The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (9 page)

S
HE WAS QUITE
unharmed. She said so to the gentleman whose name turned out to be Molineux—a name that rang a vague and distant bell—and she said so to Aunt Gill, but the gentleman merely continued to bark out his own litany about the abuses of the soldiers, and the aunt appeared to have positioned Jane at death’s door and could not back away from that view. By the time Molineux left, Aunt Gill was trembling so hard she rattled the cups and saucers on the table to which she clung; she would let Jane alone only after Jane promised to give up her trip to the bookshop and rest on her bed till dinnertime, which only made her feel the want of a book more.

At dinner Aunt Gill ordered her own boiled pudding served to Jane and insisted on suffering with the mutton that had been roasting temptingly all morning long. She insisted again that Jane rest in the afternoon, and in truth, by then Jane was so worn down by her aunt’s fussing that she happily went up the stairs. She even slipped into a doze, but found any loud cry from the street brought her out of it. She heard similar shouts to those of earlier in the day—or did she? Was it “bloody-backed dog” or “blackened log”? “Lobster” or “stop her”? And if “stop her,” stop her from doing what? Going where? And was that a knock at the door or had she now become Aunt Gill? Yes, a knock. And a familiar voice; two. Jane leaped up and flew down the stairs.

Her brother and her grandfather Freeman had just found their way into the front parlor. Jane hadn’t seen her grandfather in more than a year, but she had long ago learned to collect his smiles like ripe apples; this one hinted of something out of last winter’s store. Even at his best fettle he was more loose angles than fleshed limbs, but the way his coat hung on his shoulders made her think he’d either been ill or worked into a state near to it. He came directly to Jane and dropped a kiss on her brow; he may have been tired, but he didn’t miss the faded scar, angling his head for a closer look. He said, “Tell me, please, child, how do you fare?”

Nate’s first words tripped over the last of her grandfather’s. “How she fares is the same as we all fare with these bloody red coats in our face every time we turn around!”

Jane said, “How did you hear of this, Grandfather?”

“How did we hear!” Nate answered for
him
now. “The whole town hears! And mark me, those who haven’t, shall!”

But Jane’s grandfather was still looking at Jane. “Are you injured, child?”

“No, sir. I stumbled into the gutter. When the sentry said to get along—”

“The sentry ordered you along!” Nate again.

“He only meant to keep me safe from the crowd. And I would have been safe enough if I hadn’t tried to look backward and walk forward. Which I wouldn’t have tried to do if the crowd wasn’t throwing mud at the poor man. And all because he spoke to me.”

“He spoke to you!” Again, Nate.

“He bid me good-day; nothing more. He lives on this street.”

“So he takes that as his right to accost you?”

Jane looked at her brother in surprise; his rage now heated the room. “The sentry accosted no one, Nate. ’Twas the boys accosted
him.
”

Aunt Gill said, “ ’Tis not the boys who’ve invaded our town unasked and unwanted.”

Nate turned to his aunt. “At least
you
know who your enemies are, Aunt Gill! But you needn’t fear. We’ll settle them soon.”

Jane looked at her brother again. No matter how much of the man had usurped his form, no matter how many lawyer’s poses he’d learned, he reminded her of nothing so much as the boys in the street. The boy-men.

IT WASN’T UNTIL NIGHT,
when Jane had finally settled an anxious and clinging Aunt Gill to sleep, that Jane could turn to settling her own mind, but she found it more difficult than she’d imagined; she felt as if she’d dropped right-side up into an upside-down barrel. Even her father’s rages over the papers seemed whitewashed compared to the misplaced fury she’d encountered in the street and in her brother; she didn’t yet know where to place her grandfather in the scheme. She wished she could have talked to him alone; she wished—how mad it was—she wished she could have talked to her father.

Her father being her last clear thought as her mind shut down for sleep she was unsurprised when his old words came flooding in as soon as her more conscious thoughts had gone.
Otis. Adams. Molineux. Feeding the lower classes tyrannous articles in the paper and rum in the tavern. Sending them out to so abuse the soldiers it would try the patience of Job.

Molineux? The same Molineux who had picked her out of the gutter and seen her to Aunt Gill’s? In Satucket she would have said yes, it would have to be; in crowded Boston she could say only
maybe
.

IT BECAME SOMETHING MORE
likely the next day, when Aunt Gill’s newspaper arrived along with her mail. The old woman hadn’t gotten far in her reading when she exclaimed and handed the paper to Jane. Jane read, and with great effort of will restrained any sound of her own.

