The Windflower (3 page)

Tightening her embroidery hoop. Aunt April said in a gloomy voice, "1 can't think why your father would want to have you visit Thursday. Thursday! He's never been one for visits on Thursday that 1 can remember." She threaded pink silk on her needle in a single swift stab. "And I can't understand why your brother wouldn't stay for supper. Such a
sudden
boy." A swirl of her forefinger knotted the thread. "I know what it is. I offered him tea. He despises me for serving tea. Sometimes I think he despises all civilized things."

Merry was caught in a churning muddle of embarrassment and conflicting loyalties. "Oh, no. Aunt April. I'm quite sure that . . . that is, I know tea is your very favorite drink, and ... if we are to be free in the United States, that means people are free to drink what they want, surely."

"That's not the point of view of Mrs. Patterson."

Merry set down her pillowcase. "From the Society of Patriotic Ladies?"

"Oh, yes indeed. She was here this afternoon, dispensing recipes for drinks that might be substituted for imported teas.
Liberty
tea, for instance, can be made by boiling loosestrife. Have we any in the cow field? And one can make do with strawberry leaves, raspberry leaves, or leaves from the currant plant."

Merry went to her aunt, taking her aunt's hand in her own. "I'm sorry. Aunt April. Did she . . . was she condescending?"

Her aunt smiled wryly at Merry. "Dreadfully." She stared at the black square of the window, and her smile faded. "A goose fanner's daughter, at that. She has nowhere from which to condescend. In England that woman wouldn't have been received into our home!" April's faded blue eyes were melancholy. "That was another life. England . . . cool mists; the grass as fragrant and sweet as winter-green candies. Our home, with deep rooms scented of beeswax and fresh flowers, and filled with friends in bright silks. Oh, you'd laugh if you saw how we used to dress, with hairpieces piled in stacks on our heads, sometimes more than three feet high, stuffed with cotton bunting and doused with white powder until we looked like a crowd of grandmamas. Monstrous, the satirists called it, but that was the fashion. My, we thought we looked like something—'prodigious elegant' was what we used to say. 1 don't believe I had a single care in the world." April returned Merry's handclasp. "Oh, how I wish I could have those things for you. not this savage land of heat and mosquitoes, and fathers who visit only once a year. And brothers so overcome with the heat that all they want to do is make a war." Aunt April shook her head, her lips tight, the skin on her cheeks drawn. "What could be important enough to make a man shoot at another? For the United States to be warring with England—the idea is absurd. We
are
English. We speak English, we eat English food, the very gowns on our bodies are woven on English looms."

Yes, indeed. That was certainly true. And it was a mark of shame for Merry to walk through the streets wearing British cotton while loyal Americans had switched proudly to coarse homespun. It was useless to try to explain that kind of thing to her aunt. Instead Merry said gently, "Americans aren't only English, Aunt April. We're Dutch, French, German, Spanish—"

"Criminals," said April, "malcontents, and religious fanatics." She thrust her needle into the pink crossbar of her sampler's italic letter
A.
"There are times, Merry Patricia, when I feel I could give my two arms if only I could take you with me and travel back to England."

CHAPTER TWO

"What did Henry Cork do then?" asked Jason, twisting around in the jouncing wagon's bench beside Carl and toward Merry's shadowed form in the wagon interior.

"Nothing that night," she said. "Aunt April shut the window and ignored him. The next morning he was up at sunrise, slipped out to the orchard, picked every last one of the apples on our trees, and passed them out to whoever walked past the fence. And do you know why he said he did it? Because he was tired of cider and apple pies."

Jason laughed just as the wagon passed over a rut and snapped the sound back into his throat. One of the marionettes that Carl used to cover his spying swung on the wagon ribs and knocked its pine legs into the back of Merry's head. Fending off puppet feet, she studied her cousin's rocking silhouette. He was touching twenty, and adolescence had finally ceased to ravage his complexion. The waves in his sandy hair were looser, his chin more square, his freckles as numerous, and his sarcastic tongue, so she had discovered, quite as sharp as it had ever been.

