by Paul Lussier
I was right. About as much as I was in my feeling that we would meet next at the Continental Congress of September 1774, which, based on this intuition, I’d resolved to find a way to attend.
The First Continental Congress was a convention organized by the Gang and other “Patriots” of the colonies stretching as far south as Carolina, who wanted to meet to formulate an official but, of course, entirely illegal response to Britain’s recent blockade and the installation of all those troops. Little did I know—or did they know—that the Continental Congress would actually launch the Revolution—from a cave in Philadelphia, thanks to Deborah and me.
My shot at getting to Philadelphia came quite easily, due to Hancock’s obsession with the French language. I knew full well when he tried to attend group classes (“to swing with the multitude,” as he put it) that this would not last. And it didn’t. At the end of his first half hour, during what used to be called a tea break, he professed to be unhappy sitting next to people who were “more than a little smelly,” and so offered me a post on the spot as a personal secretary to tutor him privately in French. I took the job then and there, leaving my other French students to their unfinished lessons, never to return.
My job, theoretically, was to teach Hancock French and record or fabricate only his best words, seasoned with French, whether he had actually uttered French or not, but before long I was dusting his cuffs like a valet, advising his cook on daily menus like a butler, and toting his gigantic damned trunk about town like a slave.
Mounted on his fine carriage, it was one hundred pounds of pine and hide and brass that followed him everywhere, a box into which I was forbidden, for some reason, to look.
“So heavy, sir! May I ask . . .”
“Just shut up and lug it, please,” on a bad day.
And on a good: “Emporte-le et tais-toi, s’il vous plait.”
“Papiers secretes” was what I was told it contained. Felt more like dead bodies. That trunk . . . that trunk. How I loathed it. Sometimes I think I signed on to fight in battle just to be rid of it. Even during the skirmish on Lexington Green, surrounded by showering bullets—oh, never mind, more on that score later.
Hancock agreed to furnish an elaborate cortege to accompany the Massachusetts congressional delegates and I was to be one of the amenities. Pleading illness, Hancock would not be among them but wanted me to be his eyes and ears in the proceedings—and on his fellow delegates. No one really knows why Hancock did not attend himself, but I believe the others thought him too stupid and preening to represent serious Boston, the infamous hotbed of sedition, and diplomatically suggested that he “take charge of the town” in their absence, which his vanity acceded to immediately.
Top priority after Samuel Adams was elected to the First Continental Congress was to get him properly attired. Adams, with raiment filthy and poor, was much too low-class-looking, much too scrappy to attend as he was, the rest of the delegates agreed. So I remade him as a gentleman with Hancock’s money.
Hancock decreed that this makeover was to be a grand event, meaning it was to be total and complete. Toward this end, I spent whole days on Samuel trying to teach him how to ride a horse (he hated it, and arrived in Philadelphia with his backside chafed raw). I purchased everything necessary to make him look presentable. It wasn’t easy. Oh, the strange lumps on that man (nothing fit)—shaped like a trapezoid, I swear to you. Eventually, though, I cobbled together an acceptable outfit: fine silver-buckled shoes, blue satin breeches with gold knee buckles, a brocaded blue waistcoat with a fine gold fob, a green velvet coat with gold sleeve buttons, and a much-too-small-for-his-dirty-fat-head tricorne hat, monogrammed with the insignia of the Sons of Liberty. The finale: a gold-headed cane.
By the time I was through he looked like, well, not much better than a discarded Christmas tree, draped with bright baubles but wilted and derelict, hanging around on the street to greet the delegates when they arrived in September.
Although another delegate also stayed home due to ill health (James Bowdoin, who probably didn’t trust Hancock either), finally Robert Treat Paine, John Adams, Samuel Adams, and myself crammed into a coach-and-four. Preceded by two white servants armed and on horseback and with four liveried blacks at the rear (two of these were forced to keep up on foot!), we were off, looking more like a parade float than a diplomatic carriage train.
As we passed through Connecticut over the next few days, every town rang its bells and shot off its cannon. Cheering men, women, and children crowded the doorways, and John Adams, with an ear-to-ear grin, mentioned in passing that no governor, no general of any army, had ever been treated to such ceremony. What a delight!
