TWENTY-EIGHT
“Powell Cummings, stop, you shall break Uncle Lordship’s neck.”
Tony pulled his grandson from Jack’s back, but the boy only climbed up again the minute he was set loose on the floor. In response, Jack shook his head and roared like a lion, sending Wellie into a fit of giggling. Nearly exhausted by the boundless enthusiasm of a rambunctious child, Jack sprawled flat on his belly and feigned death.
The ladies of the house swept into the drawing room and Mrs. Powell shooed Wellie away, to go play with his baby brother. The unmarried girls turned to a millinery project, Mariah her mending, while Mrs. Powell pretended a keen interest in her needlework. “What is your feeble excuse for not going to Charleston this year, might I ask?” She adjusted a pillow behind her back, the cushion out of shape after serving as a cannonball earlier. “Too many grandchildren, taxing your strength?”
“The time is not right,” Jack said.
He dropped into a chair, too close to the fire, but it saved him from having to meet Mrs. Powell’s gaze. Written on his face was the bitterness such a trip would bring, a voyage that was tantamount to accepting defeat, which he would not do. He had been wounded by Maddie’s departure, and the pain of waiting for her return had grown into a constant, dull ache of three year’s duration. The wedding announcement that she clipped from the Charleston newspaper and sent off to him still stung. Never would he forget the slight that the brief paragraph contained. Daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. Etienne Beauchamp, and not a mention of the man who had shaped her. No love for a father in those words, even though she would not have written them. Yet she could have corrected the omission easily enough, if she had a mind to do so.
“What are you waiting for?” Tony asked. “Surely she extended the invitation again this year.”
“You know full well what is happening, or does Commons discuss nothing more than dinner plans?” Jack asked. After Edmund’s death Tony had left the sea, satisfied that the sacrifice of an eye and a son was more than adequate for his country. To escape the dullness of life as a country gentleman, he turned to politics and found that he thrived on debate and skilled oratory.
“Such a trivial matter,” Tony said. “Wellesley has Bonaparte on the run, and once the Little Corporal is defeated, we can settle the dispute over sailors’ rights and free trade with the United States.”
Wellie returned, a little hesitant, hoping for more fun, and Jack grabbed him. After nuzzling the boy’s belly, he made silly noises until the boy laughed. “I am Bonaparte,” Jack growled, “and I eat English boys for breakfast.”
“We hear from her infrequently,” Mrs. Powell said.
“The blockade is highly effective. Too much so, in this instance,” Jack said.
Too effective in regard to personal correspondence, which depended on the ability of a pirate to run the gauntlet, a route that Maddie utilized when it suited her purpose. Sketches of her husband, her son and their home arrived in pristine condition after traveling from Charleston to Spithead via Jamaica. She continued to write to him, despite the exorbitant cost, which limited her notes to one every five or six months. If she put her mind to it, she could contact him almost at will, judging by the birth announcement that was in his hands less than three months after John Ashford Taft drew his first breath. Jack suspected that Maddie gave birth to the boy on a particular August day to annoy him, to weave together the strands that time and distance had unraveled. To keep him dangling at the end of that strand, at her mercy, never quite letting go. Sharing a birthday with his grandson was an annual rite of remembrance that tore at his heart.
“What news from the Admiralty?” Tony asked.
They went down to the dining room, to partake of a Christmas dinner that further reminded Jack of the past, when Maddie thought he was a god who was infallible. “The war drums are beating, but on the far side of the Atlantic,” Jack said. “Mr. Madison has been claiming that his nation is at peace, as innocent as a child, while England is clearly at war with the United States.”
“The action we took in Denmark was highly effective,” Tony said. “It might be in our best interest to invade the United States and clamp down on trade with France. Starve the French into submission, make an end of the war. The people are war-weary and the costs are mounting.”
“There is an appetite for armed conflict among my officers,” Jack said. “Every lieutenant seeking promotion, and requiring combat to make his name. I am as hungry for battle as the next man, Tony. An idle crew is not a disciplined crew, and without discipline, they will not be an effective fighting force.”
Although the food from Mrs. Powell’s kitchen was well-prepared, Jack had little appetite. All around him were reminders of Maddie’s absence, the ache increased by the paucity of news coming out of Charleston. He had no doubt that he could sail up the Ashley River to the door of her plantation if he so chose, based on intelligence reports. The United States Navy was in poor condition, small in size and small in experience, populated by volunteers who served only two years and then gave way to the next raw crop. Many an American vessel put to sea with a compliment of exhausted sailors who were drilled beyond endurance in port, in a mad scramble to ready them for a war that was inevitable. At sea, it would be a short-lived conflict against the might of the Royal Navy.
“Have you heard of the unrest in Boston?” Tony asked.
“No surprise, considering the state of the American economy,” Jack said.
“A group of merchants in New England are pressing to dissolve the union, to go their own way,” Tony said. “Their own blockade is strangling them.”
Instinct honed by years of service would guide Jack’s strategy in the Atlantic. Should the northern states seek accord with England, he would shift men further south. It was ironic, in a way, given the fact that the southern planters favored France but held a greater affinity for all things British than their northern brethren. “An accumulation of bankruptcies will alter the President’s foreign policy,” Jack said. “Perhaps their grand experiment is ended, as is that of the French with their so-called republic.”
The Second War of Rebellion Page 45