Revolution

by Edward Cline

  “All right.” After a pause, Hugh asked, “That Handel piece that Etáin said she would play in your honor — what is its significance?”

  “I’ve heard it only once, long ago, when Redmagne and I went to London. I remember it, now and then. It became a kind of anthem for me.”

  “I see,” said Hugh. “It’s curious that you should say that. I have written a fragment on that very subject. Personal anthems, that is.”

  “More reading for me?”

  “If you wish, and only after I have polished it.”

  They talked of other things for a while, their conversation for once mutually light and airy, in spontaneous conformance to the holiday and as an expression of their own happiness.

  Then a servant appeared at the gaming room doors and announced the beginning of the concert. Hugh said, as Jack emptied his pipe in the gaming room fireplace, “Well, let’s see what else our wives have in store for us. Reverdy intimated that she has a special present for me, as well.”

  “You have not heard any of the music?” queried Jack.

  “Not a note of it,” said Hugh.

  “You have not even heard Reverdy sing?”

  “No. I am not even familiar with the cantata she is to introduce.”

  * * *

  Beneath the lustre blazing with dozens of candles, servants had set up a semicircle of chairs around the musicians and their instruments. Jack, Hugh, and John Proudlocks sat together in the rear row.

  When his guests were seated, and the older children fetched to sit with their parents, Reece Vishonn introduced the musicians, each of whom was given a welcoming applause by the guests. Barbara Vishonn had ordered the curtains of the wall-length windows opened in back of the musicians; the guests could see faint ghosts of snowflakes fall outside.

  Etáin indeed opened the concert with “Brian Boru’s March,” which was a grim, determined melody that spoke of a life-or-death purpose. She reminded the guests that she had renamed it “A Meeting at Caxton Pier” to commemorate the town’s foiling of the stamps. It lasted all of two and a half minutes, and received an ovation almost as long.

  Next, she and the hired musicians played “See, the conquering hero comes,” from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, with James Vishonn on the spinet. During the performance, Jack rose and paced restlessly back and forth behind the last row, and cast glances of loving gratitude at his wife across the room. When they were finished, Etáin and her accompanists received an even more enthusiastic ovation.

  James Vishonn sat at the pianoforte and played two Domenico Scarlatti sonatas as a prelude to the “Pastoral Cantata on the Nativity,” composed by the son, Alessandro.

  Then Reece Vishonn rose and came forward to introduce Reverdy. After some complimentary remarks, he took his seat next to his wife. Reverdy stood up, holding her sheet music. A hush invaded the ballroom, a silence so complete that some guests thought they could hear snowflakes fall outside the window behind her. James Vishonn, the Kenny brothers, and the hired musicians opened with the establishing bars, and Reverdy sang the “Recitativo” that usually preceded the cantata.

  When she was finished, there was another pause, and her accompanists played the establishing bars for the aria. And then she sang.

  As he listened to Reverdy sing in a flawless soprano voice, Hugh was suddenly overcome with the sense that the music was about him. He could not understand the Italian words that his wife sang, but they seemed nevertheless to beckon him to accept the aria as his own, and to continue his enthralling, guiltless journey through life. The words were irrelevant, he thought, yet words were necessary to accompany the music to convey a joyous, untroubled serenity. The foreign, unknown words seemed to invite him to substitute his own, yet he knew not what words to put in their place. Those words celebrated his every conscious thought and action, his own existence and that of the world. They had the sense of a debut and an end at the same time, and evoked a vista that stretched behind him — the one traveled — and another before him, yet to be traveled. It was an anthem, he thought, one he wished he could somehow project and express. It was as sacred and joyous as any great hymn he had heard in the cathedrals of his past, yet it was somehow addressed to him, and to him alone. He wondered if Reverdy knew this, if she understood him enough to have chosen this cantata for that reason.

  Reverdy received a standing ovation from the guests. Hugh was unable to rise, unable even to applaud; he sat immobilized by a benign paralysis. Jack Frake glanced over at him once, and saw a faraway, absorbed look on his friend’s face, one that he recognized and understood.

