The Rebellion of Jane Clarke

by Sally Gunning

  The sentry said, “Good-day to you, Miss Clarke,” still in his grin, but Jane had no smile in her. She walked on.

  IT WAS NOT A THING she could talk of to Aunt Gill, nor did she feel like bringing it out when Knox came to call, but neither did she feel like listening to the two of them talk over a rumor of a cache of arms being stored in Faneuil Hall. Aunt Gill seemed to enjoy the talk, however—she stayed up a good deal later than her usual bedtime, her eyes fever-bright, her shawl twice cast aside. When she finally announced her desire to go above-stairs, Knox and Jane rose together, but Aunt Gill waved them back to their chairs. “Stay as you are, please, stay as you are. An old person’s bedtime is not a young person’s bedtime; Martha may take me up this once. I trust, Jane, you’re fully capable of entertaining Mr. Knox alone?”

  Jane looked at her aunt in surprise. It was one thing for a father to leave a daughter alone with a declared future husband; it was another for an aunt to leave a niece alone with a near stranger.

  But Knox continued on without seeming to notice anything out of the ordinary, intent on his plan. “Before I say good evening, Miss Gill, I wonder if I might ask permission to take Miss Clarke to a play-reading Tuesday next.”

  “A play? You would take my niece to a play?”

  “A play-reading, Miss Gill. Not a play performed.”

  “Oh! Very well. I can see no harm. Martha may wait on me now and then.” But there she peered at Knox as if thinking it all over again. “Although I do rest easier with my niece under my roof during the dark hours, Mr. Knox. If you would humor an old woman and hurry her home?”

  Knox promised to hurry her home as soon as the play-reading ended, and Aunt Gill in turn promised all the refreshment he should like, waiting for them in the parlor on their return. As Martha led her to the door Aunt Gill stopped and turned. “Are you acquainted with Mr. Otis, Mr. Knox?”

  “We’ve met from time to time.”

  “I wonder what you would say of these rumors of his mental decline.”

  Knox hesitated.

  “Yes, yes. A delicate subject. And were you not so polite you might tell me not one’s business besides. Good night, then.”

  But after Aunt Gill and Martha had climbed the stairs, Knox seemed compelled to answer the question for Jane. “He has not—” he began. “Of late he has not exactly been—” He fell silent, all his happy glow gone, leaving Jane struggling to think how she might help the conversation to its feet again.

  Jane said, “I move along nicely with Mr. Crusoe,” and for a second time heard in her voice the shadow of Phinnie Paine, turning the subject from the difficult to the facile. In fact Jane had much she might have said about Mr. Otis, much she wanted to know of him, and in the process she might have learned something new of Henry Knox as well. But Knox took up the subject of Crusoe happily enough, going on to describe all the other books and poems and plays that he had waiting in the wings for Jane, as if safe in the assumption that their acquaintance would be long.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY an article appeared in John Mein’s loyalist newspaper, the Chronicle, printing the cargo manifests of a number of noted patriots which proved them to have been importing goods from England throughout the embargo. Two letters from the customs commissioners appeared in the same paper, accusing Otis of being a traitor to the Crown. Jane wouldn’t have seen such a paper in Aunt Gill’s house if it hadn’t been brought there by her Grandfather Freeman; he carried both Gazette and Chronicle under his arm, as well as letters he’d collected at the wharf for Jane, and on Aunt Gill’s inquiring of the Chronicle’s latest tricks her grandfather opened the paper and read to her aloud. Jane’s first thought on hearing the stories was that her grandfather wished to know his enemies the same as her father did, and she found a queer kind of comfort in the thought. Her second thought was not so much a thought as a warning, albeit a silent one, to the publisher of the Chronicle.

  Once Jane’s grandfather left, Jane turned to her letters. Bethiah had written in a near-frenzy, wanting more of everything, especially Mrs. Otis and Mrs. Adams. You tell me nothing of the looks of things! And how can you talk of the stillness and quiet of Satucket? Do you forget the sea? The wind? The gulls? Do you forget your father lives here? Finally, at the end, she wrote: You ask of Phinnie. He’s come but once. He spoke to Papa and left. He wouldn’t dine.

