The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  King Dick pushed me into his throne room, dropped heavily on his red plush throne, and eyed me thoughtfully.

  “Namiah,” he said to his seckatary, who stood waiting the royal orders, “go git a basket o’ plum gudgeons an’ foh mugs of beer, wivout no foam on ’em. ’Ey’s goin’ to be a war roun’ heah, an’ we better git ouahse’fs raidy.”

  XXX

  R ICKOR, Whitten and Miller had not attempted the barrier. Hays had got over, and within half an hour was as well swallowed in the crowd as I was myself. Captain Shortland, raging, had promised heavy punishments to the guards if we got clear of Dartmoor: not only that, but he swore to have us back in the Cachot and see us rot there.

  There have certainly been larger wars than this war of six thousand unarmed, imprisoned Americans against red-faced Thomas Shortland and his regiment of thick-witted Somersetshire militia, but I doubt that there have been stranger ones.

  The prison houses buzzed like beehives after our escape, and acquaintances came hurrying to see me on the second floor of Number Four to tell me how the governing committees of the prisons had refused to deal with Shortland and had ignored demands that we be given up; how even the Rough Alleys, headed by men we knew only as Sodom and Gomorrah, were fighting him and the militiamen with all the obscenities to which they could lay tongue; and how the bulk of the prisoners, simple seamen from New England and New York and the Chesapeake, were determined to give him no satisfaction.

  It was on the day after our escape that King Dick came to me, chuckling. “ ’At ole Shoatland,” he said, “he’s goin’ bus’ his bazoo effen he gits much moh lip offen ’ese white boys. Mm, mm! ’At ole Shoatland, he’s pow’ful mad!”

  He had, King Dick said, closed the market, thinking to bring the prisoners to terms.

  “Mah lan’!” the big Negro exclaimed, “what ’ose white boys call him an’ call ’ose Som’set m’litia—ooh! Meks yo’ yahs bu’n when you heahs it.”

  I could hear a derisive howling from the yard outside and from the lower floor of the prison house: the howling of hundreds of men; but King Dick would not let me go to a window to see what it was.

  “Rest yo’se’f right yah,” he said. “ ’At old Shoatland, li’l’ buhd tol’ him ’at one of you’s hidin’ in ’is prison, ’an he’s goin’ drive ev’ybody out so’s he kin suhch it!”

  “Maybe I’d better get in the hole?” I said, for King Dick had a movable slab in his throne room, and underneath it a royal storehouse for his money bags and private rum supply; and this was my hiding place when searchers were near.

  King Dick shook his head. “Ain’t nobody goin’ out, not till ’ey gits raidy,” he said.

  The howling grew louder; and as we watched the staircase at the rear of the long hall, a mass of shouting, laughing prisoners came pouring up onto our floor. Hard on their heels was a squad of Somersetshire militia, pursuing them with bayoneted muskets at the charge.

  The prisoners came past us, leaping, whistling, turning handsprings, roaring with laughter; and behind the angry, red-faced militiamen pressed another howling, capering mob. Thus escorted, front and rear, the militiamen shambled the length of the alley and vanished down the stairs at the far end, only to reappear immediately up the stairs opposite those which they had descended. At the top they turned in seeming desperation on those who followed them; their march reversed itself, the pursued becoming the pursuers. The place, it seemed to me, was full of squads of frantic militiamen, all of them preceded and followed and hindered and jostled by contemptuous prisoners.

  Eventually King Dick tucked me snugly under the slab; the militiamen were left in possession of the building and allowed to search, while the prisoners packed the yard outside and cursed them for bloody library-burning lobsters and worse.

  Later that day, when the black paint on my face had been renewed, we watched from a window to see the rioting in the yard.

  There were men employed to light the lamps in the yards and market place, and when these men came in among the prisoners, they were promptly seized. Thereupon a company of militiamen was sent to the yard of Number Four Prison to push the prisoners into the prison house at the points of bayonets; and I truly believe any old woman would have known more than to send a small body of troops among reckless men at such a time. Resentful of the bayonets, the prisoners sought to pry up paving stones to use as weapons. We could see the soldiers cocking their muskets; and at this the militia officers came out in front of their men and ordered them back to the market place, in spite of the shouts of Shortland, who stood on the covered walk overlooking the yard, bawling God knows what to prisoners and soldiers alike. Thus the prisoners were conscious of defying Shortland successfully, and the Somersetshire militia could see they had been flouted by unarmed men.

