The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (21 page)

“And if Hugh White killed no one? If he discharged his weapon at the ground or at the gutter or at the moon? You make no allowance for such an occurrence?”

“By discharging his weapon he put at risk the lives of the innocent inhabitants of this town. What matter whether he in fact struck any of them down? The guilt is the same.”

“Under law?”

For the first time since Jane had met Henry Knox, he looked on her with something that was not entirely admiring. “I am no lawyer, Jane. I cannot argue law with you. I’d prefer not to argue with you at all. I can only speak my mind to you as I’ve always done, and ’tis now your choice whether to come here and prove us still friends or bid me go home.”

It was true, Jane thought—she couldn’t dismiss Henry for doing the very thing she had once begged Phinnie to do, but it seemed now as if there were a great weight, like a pendulum, hanging between them in the room. But what was this weight made of? A man and a woman, a husband and a wife come to that, needn’t always be of the same mind. There would be fundamental things they must agree upon, no doubt, but was the direction of a British sentry’s aim such a fundamental?

Jane looked across the room at Henry. He had fallen silent, and without the dangerous words she saw only the things that had so often comforted her—the great shoulders, the solid chest, the gentle brown eyes that she knew if she drew close enough would hold nothing but her image. She crossed the room.

A
FTER PATRICK CARR’S
funeral a peculiar calm dropped over the town like a still, cool snow. Nate came to fetch her to work out her deposition at Adams’s office, but it so happened Jane’s excuse was ready at hand and true to boot—Aunt Gill was not well, in chills and shakes and confined to her room. Jane sent her brother back with a note for Adams instead, expressing her great sorrow over the death of his child.

Nate came again the next day, and Aunt Gill having returned to her parlor chair, Jane’s only excuse was her indecision, if it could even be called indecision. She had thought of the whip; she had thought of Henry’s words; she had felt that small, hard thing inside her that wanted the soldiers to pay for what they did—to Otis, to her, to her brother, to the five dead. It seemed it was only the will she lacked. She got up and followed Nate out the door, into Royal Exchange Lane, as far as the corner of King and the scene of the violence.

Jane had spent so many nights lying with her eyes closed, seeing the thick snow turned blue with moonlight, the soldiers’ red coats, the multicolored jackets of the crowd, the yellow flash of the muskets, the red blood, so much redder on the snow than on the clothes. Her brother’s clothes. Hugh White. Bloody White? What
had
he done? Jane could see the line of soldiers as clearly as she could see her hand in front of her face, but the hand was too close; she couldn’t see all the fingers. She knew that Preston had stood in front of the line and the man in the cloak had slipped behind. She could see the man in the cloak, his mouth moving, urging the soldiers to fire, Preston’s mouth still fixed and grim. But what of Hugh White? He’d stood near her; he’d urged her back to safety. And then what? She didn’t know.

Jane stopped. “Nate. I don’t know where Hugh White aimed his musket. I don’t indeed know that he fired his musket.”

“Don’t know that he fired! Were you deaf and blind? And I told you where he aimed. Do you think I lie to you?”

“No. Nor should I like to think you would ask me to.”

That quieted him, as she knew it would; he was not that far a stranger to her. She said, “Come. I’ll walk a way with you. We have other things to talk of. Tell me of Miss Linnet. I know nothing of this woman who comes to see you in your distress, who clearly cares for you very—”

“She’s no Miss Linnet, she’s Mrs. Lincoln; she stops with me while her husband travels the country with his concubine. You see, Jane? I don’t lie to you. Not about her, not about White.”

He picked up his pace and left her behind.

THAT NIGHT JANE WROTE
her longest letter ever to Bethiah. She of course had Mrs. Lincoln on her mind, but in no long time she realized that was not a story that served any purpose in its telling. There was another story, though, that she was anxious to get down. She began by laying out the barest, bluntest version of events, hoping that to do so might clear up matters in her own mind, but after a very few lines her pen seemed to dash off on a road of its own. When she finished she discovered she’d laid out all—what she saw, what the ninety-some-odd deposers said they saw, what Nate and Henry wished her to say she saw, what Phinnie wished her not to say at all—and yet as she read over what she’d written she found herself less sure of things than when she’d begun. In any case, it was no letter to send to Bethiah. She closed her letter book on it but could not close her mind on it. She lay awake, seeing it, doubting what she saw.