  Jane cracked the seal on Mehitable’s letter with clumsy fingers. On the first side of the page she read through an account of all the usual illnesses suffered during the summer dog days, of the firing of the tanner’s apprentice, of the early returns of the whale men. She included no personal thoughts this time, which puzzled and disappointed Jane, until she turned the paper over and saw the addition at the bottom in her father’s undisciplined hand: I hear from Aunt that you are all she hoped and she has no wish to give you over, which is no surprise to a father who would say the same were your duty done to him as it should. Paine has been here over business and would not speak of you but to say you were a great surprise to him. I made query of what might happen if a letter from you came to him, to which he answered he reads all letters with his name writ across the back, which you may take to mean you have not quite done for yourself yet, either in his eyes or mine.

  Jane’s father had not signed his name, which allowed for the exclusion of the customary endearment, not that Jane had expected one. Jane folded the letter and sat thinking of sea, wind, gulls.

  THAT NIGHT JANE HEARD the roar of a crowd out on King Street again. She and Prince arrived on the stoop together, just as the cart came by, a creature cowering like a half-plucked bird in the back, lit in part by a lantern he’d been forced to hold and in part by the illuminated windows along the way. Prince dashed down the lane and into the street; Jane went as close to the corner as she dared until she could see the patches of black tar that gleamed through the man’s involuntary coat of feathers. As Jane watched, the windows of the only house without a light received a shower of stones through the glass. When Prince returned she asked, “Is it Mein?”

  “Couldn’t find Mein. Tarred a custom informer instead.”

  Whose poor luck it had been to choose that hour to go abroad, thought Jane.

  THE NEXT MORNING AUNT Gill kept to her bed, complaining of the sweats and an uneasy stomach. She refused any breakfast. Jane made up some of Granny Hall’s “gripe water,” but her aunt refused that as well. Jane spent a longer than usual amount of time through the morning chasing after various noises; at noon her aunt asked for the newspaper to be brought to her; Jane offered to read to her, but the old woman shooed her away. By supper she seemed somewhat revived and took some broth, but the next morning she again declined to rise. At noon Jane asked if she’d like to get up and take her broth in the chair by the window, but she declined that as well. That night was the play-reading, but Jane couldn’t think of going while her aunt was ill; she asked her aunt’s permission to send Prince with her regrets, but there Aunt Gill roused.

  “No, no, no. You shall not be denied your pleasure on account of any pain of mine. Here, child, help me to the chair.”

  The chair was gained. The broth was brought. And when Knox came to collect Jane, Aunt Gill was dressed and sitting in the parlor to greet him.

  THE NIGHT WAS AS fine as August made them. Their host, John Rowe, lived on Water Street, not far from Jane’s grandfather, and Jane would have much enjoyed the walk if she weren’t so concerned about her aunt; when Knox inquired how Jane fared with his friend Crusoe it therefore took her some time to reorder her thoughts. She’d finished the book and had pondered long on a man who could leave all his family and lived for years alone, returning at the very end to the old life he had once known, marrying and settling into it with no apparent difficulty. Could she ever return to Satucket with so little fuss? Could she ever return to Satucket at all? Would she ever marry? Or would she end as the nun ended? Or would she marry a man like Crusoe, who could spend an entire page describing a turtle eg
g and but one sentence describing the wife? Jane decided to mention her thoughts about the unfairness of Crusoe’s word allotments to Knox, but to her dismay, instead of fixing on the subject of the writing, he fixed on the subject of the wife.

  “There are some wives who require but a sentence,” he said. “There are some who require a book. You, Miss Clarke, would require volumes.” And he looked at Jane with a meaning she could not mistake.

  So it was that Jane walked into Rowe’s house with the very beetling on her brow that her father had once criticized, lifted her eyes, and met Phinnie Paine’s.

