t know. She began to wonder what else she didn’t know about Phinnie, outside of her father’s testament. She remembered meeting Phinnie for the first time in her father’s office and liking what she saw—features not too bold or too soft, clothes not too new or too old, the smile that stayed in the eyes after the mouth had given it over. She also remembered liking the way he stood with his hands at perfect ease at his sides, the way he measured his words without rush, the graceful way he mounted his horse as she watched from the window.