I peered at it. I had some difficulty reading it, for it had seen neither cloth nor polish for many years. But even as I deciphered the faded copperplate my uncle spoke the words I read there.
“ ‘The American Within.’ ”
The American within—Harry Peake with his back straight. I seized upon its meaning at once, of course, but who had commissioned the portrait—how had the artist known what Harry looked like—was it done after his death? I turned again and found my uncle gazing at me with glittering eyes.
“I wonder you did not see it before,” he said. “I made a wager with Percy that you would not. He has more faith in your intelligence than I do.”
A dry wheeze here. I nodded wearily, I had grown used to these merry barbs of his.
“Lord Drogo commissioned the painting,” he said, “and titled it himself. And he it was who gave the painter Harry’s likeness.”
This statement raised more questions than it answered, but I set them aside for the time being.
“Did Harry believe,” I said, “that there was an American inside him who looked like that?”
“Harry came to believe that his spirit was American, and that it was an accident of birth and circumstance that made him an Englishman. He felt he was trapped in England as he was trapped in his body.”
“He knew by then where Martha had gone?”
“It was a comfort to him. At times he tormented himself that he was not with her in America, but no, it gave him comfort. Odd, eh, Ambrose?”
Comfort? I turned again to the painting. This was how Harry saw himself; or rather, how Lord Drogo saw him. But I knew better than to pursue the subject, for my uncle always became evasive and oblique when I tried to establish what happened to Harry after Martha left England. He had something to hide, and he made no attempt to pretend otherwise, which did not surprise me. Harry Peake’s last days were miserable indeed, and my uncle bore a large responsibility for that misery; in his position I should have been oblique and evasive myself. Still, there was a certain poetic beauty in the depiction of that tragic figure in his self-made identity with the American people. So much of what they suffered, he suffered. So much of what they aspired to, he aspired to. And his broad back, with its ridge of peaks down the spine—was it not the very image, in miniature, of the land itself? Was he not himself a living map of America? Oh, he would have fought alongside them, he would have spoken out in their assemblies, he would have given his life, had they asked it of him. As it was, he had given his daughter. Was this the reason this most tortured of Englishmen was comforted to know that he had driven his daughter into the arms of the Americans, indeed into the very teeth of their revolution? I believe it was. I believe that in his last days he found comfort in the thought that whatever of him was in his daughter, it was now with the Americans.
Although I doubt he knew that what there was of him in his daughter was a foetus, and that this, his unborn child, was the real American within—!
Then came a most dramatic development.
26
Now here was an occasion when I might have expected my uncle’s assistance, for the incident I must next recount involves no moot question of republican principle, being a matter of espionage, rather. But the old man was most reluctant to tell me what he knew, and became truculent when I pressed him; and for no good reason that I could see, beyond the usual sport he had in frustrating me. What I had learned from the letters was this: that late in the afternoon of an unsettled day in the March of 1775 a dank salt fog came down on the cape, and within an hour all that could be seen of New Morrock were a few yellowy patches where lamps in windows down by the port shone weakly into the gathering gloom.
The next morning the fog had lifted a little, but still it clung to the trees up behind the house, and hung like a curtain at the harbour wall a half-mile out from the dock. From the hill the town was visible through a thin scrim of mist. Figures could be glimpsed moving about on the dock, and among the boats pulled up on the shingle nearby. But there was a muffled aspect to the world, and in the Rind household they moved about quietly, and spoke little, all strangely affected by the weather, all but the younger children, who were eager to be out. It was an hour or so after they had risen, with the day’s work well started, that Silas came in and told them that something peculiar was going on below, and Martha, lumbering at once to the window, saw that a crowd of people was forming down on Front Street, all of them staring out to sea, though nothing was visible beyond the harbour. The children were at once impatient to go down the hill, so Martha and Sara took them off.
Even before they reached the port they began to hear strange noises carrying across the water—a loud creaky rumbling that spoke of timber and rope, and could surely belong only to a vessel of some kind, and then a grunting, and a slow, muffled plashing, as of oars; and then what sounded like shouting, these various sounds all indistinct, all thick-blanketed in the wet fog so as to suggest a picture of men, timber, hemp, boat; but what men? What boat?
On the dock the people of New Morrock turned murmuring to one another, but none attempted to halloo the vessel, nor did anyone pull a boat down the shingle and row out across the harbour. No, they stood and watched, and Martha was soon aware that several members of the militia had come down to the dock with their muskets. And so in silence they waited for the creaking thing bearing down on them through the fog. Then it emerged; and they gazed at it in astonishment.
It was a large rowboat filled with men, crowded to the gunwales with men, men heaped on men, ragged, desperate men, straining at the oars, and moving forward with the incoming tide with huge effort. From the stern of this overloaded boat, which sat so low in the water that even in the calm of the harbour the sea slopped in over the sides—from the stern, where a single stout figure stood over the others, manning the tiller, a clutch of ropes was stretched taut, hauling some greater vessel through the fog behind them.
