Time Enough for Drums (3 page)

He excused himself. “Jem, for heaven’s sake, why are you up and about on a night like this?”

“I must talk to you.”

“If it’s about tomorrow, you know I said you could come along.”

“Not about tomorrow.”

“What then?”

I moved farther back into the hall, lowered my voice. “Dan, it will soon be ten o’clock.”

“And did you come downstairs to tell me that?”

“No. I came to tell you that someone is waiting in the barn to see you. He wants to enlist.”

In the candlelight he searched my face. “What are you telling me? Anyone who wants to see me can come to the house.”

“If I tell you his name, you’ll know why he doesn’t dare.”

“Then will you tell me? Or do we stand here playing games?”

“It’s Raymond Moore.”

“Moore? A Quaker? Are you daft, Jem? The Moores would never allow—”

“That’s why he’s in the barn, Dan.”

He stood in silence as the enormity of what I’d said embraced him. “Raymond Moore! I’d never have guessed. He never said a word to me!”

“He came to me today in the street and begged me to
get word to you. He says he’s been praying on his decision for weeks. His mind is made up, he says.”

“Well, I’m glad
his
mind is made up. But where does that put me? His parents will never forgive me, and I’m about to ask for Betsy’s hand.”

“He says if you won’t take him, he’ll enlist elsewhere. And that Betsy won’t blame you. If his mind is made up, mightn’t his parents feel better about it if he served with You?”

“You certainly can make things sound simple.”

“Raymond says it isn’t seemly that others should fight for his land. Things are simple to him.”

He sighed. “A good man. I’m honored he wants to sign on with me.”

“You still need men. You said so yourself.”

“I’ve seventy privates. I need six more. Since October when the Provincial Congress authorized a second battalion from this colony, it seems like half the county has knocked on our door in the middle of the night. But this is the first time I’ve had a recruit hiding in our barn like a runaway slave.”

“Will you take him, Dan?”

“I’ll talk with him first. Now go to bed.”

“Dan, there’s one more thing. Do you think Mr. Reid will tell about the musket?”

Over the rim of my candlelight he scowled at me. “He gave his word that he wouldn’t. That’s good enough for me. It should be good enough for you.”

“I don’t trust him, Dan. He’s a Tory. How did he know Fitch was making gunlocks at the mill?”

“It’s common knowledge in town. The Methodist Society is threatening to dismiss Fitch because he was doing it on
the Sabbath. John is our friend, Jem. He would do nothing to hurt any of us. And you’re only making it worse for yourself by provoking him.”

“Is everything all right, Dan?” John Reid came toward us. It was not so dark that I couldn’t see the amusement in his eyes at the sight of me in my flannel nightdress and blanket.

“If you two are plotting the overthrow of George the Third, you should at least do it by the warm fire.”

“Jem was just going to bed,” Dan said firmly.

“And I was just leaving.” John put on his cloak. “Good night again, Jemima,” he said, bowing. Dan walked him to the door. “I expect you to be your usual saucy self for your lessons on Friday,” he said as he went out.

John Reid’s words about Dan and me plotting to overthrow George the Third danced around in my head as I lay in bed. Sleep would not come. I lay watching the light snowflakes swirling against my window and seeing Reid’s brown eyes filled with mockery. And lying there in the dark, it came to me. Ever since he had come home from Boston in September, Reid’s mockery had boasted an air of assurance, as if he were privy to special information. There was nothing about him at all to indicate the rejected lover. It was too bad he hadn’t married Becky. They deserved each other.

“Jemima, are you asleep?”

Mother stood in the doorway, a candle in one hand, a bundle in the other. “No, Mama, I haven’t been able to.”

“I heard you moving about. I’ve been lying awake myself, so I wanted to give you this to take to your sister tomorrow.”

“Are you sending Becky a present after the way she’s treated you?”

“Jem, Becky is still my daughter, no matter what she’s done.”

Had I done half of what Becky had done, I would have
been soundly punished for it. Of course, Grandfather Henshaw was a Tory, which was probably why she preferred to live with him. There he was, Mother’s own father, and he and Mother barely spoke. They’d been at odds for months before fighting broke out up at Lexington, last spring. Right before that Becky had gone to Boston to visit Mother’s sister, Aunt Grace. Another Tory. And when the fighting started in April, Becky just stayed on.

