The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (27 page)

“You would keep yourself! Where? In your father’s barn?”

“I would keep myself at my grandparents’ house and look after it while they’re gone. But I suppose ten pence, with the noon meal provided, would keep me fed and warm.”

The old woman studied her. “Six pence.”

“Eight. And the meal.”

The old woman turned back to her kettle, which was all Jane would get for a nod on the deal.

Jane collected the wood. She made up the syrup, carried it to the Hopkins house, and administered it to Mrs. Hopkins, who was so glad to see Jane she gave her an extra twopence of her own, making up for the first day’s twopence Jane had lost in her deal, which Jane decided to take as her own kind of sign. She left the Hopkins house feeling both heavy and light—eight pence a day was in fact more than she had expected to receive from Granny Hall, and the work would be much as she
had
expected, but she felt the weight of it just the same.

WHEN JANE RETURNED SHE
found her grandmother bent over the oven, scraping a spill off the bricks. Jane took the knife from her and began to chip at the mess, explaining the arrangement with the Cobbs as she worked. She looked sideways and saw her grandmother’s shoulders loosen in relief. Jane continued, “I wonder what you should think if I were to stay behind in Satucket. I might keep the house for you till your return, put in your garden for you once it thaws, perhaps get in some chickens. I’ve spoken to Granny Hall and have work there if I wish it.”

Jane’s grandmother’s shoulders stiffened again. She stared at Jane in silence. What was she thinking? Of Jane, alone at Satucket? Of Jane in town? Of Jane’s father? Those were the things Jane thought of.

After a time Jane’s grandmother said, “You feel quite sure of this?”

“I feel quite sure I should like to try.”

“You do know you might return to me at town at any time?”

“I know it.”

“Well, then.”

To Jane’s great surprise her grandmother’s eyes filled with tears.

JANE’S GRANDMOTHER HAD SAILED
out of Satucket in a storm and sailed back to it the same way; ironic that the day of the carriage journey the bay sat as still and bright as a silver bowl. Mrs. Cobb had decided to take advantage of the carriage and accompany her husband to town; Jane was glad of it, for her grandmother’s unease had not dissipated, and Jane suspected she would have made Mr. Cobb a poor traveling companion alone. The carriage was already in motion when Jane remembered Mehitable’s old request for a letter confirming her safe arrival; she shouted the same request after her grandmother, and her grandmother raised her hand in the old pledge. Again, Jane raised her hand in return.

I
T HAD BEEN
a long day. She’d spent the first part of it peeling, cutting, and boiling onions; she’d spent the second part of it blistering her fingers making up Granny Hall’s turpentine and mustard poultice and attempting to apply it to the chest of the demented Mr. Earle. The experience with Mr. Earle would of course bring Otis to mind, which would of course bring her a little low; she’d stopped by the Cookes’ to check on the child’s burn and was brought lower. The girl’s skin looked healthy; Mrs. Cooke paid promptly into Jane’s palm, but she then said, “Heard you’re living alone out at the landing road.”

“For a time.”

“How long a time?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Cooke. I imagine my grandparents will remain in town a good while; I keep their house while they’re gone.”

Mrs. Cooke planted her chin on her chest in a way that allowed her eyes to bore into Jane’s. “An unmarried girl should be living at home.”

Jane pushed on to her grandmother’s house, the going that much harder as she now pushed against Mrs. Cooke all the way, to find a cold house and a basket of seed cake on her table, a sign that her sister had been and she’d missed the call. Jane shouldn’t have greatly minded the missed visit—Bethiah came often and like as not brought seed cake, thinking it a favorite of Jane’s, although in fact it was Nate who had preferred it above all—and yet she felt lower still. She built up the fire and made herself a supper of toast and tea; she sat with her shoes to the blaze and waited for the peace and comfort of her grandmother’s house to take hold.

Jane could not say she was lonely. She saw Granny Hall and at least one or two of the village inhabitants every day, although a quarter of the women she saw looked their disapproval and perhaps half their men looked away. She saw Bethiah every few days and Neddy and the little girls once a week or so; Mehitable stayed away, but Jane couldn’t blame her—her absence at home would be noted much faster than a child’s. Jane might have
liked
her stepmother to call, she might have
liked
a letter, but she was
not
lonely. It was the commonest of courtesies only that drew her to invite Harry Nye inside when he arrived with the long-awaited mail.

