The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “ ’Tis your man Bertrand’s fault,” Burlingame answered and, laughing at Ebenezer’s bewilderment and surprise, confessed that when he had dispatched Bertrand from Captain Mitchell’s to St. Mary’s City back in September, he had charged the valet not only to retrieve the Laureate’s trunk but if possible to claim it in the guise of the Laureate himself, the better to throw John Coode off the scent while they made their way to Malden. “To this end I rashly loaned him your commission—”

  “My commission! Then ’tis true you stole it from me back in England!”

  Burlingame shrugged. “ ’Twas I authored it, was’t not? Besides, would it not have gone worse with you had Pound been certain of your identity? In any case, there was some peril in your man’s assignment, and ’twas my thought, if Coode should kill or kidnap him with the paper on his person, he might think you yourself were an impostor—’twould have spun his compass for fair! Howbeit, Bertrand could not rest at fetching your trunk, it seems, but must parade St. Mary’s City as the Laureate and declare his post in every inn and tavern.”

  Thus it was, Burlingame declared, that on reaching the port of St. Mary’s some time ago, Anna had been given to think her brother was in the town and had disembarked in quest of him. “I myself heard naught of this until old Andrew came to Captain Mitchell’s; he had learnt in London of my whereabouts, and, like you, thinks Anna hath come to be my wife. But he believes thou’rt party to the scheme as well and are pimping us in some wise: when he learns the state of things at Malden, today or tomorrow, he’ll assume you’ve fled with the twain of us to Pennsylvania, where fly all fugitives from responsibility—the more readily, inasmuch as neither Anna nor the false Laureate hath been seen or heard of since she landed.” He sucked in the corner of his mouth. “ ’Twas my intent to stay with Andrew, disguised as Timothy Mitchell, the better to temper his wrath and learn his connection with Lord Baltimore; but so vain hath been my search for parentage in the world, and so much rancor hath that search engendered, ’twas no longer safe to play that role.”

  Ebenezer asked what were his tutor’s present plans.

  “We’ll put ashore together at St. Mary’s,” Burlingame said. “You then enquire in public places for news of Anna or Eben Cooke, and I shall search alone for Coode.”

  “At once? Is’t not more urgent to find my sister ere some harm befall her?”

  “ ’Tis but two paths to a single end,” replied Burlingame. “No man knows more than Coode of what transpires in Maryland, and for aught we know he may have made prisoners of them both. Besides which, if I can win his confidence, he may abet us in regaining your estate. ’Twill be a joy to him, after all, to hear the Laureate of Maryland is his ally!”

  “Not so swiftly,” Ebenezer protested. “I may be disabused of my faith in Baltimore, but I’ve sworn no oaths of loyalty to John Coode. In any case, as you well know, I ne’er was Laureate—and even had I been, I’d be no longer. Look at this.” He drew the ledger from his coat and showed Burlingame the finished Marylandiad, which in view of its antipanegyric tone he had retitled The Sot-Weed Factor. “Call’t a clumsy piece if you will,” he challenged. “ ’Tis honest nonetheless, and may spare others my misfortunes.”

  “What’s full of heart may be bare of art,” Burlingame asserted with interest, “—and vice-versa.” He held the ledger open against the rail and read the work closely several times while the Pilgrim ran down the Bay to Point Lookout, where the Potomac River meets Chesapeake Bay. Although he made no comments either favorable or unfavorable, when the time came for them to transfer to the lighter for St. Mary’s City he insisted that the poem be forwarded aboard the Pilgrim to Ben Bragg, at the Sign of the Raven in Paternoster Row.

  “But he’ll destroy it!” exclaimed the poet. “D’you recall how I came by this ledger back in March?”

  “He’ll not destroy it,” Burlingame assured him. “Bragg is obliged to me in ways I shan’t describe.”

  There was no time to ponder the proposal; with some misgivings Ebenezer allowed his former tutor to entrust The Sot-Weed Factor to the bark’s captain, who also refunded the balance of his fare to England, and the two men ferried upriver to St. Mary’s City.