En route, we discussed not Boston or the people and their plight, but the watermelons in New Haven (“So red they look untrue!”), the stunning statue of King George III in New York (“What a sight to behold!”), and the seasonal flowers, with a few jokes about birds and bees thrown in.
We feasted upon more sumptuous breakfasts than even I had ever seen, served on rich delftware, in massive Revere coffee urns and teapots, with luxurious lace napkins that were lovely but useless for the perfect toast and butter, followed by luscious peaches and pears and plums.
John Adams’s ecstatic state, however, varied on a meal-to-meal basis, and then only if he hadn’t come into contact with a lot of people.
“Ah, the lack of good breeding in America,” he bemoaned. “Would that there was more evidence of real gentlemen about. . . .” New York fellows, in particular, got his goat: “No interest in another’s opinion, [they] talk overly loud and very fast and all at the same time.”
By the time we trundled into Philadelphia, we were dusty and weary and in need of a drink. We couldn’t resist heading for City Tavern, where we mingled with a host of Philadelphians and met Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina, my father’s friend who knew me in youth, yet was goggle-eyed at my appearance there in Philadelphia. I asked him about Papa, and he started to stammer, then shook his head: “Not well.” Papa’s gout was plaguing him, he said, and then finally explained his amazement at seeing me; he had been told that I had died after falling ill on a junket at sea. I nodded slowly, then dropped the subject.
The delegates at the tavern had their eyes upon the “three men from Boston” and from the start were wary and quick to judge: “Bostonians for Liberty—I see, but don’t they hang Quakers?” Between the jellies, continual toasts in claret (the Adams cousins practicing their elegance, not raising their drinks “too low or too tall, but to that nice point which is above disguise or suspicion”), bits of Parmesan cheese (John came to be known as “Baconface”), almonds and raisins washed down with strong punch and rich red wine, trifles, curds, creams, and whipped syllabubs, there was enormous suspicion and paralyzing fear. More than that: deep, deep hatred.
“Those New Englanders—ranting, canting idiots. I will not be duped into fighting their battles against the government!”
As far as I could tell, most of the men who had come seemed to have a single surprising agenda: to free the colonies not from England but from the “Bostonization of the Republic.” I had had no idea that Boston was so widely hated by those other than my father, and its misconstrued influence so widespread.
I had just settled into that little world unto itself and forgotten, I think, that the rest of the colonies were even there. And I certainly had no sense of any dangerous nationalistic agenda afoot, which clearly these men did, for to quell it was their aim.
“There is too great a nationality among the Bay men for the good of America as a whole.”
What were they talking about?
She would explain.
It was in Watertown, en route to Philadelphia, where a gentleman on horseback had treated us to an elegant entertainment, that I noticed she was following. First as a lady in a carriage and riding dress. The next day as a courier, and the third as a milkmaid, pushing her cart into town—never once wavering from her path, trailing ours.
It was in the City T
avern, while the delegates, wary all, were hissing under their breaths, “This Washington—are those peas in his head or brains?” As they slurped flip and sucked their wine, I approached her, dressed now as a housewife with a beribboned mobcap, a spotted bodice with striped kerchief, and even a pail for fetching water.
“Nice touch,” were my first words, pointing to the pail.
She chastised me with a “Shush,” then: “’Tisn’t polite to comment on a lady’s attire.” It was as if we knew each other so well that we could bicker like husband and wife. In fact, taking advantage of this impression, she dragged me outside, careful not to take my hand, as this was not generally what old intimates would do.
“Am I to know who it is you’re following and why?” I dared ask, once I was confident that the garden fountain was covering my sounds.
She rolled her eyes. “Shut up now.”
“May I call you Deborah,” I whispered, “or do you go by another name?”
She scowled.
I took the liberty of getting closer. “Deborah, I’ve thought of nothing but you since the Tea Party. I want to know everything.”
“That’s a tall order,” she insisted. “I’m not sure you’re ready.”
“Yes, you are, otherwise you’d never let me spot you. Believe me, ‘Me know you.’”
