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by Diane Carey

  “Child of God, whose son was thus anointed, know that you too are purified and absolved of all sins of this world, for the soul but waits in earthly form …”

  A hopeless calm came over him then. Key was rambling, stringing together senseless platitudes. With great inner will, he focused his thoughts and got on with business.

  “I, Francis Scott Key, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, baptize you—”

  He paused, then one of the men quickly said, “Joshua John Butterford.”

  “Joshua John Butterford, and commit your immortal soul into the hands of God, our Heavenly Father, if He should deem it so. Dear child, in innocence you were born and in innocence remain. May you dwell with angels in eternal paradise … Amen.”

  “Amen,” the others chanted.

  Key lowered his head and kissed the tiny boy’s forehead.

  Silence folded in. To speak now seemed crude, to interrupt the moment at which God would dip down from Heaven and take this little life, if that were His divine will. Key hoped it had sounded all right, and that they wouldn’t notice he had literally run out of words.

  Only the rock-hard common sense of Mrs. Flett finally put an end to it. She reached up, wrapped the small body again in the bread cloth, and took him back under her shawl.

  “Done,” she said, with a heave of relief.

  Visibly shaking, Key stepped back and let her go past him. He felt Captain Boyle’s hand around his arm as if to steady him or keep him from doing anything else, and remembered that Boyle had lost a son in infancy himself, while Key had been graced with healthy children. So far.

  “Bless you, sir,” Mrs. Flett said. Whether the baby was alive or dead as she stepped out the door was known only to her and God. “Bless you, bless you, bless you.”

  Her voice faded as she went up to the street. One of the two men nodded a silent thanks at Key and the captain, then followed her.

  The other man shook Key’s whitened hand. “Bless you, Mr. Key.” He started digging in a pocket. “I have—”

  “No.” Key stopped him sharply. “Not a thought of it. Go into the kitchen and tell Mrs. Key that I request a basket for you with two roast ducks, fresh fruit, and bread. And honey. Go, please. Go.”

  The big man sheepishly pulled his hand from his pocket, held his hat as if it were a life line, and nodded before moving past them in the direction Key had pointed through the house.

  When he and the captain were alone, the shaken lawyer pressed his hands over his hot face. “Did I do that?”

  Boyle pulled him aside, away from the door. “Have you slipped your wig? You’re a layman!”

  “I told them. God help me, Tom, I made it up as I went.”

  “The bishop is going to baptize you in a whole new way, I think.”

  “Did I sin? What’ve I done? My pride is my undoing—”

  “Shh,” Boyle cautioned. “It’ll be all right. Have a sip.”

  He picked up the teacup of consecrated water from the corner table where one of those men had left it and handed it to Key, who almost made the colossal roaring scandalization of actually drinking from it.

  “Not that!” he choked.

  “Right—” Boyle pulled it away. “Something stronger. Let’s go downstairs.”

  In a dither, he tried to find a place to put the teacup, but had no idea what to do with a handful of holy water.

  Key stammered, “Give … it to me … I’ll…”

  He took the cup, but likewise had no brilliant solution and only clutched it to his chest.

  “Below.” Tom Boyle seized him and together they disappeared into a hole in the earth where Frank Key could only hope to keep going onward to hell.

  “His wound was a horror. Most of his thigh was torn away. I was sad to hear that he later died of it. We could’ve been friends, I think, in another life. When they told me he had died, they also said he was noble enough to send a letter to Lisbon, regaling what he called my ‘superior sailing abilities.’ He must’ve been in unspeakable agony, but he did me a kindness even so.”

  Tom Boyle stood at the dining room’s window on the lower level of the Keys’ home, holding a glass of wine and measuring in his mind the distance between the moonlit swells of current on the Potomac River outside. The dining room provided a view of both the Potomac on the riverside, with the lovely terraced gardens sloping from here down to the water, and the street on the front side. The room was graciously decorated, a sanctuary in the basement of the home, warm in winter and cool in summer. Moonlight came through the window, softly moving as it shined through the huge walnut and poplar trees and the orchard, and turned the yellow cotton of Boyle’s shirt to a buttery cream.