  3

  A Colloquy Between Ex-Laureates of Maryland, Relating Duly the Trials of Miss Lucy Robotham and Concluding With an Assertion Not Lightly Matched for Its Implausibility

  NOT LONG AFTER HIS arrival in the Province some months previously, Governor Francis Nicholson had declared his intention to move the seat of Maryland’s government from St. Mary’s City, which was unhappily associated with Lord Baltimore, the Jacobean and Carolingian kings, and the Roman Catholic Church, to Anne Arundel Town on the Severn River, which enjoyed the double merit of a central location on the Chesapeake and an altogether Protestant history. Although the actual transfer of government records and the official change of the capital’s name from Anne Arundel Town to Annapolis were not to be effected until the end of February, the consequences of the decision were noticeable already in St. Mary’s City: few people were on the streets; the capitol and other public buildings were virtually deserted; and some inns and private houses were abandoned or closed and boarded up.

  Before the arched doorway of the Statehouse Burlingame said, “ ’Twill hasten our search if we move in separate directions; you enquire at the wharves and taverns hereabouts, and I shall do likewise farther in the town. At dusk we’ll meet here and go to supper—God grant your sister will be dining with us too!”

  Ebenezer agreed to the proposal and to the wish as well, for though the prospect of confronting Anna, after Burlingame’s revelations, was a disconcerting one, yet he feared for her safety alone in the Province.

  “But if perchance we find her,” he asked with a little smile, “what then?”

  “Why, haply Coode will find some way to snatch Cooke’s Point from William Smith, and then, when Andrew hath returned in peace to England, the three of us will make our home in Malden. Or haply we’ll fly to Pennsylvania, as your father suspects already: Anna, if she’ll have me, shall become Mrs. Nicholas Lowe, and you, under a nom de plume, poet laureate to William Penn! ’Tis a wondrous tonic for defeat, to murther an old self and beget a new! But we must hatch our chickens ere we count ’em.”

  The two then separated, Burlingame heading inland and Ebenezer towards an inn not far from where they stood. Upon entering he found a dozen or more townspeople eating and drinking and could not at once muster courage enough to make his inquiries. He had not the small, prerequisite effrontery of the journalist or canvasser, for one thing; for another, he was still too confounded by events of the immediate past to know clearly how he should feel about his present position. When was it he had finished The Sot-Weed Factor in his room at Malden? Only the previous evening, though it seemed a fortnight past; yet since that time he had been given to assimilate no fewer than twelve perfectly astounding facts, each warranting the most careful contemplations and modification of his position, and some requiring immediate and drastic action:

  He had become the indentured servant of Malden’s master.

  His father was in Maryland and en route to Cooke’s Point.

  His wife Susan Warren was in fact his Joan Toast of London.

  But she was a slave to opium, a victim of the pox, and a whore to the Indians of Dorchester.

  Moreover she had been raped by the Moor Boabdil, and almost by Ebenezer himself.

  He had in deserting her committed the most thoroughly and least equivocally dishonorable act of his entire life—indeed, the very first of any magnitude, not counting his thwarted ill intentions aboard the Cyprian and at Captain Mitchell’s manor.

  Lord Baltimore might not at all represent, as he had supposed, the very essence of Good, and Coode the essence of Evil, but vice versa, if Burlingame spoke truly; and Andrew might well be party to an enormously vicious plot.

  His tutor Burlingame had been, perhaps, a loyal friend after all, and was inflamed with passion for Ebenezer and Anna as
one.

  His sister was at that moment somewhere in the Province.

  She was a virgin to that day, despite her intimacy with Burlingame.

  She loved not Burlingame but her brother, in a way too dark and deep for her cognition.

  And he himself had no direction, aim, or prospect whatsoever for the future, but was as orphan in the world as Burlingame, without that gentleman’s corporal, financial, intellectual, experiential, or spiritual resources.

  With these propositions very nearly unhinging his Reason, how could he approach the strangers and calmly put his question? Even their mildly curious stare upon his entrance set his stomach a-quiver and his face afire. His small resolution vanished; with some of the money entrusted to him by Joan Toast he purchased his first meal since the previous day, and when it was eaten he left the inn. For some minutes he wandered unsystematically through the several rude streets of the town, as though in hopes of glimpsing Anna herself on one of them. Had the season permitted, he would doubtless have continued thus all day, for want of courage refusing to comprehend in what serious straits his sister might well languish, and then at sundown have reported with a sigh to Burlingame that his inquiries had borne no fruit. But the wet wind off St. Mary’s River soon chilled him through; he was obliged to take refuge in another nameless public house, the only other tavern he had observed, and order rum to still the chattering of his teeth.