  Hugh then rose, walked around the assembly of guests, and approached his wife. He gazed into her eyes with silent thanks, then took one of her hands and raised it to his lips. He was vaguely aware that the guests were still applauding.

  Reverdy dipped in an abbreviated curtsy, then leaned closer to her husband and said, knowing she could not be heard in the din by anyone but him, “The song is somehow about you, Hugh, not the Lord, and how you chart your own life. When I first heard another singer perform it in Vauxhall Gardens, I confess I thought of you.”

  Hugh smiled. “That is markedly sacrilegious, Reverdy, and I am forever grateful,” he said with approval. Then the applause became intrusive. Hugh squeezed once the hand he still held, bowed briefly to Reverdy, and stepped away to return to his seat next to Jack Frake.

  The guests demanded an encore. Etáin and Reverdy were prepared for this, and had planned and rehearsed another Handel piece, this one sung in English, the words to the first section of the “Dettingen Te Deum.” This, too, when the women were finished, received a standing ovation. Some of the guests in the front row of chairs noted that the eyes of their newfound soprano were glassy with tentative tears.

  Reverdy bowed, once to the guests, and once to Etáin, then, her part in the concert finished, left the musicians to join Hugh. He rose, took her elbow and walked her to the rear of the last row, out of sight of the assembly.

  Etáin sat back in her chair from her harp. James Vishonn put another sheaf of sheet music in front of him on the spinet. Will Kenny stood near him, while Jude Kenny did an odd thing and left the ballroom by one of the double doors, which he left open.

  Reverdy linked an arm through one of Hugh’s. “I have another surprise for you, my darling. Do you remember the private concert we attended held on the terrace of that merchant friend’s of Mr. Worley’s in London, when I visited you with James and my mother one summer?”

  “Yes.”

  Reverdy said nothing else. James Vishonn rose to announce, “We are pleased to perform now Mr. Vivaldi’s ‘Echo’ Concerto. Mr. Jude Kenny will serve as the ‘echo.’”

  Hugh grinned in gratitude throughout the number. Even though the trio played it with a halting tempo and undeniable coarseness, he applauded nonetheless, along with the assembly.

  “Thank you,” said Hugh to his wife.

  Etáin had by now begun playing two other Irish tunes by the composer Turlough O’Carolan, “Lord Inchiquin” and “Hugh O’Donnell.” Hugh and Reverdy stood close together and listened.

  “That is a pretty tune,” remarked Hugh about the latter.

  Reverdy turned to face Hugh. “It is called ‘Hugh O’Donnell,’” she said, “but I would call it simply ‘Hugh.’”

  Hugh smiled at her. They instinctively took each other’s hands and, carried away by the melody and the rhythm, began moving together. Soon, they improvised a dance without thinking about it, gently twirling around and rocking back and forth. Hugh thought it a natural thing to hold Reverdy’s waist, and was about to, while Reverdy felt a desire to rest her hands on his shoulders, and actually did so. But they stopped in confusion, and separated reluctantly in frustration, because there was no precedent for it. They did not know how else to proceed. But they still smiled at each other, oblivious to the confused or disapproving looks of the few guests and servants who had observed them, because they had together come near to the discovery of something.r />
  The sole dance, at least in the middle and upper classes at that time, that called for a couple, was the minuet, an extremely formal, ritualistic mode that allowed a mere touching of hands by the pair, and then only at a distance. No dancing master then had ever conceived, let alone would have ever approved, of the mutually selfish celebration of a man and woman dancing by themselves. The crude, inappropriate notion of dancing couples was the entertainment only of the vulgar mobility.

  “Well,” said Hugh, “there must be a something like it on the Continent.”

  “Perhaps, but I did not observe it,” said Reverdy.