Jane read it through again, discovering a fine rage of her own. Once Aunt Gill had settled into her nap, Jane picked up the paper and went to the door, but before opening it she paused, thinking of the trouble she might cause the sentry if she sought him out in daylight. She waited through a long afternoon and longer supper until Aunt Gill was settled into her bed once again before returning to the front room, to sit by the window and watch, but it must have been another sentry scheduled for duty that afternoon; her dirty-booted friend didn’t come.

JANE WAS FORCED TO
repeat her watch for another full day and evening before she spied the sentry passing by the window. She stepped outside; it was after ten o’clock at night and the sound of her latch lifting and falling brought him whirling around on his boot heel.

“Lord God, miss! What’re you doing about at this hour?”

“Looking to speak to you. I wanted you to know that what got in the papers—”

“Had naught to do with you. This I knew when you first spoke up in the street. Now you’d best get in before one of those rabble from the tavern sees you.”

“Is this what it is to live in this town? Neighbor must fear talking to neighbor?”

The sentry was silent. Against the lesser dark of the sky she saw the dark shape of his hat come down. “The name’s Hugh White. I know yours. And ’tis glad I am to call you neighbor. Good night, Miss Clarke.”

“Good night to you.”

JANE’S NEXT ATTEMPT
at
Wharton & Bowes began better. She set out determined to keep her eyes off anything in a red coat, and in an effort to do that she walked the north side of King Street, which would put her far from the Main Guard and the sentries on duty there. She also set out determined to keep her mind off Phinnie Paine; he had just come from town in May—how likely that he would be back in July? Jane had no idea how often shingles and barrel staves might bring a man to town; they had seemed to bring him often enough to Satucket, but that was another thing. She thought back over his visits to Satucket—the first had been in September, when she had met him in her father’s office; but what had come next? Yes, it had been another visit that same month—she remembered being surprised to see him so soon—but she would hardly call it a visit; she’d met him walking north along the millstream on his way to speak with the miller while Jane had been walking south just returning from an errand to the same. She didn’t remember how it had happened but somehow he had turned with her, and they had walked together along the stream all the way to the marsh, talking about nothing. About how he liked the look of a fall marsh. About how she disliked what it warned of—the coming cold. He told her if she thought herself warm she could make herself warm and he bade her try it, holding her hands to judge the heat in them. Jane warmed then and she warmed now, remembering—the touching, yes, but also the matching smiles at the joke of it, the feeling of looking in a glass when she looked at him. How enormous a thing it had seemed at the time, and now it only seemed . . . silly.

Jane came out of her musings and discovered that she’d walked straight past her turn to the bookshop. She looked around. On one side of her was the courthouse and on the other side was the print shop of Edes & Gill, publishers of the
Boston
Gazette.
The name
Gill
reminded her that her aunt had claimed a distant relation to one of the publishers of the
Gazette,
a relation that Jane’s father had understandably never mentioned; staring at the sign Jane discovered a few things she should like to say to this relation. She pushed open the door and went in.

It would be another boy-man who greeted her, of course, his face spotty, his neck too small for his shirt, his fingernails rimmed with ink and frequently in his mouth.

“I should like to speak to Mr. Gill,” she said.

“Ain’t in.”

“Mr. Edes, then.”

“Ain’t in nether.”

“Then I should like to know how to go about correcting something that was printed in the paper.”

“Depends what you’re correctin’.”

“A false account of an episode that occurred at the corner of King and Royal Exchange.”

The boy took out a piece of paper and began to write; encouraged, Jane went on. She had been neither accosted nor insulted by the sentry at the Custom House, she said; the boys—she emphasized the word
boys
—had engaged in an unprovoked attack. The sentry and she had exchanged a greeting, nothing more. She had tripped in the gutter, nothing more. The boy asked for Jane’s name and address and she gave it with some pride; she left the printer’s shop feeling of some use once more.

At Wharton & Bowes Jane discovered that Henry Knox had read all about the altercation in front of the Custom House, but she suspected he’d heard something else that hadn’t been in the papers—the identity of the supposed victim. He came at her in a rush and took her hand, which could only remind her, again, of Phinnie, but she took back the hand long before it might have warmed. “Miss Clarke! How glad I am to see you! But may I inquire—I must inquire—how is your health?”

“My health has never been better.”

“And your spirits?”

“The same.”

Knox peered at her hard, but whatever he saw seemed to satisfy; he moved the subject along.

“And what report do you make to me on
The
Nun
?”

“Another end would have left me better disposed toward it.”

“You don’t find being generally lamented and honorably buried sufficient reward for a beheading?”