  This establishment was, he observed, less elegantly appointed than its competitor: the floor was paved with oyster-shells, the tables were bare of cloths, and in the air hung a compound fragrance of stale smoke, stale beer, and stale seafood. This last smell seemed to come not so much from the tavern’s cuisine as from the damp coats of its patrons, who in other respects as well appeared to be fishermen. They paid Ebenezer no notice whatever, but went on with their talk of seines and the weather, or fingered beards and brooded into their glasses. Although their indifference removed any possibility of Ebenezer’s interrogating them, at the same time it permitted him to feel less uneasy in their presence; he was able to move his chair nearer the fireplace and was even emboldened, as he sipped his rum, to survey the other customers more closely.

  In one corner of the room, he noticed a man sleeping with head, arms, and chest upon the table. Whether liquor, despair, or mere fatigue was the soporific, the poet could not tell, but his heart beat faster at the sight, for though the fellow was no cleaner nor less ragged than his companions, his coat in better days had been not the honest Scotch cloth of the laborer, but plum-colored serge and silver-grey prunella—a very twin to the one Ebenezer had worn to his audience with Lord Baltimore and had packed next day in his trunk to bring to Maryland! That there could be two such coats was most unlikely, for Ebenezer had chosen the goods himself and had them tailored to the style of the moment, which was scarcely to be seen outside London; nevertheless he dared not risk a scene by waking the fellow, and so signaled for more rum instead and asked the waiter who the slumbering chap might be.

  “Haply ’tis Governor Nicholson, or King William,” the man replied. “ ’Tis not my wont to pry into my patrons’ lives.”

  “To be sure, to be sure,” Ebenezer persisted, and pressed two shillings into his hand. “But ’tis of some small importance that I know.”

  The waiter examined the coins and seemed to find them satisfactory. “The fact is,” he declared, “nobody knows just who the wight may be, albeit he hires his bed upstairs and eats his meals at yonder table.”

  “What’s this! Ye want two shillings for that news?”

  The waiter held up an admonitory finger and explained that the sleeping man was no stranger to St. Mary’s—indeed, he had frequented the tavern for some months past—but current rumor had it that his declared identity was false.

  “He hath given all and sundry to believe his is the Laureate Poet of Maryland, name of Ebenezer Cooke, but either he’s the grandest swindler that ever prowled St. Mary’s, or else he is afraid of his very shadow.”

  Ebenezer betrayed such considerable interest in this statement that to hear it glossed set him back another shilling.

  “He came to St. Mary’s last September or October,” the waiter went on, pocketing the money, “though whence or how no man knows truly, since the fleet was come and gone some weeks before. He was dressed in the clothes ye see there, that were splendid then as a St. Paul fop’s, and had a wondrous swaggering air, and declared he was the Laureate of Maryland, Eben Cooke.”

  “I’Christ, the fraud!” Ebenezer exclaimed. “Did no man doubt him?”

  “He had his share of hecklers; that he did,” the waiter conceded. “Whene’er they asked him for a verse he’d say ‘The muse sings not in taverns,’ or some such; and when they asked him how he was so lately come from England, he declared he’d been kidnaped by the pirates from Jim Meech’s boat Poseidon ere the fleet reached the Capes, and was later cast o’erside to drown, but swam ashore and found himself in Maryland. The wags and wits had fun at his expense, but his story was borne out anon by Colonel Robotham himself, the Councillor—”

  “Nay!”

  The waiter nodded firmly. “The Colonel and his daughter had crossed with him on the Poseidon and had seen him kidnaped, along with his servant and three sailors, that have ne’er been heard from since. Some skeptical souls still doubt the fellow’s story, for he hath spoke not a line of verse these many months, and to set him in a panic one need only mention his father Andrew’s name, or the name of his father-in-law.”

  “Father-in-law!” Ebenezer rose from his chair. “You mean William Smith, the cooper?”