  When the concert was concluded, and the dancing commenced, Reece Vishonn and his wife performed the first dance, the traditional opening minuet, a stately number played by James Vishonn on the spinet and Jude Kenny on the flute. Later, Hugh and Reverdy took part with six other couples and Jack Frake in Etáin’s “Squaring the Circle” country-dance, which was well received by the guests and her last solo for the evening. Jack, nominally paired with Selina Vishonn, was the odd man out when the number abruptly ended. As the guests applauded, he retired from the floor, grinning at his wife at the harp, wondering if she had calculated the effect.

  A too-bright smile on her face told him that she had.

  * * *

  Chapter 18: The Clarion

  Two days after the concert-ball at Enderly, the snow vanished again, beginning in the morning and disappearing completely by early afternoon. It ebbed steadily under the sun, sped on by some warm western breezes, until little was left of it but a scattering of gray, icy slivers over the vast, brown acreage of Morland Hall.

  Jack Frake watched it go. He had traversed his fields that morning and afternoon to decide what would be planted in the spring and where. As the snow receded and revealed the ground beneath it, a certainty grew in his mind, and a revelation of a different kind. The phenomenon fascinated him, and caused him to linger in the bare fields to observe it and to dwell on a conclusion and solution it had triggered in his thoughts. When he returned to the great house, he collected all the Stamp Act literature that Hugh had loaned him, then saddled his favorite mount and rode to Meum Hall.

  Mrs. Vere, the housekeeper, answered the door and showed him into his friend’s study. Hugh greeted his friend and ordered a pot of tea. Jack said, as he sat down opposite Hugh’s desk, “I watched the snow melt today, and more than the ground was bared.”

  Hugh looked curious.

  “The Navigation Act and all its amendments. That is what we should be opposing.”

  Hugh merely smiled in answer.

  Jack leaned forward and put the bundle of pamphlets and fliers on his host’s desk, then continued. “In all this literature I have read — narrowly argued, though right as most of it is — I do not see that power questioned or even mentioned as an abuse of colonial trade. The power to regulate our trade implies the power to tax, that regulation ensuring the collection of taxes. For if we were granted the freedom to trade when, where, and with whom we wished, the collection of a tax, if any existed, would become as onerous to its collectors as paying it now under the present system is to us.” He smiled in turn. “The absence of that point in this literature is what nagged me for a while. The melting snow caused me to think of it.”

  “What propinquity,” remarked Hugh. “I remarked the same point to Governor Fauquier.”

  Jack nodded. “Yes. You told me about your meeting with him.”

  Hugh in turn picked up a sheaf of papers that was in front of him on the desk and handed them over to Jack. “Mr. Talbot in Philadelphia sent me those. They came by post-rider not two hours ago.”

  Jack reached for the sheaf and read the top page. “A non-importation agreement, signed by Philadelphia merchants?” he queried.

  “And copies of similar agreements, signed by merchants in New York, Albany, and Boston. As you will see, Mr. Talbot signed the Philadelphia agreement not to order more goods from Britain as of that date. Exempt from all the agreements are goods ordered before the various covenants.”

  Jack read through the documents. By the time he was finished, Mrs. Vere returned with the tea tray. When she was finished serving, she left. Jack took a sip of the tea, then remarked, “Still, while this is a good idea, these agreements say nothing against the navigation laws.” He put the sheaf back on Hugh’s desk.

  “Perhaps the men who signed these concur that opposition to them would be either fruitless or counter-productive. Perhaps many of them don’t question the rightness of their mercantile captivity, or it has never occurred to them to question it.”

  “Perhaps,” said Jack. “But for as long as the navigation laws are not questioned and identified as another form of servitude, the power of Parliament to regulate us will not be checked.” He paused to grimace. “They argue that it is only equitable that we help defray the costs of our own security. But what do they truly mean by our ‘security’? That of indentureds? Of captive factotums? Of menials who labor without even the benefit of livery? Is not this style of servitude a sign of conquest?”

  Hugh chuckled. “Only servants and horses wear livery,” he said with irony. “At least, in London they do.”

  “What rights of Englishmen may we then boast of, when we have been denied them? If we grant them the power to instruct us what to do with our trade, and where, and with whom, is that not by implication a grant to tax us as well, at their pleasure, for their own ends?”