“I do not, sir.”

“Then you must take another book in exchange. You see I would please you, Miss Clarke.”

Did she hear something in that remark? She looked at him and met so clear a gaze she had little trouble reading the thought behind it. A surprise thrill ran through her. A strange town. A strange man. She was only Jane Clarke here, not daughter or sister or intended wife or even neighbor; there was no father to direct her, no family or friend to presume this or that out of any remark she made. But who might this “only Jane Clarke” be? She said, “I wonder what you would recommend, sir, now that you know something of my thoughts on severed heads.”

Knox folded his arms and stared, as if making a great study of her. He disappeared among the shelves. He came back with
The Life & Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner,
a much larger volume than
The
Nun.

Jane turned to the first page, where a subheading informed her that the first chapter would be about Crusoe’s desire to go to sea, his father’s wise counsel against it, and his decision to leave home anyway. Jane said, “Does he live, or is he too generally lamented and honorably buried?”

“Ah, Miss Clarke, you must trust me there.”

“Despite having been given little reason thus far to do so?”

“This is where the trust enters. But it comes with little risk, as I make no extra charge for it.”

“Except of my time.”

“Yes. That I would charge you. And perhaps more of it one day.” If that weren’t quite plain enough he added, “And allow me to assure you, Miss Clarke, once you pass through that door you will be most specifically lamented.”

W
HEN JANE GOT
home she found Aunt Gill in the front room asleep where she sat, the rest of the house settled into a rare and utter quiet—no clattering utensils in the kitchen, no shuffling of furniture or chopping or hammering from any of the rooms or the yard beyond. Jane worked her way down the hall to the keeping room; Martha and Prince stood with their backs to the door, but they didn’t stand close enough together; in the narrow space between them the light caught and flashed on a silver coin changing hands. Jane tiptoed back as she’d come.

As Jane turned for the stairs to put away her book, she heard something smash against the front windowpane. A bird, she suspected. She walked to the window and caught the second and third mud balls as they struck. She peered out and clearly saw the face of the boy from Edes & Gill; of the other two boys she saw only their heels as they ran away.

Aunt Gill called from behind. “Jane? Jane? What is it? What’s the noise?”

“A flock of birds,” Jane said.

THAT NIGHT AFTER THE HOUSE
had quieted a second time, Jane took herself down the stairs, barefooted and silent, to her aunt’s work basket. She removed the key from the needle case, slid through the hall and into the back room. She fitted the key to the desk lock and opened the drawer. The silver glinted as she counted the coins: two, four, seven, nine, ten. She counted again, not believing, and came again to ten. All there.

WHEN THE NEXT MONDAY’S
Gazette
arrived along with the post, Jane made sure to capture it before her aunt could see it, but she needn’t have bothered; there was no correction inside, only more of the same about abuse by the soldiers. But in the collection of letters for her aunt, Jane discovered a lengthy note from her grandfather for Jane, the first part an apology for taking so long to pay Jane the proper attention on her arrival, his excuse being his absence from town on “tedious matters of lesser import.” As a lawyer and representative to the legislature Jane imagined the “tedious matters” that required her grandfather’s attention were of greater rather than lesser import, and was all the more surprised when the second part of his note contained an invitation for Jane and her aunt to dine. As her grandfather made sure to note that the invitation included her brother, few things could have enticed Jane more. Jane’s only worry over the invitation was that as far as she had been able to observe, her aunt seldom if ever left her home. And if Jane’s aunt declined the invitation Jane must likewise decline—her duty lay in attending her aunt.

Jane couldn’t have been more astonished when Aunt Gill sat down and wrote out an acceptance to Grandfather Freeman’s invitation. It caused such a spark of new life in Jane that she found herself unable to contain it; she leaped up from her chair and kissed Aunt Gill’s papery cheek, an act that looked to surprise the aunt as much as it did Jane. But as Jane considered it afterward, she was glad for her impetuous act—Jane now knew that the old woman would not be getting any kind of affection from Prince or Martha, and who else was there within those tall and narrow walls to give it to her? Come to that, who else was there for Jane?

JANE’S GRANDFATHER LIVED ON
Water Street, two blocks south of King. Right up until the minute his chaise arrived to collect them Jane thought Aunt Gill would suffer one or another effect that would prevent her going out, but she called Jane to help her dress at half after eleven, and they were in the chaise only a quarter hour later than they had planned. Jane again expected difficulty from her aunt’s nerves once they were under way, but the old woman appeared more at ease out in the middle of all the noise and traffic than she had been inside her own dwelling. She looked left and right with more interest than alarm and only once cried out to Jane, “Look! There! Does that man carry a musket?”