THE NEXT MORNING JANE
woke realizing that if she wished to sort it, if she wished to sort herself, she must revisit the scene. She’d stood near enough to the spot twice now, but each time she’d been accompanied by Nate—preoccupied by Nate—she needed to be alone with her memory. She hastened herself into her clothes, hurried Aunt Gill into hers as much as it was ever possible to hurry Aunt Gill, and urged her down the stairs to her breakfast. After breakfast, as Jane settled the old woman in the front room, she explained that she needed to make an emergency errand to the apothecary for some catnip to treat a toothache.

“Ah!” her aunt said. “I saw the shadow of your candle last night. I thought you keeping overlong at your letters, but it was, after all, a tooth.”

“
And
an overlong letter.”

“But you leave nothing on the post table.”

Jane smiled. “Overlong letters must never be sent.”

Aunt Gill patted her arm. “Well then, you must hasten out and take care of your tooth.”

Jane wrapped herself up in her cloak and stepped out. The wind that ripped down Royal Exchange Lane reminded Jane again of Satucket, made her think in a way she hadn’t thought in a while about returning home. What if it did require only a simple letter to her father, as Mehitable had implied? What if she
could
go home? What then?

Out of nothing Jane recalled a time when the family had gone in a carriage to visit a relative at Yarmouth; Jane could not remember what had happened to the carriage or the relative, but she remembered the long carriage ride coming home from that visit, her parents sitting in the front seat, Jane and Nate and Bethiah curled up on one another like puppies in the seat behind. The dark and damp had come down before they’d reached home and Jane’s mother had pulled a bed rug over them, tucking it around. The touch of the rug had wakened Jane, and she’d lain with her eyes open for the rest of the ride, looking at the dim silhouettes of her parents, feeling the warmth of her siblings, listening to the
whoomph whoomph whoomph
of the horse’s hooves as it pulled them closer to home. Over all the years Jane had remembered that ride home and the utter sleepy contentment of it: there were her father and mother just there; here were her sister and brother just here; here too was the maple sugar in her stomach and the warm rug over her, and what a fine thing it was to be just who she was and where she was—curled in the nest of her rug with her mother on the watch, her father at the reins.

Except. It could not have been her mother on the watch beside her father or Jane would have been too young to remember it, and Bethiah would not have been born. Yes, now Jane remembered it had been
Bethiah’s
mother on the watch, and she remembered another thing too—when they reached Nobscusset Jane had puked up the maple sugar at the side of the road. Her father had said, “You do that again and you’ll do it in your shoe—we’re an hour behind time.” But then he’d reached behind and tugged her hair and said, “My poor Jane.”

Jane pushed back against the wind and trudged on, but at the corner of Exchange and King a queer thing happened; the wind grew less, as it often did when channeled from narrow tunnel to wide expanse, but Jane’s feet struggled twice as hard to move. Around that corner lay the spot where someone had shouted
fire
and someone else had shot her brother through the shoulder, and Jane found she could not push ahead. She turned around and made her way home.
Home
. Jane had called Aunt Gill’s house
home
before, but was it? She supposed she could love Aunt Gill well enough; she supposed she could fill her days with what passed for nursing, writing letters and reading, and perhaps in time all those things would make it home. Or perhaps not. The wind and Jane’s thoughts converged to start tears in her eyes; she dashed them away, but more came, in a horrifying torrent.

When Jane reached the house she crept through the door and past the front room in hope of slipping by her aunt unnoticed; she took care to avoid the two cracked treads on the stairs and crept upward. She had been so sure of Aunt Gill’s still sitting in the front room where she’d left her that as she passed her aunt’s chamber door and saw her at the small table by her bed, she started. Aunt Gill, too, seemed startled. She drew in a sharp breath. She picked up her letter book and attempted to slide it under the bolster.

“ ’Tis only I, Aunt,” Jane said, but her aunt continued her fumbling, and only then did Jane realize that the letter book her aunt was struggling to conceal looked very much like her own.

Jane crossed to the bed and pulled the letter book free of the bolster. It
was
her letter book. She looked down at her aunt in puzzlement. “What on earth do you want with my letter book?” She looked down at the paper her aunt had half covered with ink. The old woman grabbed at the paper and attempted to conceal that too; Jane snatched it out of her hands, knocking the inky pen to the floor. She looked down and read in disbelief:
Sir: The girl remains in confusion yet—it is not clear what if any testimony she might offer. The brother will declare that White aimed at him with intent. Knox continues to disguise any provocation by the crowd. I have not yet learned anything from the brother about how Adams intends to proceed. Otis I think you may safely dispense with.

Jane read and did not understand it. She looked over the paper at her aunt. “Why do you write about me in this way? Who is it you write to?”

“ ’Tis not your concern.”

“Not my concern! When you write all I put down in my letter book? All I talk about with my family and friends? Is it my father you write?”

