The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (5 page)

AT LAST, NATE ANSWERED
her letter. He began with the definition of a
qui tam—
“he who sues for the king as well as himself”—a particular kind of lawsuit created to encourage private citizens to inform against their neighbors on behalf of the province. Winslow claimed that in defiance of province law Jane’s father had constructed a dam that impeded the flow of the alewives during spawning season; if Winslow won his suit half the judgment would go to the care of the poor in the village and the other half into Winslow’s pocket. Nate added the surprising news that explained his intimate knowledge of the case: their father had passed over his local attorney and engaged John Adams for his defense.

Nate had filled a page and a half with the
qui tam
. Enough room remained to have answered Jane’s questions about his injuries, but he’d not bothered to do so.

J
ANE’S FATHER CONTINUED
in his benevolence toward Jane for a fortnight. Jane spent that fortnight working for Granny Hall, joining her in attendance at two births, helping her to apply the more unwieldy poultices and bandages, even being sent on her own to administer emetics and physicks and any numbers of gargles—the sore throat epidemic continued strong.

Mehitable spent a good part of that same fortnight in bed with her sick headache, although she managed to bring herself to her feet for John Adams, who had traveled the extra day’s ride from the court at Barnstable to meet with Jane’s father regarding the lawsuit. At first Jane had been surprised that her father would hire Adams, knowing how the two men’s politics differed, but after some additional thought she concluded he did so for the same reason he’d selected the man as Nate’s tutor—according to Jane’s reading of the papers, Adams was now recognized as the foremost lawyer at Boston. Jane was glad enough that her brother could clerk for such a respected man, even glad that her father could make use of his services in the
qui tam,
but she did not look forward to sitting at table between them.

Jane’s father had prepared Mehitable with orders for a veal roast at noon and “no children milling about the table,” but in fact the children seemed to please Adams as much as the roast. He came in red-faced and shining with sweat, dispensed his letters and papers in a lump to Jane’s father, and turned to Mehitable, who stood in attendance with the infant on her shoulder.

“Ah!” he cried. “An angel! I’ve one of like age at home—my little Susanna—’tis a month since I’ve seen her, a month since I’ve been riding the court circuit. Do you suppose . . . dare I ask . . . would I be allowed—?” To Jane’s astonishment he took the babe out of Mehitable’s arms and cradled it in all its messy damp against his waistcoat.

Jane looked at her father. His own astonishment was evident, and something more, which might have been disdain or distrust or perhaps only doubt over the fate of his
qui tam
; he bore it as long as he could before shouting to Bethiah to collect the babe and herding Adams to table. As Jane served out the preliminary Indian pudding, she waited for her father to bring up the treatment of the importers or some other such subject that daily disturbed him, but it turned out Adams was a new kind of dinner guest. At her father’s first bite of pudding, Adams grasped hold of the conversation and didn’t give it back until he spied the tart. As Adams gazed joyfully at the last of the winter’s apples bubbling in the hot crust, Jane’s father leaped in. “May I ask you, sir, do you not decry the sorry reports put about these days in the papers?”

“I am indeed heartily sorry to read such accounts, but a town under occupation must of course result in such nonsense.”

“How can you describe the soldiers of your own country as occupiers?” Jane’s father cried.

“When my own country denies me my lawful right to have some say in how I’m governed.” Adams had not raised his voice but had clipped his words in such a way that even Jane’s father was forced to pause before charging after them, and in that pause Adams managed to consume the tart Jane had put on his plate as well as remove his watch from his pocket. “Now then, Mr. Clarke, as I’ve little time to waste, I suggest we get to our business. Shall we begin with an examination of this impediment to the fishes?”

“I impede no fish, sir! There’s the point of the matter.”

“My dear sir! I should of course have said let us examine the scene of this
alleged
impediment.”