“A stick,” Jane said, with credible assurance, considering she hadn’t seen the man at all.

The Freeman house was more like the houses Jane was used to in Satucket—wider than it was long and but one and a half stories tall—the only great external oddity was that it was painted white, something Jane had never before seen. Internally it was so sparsely furnished that it gave the look of a temporary abode, and as Jane thought on it, and on her grandmother’s as yet unrealized intention of spending most of her time in Satucket, she saw in it something of the woman’s strength of purpose. Her father might have called it her stubbornness.

The women were brought into the parlor by a middle-aged servant named Mrs. Poole, whose fire-chapped face seemed to beam wildly at them until Jane realized she was comparing those lively features to Martha’s dead ones. Nate had already arrived, and he and Jane’s grandfather were deep in conversation, Nate sitting with eyes wide and lips parted as if drinking his grandfather’s words as they came. Exactly what her grandfather talked of Jane couldn’t say, as he broke off as the women entered the room, but she guessed it to be political by its tone.

Mrs. Poole collected the men and led the way to the table. As they went Jane again took note of empty walls and cupboards, but the meal that had been set out was far from bare: the traditional plain pudding to start, but followed with soup, fish, roast beef, greens, bread, cheese, butter, jam. Aunt Gill delivered to Jane her second surprise of the day by eating much of everything, so much so that it made Jane look the laggard. Her grandfather was just urging the beef at her a second time when Mrs. Poole ushered in another visitor.

“Mr. Otis,” she announced, and Jane stopped chewing. The visitor was perhaps as tall and broad as Henry Knox, but his reputation lengthened and widened him so that Jane was surprised at the ease with which he glided through the door. Even Jane knew of Otis, partly from the invectives her father frequently delivered against him, and partly from the praise her brother heaped on him. It was Otis who had first raised the question of man’s natural rights to such things as life and liberty and property, Otis who had written pamphlet after pamphlet denouncing the policies of Parliament, Otis again who had spoken out as moderator at town meeting and representative in the legislature on the tyranny of Britain’s taxation without representation.

Jane looked at the visitor as carefully as she might in all politeness, expecting to see either god or devil in him, but she saw neither thing. He greeted her grandfather with a smile as easy and comfortable as an old shoe; he tipped his head to Nate; he gave Aunt Gill an elegant bow; but when he was introduced to Jane his eyes drew down on her like one of the gulls that forever hovered over the herring in the millstream. There were several empty seats at table, but he pulled out the one beside Jane and sat down.

“Would this be the Miss Jane Clarke of the affair at the corner of Exchange and King?” he asked.

“ ’Tis,” Nate answered for her. “But at least it taught her to keep wide of the soldiers.”

Jane said, “Or the boys.”

“The boys!”

“I’d prefer a ‘good-day’ to a mud ball.
Or
to a slander in the paper.”

The herring gull’s eyes fixed harder.

“I should say it stops short of
slander,
” Jane’s grandfather put in. “An unsolicited greeting by a stranger might well be called ‘accosting.’ And you were in fact ‘brought to the ground’ by whatever means it happened, and it would not have happened had you not been so ‘accosted.’ And we don’t in fact know what might have happened if Mr. Molineux hadn’t come upon the scene and assisted you home.”

Otis, at last, removed his eyes from Jane. “All very well, my friend, but I must side with Miss Clarke here. The soldiers in this town have been treated abominably.”

The table went still.

Otis went on. “Admit it, Freeman. Mud throwing and name-calling are one thing, but the courts—any flimsy charge against a soldier upheld, outrageous fines put down—criminal! The law must not be conscripted to serve one particular cause. To lose the law is to lose the fight.”

“With respect, sir,” Nate said, “I say when a people are under an illegal occupation they must fight with what they’ve got to hand.”

Aunt Gill said, “And what have we got to hand but a few stories in the paper?”

Jane looked at her aunt in surprise. Another
we.

“We have the people, Aunt,” Nate answered her. “Thirty thousand from all the outlying towns, ready to march at a minute’s notice, and all it takes to call them is a flaming barrel of pitch on the beacon hill.”

“But what use thirty thousand unarmed people?”

“Oh, we have arms,” Nate said softly. “We have arms.”

Jane said, “So you would pick up these arms and shoot down the patient and forbearing Mr. White, all for bidding me good-day?”