  * * *

  I was in a fever to be free of the prison. To find myself out of the Cachot, rightfully a free man, since the war was over, and with every right to go in search of Emily, yet to be held here and to be a fugitive within the walls, was sheerly maddening. I was troubled, as well, by the news Jesse Smith brought when he was released from the Cachot and hurried to King Dick’s domain in Number Four.

  “By God!” he said, when he had looked hard at me and made sure it was I beneath the black paint, “I damn near died that morning, waiting to see if you’d get over!”

  “Where’s Tommy?” I asked him.

  “Well,” he said, “I was coming to that. I been kind of dreading this. That’s an awful nice boy, Cap’n Dick! Gosh! Seemed as if he wouldn’t talk about nothing but Cap’n Dick!”

  “Say what you mean,” I told him. “Are you trying to tell me Tommy’s sick? What’s the— He hasn’t got the smallpox?”

  “No, it ain’t the smallpox. He—by gracious, I never seen a nicer boy!”

  I waited for him to go on. He cleared his throat and ran his fingers through his hair, matted from his ten days in the Cachot. I could smell the stench of the place, as if a gargantuan polecat had bedded down with him; and the sweat came out on me at the thought that violent, worthless Shortland could have sent a boy like Tommy Bickford, worth a million Shortlands, into that terrible granite box.

  “That night,” Jesse went on, “after you’d broke out, he had a little cough, and a chill that wouldn’t let up. He shook and he shook, and he couldn’t get to sleep. First we thought he was excited on account of you, because he kept talking about Cap’n Dick. Cap’n Dick this and Cap’n Dick that, and some lady or other!” He coughed and cleared his throat and looked at me apologetically. “No offense,” he added.

  “No,” I said.

  “We—well, we fixed him up with extra blankets, but when he went out of his head and began thinking you were back with us, along toward morning, we suspicioned what it was.”

  “Did you send for Magrath, Jesse?”

  “We sent for him when Carley brought breakfast.”

  “Did Magrath say it was jail fever?”

  “He didn’t say anything,” Jesse said uncomfortably. “Just picked him up in his arms and walked off with him.”

  “Well, Jesse,” I said, “he’s a good boy. There never was a better. I’d like you to get cleaned up and find out about him. I’d like you to go just as quick as you can. His father saved my father at the Battle of Valcour Island.”

  “Sho!” Jesse exclaimed. “Did he, now!”

  “Yes,” I said. “Go see Magrath. Tell him I’ll come over any time it’ll help Tommy. You tell Tommy he needn’t worry: I’ll wait for him.”

  We waited for tidings of Tommy in the midst of a turmoil such as I had never heard or seen before; for Shortland sent message after message into the prisons, demanding this and demanding that, so that the criers were forever crying this madman’s proposals up and down the aisles, and the prisoners were perpetually howling their hatred and contempt for what he proposed; and the yards outside the prison were in a tumult all through the day because the sentries and wardens were being mocked by every prisoner in sight.r />
  At the end of a week this violent and foolish man, finding the prisoners determined to defy him, opened the market once more. Thereupon the prisoners, realizing they had beaten Shortland, celebrated their victory.

  Instead of stopping their gambling at a reasonable hour, they kept it up all night; and there was riotous drunkenness and uproar on all sides, in spite of the efforts of the cooler-headed to keep order.

  It was early on a March evening that King Dick came hurriedly to his throne room to stand between the stanchions, his melon-shaped head tilted over on his huge shoulder as if listening to the shrill clamor that rose from the bottom floor of the prison.

  “Here!” I said. “What’s the matter? Tommy isn’t worse, is he?”

  King Dick took off his bearskin cap and ran his huge, banana-like fingers across his forehead.

  “Mah lan’!” he said. “Mah lan’! ’At’s too close for mah pleasure! ’At ole ship Favorite, she better git in here wiff ’ose raffication papers, showin’ we’s free men, else ’ey git ’eirseffs jibbited up wiff bayonets!”