His sister, Sally, was two years his junior and just as sandy and freckled, but without the nervous energy that had made Jason such a difficult child. She was thin as a sapling, with wide-set gray eyes and a nose that Jason had broken by accident on her ninth birthday with an errant swing of his cricket bat. Only last month she had become engaged to a hell-for-leather young captain in the Navy.

Since Merry and Carl had met Jason and Sally at the coaching inn at Point Patience, they had been nice to Merry. Too nice. Jason was making a painfully obvious effort to rid his speech of swear words, and several times before the day's end she had noticed Sally staring at her with the friendly sympathy accorded someone who is young and easily shocked. Merry, at a loss to know what she did that engendered this kind of response, had been trying particularly hard to hide the worst of her shyness.

Through an open flap in the wagon's canvas roof Merry could see the stars and the high, moon-silvered clouds passing through, making them wink in sequence. The feeble blue starlight fell -across Sally, who knelt beside her on the wagon floor, busily stuffing feathers and straw into a square of homespun.

"1 think
Cork
is taking miserable advantage," said Sally. "Why doesn't your aunt give him the heave-ho?"

"She tries. Each time she's said 'That's it, get out,' he's developed back pains and taken to his bed. Aunt April says she doesn't doubt that if we and our maidservants got together to throw him out, he'd likely lie on our front walk moaning and railing until we half died of shame."

Carl said tartly, "Aunt April will never get rid of him, take my word on it. She's too addicted to having him around to complain about." He pulled the team around a corner and added over his shoulder, "How are you coming, Sal? We're nearing target."

"Done," she answered him. "I'm ready to pin it on. Don't turn around again, either of you. Right, Merry, up with your skirts."

"Are you absolutely sure that this is necessary?" said Merry doubtfully.

"My word as a gentleman on it," Jason said, staring carefully forward. "Trust us, there's a good girl."

The idea for the addition to Merry's costume had come within minutes of meeting Jason and Sally. Jason had looked Merry up and down in her disguise of sloppy black felt hat and faded calico and then said, "Carl, are you off your head?
That's
not good enough!"

Merry had sat alone on the bench seat of the unhitched wagon while her brother and cousins stood off in the coach yard and argued in low, intent voices. The upshot had been that they had decided, between them, to buy a piece of cheap bedding and reshape it to pillow Merry's stomach into an imaginary pregnancy. Merry had stilled the horrified protests that rose to her lips, afraid of being thought a prude, and more afraid yet that Jason's objection to her appearance might have stemmed from his thinking she looked too young.

There was another jolt that heaved the women against the side of the wagon. "Carl, slow down, will you?" called Sally, "or I'll turn Merry into a pincushion. Here, Merry—you hold the pin papers and hand them to me, head first, please."

"All right," said Merry, gamely resigned to her fate. "What size do you want first—minikins or middlings?"

Sally finished her work as the wagon made a last descent and skated around a fast curve onto the crisp gravel beach. To the east a flat tongue of land stretched into the black crashing sea, and at its base sat a battered tavern, reminding Merry of the biblical parable about the man who built his house upon the sand. The old frame building seemed to be participating in the party that was going on within it. From the gray look of it, it had joined in many such in the past. A square board sign saying The Musket and Muskrat, illustrated by crude sketches of same, clacked and squeaked in the wind on its rusted hinges, and a number of shingles, the livelier ones, clapped rhythmically to the skittering fingers of the breeze. As Merry watched, one of them let loose and slid from the roof to sail into the darkness like a bat. Through the dingy windows, which let squares of cheery yellow light escape, could be glimpsed a roiling scenario of flailing fiddles, stomping legs, flying skirts, and tilting flagons.

Carl jumped from the wagon to hitch his team in the crowded horse shed while Merry climbed with Sally out of the back.

Prodding the fake hump of stomach into place, Sally said teasingly, "Ugh! Is that realistic!"

Behind them Jason said tersely, "Let's hope that's the common attitude, shall we? Sally, you know what to do. Merry, keep your eyes cast down and cling timidly to my arm. If you catch anyone smiling at you, don't, for God's sake, smile back."