Again, Otis looked at her, and Jane saw in the look something she would not dare to call admiration but might certainly call acknowledgment, perhaps even endorsement. How strange, she thought, that of all in the room, Otis, the voice of the rebellion, should be the only one to feel for the sentry with her. But as Jane looked at the man again she saw something else. She saw he was not at ease with this feeling. She saw the war in him.

“No thinking man can wish for armed insurrection,” he said. “The soldiers must be ordered out by official decree, but such decree will only come once their presence is seen to decrease, not increase the peace.”

“The king has already agreed to our petition to recall the royal governor as an enemy of the people,” Jane’s grandfather said.

“He’d better, or we’ll hang the governor as traitor,” Nate said.

Otis pushed back his chair so abruptly it knocked into Jane’s. “I must go,” he said. “I cannot stay. I cannot. I must. I
must
go.” He dashed into the hall; seconds later they all heard the outer door open and close.

The table fell as silent and still as the mill wheel in an ice storm. Jane looked to her grandfather for some hint of what had just happened, but he was sitting as motionless as the rest, eyes fixed on the hall door, as if willing his friend to reappear. She looked at Nate, but he’d dropped his head and begun jabbing at the fish bones on his plate. It was some time before Jane bothered to notice Aunt Gill. She’d gone white with fatigue, and her hands trembled as she reached for her teacup; no surprise then, that she dropped it on her plate and it shattered. One of the shards must have caught her wrist as it went down, for a bright slash of red sprang up on it. Jane leaped up and went to work on the wound with her napkin, but it was her grandfather who proved more useful, coming around with a large dose of brandy. The pink began to return to her aunt’s cheeks, but it was clear to Jane—belatedly clear to Jane—it was time for them to go.

Jane’s grandfather called for the carriage. The solicitations and good-byes and thank-yous went back and forth in their usual course, but at last Jane had her aunt secured inside; she’d just put her own foot to the step when someone caught her arm. She backed up and whirled. Her brother tipped his head as close to hers as his hat would allow and spoke at her through a tight jaw.

“I want to know what you think you’re doing. I want to know what you’re up to with that soldier.”

“The soldier!”

“You keep to Paine.”

“Paine! You think yourself our father now?”

“
Me
our father! ’Tis you takes his side. But you hear me, Jane. You keep away from that soldier. The lot of them.” His hand tightened and released. He strode off.

Jane stood on the street, numbed. Who was this person who had been her brother? What had he become? What was this rage in him? She gripped the side of the carriage and swung herself in, stewing in her own heat, only to find Aunt Gill slumped in the corner, as if she lacked the strength to sit. All Jane’s anger washed away under the cold flood of guilt. Jane’s selfish desire for an outing and her aunt’s unselfish desire to please her had caused the old woman to tax herself past her endurance; indeed, it had been Jane’s annoyance at the talk over the sentry that had caused the conversation to grow overheated and overlong, draining her aunt’s limited reserve. And what, after all, had any of it to do with Jane? What had she been thinking in even going to the newspaper? What if the correction, along with her name and address, had actually been printed in the paper? What other than mud balls might she have drawn to her aunt’s door? How could she have risked such a thing after all her aunt’s explicit warnings on the subject, after all her kindness?

The carriage jounced hard on a curb, and Jane put out her arm to cushion the old woman’s frail body. The jolt roused Aunt Gill and added another regret to Jane’s list, or perhaps this one was to be laid to her grandfather, as there Aunt Gill launched into a nasty rill of gossip so unlike her that Jane could only blame it on the brandy.

“Perhaps you don’t know, Jane, that the great rebel Otis’s wife is high Tory; she curtain-lectures him like a schoolboy. Whenever he speaks out against the king in her presence she denies him her bed chamber. And perhaps you don’t know either, Jane, that Mrs. Otis has secretly arranged an engagement for her daughter to a captain in the British army. Imagine a British captain in the great patriot’s family! But I forget! I forget to tell you! How very rich the wife is!
And
beautiful! But you make your bed, you lie in it. Alone!” And there Aunt Gill descended into such an alarming cascade of giggles that Jane began to fear an hysteria.

A long carriage ride later they reached their home. Concerned about her aunt’s unsteadiness, Jane called through the door for Prince and Martha, but neither appeared. After an ordeal full of more silliness than unsteadiness, Jane finally secured the old woman in her bed and was able to climb the stairs to her own. She made the usual preparation for sleep, but even as she did so she knew how fruitless the act of closing her eyes would be. She lay between her sheets like a chastised child, staring into the night shadows, repeating every one of her brother’s words, burning again over every one, but especially over three of them.
Keep to Paine.
What did he know of it? What right did he have to speak to her of it?