He came in shaking off the cold like a dog shook off water and stepped up close to the fire. Jane offered him a hot cup from the kettle, and he accepted, sniffing at it, again like a dog.

He sighed. “I had hope of something beside this bog brew.”

“Perhaps at your next stop.”

“Oh, no, I stop nowhere else this day.” He set down his cup, stepped closer to Jane, grinned. “As you seem so willing to keep me warm.”

Jane’s instinct was to back away, but as with any dog she suspected it would only draw him on. Instead she leaned over, picked up the poker, and jabbed it hard into the front log on the fire. Sparks shot into the air, and it was Nye who leaped back. She said without looking up from the fire, “Thank you for the letter, Mr. Nye. As you don’t care for my tea and I’ve nothing else to offer you’d best get on.” She didn’t turn around until she’d heard the door close.

THE LETTER WAS FROM
Jane’s grandmother. In it she announced that she had not found her husband well, the paper front and back filled with a long list of complaints, but the complaints all hers: he did not eat as he should; he did not sleep as he should; he answered to any call in any weather; he came home from every meeting with his humors violently disturbed. From all this Jane concluded that her grandfather was much as he had been and that her grandmother was . . . home.

THE PRESENCE OF HARRY
Nye in the village caused Jane to wonder if the bay had indeed opened while she’d not been paying attention; she went to the above-stairs window and was at once disabused. Nye could not have landed in Satucket by sea—the February bay was still too full of ice—but the shift had begun, and rivers of blue now appeared between the giant ice islands. Jane gazed at it for some time—the option of travel to town must require of her
some
consideration—but those blue rivers didn’t draw her.

It drew others though, and either a horse and rider or walker took the trip down the landing road each day. It was perhaps five days after Nye’s visit when Winslow came by. He was mounted on his new horse and trotted past Jane with hat lifted, but Jane almost didn’t notice the hat, so blinding was the horse—the finest animal Jane had ever seen. Its coat was the black of charcoal with the shine of glass, its legs were as long and finely turned as the railings in the courthouse at Boston; it looked down its long nose at Jane with dancing eyes full of contempt for such a poor, two-legged sufferer. All that Jane had thought of Winslow in the past changed as horse and rider pranced along the road; the man who had so proudly ridden a horse with no ears had now passed that creature by. A battle lost for a battle won.

AT THE END
of
March Bethiah smuggled her father’s
Boston Gazette
out of the house and delivered it to Jane. Jane hadn’t seen a newspaper in so long that she nearly snatched it from her sister’s hands, but when she saw that the entire contents was a celebration of the events of the previous March the fifth, she handed it back again. The celebration of August the fourteenth had been supplanted for all time.

Mrs. Cooke and her ilk aside, Jane began to have other callers besides her family. Temperance Collier was the first, coming by to ask Jane for Granny Hall’s headache decoction, Jane being nearer to hand. The request thrust at Jane her first moral dilemma—it was, after all, Granny Hall’s decoction. Jane solved the problem by offering to make up her own decoction for Temperance; she had long thought that Granny Hall’s recipe was short on mustard and long on rum; she had long thought some sage would improve it. If it worked as well as Granny Hall’s, all would gain by the experiment; if it didn’t, best that Jane discover it now.

AT THE FIRST
of
April, just after Jane had swept away the last crumbs from her supper, she heard a forceful but uneven knock at her door. She picked up the poker, thinking of a drunken Harry Nye, and flung the door wide with a bang and a scold all prepared.

Her father stood there. He looked at the poker in her hand and said, “So this is how you live? Arming yourself just to open the door?”

Jane said, “Come in,” but kept hold of the poker. Her father went up to the keeping room table where Jane had been composing a letter to her brother. He leaned over the page. Jane snatched it up. Her father straightened.

“I suppose you hear what’s said about you. Entertaining the like of Harry Nye. You can’t be so great a fool as to think you’ll marry
him.
”

“No.”

Jane’s father brought his hands down flat on the table and leaned across it. Jane touched the table too, bracing for her father’s roar, but instead his voice came at her deep and low—like the shocked and pained voice of an animal that had received a surprise wound; like a horse, perhaps, whose ears had been cut off.

“What the devil do you think to do, Jane, humiliate me by setting yourself up here alone?”

“I
humiliate
you
?”

“God’s breath! Do you think—?”