  “I know no cooper named Smith,” the waiter laughed, “I mean Colonel Robotham of Talbot, that was persuaded enough to take him for a son-in-law, but hath learned since of another wight that’s said to be Eben Cooke! He means to file suit against the impostor, but in the meantime this fellow here so fears him—”

  “No more,” Ebenezer said grimly. Leaving his fresh glass of rum untouched he strode unhesitatingly to the sleeper’s table, and seeing that it was in fact Bertrand Burton who slumbered there, he shook him by the shoulders with both hands.

  “Wake up, wretch!”

  Bertrand sat up at once, and his alarm at being awakened thus ungently turned to horror when he saw who had been shaking him.

  “Base conniver!” Ebenezer whispered fiercely. “What have you done now?”

  “Stay, Master Eben!” the valet whispered back, glancing miserably about to judge the peril of his position. But the other patrons, if they had observed the scene at all, were watching with the idlest curiosity and amusement: they showed no signs of understanding the confrontation. “Let’s leave this place ere ye speak another word! I’ve much to tell ye!”

  “And I thee,” the poet replied unpleasantly. “So thou’rt afraid somewhat for your welfare, Master Laureate?”

  “With reason,” Bertrand admitted, still glancing about. “But more for your own, sir, and for your sister Anna’s!”

  Ebenezer gripped the man’s wrists. “Curse your heart, man! What do you know of Anna?”

  “Not here!” the valet pleaded. “Come to my room upstairs, where we may speak without fear.”

  “ ’Tis yours to fear, not mine,” Ebenezer said, but permitted Bertrand to lead the way upstairs. The valet was clothed from wig to slippers, he observed, with articles from his trunk, all now much the worse for wear and want of cleaning; but the man himself, though blear-eyed with sleep and trepidation, had clearly much improved his lot by playing laureate. He was well fleshed out, and dignified even in his dishevelment—unquestionably a more prepossessing figure than his master. By the time they entered Bertrand’s room, the only furnishings of which were a bed, a chair, and a pitcher-stand, Ebenezer could scarcely contain his indignation.

  But the valet spoke first. “How is’t thou’rt here, sir? I thought ye were a prisoner at Malden.”

  “You knew!” Ebenezer paled. “You knew my wretched state and exploited it!” His anger
so weakened him that he was obliged to take the chair.

  “Pray hear my side of’t,” Bertrand begged. “ ’Tis true I played your part at first from vanity, but anon I was obliged to—will-I, nill-I—and since I heard of your imprisonment, my only aim hath been to do ye a service.”

  “I know thy services!” the poet cried. “ ’Twas in my service you gambled away my savings aboard the Poseidon and got me a name for seducing the ladies into the bargain!”

  But Bertrand, little daunted, insisted on explaining his position more fully. “No man wishes more than I,” he declared, “that I had stayed behind in London with my Betsy and let my poor cod take its chances with Ralph Birdsall—Better a shive lost than the whole loaf, as they say. But Fate would have it otherwise, and—”

  “Put by thy whining preamble,” his master ordered, “and get on with thy lying tale.”

  “What I mean to say, sir, there I was, half round the globe from my heart’s desire, abused and left to drown by the cursed pirates, and farther disappointed at the loss of my ocean isle—”

  “The loss of your ocean isle!”

  “Aye, sir—what I mean is, ’tis not every day a man sees seven golden cities slip through his fingers, as’t were, to say nothing of my fair-skinned heathen wenches, that would do whatever dev’lish naughty trick might cross my fancy, and fetch me cakes and small-beer by the hour—”

  “Go to, go to, thou’rt slavering!”

  “And there was my noble Drakepecker, bless his heart—big and black as a Scotland bull, and man enough to crack the Whore o’ Babylon, but withal as meek a parishioner as any god could boast—that ye lightly gave away to nurse an ill-odored salvage—”

  “ ’Sheart, man, pass o’er the history and commence thy fabrication! I was there!”

  With this assertion Bertrand declared he had no quarrel. “The sole aim of my relating it,” he said, “is to help ye grasp the pity of my straits what time the swine-girl told us this was Maryland, and I was obliged to fall from Heav’n to Hell, as’t were.”