  Beside the captain, the staid presence of Frank Key provided a kind of philosophical gravity. Key raised his own goblet. “To Captain de Millo.”

  “Captain de Millo.” Boyle raised his goblet and together they drank the tribute. “Thank you, Frank.”

  “Truly the least I can do. Too often we forget that there are decent souls among our enemies.”

  “We must forget it in times of conflict. Or we couldn’t find it in ourselves to kill them. War makes murderers out of angels. There’s no other way.”

  “Uncivilized.”

  “To you, the manor-born poet.”

  Key smiled, rather sadly. “I wasn’t born on the manor. I was born outside, on the road to Frederick.”

  “Born outside? Like a little colt?”

  “I wonder to what that entitles me,” the lawyer mused.

  “You’ll probably turn feral. A little honey badger with curly hair.”

  They managed to laugh, in spite of the clumsy beginning to the evening. They hadn’t forgotten the immortal soul of little Joshua Butterberry—Butter something—but as adults were forced too commonly to do, they had learned to move past the death of a sick infant. Only if a child lived past the age of five was he considered safe from the deadly state of infancy.

  For the sake of his guest, Frank Key forced himself to accept the unchangeable and leave the details to God.

  He filled the captain’s goblet. “I’ll be a gentrified badger. Are you getting too hungry to wait? It’s not like the doctor to be so late.”

  “Oh, I’m not wasting away.”

  “I can offer you some biscuits.”

  The captain smiled. “You’re the only man I know who can be high-strung and composed at the same time. Well, other than Dieter, I guess. Do you have tattoos all the way up your arms?”

  “Sorry?”

  Boyle chuckled. “Nothing. By the way, I may have need of your legal services, if you’re free to take on another client. There are some challenges about the distribution of prize cargos. If my agent calls for your fees, don’t be surprised.”

  “I never charge veterans.”

  “Veterans?”

  “No one is more a veteran of this war than you, Tom.”

  “But I can afford to pay. Save your pro bono services for the wounded soldiers and the Negroes.” He hung a comforting hand on Key’s shoulder. “And desperate grandmothers.”

  The lawyer shrugged with just his eyebrows and thanked his friend with a sniff and a nod.

  “Are you available?” Boyle asked.

  “For you, always. But the war has depleted my practice anyway, the same as so many businesses. No one needs explain the hardships of the blocked to you, certainly.”

  “Still disapproving of the war?”

  “You know what I think. We claimed to strike in defense of free trade, then moved to seize Canada. Better the flag be lowered in disgrace for such un-Christian acts.”

  “Have you given further thought to running for an office?”

  “I suppose, yes.”

  “Well?”

  “Makes me go dead inside. Political parties have ruined politics. I find that the worst men in a party will be uppermost in it. So there is no great gain from change of personalities.”

  “Does seem to attract more
bugs than honey. But you are an emollient, my friend. If anyone could unkink the ropes, it’s you. Even President Madison enjoys to see your face at his office door, the poor man.”

  The bell at the front entrance rang.

  “There he is.” Key raised his gaze to an imaginary hole in the ceiling through which he could see as well as hear the presence at the front door.

  “Good,” Boyle said. “I’m starving!”

  Key smiled. “I may have to cross-examine you.”

  They turned to the stairway as Dr. William Beanes’ walking stick made its first clap on the top step, but as they met the older man at the bottom of the stairs they could see from his expression that their evening of conviviality was at an end even before beginning.

  Beanes came down the stairs so fast that they thought he had taken a tumble.

  He looked at each of his friends, one then the other, as if a strict glare could set them up for what he had to tell them.

  “It has finally happened,” he said. “They’ve come.”