  “What happened?”

  “ ’Ose sentries was fixin’ to lock ’em dohs when Ah come back fum ’at ole hospital,” he said, “an’ one of ’ose Som’set m’litia, he up an’ jibbits his bayonet into one of ’ose white folks—jibbits him in his laigs an’ in his back an’ in his rump, so’s he’s all bloodied up! Mm, mm! Mah Ian’, ’at ain’t no way to ack! Ah doan’ lak ’ose ole bayonets, no SUH!”

  “What was he jabbed for?”

  “Not for nuffin’,” he said. “He hadn’t done nuffin’ nor said nuffin’.”

  “I don’t believe it,’ J told him. “An armed man wouldn’t bayonet a prisoner without reason.”

  “Ah heahs you,” King Dick said calmly. “ ’Ese Som’set m’litia boys, ’ey bayonet ’em wiffout no reason, ’cause Ah seen it! Mm, mm! ’Ose white folks is mad! Me too! Ah’s mad; on’y Ah wants sompin to fight wiff, effen ’ere’s goin’ to be jibbitin’ wiff bayonets. Effen Ah ain’t got nuffin’ to fight wiff, Ah moves out. Lissen ’ose white boys! Mah lan’! Lissen now: wha’s goin’ on now? Lissen to—” He broke off, for in the yard outside was suddenly set up a wild yelling. We could see prisoners at the far end of our floor pushing against the windows to look down at the tumult.

  “Lissen! Lissen to—” King Dick began again, but he never finished, for the prisoners at the windows broke away and ran for the staircases, shouting, “Favorite! Favorite!” At the same time the staircases leading down from the cock loft were filled with men, all racing for the open air.

  I saw Jesse Smith free himself from the scrambling throng and swing his arms at me. “Favorite?’ he bawled. “She’s in! When you going back to Arundel?”

  * * *

  In that very moment the hopes of six thousand men, legally entitled to freedom, rose to a happy height. Jesse Smith was laughing deliriously. He actually began to dance, and hugged me like a bear, trying to make me dance with him. “Old Stonington, Connecticut!” he shouted, when I had pushed him off. And for half an hour thereafter he seemed unable to do more than splutter with delight and shout the three words over and over: “Old Stonington! Old Stonington, Connecticut!”

  To have told any of these six thousand men then that he would be in Dartmoor more than seven days longer would have brought on an immediate fight, I think. Not one of the six thousand could have dreamed that Reuben Beasley, the American agent in England, would not have ships to carry them home in a week’s time.

  That night I washed the black from my face, and the next day went boldly and openly to the hospital to see Tommy Bickford. His curly brown hair had been cut close to his head; and he looked shriveled into himself from the burning of the fever, so that he seemed like a skeleton beneath the bedclothes.

  “Well,” I said, “how you feel, Tommy?”

  “Good,” he said, and moved his lips a little, as if he tried to say my name, but hadn’t the strength.

  “Well, Tommy,” I said, “you’re a good boy. I wouldn’t have let you go into that Cachot, Tommy. Don’t you ever do anything like that again.”

  “No, sir,” he said.

  “You hurry up and get fat and strong,” I told him, “so we can start together when the time comes.”

  He nodded, fixing his eyes on my face as if to see whether I had any plans I was keeping from him. “That lady come back?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve had no means to hear from her or from Jeddy Tucker.”

  I took her picture from my pocket, unwrapped it, and held it up for him to see, thinking it might do him good to look at a face not covered with stubble, or grooved from starvation, or gray from being penned inside dripping stone walls. His eyes fastened to it and clung; so I propped it against a fold in his blanket.

  “Tommy,” I said, “I want you to put some flesh on your bones. We’re liable to be out of here almost any hour, but now I won’t go till you go with me.”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see tall, thin, one-eyed Dr. Magrath.

  “Well, well!” he said. “This is an unexpected pleasure!” He stooped over and picked up Tommy’s wrist, seeming not to notice the miniature of Lady Ransome.

  “Time for a little sleep, Tommy,” he said. He lifted an eyebrow in my direction, so I got up to go.