“Your father!”

“Who else would want to know what I write to my sister? Who else would care what I think or what Nate says or what Knox says or what Adams or Otis might do? Stop smiling at me as if I were a child and tell me who you write!”

“And why should I not smile at you as if you were a child? Is it not a child who thinks all the world spins around its father? Your father!” She broke into bright, rippling laughter, as if her father were a joke, as if Jane were one. But if not her father,
who
?

Jane looked down at the paper in her hand. Knox. Adams. Otis. Well, of course. “You write to a king’s man,” Jane said. “You
spy
for them.”

“Spy!” Aunt Gill spat. “The people you write about don’t deserve the word! Look what they do! Look what they write! They represent no government. They represent only themselves and their false ideas and their own puffed-up importance. That they could think themselves equal to a king, or a Parliament!” Aunt Gill pushed herself to her feet with a strength that Jane hadn’t seen in her. She walked in perfect steadiness to the window and pointed at the street below. “I’ve lived here the length of my life. First with my parents and sisters and brothers and now alone. In all those years I’ve never felt fear at opening my door till now. Do you think I should sit about and let them rule my street?”

Jane followed her aunt across the room and gripped her arm. “Who is it you write to, Aunt?”

Aunt Gill whirled around. “You think a name will help you? You think you would even know it? What do you know that isn’t vomited out of that paper? A paper run by my own cousin! I do naught but even the scale in my family’s name.”

Jane stared at her aunt. The old woman appeared to have grown taller and stronger as she spoke. “And you have no qualm at taking my private words and sending them where I might have no wish for them to go?”

“
Might
have no wish? You think I don’t know how joined you are to your brother? You think I don’t know the things your brother does? And him clerking for that Adams! Why, if he’d done his duty to me I’d have had no need of you, but as it was, when your father wrote to me, I thought, now there’s a fine thing! Send me the sister! That will bring the brother around! And then you bring me Henry Knox! Whore that you are, you bring me Knox too!”

Jane looked at her aunt, at the yellowed teeth exposed in her gloat, and felt the twitch in her hands, the twitch to slap the mouth closed. She looked down at the letter book she held in one hand, the paper she held in the other. She set down the letter book and ripped Aunt Gill’s paper straight across, lined up the halves with care, and ripped it across again. And again. She opened her clenched fingers and let the pieces drift over Aunt Gill’s floor, a useless and unsatisfying act. She picked up the letter book, left her aunt where she stood, and went to her room.

JANE SAT ON HER
bed, leafing through the pages of her letter book, her fingers and the papers she turned in them trembling. What else had Aunt Gill copied out and passed along to her king’s man? What had Jane written to Bethiah? This of the boys tormenting the sentry? This of the false account in the paper of her being accosted by him? Or this of Nate’s unreasoned anger, or the celebration at the Liberty Tree, or Henry’s poem that she’d copied in . . . Henry. What had her aunt done, hovered listening on the stairs as she visited with Henry? Yes, of course she had—twice Jane had caught her lurking there and only thought her confused in her mind. Jane thought of her aunt listening to her talking with Henry, not talking with Henry, and a hot, bitter fire erupted in her, the like of which she hadn’t felt since Otis had been beaten by the soldiers. She had once defended those soldiers as she had supposed she was defending this woman, watching and worrying over her day after day, allowing an affection to spring to life in her, more and more each day as the months wore on. And all that time the old woman had been sitting there like a turkey buzzard, watching and waiting to pick out Jane’s heart as soon as she dared to expose it. Well, the buzzard could sit there. Jane could not. She leaped off the bed, pulled her cloak off the peg, tumbled down the stairs and out the door, still gripping her letter book in her hands.

THE WIND SEEMED LESS
than it was, due, no doubt, to Jane’s heat within. She pushed across King Street with little regard now for what offense had transpired there and beat against the wind toward the Town House. She had no great idea where she was going, but as she walked she found she was thinking of Henry Knox, and imagined that a calmer part of her mind had directed her feet toward the store. But there the not-calm part of her mind began thinking of Henry, what she had done with Henry, with Aunt Gill listening from the hall. She slowed, her face, her chest, her ears—indeed, all that Henry had ever touched—in flame. She stopped in the street across from the empty whipping post, unable to move. An oxcart swung wide around her on one side; a couple pushed past on the other. They were in their middle years, their faces crosshatched with the appropriate lines; there was nothing in either to remind her of her parents, especially her youthful stepmother, except for the woman’s silence as the man talked on and on. But Mehitable had not been silent in her letters.
You must go to my mother if you find yourself in any difficulty.