It was Aunt Grace who introduced her to the British officer, Lieutenant Oliver Blakely. And within weeks of meeting him, Becky was writing home saying she would marry. As if he were going to melt away on her in the summer heat.

David and I were recovering from measles, so we couldn’t go. Dan and John Reid accompanied Mother, who said, seige or no seige, she wasn’t going to be kept from her daughter’s wedding.

The British held Boston, the harbor, and a few islands. The Americans settled in across the Charles River. And neither side could get to the other. Dan told me that only spies and travelers could get through.

Boston had been awful, Mother told us when she came back. The drought, the drain on provisions, and the heat had been intolerable. And there was fear of sickness, dysentery, and distemper. She worried about Becky for months. Then in November Becky came home to Trenton, leaving her husband in Boston, and went to live with Grandfather Henshaw.

Mother set down her candle and bundle and came to smooth my quilt. “It’s only homespun for a cloak, Jem.”

“Silk is more to Becky’s taste.”

“Well, silk has gone the way of our tea. Some of the finest women in Trenton are wearing homespun these days.”

“Patriot women. And that leaves Becky out.”

“Jem, I want no politics spoken between members of this family if it sets them apart.”

I was about to say that Becky and I were already set apart and it hadn’t taken a war to do it, but mother continued. ‘I want your promise that you’ll act kindly toward Becky tomorrow.”

“Mama, you know we never got along.”

“I know you never tried. That’s what I know.”

“
She
was the one who provoked me when I shared this room with her. She chided me constantly.”

“She was trying to teach you to be a lady.”

“Well, if it means courting one man and marrying another right under his nose, I want no part of it.”

Mama smiled. “I didn’t know you had such sympathy for John Reid.”

“I hate John Reid.”

“You hate too easily, Jemima. John is an excellent tutor and he’s fond of you.”

“And that’s why he brings his birch rod with him and sets it behind the door in Papa’s study, I suppose.”

“I have it on good authority that he’s never used it in his school yet. The sight of it alone makes the boys behave.”

“And so why does he bring it to our house?”

“He comes here directly from school. He brings all his things.”

“And he isn’t above setting it down with a flourish.”

Mother’s round face was serene, as always. “Jem, there is no more decent and gentle a man than John Reid. If your father and I weren’t sure of that, he wouldn’t be your tutor.”

“Mama, how can you
say
that? He’s a Tory! He’s sneaky and mean. He told father about David being at the mill this afternoon, and he’s mean to me when he teaches.”

“Could it be that he’s mean, as you say, Jem, because he can’t control you? You ran off on him this afternoon.”

I looked down at my quilt. “Did he tell you that, Mama?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes, but that’s not the whole story. I meant to be back at lessons. I just lost my sense of time.”

“He might be trying to teach you a sense of time, Jem. And responsibility. As well as sums and French. Did that ever occur to you?”

I was silent for a moment. “Mama, I only know that I don’t like being tutored by a Tory. And when I went with Father last week to see the militia drill, Father said this quarrel we have with the king isn’t likely to be made up without bloodshed. And John Reid’s on the side of the king.”

“Jem, do you remember last week when you told me you would never marry because, under this law of ours, once a woman marries she ceases to exist as a person? Do you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember what else you said?”

“I said I’d like to exist as a person for a while if it was all right with everybody.”

“And when I told you that I never felt I’d ceased to exist as a person, married to your father, did you believe me?”

“Oh yes, Mama. You’re more of a person than anybody I know!”

“Then believe me about this.” She got up. “Believe me when I say that John Reid is a good man. People are much more than they appear on the outside. Why, when I was in Boston I even started to like Oliver Blakely. I found him to be very pleasant and considerate.”

She kissed me and left. Sometime I just didn’t understand
Mother. It was she who organized the Patriot women in town to boycott imported textiles and make their own liberty teas with sassafras or sage or strawberry. On one occasion she got the women to bring their spinning wheels to the courthouse yard where they worked spools of flax for a full day.