"And Merry, try to walk awkwardly," said Sally, mimicking her brother's tone as they started toward the door, "like a woman about to give birth. Yes, that will do perfectly." They both laughed— Merry hadn't changed her walk at all.

"Oh, lordy, Sal, don't make her laugh like that or we'll be in the soup," Jason said.

"Why?" asked Merry. "Aren't women allowed to laugh in taverns?"

"Not when they're as fetching as you are." Jason pinched her lightly on the cheek. "Shush now. And act cowed."

She looked startled and then felt like an idiot. The amazing novelty of a compliment brought the blood running high in her cheeks as she stepped over the threshold and saw her first of the smugglers' lair.

Earlier in the evening the floor sand had probably been swept in a fanciful pattern, and perhaps the smoke from the clay pipes of the patrons had made matching idle curlicues in the air. But now the sand had been spread into an anonymous covering by the shuffling of many feet, and the curling smoke had faded into a bone-colored haze that smarted the eyes.

Whatever order the crude tables and chairs had begun the evening in was well broken, as were some of the hapless pieces of furniture. The air was alive with the reek of sweat, fish, and roast corn, and a roar of conversation that nearly overwhelmed the music from the fiddles and squeeze box that enlivened the near corner of the room. There were a few. not many, women scattered among the rough-clothed men in the crowd, and from the look of the river peddlers, bullwhackers, and men of the sea that were sitting, standing, and chatting, one might guess that they would have been as comfortable pulling, pushing, lifting, shouting, and breaking and entering. A plank laid over two tobacco casks formed the bar, and behind it was a stair to the sleeping room with a sign above it that read: Five Only to a Bed. No Dogs Allowed Upstairs. Organ-grinders to Sleep in the Washhouse.

The host was a skinny, energetic Belgian immigrant with a grizzled red and brown beard and a bald pate. He joined them right away, clapping Carl on the arm and smiling genially at Jason. In thick accents he said, "Hey, you're the fellows that do the puppets, right? Glad to see you! Are you going to make me a show tonight? Good. Real good! You can put the stage by the fireplace, hey?" He winked. "When folks come over to watch, they get real hot and thirsty and soak up my good wine like sponges. They have plenty to drink; they put plenty in the hat when you collect! Good for me; good for you! Ha, ha! Easier for these fellows to make it home without that heavy money in their pockets, hey?"

Fascinated, Merry watched as her coconspirators played their parts with a brisk competence that stilled her own worries. How well they knew what they were doing. Jase and Carl in short jackets and flat-brimmed hats with frayed red and blue streamers, and Sally with her hair flattened under a triangle of paisley wool, frizzled ends lank with hair oil pulled forward to straggle over her gamin face.

Sally pulled Merry to sit with her at a heavy gray table near the fire and gave her a cozy grin, motioning toward Jason when he returned from the wagon with the unwieldy shadow-box puppet theater. Carl followed, holding two puppets aloft in salute. The fiddles stopped scraping, and the crowd gave a cheer of comfortable appreciation. The act was a popular attraction.

The puppets were nearly three feet in height. The first was an aristocrat with an exaggerated sneer painted on his lips and dressed in absurdly foppish clothes with glass jewelry; the other puppet was a revolutionary, outfitted in sansculotte rags, a cockade, and a wide, anarchistic grin. They were attached to long handles by very active springs and had rolling joints at the elbows and knees. Merry felt like laughing just looking at them.

Jason talked the part of the aristocrat, in a high comical lisp, and Carl made the sansculotte the essence of hearty vulgarity. It was a routine they had developed as schoolboys, with many refinements since, and like every good puppet show, it was a delight for any crowd, children and adults. The sansculotte would bellow a republican anthem, and the aristocrat would take a swipe at him, and then the aristocrat would try to sing "God Save the King" and the sansculotte's musical sensibilities would be violently offended. And at the end they were both yelling their respective anthems and trying to turn each other into splinters. The place was in an uproar, and when the play ended with the sansculotte shouting the aristocrat into a dead swoon, the applause was long and loud, and Carl and Jason were surrounded by backslappers.