She giggled. “It’s true.”
“Then tell me,” I pleaded.
“Then meet me,” she countered, reaching for her pail, “at Hell’s Caves.”
I couldn’t say no, not to something that sounded so good. Though I had no idea whatsoever what she meant.
CHAPTER 16
Hell’s Caves
It was to be my initiation into the other story.
Hell’s Caves were essentially a series of holes in rock serving as taverns on the banks of the Delaware. They were like nothing I had ever seen before. Crevices splayed wide, black openings into which drunks and whores and those who wished to meet in secret would slip, checking their daylight identities at the entrance to the hole that served as a door. Inside, beer, wine, gin, rum, and meat pies were served to company of “lesser sorts” as bats swirled about heads and snakes slithered across the floor wet with water oozing up through fissures from a source that predated man. By “lesser sorts” I mean a collection of farriers, peddlers, Indians (real ones), cobblers, street sweepers, stableboys, and indentured servants who somehow, having managed the night off, were assembling for what looked to be more than a routine, casual affair.
“Welcome,” she said.
At some level I must have understood hers was more than a simple greeting, for the impact of her salutation was almost more than I could bear. Something about the cave, a wet, dark hole in the earth; the particular caste of people (whom I hadn’t seen collected since the night Otis was carried away); the quality of candlelight, amber and flickering gold; even the shadows, tall, black, and jagged silhouettes of ladies and gentlemen whispering, caressing, conspiring, flirting, cracking jokes, and plotting Revolution all at the same time.
There was only one place left to sit, a bench, which seemed to be reserved for Deborah. It was carved out of rock and belonged to Benjamin Franklin, who, when not on ambassadorial missions to England, was a regular here, welcome not for his political work or his almanac, I would eventually learn, but because he was the man who had harnessed lightning.
Here upon Franklin’s bench, no less, I was to encounter my own brand of lightning: the momentous power of Deborah’s secret world, not particular to Boston, Philadelphia, or any one location or place, but pervasive and ubiquitous throughout America, up and down the seaboard line. Not an organized network as much as a common bond, all the more recognizable for going unspoken and undocumented. More or less a state of mind.
This power, by the way, was immediately palpable; the moment I set foot inside the cave it had me in its grip. Imagine a shining, vibrating ray with a sharp tip (was it the Green Dragon’s fire, the tip his tongue?), attracting like a magnet all the bits and pieces of heightened awareness I’d accumulated over time (in the swamp, in beholding Apollo, in listening to Otis, during the Tea Party, and in the presence of Deborah’s smile, to review a few) and reorganizing them, connecting them in a whole new way. In this new configuration, these moments were no longer merely separate manifestations of transcendence, representations of beauty that one could only dream of, but were nothing less than goads to action. Not about yearning but about doing. Principles not simply to contemplate, but to live by.
I can’t say I felt Ah, at long last—I’m home! Among my people! Frankly, I found everyone there, even Deborah at the moment, somewhat fearsome, if only because I sensed—even if Deborah hadn’t said a word to me—that the simple fact of having discovered this cave and its denizens was about to make my life more dangerous than I ever could have dreamed.
Revolution would have it no other way.
But alas, Deborah did talk, and a lot.
“If you think you’re ready, I could use your help,” she began.
“Why the hell not?” I said, causing us both to smile.
She started in: “You said to me you was no Tory or Patriot, that your side was my side.” She paused. “That still true?”
I shrugged my assent.
“I’m a spy,” she went on, “but I belong to neither side.”
I waited for clarification.
She ordered an ale and settled in to tell a story, which I would learn was her wont when things got serious. She talked in stories, because that’s how she saw life: as a tale with a beginning, middle, and end.
Tonight’s story, an account of what would eventually come to be thought of by me as “The Missing Years, Part One” (sadly, there would be a “Part Two”), covered our time apart from the Stamp Act Riot of ’65 to the night we spotted each other outside Hancock’s home.
The morning after the destruction of Hutchinson’s mansion, Deborah, still wet with blood from her attackers, walked right into the Massachusetts Statehouse while it was in session. She smashed her way through the heavy doors to a chamber where women were not allowed and, storming up the aisle, demanded that justice be done.