The hard lines that had rucked up Jane’s father’s mouth a moment before now softened, but just the same, a question Jane had never once before considered rose in her mind: must a lawyer believe his client innocent in order to properly defend him? As soon as the men left, Jane made an excuse of a loose pin and climbed the stairs to look out her chamber window to make a closer study of this foremost lawyer. Adams’s well-stuffed waistcoat and breeches had camouflaged the underlying athleticism; he scrambled through the brush, over the riverbank, and up the stream like a ten-year-old boy, but once they’d reached the milldam he pulled a little notebook from his coat pocket and began to write in it in a more lawyerly fashion. The men began to talk, Adams’s arms waving about, as if attempting to paint the entire mill valley onto a canvas of air, Jane’s father punching at the water, as if to pummel it in a new direction, and there a queer idea entered Jane’s head that the scene could be written another way—the two men might be dueling—but over what? They were on the same side in the matter.

THE MEN RETURNED ONLY
in time for supper—a cold platter that Mehitable left Jane to serve. This time Adams seemed bent on talking of children and weather and crops and a new recipe for beer, and it amused Jane that her father appeared unable to swerve him. After supper the men went into the office, and when they came out Jane showed Adams to the bed last occupied by Phinnie Paine. At the sight of the bed Jane felt herself blushing and was convinced that Adams took note; she could think of no other reason why he should jog off into such a long compliment over the unremarkable cheese she’d served him at supper.

ADAMS POPPED OUT OF
his room the next morning as neatly dressed as a traveling man might hope for; he took a gill of cider and toast and managed a second time to wrest the infant from Mehitable’s arms; it appeared for some few minutes that he would ride off with the babe propped on the saddle before him. At the last he trotted off alone, clearly a happier man heading toward his home than away from it.

Jane was on her way to the necessary house to empty Adams’s night jar when her father called to her from his office. She set the jar down outside the office door and stepped through; out of the bundle of letters Adams had delivered, Jane’s father held one in his hand. “Do you know who this is from?” he asked.

“Phinnie?”

“Phinnie! You think it from Phinnie! Mark me, girl, you’ve heard the last of Phinnie Paine. This is from my Aunt Gill. You remember my Aunt Gill?”

Jane did. A half-dozen years ago Aunt Gill had arrived in Satucket for what had been planned as an extended visit, but she’d been made so ill by the damp air and the dust in the bed tick that she’d packed up after three days and returned to Boston. Jane remembered her as always holding a handkerchief to her nose and gripping Jane’s arm so hard it hurt. She also remembered Mehitable responding to the “dust in the bed tick” remark with a rare burst of feeling.

Jane said, “I remember Aunt Gill, sir.”

“I’m glad of it. Because you’re to go to town to be nurse to her.”

JANE HAD TO ADMIT
the scheme was a clever one. Her father had for years received letters from Aunt Gill complaining of her declining health and the incompetent help that attended her; after Phinnie decamped her father had only to write and offer his newly disengaged daughter as nurse to get a winged answer back, offering a shilling a day plus her keep and care. As punishment it was likewise clever, for one day at dinner Jane had allowed a complaint about Granny Hall’s old-woman fussing to escape her, and she had more than once expressed her dislike of traveling even as far as Yarmouth. Just thinking of the journey, the nature of the work, and the confinement with a near stranger set the bubble rising in her chest again; but as she stood there, watching her father smile at her in all his cleverness, the bubble began to heat and burn and finally to burst in her. If her father believed that with the threat of the aunt she would choose the suitor, he did not know her.

Jane stood up. She said, “Thank you, Papa. I should like a chance to see something of my brother. And I shall be able to report to you firsthand on the rapes and beatings of the soldiers.”

Her father’s mouth leveled. She leaned over and kissed its corner. She retrieved Adams’s slops, carted them out to the necessary, and dashed them down the shit-hole.

JANE’S FATHER ANNOUNCED THE
news at dinner. Neddy at once flew away to the barn and Hitty burst into tears, which made Anne cry too, although she little understood it meant the loss of Jane to her. Bethiah only looked into her mug, but soon after the meal and long before it was necessary she turned uncommonly helpful, pulling the small trunk out from under the eaves, scrubbing out the mold, dragging it down the stairs to dry in the dooryard. Hitty and Anne might walk around hollow-eyed, Neddy might disappear among the cows, but Jane guessed at least one sister wouldn’t mourn her departure. An entire bed to herself, the opportunity to escape the kitchen heat and run the choice errands, perhaps the chance to take Jane’s place as their father’s favored daughter. It was like catching the first glimpse of her shadow.