The men in the boat turned with shouts and cries, rising up and waving as they glimpsed the dock and the waiting townspeople, the oars flailing wildly now, several men tumbling into the sea and striking out for shore, others clinging to the sides of the boat and flinging their arms in the air. Some shouting from the dock, when it was observed that among the men crowded into the boat were several who wore the familiar red coat of the king’s army. Boys ran back into town to raise the alarm, but it was at once clear that if these redcoats wished to fight they chose an odd way of coming at their enemy.
Once more silence fell upon the watching Americans. Sara slipped her arm into Martha’s and the cousins drew close together. Silas, mounted on horseback, clattered onto the dock now, followed by the remainder of the militia, Nat Pierce directing them into ranks.
Then all at once the prow of a ship broke through the fog. A cry from the people on the dock, who at once pressed forward on all sides, but were held back by the militia. The prow of a sloop—for a sloop she was, and a sloop-of-war at that—towered over the crowded boat, and it was strange indeed to see the great height and bulk of the empty vessel dwarfing the boatload of men below, her figurehead the deep-breasted torso of a queen. On she came, this flightless bird of the sea, and it was at once clear to the watching crowd why she was towed: she had lost her mainmast. Though not her flag; the Union Jack hung limp and tattered from her bowsprit.
Silas sat deathly still upon his horse, and about his pressed lips flickered a suggestion of wry contempt. There was laughter now among the waiting crowd, for here came the hated English, the enemy, the oppressor, but unmanned, unmasted, and undone. Martha glanced about her and soon found Adam among the ranks of the militia, tall as any man there and his hair tumbling out from under his hat. The militia stood stolidly to attention on the dock, their muskets shouldered, but the mood of the people around them was charged with derisive antagonism at the sight of the broken ship and its labouring crew. Then all at once Martha fell silent, her eyes fixed on the bare-chested officer at the tiller of the rowboat. For she knew him, ye
s she knew him—he was Captain Hawkins.
Captain Hawkins. Oh, she remembered that combative little man, she remembered how he had strode about the bridge of an American ship and given orders to the master of that ship; and she remembered his utter assurance, his confidence in the authority of his uniform, and his own proud self, and it aroused in her a mixture of warm emotions, for she also remembered his kindness to her in the captain’s cabin, more than kindness, a genuine paternal sympathy. Now he had his spy-glass to his eye, as he stood at the tiller and coolly surveyed the dock, the town beyond, the hill, the cliff, and the forest above, where the fog still hung heavy in the trees.
At last the spy-glass came to rest, and it was evident upon what it rested: the single mounted figure on the dock; and Silas in turn gazed at the gazing officer.
The children grew quiet and stood close to their parents as they stared out across the harbour at the overcrowded boat and the looming vessel it dragged through the misty water in its wake.
It was another hour before the boat approached Rind’s Wharf, where men now stood ready to take the ropes flung from her bow and haul her in. English sailors and English soldiers, soaked and chilled after their long night at sea, scrambled wearily onto the planks, and a moment later their officer joined them. He stepped out of the boat unafraid, seemingly unwearied by his ordeal, and gazed keenly about him at the silent Americans.
The militia stood in ranks at Silas’ back, still with arms shouldered. Giles Hawkins strode down the wharf to the laughter of the watching Americans, his chest bare and his britches soaked, but his head high and his gaze firm. He spoke a few words to Silas and lifted his hand. No one on the dock could hear what he said, and for a long moment they waited for Silas’ response. If there were some present who wished to see Silas spurn the Englishman’s hand, if there were even a few present who would have the militia march these wretched men off to some quiet cove and stand them up before a firing squad—none spoke, for Silas had already made it known how he wished them to conduct themselves. They waited in silence, and there was barely a murmur when Silas leaned forward in the saddle and gave the Englishman his hand.
The family were all in the kitchen when Silas came home late in the afternoon. He wore an expression Martha had come to know well, the angry, set, sober face he seemed always to bring back from Pierce’s. He came in through the scullery and his eye sought first not his wife but Martha, and the look he gave her alarmed her, for she found it difficult to read, there was in it something quizzical—skeptical—irritable also—but approving withal, or at least suggesting a sort of dark amusement. He did not trouble to make clear what he meant by it, for he sat down without a word, and only when he had eaten did he tell them what they might expect in the days to come.
The Queen Charlotte—for this was the name of the sloop, and a hated name too, Charlotte being the king’s wife—had been on patrol up the coast. The ship’s master, an Englishman unfamiliar with these waters, had been surprised by a storm out to sea: waves thirty foot high and a gale that came up without warning and tore through his canvas before he could get any men aloft, all this in the middle of the night and no moon to help them see what they were doing. Four men coming up out of the hatchway before the mast were lost at once, swept overboard by a sudden great wave; and it must be said there was no heart in Maddy Rind’s kitchen so hard set against England that it did not feel pity for those poor sailors.