  “They’re in our bays and inlets, right in the top of the Chesapeake, sculling barges up our rivers, blocking our ports. This morning before dawn, they went in on barges to get past the shoal. When they rounded Concord Point in Havre de Grace, a man at the battery fired on them and tried to hold them off. They landed, captured him, turned the guns on the town, and started shooting.”

  Beanes’ words were cannon shots across the expansive dining table. Light from the chandelier reflected in the rosewood as if to display the enemy firestorm delivered to a small town in the north of Chesapeake Bay. The British were starting at the top.

  The dining room was warm, windows open to capture any moment of breeze off the Potomac, but Washington had been built on a swamp and the pestilence of heat and humidity were already weighing down the spring air. Beanes and his host across the table were sitting, but everyone else in the room was either pacing or trying to find a place to hide his or her expression.

  At the other end of the impeccably set table, Francis Key sat with his eyes fixed on that reflection from the chandelier. His curls framed his solemn expression. It was as if he and his wife, who stood a few paces behind him, were from a painting come to life.

  Mary Tayloe Lloyd Key, whom for some reason everyone called Polly, was a myth-made match for Frank, a charmer with long arms, a swanlike neck and pretty hands, who had a queenliness about her, but was also approachable and open-hearted, and whose youthfulness had not been worn away by having had five children and carrying their sixth, expected in the autumn. She was almost tall enough to look her husband straight in the eyes, but not so tall as to be awkward or unwomanly, which was probably why she wore her expectancies with such grace. Her high-set eyes and cameo complexion were lovely in a frame of lemon-zest curls caught up in ribbons, showing her throat and shoulders just open like that. She enjoyed entertaining and was supportive of Frank’s very common dinner parties with his myriad friends, clients, associates, Congressmen, the clergy, and all manner of luminaries. She was the arbiter elegantiarum of Francis Scott Key’s social position as a prominent barrister in the Washington/Baltimore tableau. This dinner had been arranged in good cheer, but Beanes was now forced to ruin it with grim news upon his arrival only minutes ago.

  He knew he had been late for dinner and that they had held it as long as possible for him, but the news from Havre de Grace had delayed him, and now they all knew why he had been so rude as to let the roasted ducks go dry on the warming plates.

  Polly Key stood near the fireplace with her daughters Elizabeth and Marie and son Francis Scott Jr., who were crowded around her for the kind of security children seek from their mothers’ arms when dire tidings are delivered. The children, at ten, eight, and seven years, were old enough to hear, and if the British brought their brutalities to Georgetown, these children would be expected to help with their two—and this autumn, three—younger siblings.

  But the fear in their faces as they read their elders’ expressions—Beanes found their countenances troubling as he described the terrors of Havre de Grace. Until now the war had seemed a thing to talk about, but beyond the horizon.

  This evening they were no longer chatting about the theoretical pros and cons or strategies in the Western Territories, but heard the crushing details of real attacks, brutalities leveled upon their Maryland neighbors—not soldiers or sailors, but ordinary folk. Like those in this room.

  At the window, gazing out, probably to hide his expression as he might have done on the stern of his ship, Captain Tom Boyle was uncharacteristically quiet as he now heard the dreadful announcement of the attack on the small Susquehanna River village. He looked like something out of a Barbary Coast story, with his yellow shirt, black waistcoat, and blue neckerchief. His day coat was over there on a hook, because of the heat.

  The doctor continued speaking, as he knew he must, and knew that Captain Boyle wished he could drive his schooner up to the top of the bay and take revenge.