AS FOR JANE’S FATHER,
the foul temper she’d been waiting for now assaulted the household with the punch of an awl: his tea was too cold, his cider too new, his lamb undercooked, his beef indistinguishable from the horse dung he’d supposedly twice told Jane to clean off his boots. Jane might have borne all this well enough if it hadn’t spilled out at the others—he sent little Anne from the table for clanking the pewter, cuffed Neddy for splashing his beer, shouted at Mehitable that she was as useless as a stopped chimney.

For the first two days Mehitable said and looked her usual nothing, but on the third she came into Jane’s room while she was still in her bed, shook her awake, and motioned her to follow. Jane threw a wrap over her shift and groggily trailed her stepmother down the stairs; in growing alarm she continued after her through the keeping room and out the door. It was an hour of the morning that was hardly less night than day, and Jane followed the rise of the ground as much as Mehitable’s rapid footsteps; Jane had begun to wonder if her stepmother was completely in her senses when she stopped at the edge of the meadow and turned to Jane.

“There’s no need of this, you know. You need only write him. Your father wouldn’t send you off if you did, and what you wrote should be your own.”

“I don’t see how it should.”

“You might write him whatever you wish as long as you tell your father what he wishes! And while he waits for Mr. Paine’s answer, Aunt Gill must be postponed.”

“
If
Mr. Paine answers.”

“You’re not suited to coyness, Jane.
Once
Mr. Paine answers, you would of course have to write again.”

“To say what?”

“Whatever would require another letter! Surely you can’t be so thick! You might carry it along for months! A year!”

“And what of Mr. Paine?”

“What of Mr. Paine! What do you care of Mr. Paine? Do you wish to be sent away?”

Jane looked around her. The sky had taken on its first gray hint of day, and the coop, the barn, the house, even the millstream seemed to have drawn in around her. As a child it had seemed such a long walk to the meadow. It had seemed such a long walk only a dark moment ago. She said, “Perhaps I do.”

JANE WROTE TO HER
brother to inform him of her pending arrival in town, thinking as she did so of the oddity of her letters going in the opposite direction soon. And what letters might she expect in return? Her stepmother would write, surely, but she had little hope of Bethiah or Neddy, although the night before Jane was to depart, Bethiah took an odd turn.

“I don’t see why you have to go,” she said across the dark.

Jane made no answer.

“Well, I
don’t
. I
like
Phinnie Paine.”

Well, Phinnie Paine liked Bethiah, or so Jane might assume by the attention he had always paid her jabbering. And he’d once followed Neddy to the barn and stayed there, presumably admiring his creatures with him, till Jane was sent to fetch them for supper. Phinnie had paid no great attention to the little ones, perhaps sensing that if he had they’d have ducked under the table and quivered. But there were all those words again—
assume, presumably, perhaps
. What did Jane really
know
of Phinnie
?
Well, she knew his eyes, that strange green of a frothless wave, and that nose with the question of a turn before the end, and his mouth, too often amused for her liking. But what was the sum of
those
parts, other than a surface? What else did she know of him? Inconvenient other images began to dart at Jane like minnows—the hands, the mouth, the bedpost. But again, more surface.

Across the hall Jane’s father began to snore, and as unwelcome as the sound was, it at least served to divert Jane’s thoughts from Phinnie. Despite what Jane had said to Bethiah, she did not know whether her father had lain in bed snoring through the butchering of Winslow’s horse or not. Perhaps Mehitable would know if her husband had been lying beside her during the incident. . . . Well, of course Mehitable would know. And no matter what she knew, she would continue to lie beside her husband every night here forward, reminded of it by every snore.

Such it was to be Mehitable, Jane thought.

Such it was to be a wife?

BETHIAH WAS LONG ASLEEP,
oblivious to the trouble her three short sentences had caused Jane in her own efforts toward that end, when a shape appeared and hovered over Jane’s bedside. The night was a dark one and the figure looked like nothing but a thicker patch of dark until it moved out of the shadow of the door and against the whitewashed wall, revealing the casklike shape of her father. Jane lay still, waiting for him to declare his purpose, but he stayed silent. After a length of time made longer by the dark, his hand came down, not on her head but on the bolster next to it. After another cloudy length of time, he reclaimed his hand and left.