It took the wind a very few minutes to bring down the mainmast, which lay across the deck with its rigging all tangled and the loose shrouds flapping wildly like some great white gliding creature brought up from the deep. Still the wild nor’easter clawed and howled about the vessel, and it was then that Giles Hawkins had struggled up on deck with an ax, and amid the shrieking fury of the storm hacked the mainmast free and cut loose the rigging. Liberated of her burden the ship found some measure of stability, and somehow they survived the night; and the following morning were driven toward the coast before the wind died away and they found themselves adrift in the fog.
Captain Hawkins, said Silas, was then faced with a hard necessity: he must strip the Queen Charlotte of her cannon and dump them overboard, and put his men in the boat, which by chance had not been swept away in the night. Then they would haul her to some natural harbour.
“And,” said Silas, one eyebrow lifted, and with a curl to his lip, “by great good fortune they found shelter with us.”
“What now?” said Adam.
“What now indeed,” said Silas; and told him that the Queen Charlotte must be refitted in New Morrock before she could return to Boston.
“Refitted here,” said Caesar.
Silas nodded, his chin on his hands.
“A new mast,” said Adam. “Sailcloth and rigging.”
Silas nodded. Martha glanced from father to son, but could not read what else passed between them.
“And the redcoats?”
“I have put them in the George.”
This was an old dilapidated wooden structure on stilts, down the far end of Front Street. It had prospered in the days before Nat Pierce opened his establishment. Only a very few of the old fishermen continued to drink in the George, the reason for its unpopularity being its name. Now it was to be used as a billet for the soldiers. A greater irritant to the inflamed passions of this patriot town would be hard to imagine, and Adam said so.
“Those passions,” said Silas, “must be contained.”
There were only the two voices now, Silas’ and Adam’s, and the others in the kitchen stayed quiet and still, all but Sara, who moved around lighting the lamps. Silas did not have to tell his son that if the militia attacked the redcoats it would set the colony ablaze. A massacre on that scale could not be concealed.
Adam pondered, then said: “What does the Englishman say?”
“He is with me,” said Silas. “There must be no trouble. You must all help me.”
He looked round the table, looked closely in the lamplight into the faces of his worried family. His gaze came to rest on Martha. “Much depends on it. Perhaps everything.”
Late that night Martha lay awake and stared at the ceiling, where a stray shaft of moonlight had picked out a long pale rectangular patch on the plaster. Her hands were under her nightshirt, on her belly. Silas’ words turned in her mind. “Much depends on it. Perhaps everything.” What was everything—America? Was America everything? To her it had become so. America was the world into which her child would be born. But as she thought of Giles Hawkins she felt a profound unease, for she had not admitted to Silas that she knew the man.
The next morning New Morrock awoke to the knowledge that it now sheltered a detachment of redcoats and a crew of English seamen in the port. The redcoats were billeted in the George and the seamen were aboard the Queen Charlotte, and Martha was not alone that morning in running at once to the window and looking down to the harbour, and the hulk tied up off the end of Rind’s Wharf. The weather, instead of throwing up tempests and hurricanoes to match the passions that simmered in every heart that day, instead unfolded the first of a string of still, cold, cloudless days in which the world in its physical vestments shone forth with a terrible clarity, the most vivid element of that shining world being the faded red coats of the English soldiers as they emerged from their billet on Front Street. That, and the Queen Charlotte, visible to every household in the town, so that not for a second could they forget this monstrous broken alien vessel riding at anchor in their harbour.
When Martha went downstairs Silas had already gone out. She spoke briefly to Adam before he too left the house. Dear good Adam, he stole what moments he could with his love before kissing her at the back door then hurrying off down the hill to Pierce’s. There he was publicly delegated by his father to lead a squad of redcoats into the woods to select a good straight pine for a mainmast; and it surprised nobody that he set off to the south, away from Scup Head, away from his father’s sawmill, with Caesar at his side and the soldiers in rank
behind them.
Now Martha began to glimpse the delicacy of the predicament into which Silas Rind was plunged by the arrival of the Queen Charlotte. She spoke to Sara, and came to understand the necessity Silas faced of making an ally of the Englishman, almost indeed a friend. The Lady Ann was moored behind Scup Head, just a few miles away, and not far off the sawmill was packed to the roofbeams with materials of war. Silas wanted no suspicions aroused. He did not want those redcoats out searching the countryside. He wanted them away from New Morrock as quick as possible, and as they could not leave until their ship was refitted, he had sent them off into the woods for a mast, and given Captain Hawkins his word there would be no ambush.
27
There was no ambush, and late in the afternoon came the news that a tree had been felled and trimmed; they would go back the next day with horses and chains to drag it out. The family was sitting down to dinner when Adam and Caesar returned to the house, and Silas told them they had done well. They then fell to their food and Silas said nothing more.
Not until the meal was over and the table was being cleared did he make his announcement. To general astonishment he told them that Captain Hawkins would be coming to the house that night, and would they all please show a civil face to the man. This he said in that dry, grim way of his that was not without humour, but it was that desiccated humour which Martha now recognized as a Massachusetts variation on a certain laconic English wit. Silas Rind was a man of some severity, even in his levity.
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