  Hugh said, “You are preaching to the choir, Jack.”

  Jack nodded to the pamphlets and agreements he had put on Hugh’s desk. “One reason I came over was to ask you if you planned to write a pamphlet on that subject.”

  “You are just as capable of that composition,” said Hugh. “You’ve proven that.”

  Jack shook his head. “I could not put the argument as finely as you could.”

  Hugh scoffed. “How rudely would you put it?”

  Jack did not answer immediately, but sat for a moment, thinking. Then he rose and paced back and forth, hands linked behind his back, as he spoke. He said, “I would say that in the end, the arbitrary direction of my trade to benefit the mother country by means of the navigation laws and their amendments is surely as much a tax on me as a tax levied directly on my purse through a stamp or other instrument. It is as much a…redirection of my goods or money as is a direct tax, one also levied without my consent.” He stopped to glance at Hugh, who was listening intently.

  He continued pacing. “I would say that the authority to tell colonials what may or may not be imported or exported, by what means, and to and from what ports and countries, logically extends to the power to tax as well, for what is a navigation law but a seizure or confiscation of property in favor of an unchosen beneficiary — unchosen by me? What is it but the power of disposal of one’s property to the benefit of another? The power to dispose through trade regulations is simply another form of seizure. A tax is a more immediate form of seizure and disposal. That is all.”

  Jack again glanced at Hugh. His host merely nodded in agreement. Jack said, “I would say further that I predict a greater crisis than what we are witnessing over the stamps. The men in London have no incentive to grant us our liberties. Their palates are accustomed to the taste of power and they will want to retain and perpetuate it. They are determined that we shall be their servants and factotums. To date, we have minded only the taxes and spoken against them — not the means of collecting them. I believe that those men see the contradiction in the arguments made in all this literature, if they even bother to read it. We don’t see it. I believe they must celebrate the oversight, or at least breathe easier, when they prepare a rebuttal to colonial resolves and petitions.”

  Hugh cocked his head in appreciation. “Too blunt by half, but elegant in its brevity. I particularly appreciate your point about the men in London having no incentive to annul what they and their predecessors have wrought.” He took a sip of his tea, then put down his cup and leaned forward. “My
friend, you are capable of penning that fragment yourself. Your style is not rude at all. It never was. It is refreshingly frank. You should not doubt its potency or efficacy.”

  Jack nodded in thanks, and sat down again. He gestured briefly with his hands. “But what incentive do the men in London have to acknowledge the rightness of the argument? None. I own that this answer stops me when I contemplate composing such a tract. Whom would I be addressing, but men who do not wish to be addressed by reason? I have not done so in the past in other matters, except when I thought there was half a chance of persuasion.” He paused to chuckle in wry amusement. “Do you remember the first night we met, at Enderly, at the victory ball, and the argument in Mr. Vishonn’s gaming room?”

  “I remember it well,” said Hugh. “Do you remember the debates in the House on the Resolves?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, there you are. Three or four men from that evening at Enderly later sided with us over the stamps. And in the House, more than a dozen burgesses who had earlier objected to my call for stronger language in the memorial and remonstrance, voted for the Resolves. Argumentation is not a futile recourse even in the worst circumstances, when it may seem that one is speaking to an audience of medieval serfs or to the inmates of Bedlam Hospital.”

  Jack laughed softly. “I remember your relating your nightmare about the medieval serfs.”

  “The finer one hones its blade, the deeper an argument can cut through all the guff in which otherwise reasonable men clothe themselves.” Hugh shrugged. “And constructing a finely drawn argument helps to properly arrange the idea in one’s head. Mr. Reisdale, who has had some experience in court, would likely attest to the truth of that.”

  After a moment, Jack smiled with decision. “I will make the attempt, and compose a pamphlet on this subject. Will you read it?”

  “Of course,” said Hugh. “It so happens that, while you have been watching melting snow, I have been contemplating chimney swifts.”