  He was leaning against a wall holding a cup of punch and speaking with a British officer, looking so at home that it made Jane feel all the more out of place. She’d brought a silk gown from Satucket, but Aunt Gill had almost toppled at the sight of the imported cloth, so Jane had made a last-minute change to a fine lawn, thinking herself done up well enough until she looked around and saw the fancy shoes and embroidered bags and jewels glinting at every neckline. Very well, but there was no need for her to worsen her effect; she smoothed out her brow, dropped her shoulders, and lifted her head. She looked at Phinnie again, but his attention had returned to the soldier beside him. Jane’s instinct told her to cross the room, speak with him, and be done with it, but Knox had taken her arm and begun to guide her in another direction, introducing her first to Mr. and Mrs. Rowe and then to any number of people whose names Jane left behind with their faces, until they reached a Mr. Shaw, who stood alone.

  When Knox introduced Jane, Shaw frowned at once. “Miss Clarke of Satucket. I know a Mr. Nathan Clarke of Satucket. What would be your association with this man?”

  “He’s my father.”

  “Is he now? Well pray allow me to inform you that he’s no friend of mine.”

  Or mine, Jane might have said. Or, she might equally have said, then you, sir, are no friend of mine. She stood and considered the strangeness of it, that either remark might come as easily off her tongue, and chose a third thing instead. “Then I imagine neither of us shall object if I move on.” She stepped away, leaving Knox to take a small leap to catch her up. She did spare a minute to wonder if Shaw were a particular friend of Knox’s, but she didn’t greatly care.

  Jane looked around the room and found that their circling had brought them in range of Phinnie Paine, that he’d likely overheard her exchange with Shaw. She couldn’t know he’d heard it—it was entirely possible that his mouth had adopted that familiar, amused cant over someone else’s joke and he only looked her way by accident—but she decided it was time to cross the floor to him and get it finished. She took three steps; Phinnie took only one before someone hailed him from the other side of the room; he slanted off in the new direction. Coward, Jane thought.

  In due time the parties were directed to the chairs and a gentleman with a florid face and lusty voice began to read: Now fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace. Jane shuddered. More wives. She allowed her eyes to drift off and discovered Phinnie’s shadowed profile a number of seats to her right. She looked away. Back. She caught the flash of a jewel against a naked throat beside him. Did the woman next to him lean toward him so extravagantly out of lazy posture or was she attempting to work up an intimacy? Or did she already know what Phinnie’s hand felt like under her skirt?

  Jane looked down at her own hands and flushed. It was odd to think of it, but her hands had touched Phinnie before he had ever touched her. She’d gone out to the barn to rescue him from Neddy; he’d been sitting in the hay with the boy, and he swiped the stuff from his breeches when he rose, but some straw still clung to the back of his shirt. After Neddy ran off Jane took Phinnie by the sleeve, turned him around and brushed him off, thinking as she did so: This is how a man’s back feels, and there Phinnie turned a second time and swallowed her up. That was how it had seemed—that he had swallowed her up—and she’d learned the feel of a man’s mouth on the same day that she’d learned about the back. Woollen, she’d decided that day, could no longer count.

  The people in the seats around Jane began to applaud; she looked up; the play had ended. Knox took her elbow and helped her to her feet, but Phinnie had come up out of his seat too and was moving toward her with the kind of stride that implied some purpose. He lost some of his size as he approached the looming Knox, but against Knox’s smooth, round features his appeared more finished, as if Knox’s sculptor had left off in a rush. Phinnie bowed deeply before Jane—nothing like the quick dip of the head Jane had gotten used to in Satucket, but she responded with her usual country version and let him think of her as he liked. Jane’s thought was that a person should be of one place or another, and his place should show on him as brightly as a well-shined pair of shoe buckles or a clever pair of eyes or a fresh-bleached shirt.

  Phinnie said, “Miss Clarke.”

  Jane said, “Good evening, Mr. Paine. May I present Mr. Knox?”

  Phinnie smiled. “You might do if Mr. Knox and I weren’t already sufficiently acquainted. How do you fare, Knox?”

  “Exceeding well, Mr. Paine. Exceeding well. I’ve not seen you about of late.”

  “I’ve been at New York.”

  “New York! And what news have you from New York?”