She insisted upon attention, exhorting the legislators to see to laws that would deter men from such savage acts upon women as she had experienced last night in Hutchinson’s cellar. And of Sheriff Greenleaf, there in the balcony, she demanded that the men who had done this to her be tried and, when found guilty, hung. “Every last one of them, Sons of Liberty or no!”
She was tossed out for being a bunter and a crazed whore who stunk of menstruation and deserved what she got. The sheriff made nothing whatsoever of her claim. Furthermore, because she got caught during the attack and would not expunge the child growing inside her, she was cut from Madam Dorcas Griffiths’s roster of “gentlemen’s companions” available for hire through her agency. Consigned to the stable at the rear of the millinery shop-cum-whorehouse, she was given one week to move on.
Deborah hid in stores and silos and pens. She ate gruel and hay. She kept moving, stealing clothing appropriate for her to pass for a lady. And since fine ladies were usually given credit, she would often eat and sleep for free. Then, after purloining whatever she could to survive, she would flee.
By the time she was wanted for thievery in Boston, Deborah had moved on to Milton, Massachusetts, and there, after being hunted by dogs, it was on to Plymouth. Then back up to Salem, across to Concord and Lexington and Menotomy, zigzagging her way across the Bay Colony.
Moving, always moving, and in an unpredictable way so as to be difficult to pursue, Deborah stopped to rest for more than a day only once, at the gallows in the marshes of Charlestown. It was there, beneath Ezekiel’s clacking bones, that she gave birth to the child misbegotten by one of her attackers in Hutchinson’s cellar. Now, as the unwed mother of a daughter with a clubbed hand, her life situation was made worse.
Moving some more. Swallowing stolen gold so if she was apprehended she would not be found
out. Tucking sugar inside a band wrapped around her waist. Raw meat inside her daughter’s drawers. Carrots and corn in her bosom. Whatever survival required, until, luck having run its course in one location, she’d be spotted and sometimes arrested. But somehow, she’d flee again, moving to the next village, carrying a child for whom breathing, walking, simply existing was a chore.
“Please, daughter, just one foot before the other. That’s all you need to do. Let God take care of the rest.”
“Mummy, I don’t think I can,” burbled the tot. Then she would fall. And Mama would clean her face with a kerchief sticky with sugar, which would make Alice, the little tyke with the little legs, smack her lips, call out “Sweet!” and smile.
So when Mein came to town with his Tory rag the Chronicle, he made it plain on the streets that he needed prostitutes and stableboys. Because of their low profile and obvious access, they were in a fine position to do the state’s bidding, to dig up defamation on the famous Patriots. Deborah was only too happy to volunteer. For the money, yes, but also to discredit The Cause, as it smugly styled itself. For she was every bit as angry with the Founding Fathers as she ever was with the Brits for all their finery and arrogance. Indeed, she saw little distinction between them, if any at all.
And besides, working for Mein, she thrived for the first time in her life. No pay up front, of course, but she was not about to refuse the chance to trade her considerable survival skills and wile for steady shelter, food, clothing, and, most importantly, a way of finally keeping Alice from harm.
First Mein liked her. Then Admiral Montague. Hutchinson liked her once, for a night. Gage twice. And Church, Benjamin Church, yes, the married Patriot most fiery of all, liked her enough to keep her as his own mistress, and then his personal British spy. Before she knew it, she was in deep, reporting on events she learned about in Hancock et al.’s beds. It was decided: It was on spying and whoring, then, that she would rely to keep herself and Alice alive. Why, in that mansion Church was building for himself with all those British pounds (didn’t any of his esteemed colleagues wonder where a poet might be getting this kind of cash?), she and Alice were even given their own bedroom, if only to make it easier for Church to fuck Deborah on demand. There she lay, thinking of England, thanking it, for keeping little Alice alive. Every part of herself she would give them, from cunt to brain—every part but her heart and soul. These she would keep for herself, for the Revolution, for the day her country would call. In the meantime . . . call her traitor, call her Patriot—spying, no matter the side, was just a job.