“Do
you
think I was not humiliated when you shipped me away to a town in the throes of bedlam, into the home of a woman without a moral scruple to her name?”

“You dare talk moral scruple to me?”

“You
dare?”

“You watch how you go!”

“Did you cut off the horse’s ears?”

She’d had no idea of asking it, but there it was, after all that time. And there it sat; Jane’s father was not a man who shifted from thought to thought with any great speed. First he had to stop his speech; next he had to shut up his gaping maw; third he had to decide if he had indeed heard what he couldn’t possibly have heard; fourth he had to respond. Most times the fourth stage followed hard on the third as her father spewed out whatever thought happened to arrive first, but now he took the time to round the table to the fire and hold out his hands to the flame. When he spoke at last he spoke in utter calm.

“For you of all people in this godforsaken village to ask me this—” He turned, took a step toward her. She didn’t move.

He smiled. “Very well, I shall answer what I shouldn’t need to. Not to my own daughter. Not to
you
. ’Twas your cousin Silas, the lad I took on as tanner’s apprentice, who butchered the horse. He’d ruined a vat of hides and thought to get in better with me, to put the Clarkes one up for a change. I always thought him half idiot, but there I knew him to be the whole. When he told me what he’d done I packed him off. There. Does this satisfy you?”

Did it? “But Winslow threatened to sue
you.
”

“Of course he threatened to sue me. What’s he like to get from a tanner’s apprentice? And the boy was in my charge. Acting on orders, they might say.”

“But the suit was called off.”

“And Winslow has a new horse. Or didn’t you see?”

Yes, Jane saw. Her father stood backlit by the fire, his features a wash of gray, but without the individual bits of him, Jane saw, for the first time, something of the whole.

When her father spoke again he spoke softly, as he had done that night in the dark when she was a child. “Jane. Do you know what it cost me having you gone? Do you know what it costs me now? Never mind the fool you make of me living here alone; I’m telling you now—I want you home. Do as you like with Paine.” He stepped up to her, laid a hand on her hair. “I’ll send Jot with the cart on the morrow.”

He left.

JANE SAT AT THE KEEPING
room table, her brother’s letter pushed aside.
I want you home.
She thought of her sister Bethiah and all the letters full of heart and mind that they had learned to share. She thought of the comfort she hadn’t identified as such while she’d had it—the comfort of a shared bed. She thought of Mehitable, of the heart and mind she’d shared with her pen and might yet learn to share with her voice. She thought of Neddy, of what he might need of her in the years to come, and the little girls and the babe she should like to know as it grew. To love as it grew. She thought of her father, a man she had long loved and who had loved her in return. Jane had lived nearly two years in town and had seen the many parts that could make up a man, good and bad, right and wrong, all the parts necessarily cemented together to make the whole. Why should she have thought her father made up of only one of those parts? Perhaps the whole that she now saw might get another man cast from church or flood his mill in the throes of an impotent rage; perhaps it might impede the flow of herring for personal gain. But was it something that might cut off the ears of another man’s horse? Did he tell the truth about her cousin Silas? Did it even matter now? What Jane needed to know she already knew, and she’d learned it from her father and brother and Aunt Gill and Henry Knox and Phinnie Paine and even John Adams, the day he’d stood in her father’s house cradling Mehitable’s babe: she could not look to her father’s arms to keep her safe anymore.

Jane sat at the table long, thinking of all that had transpired in all the days since she’d left Satucket, thinking of all the people who had passed through those days, and after a time a new thought came to her. Even though her father had been wrong in so many things, was there a place where he may have been right? She thought then—as in truth she’d been thinking for nearly two years now—of Phinnie Paine.

Jane got up and went to the chest in the room her grandmother had allotted her. Jane had brought all she owned to Satucket; by contrast, her grandmother had brought very little, which might have told Jane a thing or two had she considered it beforehand. She found her bundle of letters under her summer petticoats; Phinnie’s, so old now, was nearest the bottom. She picked it out and read it through.

Sum over parts.

But were not they all the sum of their parts?

Jane pushed the letter back onto the top of the bundle and dropped it into the drawer of her grandmother’s chest. She returned to the keeping room, pulled out a fresh piece of paper, and picked up her pen. As she did so she couldn’t help but smile—she was, at last, obeying her father’s wish.

Jane lifted her pen. What was she? In truth, what was she? She put the pen to page.