  “None whatever.” Phinnie turned to Jane. “And how long do you expect to be in town, Miss Clarke?”

  Miss Clarke. Jane listened but could hear nothing of the old Jane in it. But what had been the question? How long? And where lay the answer to that?

  Knox said, “If I may cast a vote for Miss Clarke remaining in town a long while yet—”

  “Ah, but a vote does you no good,” Phinnie said. “Dictatorship rules here.”

  And what did that mean? Was Jane the dictator? Her father? Or did Phinnie play at politics with that remark, like all the rest of the men around her? And if so, did he mean the Sons of Liberty dictated, or the royal governor? The British officer to Phinnie’s left apparently took it to mean the latter. He swung around.

  “Good evening, Colonel,” Phinnie said. “May I present to you Miss Clarke? Miss Clarke, you may wish to remember this name—Colonel Dalrymple, the man in charge of keeping the peace in your streets.” The colonel made his bow to Jane. Jane looked at Phinnie but still could not determine if he spoke to flatter or goad. But what did it matter? Already he was moving on. “If you would excuse me,” he said, “I’ve had a long day and must here say good night.” He bowed again to Jane. Jane didn’t trouble with a second Satucket curtsey, as he’d already turned his back.

  The night continued on. There was more talk—hours of it. The delights of the play had to be discussed, and the newfound beauty of the nonimported homespun, and the health of everyone’s relations. Jane was seldom required to join in with more than the usual smile or the usual small answer, but she answered and smiled until her lips had stretched so tight she could scarcely get them over her teeth.

  Finally they were paying their duty to the Rowes and making their exit. Astonishingly, Knox still possessed life enough to chat at her all the way home, but Jane’s answers were short and dull and dropped like stones. At Aunt Gill’s door Knox said, “Well, Miss Clarke, here we are, and here, I believe, I’d best say good night. I wish I felt sure of giving you some pleasure this evening, but I’m in some doubt of it.”

  “No! Oh, no! I enjoyed myself immensely. Or rather I should have; ’tis no fault of yours that I did not.”

  “Now there’s a compliment I shall carry to my death. Pray then, where lay the fault?”

  Jane made no answer.

  Knox’s large voice dropped a key. “Do I understand you and Mr. Paine were acquainted at Satucket?”

  “Mr. Paine and I were acquainted, yes.” And in the words Jane heard the whole of it summed up, ended. One did not contemplate marriage to an acquaintance. She turned to Knox. “My father once attempted to push us together,” she said. “I must therefore take care when we meet not to frighten Mr. Paine excessively. I find it . . . wearing.”


  Knox peered at her. “Indeed. Yes.”

  Jane moved the subject. “I observed the other day that you and my brother were acquainted?”

  “Acquainted, yes, but not well enough. I hope to remedy the situation as soon as I’m able.”

  “And have you had occasion to meet my father on any of his visits to town?”

  “I have not. Although I have heard tell of him.”

  “No doubt you dislike his politics.”

  “No more than he must dislike mine. Which evens us nicely, wouldn’t you say?”

  She might. Some others might not. A wild desire to tell Knox about Winslow’s horse bubbled up in her, to ask him what he thought of a man who could do such a thing—perhaps in town such acts were common—but as fast as the desire had risen it sank. She said, “I fear I’m greatly fatigued. I must beg to say good night here.”

  “Well, then, we shall say good night here.” He took her by the shoulders and ran his thumbs over the bare skin just below her collarbone, causing her flesh to ripple. He touched his lips to her temple, where the scar had faded to a small, white line. It was no Woollen. It was no Phinnie. It was . . . Jane had no idea what it was, but whatever it was, it was not the night for it. She slid from under his hands and ducked inside.

  THE NEXT WEEK JANE discovered an embroidered bag in a shop not far from the mantua maker’s and gave long thought to making it her month’s purchase. But at her next trip to Wharton & Bowes she also found a novel called Clarissa, whose frontispiece promised to include “The most Important Concerns of Private Life, and particularly shewing the Distresses that may attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to Marriage.” She chose Clarissa.