But talk of war or say something against someone she cherished, even if that person was a Tory, and she acted as if it had nothing to do with the war at all.

“Your mama say you’re to be up right quick. Your mama say she never see such a lazy girl in the morning. Dan’l be out of the house on business two hours already.”

I opened my eyes to see the sun streaming through my window and Lucy standing over me. “Your mama say breakfast be ready soon and your father be in from the shop any minute. And you know he don’t tolerate no latecomers at the table. You be hearin’ me?”

“I hear you, Lucy.”

“Then sit up so’s I know you’re awake. Your mama say I’m not to come down and leave you to go back to sleep.”

Lucy and her husband, Cornelius, were slaves, although you’d never know it the way they bossed us children around. A lot of families in Trenton had slaves. Even the Moores. But Mother was teaching ours to read and write. And Father was apprenticing Cornelius to Benjamin Smith to learn harnessmaking. They intended to set Cornelius and Lucy free one day.

It cost two hundred pounds to set a slave free, and they must be guaranteed an income of twenty pounds a year in
earnings. But Father was determined to do it. My parents had endless discussions about it.

“You sleepin’?”

“No, Lucy, I’m saying my prayers.”

“You bein’ blasphemous, is what you doin’. And I aim to tell your mama if’n you don’t get yourself out of bed this minute.”

I sighed and pushed back the quilt and sat up. She stood, slim and erect and elegant in her homespun clothes. “I’m going to tell Mother you’re slipping back into your careless ways of speaking if you tell her I was being blasphemous, Lucy.”

“Put your feet on the floor and git up.”

“The floor is cold.”

She poured some water into the china washing basin, put another log on the fire, and handed me a piece of flannel. “Start washin’.”

“You can read almost all of
Poor Richard’s Almanac
, Lucy. And verses in the Bible that even I have trouble with. Mama works so hard with you. You can speak properly and you should at all times.”

“John Reid … he works hard with
you
, too,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“You don’t ’preciate what he does for you. You ran off yesterday when you was supposed to be learnin’.”

“And so what if I did, Lucy?”

“So you’re nobody to be tellin’ Lucy what she should do. There’s scented soap from your father’s shop. Use it.”

“Why do I get scented soap today?”

“Special. So you can smell sweet for your sister.”

“I don’t care a shilling’s worth about smelling sweet for her.”

“There’s a new blue ribbon there, too. Your mama say
you’re to wear it with your new printed English gown.”

“I told you, Lucy, I don’t care about your fine Miss Rebeckah.”

“She ain’t no miss no more. And she never was mine, anyway.”

“She always was. You liked her manners. And you don’t like me because I’m not prim and proper like her.”

“I said start washin’.”

“If I were Father, I’d never set you free, Lucy, do you know that? Never!”

She glided toward the door. “Hurry up,” she said, “before the water gits cold.”

Everything worth talking about in our family was discussed at mealtime. Breakfast was particularly noteworthy for this. When I got down to the kitchen the family was already assembled and eating.

We ate breakfast in the kitchen at the long oaken table. Cornelius had recently put a fresh coat of whitewash on the walls, and the usual assortment of dried herbs hung from the beams. The windows were without curtains, letting in plenty of light. The big cupboard in the corner held all of Mother’s Delft plates, pewter, porcelain, and wooden bowls. The eight-foot fireplace was trimmed with blue and white tiles Father had imported from Holland, and there hung the oversized teakettle and brass and copper chafing dishes and all the other equipment Mother and Lucy needed for the constant cooking. It was a very friendly kitchen. But the look Father cast me as I slid into my place at the table was decidedly unfriendly.

“How long have you lived in this house, Jemima Emerson?”

“It will soon be sixteen years.”

“And have you noticed, over those sixteen years, that breakfast in this house has always been at eight?”

“Yes, Father, I’ve noticed.”

“Is this morning an exception?”

“I was dressing for my trip today. It took extra time.”

He sipped his hot coffee and put a generous share of butter on his bread. My father’s face, with his wisps of hair tucked behind his ears and his spectacles and finely chisled features, was the very image of a mild and loving parent. But he could manage sternness very nicely when the occasion warranted it.