  “While the women and children ran into the woods, the seamen came with hatchets and torches. Rear-Admiral Cockburn’s orders. They ransacked every building, then set it afire. They took what they wanted, like common pillagers, delivering revenge. People’s private possessions— clothing, bedsteads, sofas, shoes, heirlooms—your grandfather’s chessboard, your mother’s rocking chair, whatever they saw fit to steal. They took an antique globe and used it for target practice in front of the terrorized family. Go on and guess which part of the globe they shot at. They did the same with milk crocks, wig boxes, anything to scare the families. They smashed furniture they could not carry off. They set alight each house and moved to the next. They set fire to the herring boats and nets. For four hours they plundered and molested. Featherbeds cut open, shaken into the wind. Mirrors shattered for the shameless delight of it. They rolled rain barrels and butter churns down a hill, aiming for the people in the trees, then cheered when they knocked some poor sot over. The pitiful citizens were driven out, to look back and see their houses fall into red ash. This the British did till the whole town blazed. When nothing was left but burned-out hulks, the rascals climbed onto their barges, cheered Admiral Cockburn, and moved on to plunder other towns.”

  Frank Key suddenly interrupted, “What other towns?”

  “I don’t know. I only know they’ve moved on through the upper bay for more marauding and conflagration.”

  “Cockburn,” Boyle snarled. “That son of a freshwater gondolier.”

  “You know him?” Key asked.

  “I know about him. He’s a vain sadist. He’s also brilliant and notoriously thorough. That’s why he’s an admiral at only forty. His methods are right out of the most vulgar backstreet barrack and quarter no discretion for the harmless civilians in his wake. His own sailors deplore serving under him. His ships are like prisons. He creates a lot of deserters.”

  The captain paused, took a swig of wine, then turned to those at the table. He put his wine glass down.

  “Well, Frank,” he said bitterly, “there’s your next rhyme. ‘The day they laid waste to Havre de Grace.’”

  Beanes looked up at Tom Boyle, but found neither mirth nor satire in the captain’s eyes. Boyle simply glared at their mutual friend, communicating some silent punishment only those two understood.

  But then, as he thought about it, the doctor understood. When the British finally came to Georgetown and the Capitol, would this famous young lawyer, this pacifist, stand down or stand up to defend his own home?

  The brick house, with its many keystone-linteled windows and two dormers with their own arched window, provided three and a half stories and two framed porches to the Potomac in back and two and a half stories in front to the street. Both the river and the street were avenues the British would certainly employ in their invasion. The house would be an obvious target for English gunners coming up that river. It was not the most aristocratic home in Georgetown, but it was settled and appealing, flanked by two chimneys on the sides that
always reminded Beanes of raised ears on a cat’s head. He always enjoyed coming here, or most of the time, to attend Frank’s dinner parties and hear the latest bubblings from the political pot.

  “Even when upheaval is so long portended,” Beanes went on, “its arrival is still a shock. Since Napoleon retreated from Russia in that mess last December, the British have been plotting how to turn their concentration on us. And now they have finally done it.”

  “Napoleon isn’t defeated yet,” Polly Key reminded them.

  “No, but he is substantially weakened,” her husband said, “for now. We pray for the poor souls who—”

  “Five hundred thousand men,” Boyle interrupted sharply. “Reprehensible behavior for a commanding officer. Half a million men, starved and frozen in that Cossack wilderness. The time to pray for them has passed. They were eating their horses even before the horses died. Some were even eating—”

  “Captain,” Polly warned, “another time.”

  He glanced at her, at all the little Key faces. “Sorry.”

  “Children, you’ve heard enough for tonight. Upstairs for your reading hour.”

  Disappointed, the three children slogged toward the stairs. Nothing they could read would be as salacious as listening to the adults tonight. At least the elder two perceived what the captain had been saying—children always knew more than their parents realized. And these were particularly quick-minded and observant children with minds like wicks. Beanes knew their education was their father’s pride, for he devised their lessons and taught them himself, as he was taught at home by his own parents. He could easily have foisted them off on some elite school, but instead he took this task upon himself.

  Polly herded her daughters and son upstairs and went with them, courteously giving the men a chance to descend into men’s kind of talk if they wanted to.

  “Napoleon will not suffer long for the loss of his army,” Boyle went on. “He hasn’t given up the crown. But he’ll need time to gather more men. Until then, Britain’s anger will land hard on us. This is a world war, my friends. We’re in grave danger.”