  “Eat your soup and get fat,” I told Tommy again.

  I took back the miniature and went out with Magrath. There was a strange, unpleasant, unclean smell in the stone-walled corridor.

  “Can’t you get him out of here, Doctor?” I asked.

  Magrath drew his fingers down the blind side of his face, as if to free himself of a cobweb.

  “Look here, Captain,” he said, “do you think it’s quite safe for you to be out in the open like this?”

  “But we’re at peace!”

  “Yes,” he said, “but you’re still in prison, and some people can’t distinguish between a man who happens to be in a prison and a criminal. I’m having hard work to get your friends released from the Cachot.”

  That was the truth of it: the war was over, yet from morning to night the Somerset militiamen glowered at us over the walls; their bayonets winked at us in the watery sun that occasionally peeped through the rain clouds and fog banks of late March. The war was over, yet the bells still hung on the wires; and each night, at sundown, sentries manned the fire steps while turnkeys herded us into our prison houses and locked the doors on us. We were at peace with the English, yet the criers cried through the prisons a notice from red-faced, hook-nosed Thomas Shortland that any man caught attempting to escape from the depot would be punished by being locked in the Cachot for ten days.

  Thus the deferred hope of these six thousand penniless and halfstarved men threw them into a desperate rage that grew deeper and more bitter from day to day; and after a week had gone by with no prospect of relief or release for any man there began to be talk of how we could overpower the guards, break the gates, and march in a body to Tor Bay or Teignmouth. This talk, we learned, was carried somehow into the market place and spread among the farmers and merchants of Princetown and Tavistock and Moreton-Hampstead. Men from those towns moved their families into Plymouth for fear the country would be overrun by six thousand angry Americans. The guards on the walls were doubled.

  I think I alone had cause for gratitude; for Tommy Bickford was gaining weight; his talk was beginning to sound as though there might be a trace of blood and muscle in him after all, and I made trip after trip to the hospital without being discovered by Shortland.

  “Be careful, Cap’n Dick,” Tommy warned me after one of my visits. “I’d feel safer about you if you’d kept on your paint, I think. Maybe you’d better turn blackamoor again.”

  I laughed at him then; but half an hour later I had a shock and thought for a moment that perhaps he had been right.

  “You go on up to Cap’n Shoatland’s office,” King Dick said, meeting me at the top of the second-floor stairway in Number Four.
“You go on right up there. King Dick and Shoatland, ’ey bofe say so.”

  “What!” I gasped. “What!”

  But the big black man laughed and reassured me—though he mystified me too. Visitors for me waited in the office; the commandant himself had agreed to let me go and come, and he had added the words “in spite of past offenses.”

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Ah doan know,” King Dick said and giggled. “Whyn’t you go fine out yo’se’f? Sooner you hurry, sooner you’ll know. Ain’t Ah tole you-

  So far as I know he may have finished his question. If he did, it reached only the empty air where I had stood when he began it, for I took his advice and hurried.

  From the door of Shortland’s office I stood and looked back, down the hill and across the market place to the seven prison buildings crouching at the bottom of the slope, like seven cats watching me patiently, as if secure in the knowledge that still I could not escape them. Then I knocked on the door and went in.

  Shortland, red-faced and hook-nosed, was crouched behind his desk. Opposite him sat a slender gentleman in blue broadcloth, accompanied by a fashionably-dressed lady, plump and pretty and fair-haired. The man jumped up when I came in, and looked hard at me; and I remembered his eyes. Like those of Emily Ransome, they were the color of smoke in the swamps of Maryland.

  “Why—” he said—“why—the man I wanted—why, what’s happened to you? I mean, you may not remember me: Sanderson, my name is.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I remember Mrs. Sanderson and you very well—very pleasantly.” I licked my lips to take the dryness from them and steadied myself. “Your sister,” I said, “your sister—”

  “Yes,” he said. “Where is she?”

  “Where is she?” I asked. “Where is she? Don’t you know where she is?”

  “No,” he said. There was a look in his smoke-colored eyes that wrung my heart with the memory of how Emily had put her hand to her throat when Sir Arthur had offered to buy my dog Pinky.