Banners

by Diane Carey

  “Fire away.”

  “Here? You wouldn’t like to get a cup of—”

  “No time.”

  “Ah … well, then … I hope this is not jarring.”

  “Mr. Yambrick, I’ll knock you silly and turn you over to the nearest barge master.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Yambrick leaned on his walking stick and drew a stabilizing breath. “I’m just not good at difficult news.”

  “I am. Let’s have it.”

  “You see, it’s possible to do a job too well. You’ve gained considerable fame, and the Comet herself great notoriety. For those who expected the war to be over by now, your red-blooded legend is more than fulfilled.”

  “But the war isn’t over.”

  “Nor does it seem to have a resolution coming any time soon. At this juncture in events, it’s worth discussion that your company and the nation might both profit from a few key changes.”

  Unshrinking, Boyle gazed at him, but refused to ask the obvious question. He didn’t like being led blindfolded through a maze.

  The mysterious man nodded. “The time has come for bigger privateer ships, able to carry more men and more guns.”

  Boyle’s legs went cold and his ears started ringing. Like a shot out of hell, he suddenly understood. Unable to hide his frown, he turned partly away and tried to control his reaction. The best he could do was not pull the propped-open door off its hinges.

  The other man gave him a few moments then cautiously continued. “Comet is famous, fast, and has taken many blows. And I suppose this is why the conversation came up when you were not present. No one wanted to ambush you.”

  “What you mean is that no one had the plums to face me.”

  The other man nodded and shrugged, heeding his responsibility to agree with no one or everyone.

  “The Comet is tired, captain,” he said. “She’s earned her legend and her rest. Suggestions have arisen that she might be retired. Or sold.”

  As his mind raged with a thousand details, twisting with the conflict between a devoted captain with a ship that had saved his life over and over, and a businessman with other responsibilities to other people, Boyle muttered, “She’s not a horse.”

  “But like a horse, she has run her maximum. Perhaps she could see new service as a pleasure craft … a yacht.”

  Boyle scowled. “Yacht!”

  “But even more, your partners would like to make optimal use of their best captain. They want to find a newer, larger ship for the dauntless, impetuous Thomas Boyle to command. It’s good advertising, good use of … em …”

  “Resources?”

  “It’s meant as a reward, Captain, please take it so.”

  “They want me to be their big flag.”

  “Sorry? I don’t understand that.”

  Boyle shook his head and made a dismissing gesture. His mind was somewhere else. This was not a conversation he wanted to have.

  “As an owner, you have options,” Yambrick said. “You could appeal to them to keep both ships in operation for you.”

  “A captain must be monogamous. One wife, one ship—”

  Boyle cut himself off. His mind, unbidden, flashed to the many ships he had commanded since his sixteenth birthday. Ships come and ships go.

  But now and then, not often, there’s a ship with a sense of herself. A ship that saves her crew’s lives again and again, that hits the shoal, gives herself a shake, gets up on the next swell and carries on as if nothing happened. A ship that takes on water up to the weather deck and still doesn’t roll over, that gives the crew time to scramble, a fighting chance to save their own lives and hers. Some ships came off the ramps with a certain undefined quality of being that proved itself out over years of stubborn service. With right combination of lumber, iron, and workmanship, somehow the right captain and the right procedures, a perfect balance was discovered, an amalgam of all the unknowable thousand things that fuse and end up on the ocean together in the same place, at that one moment of danger where it all demonstrates itself at once. And out the other end of the tube comes a human devotion to this object underfoot, this battered gathering of wood and rope that has taken on a personality.

  But not every ship. Just now and then.

  “When do they want to do this?” he asked, hoping to drown out his thoughts.

  “When you’re ready.”

  “We’ve just done repairs and re-rigging. New foremast.”

  “Certainly, Captain. When you’re ready.”

  Boyle knew what that meant—when he was ready, but as soon as he could manage to become ready. They were planting this in his head, but allowing him time to get used to it. They knew he was provisioning and mending the Comet and would not yank her away quite yet, but would give him one more voyage with her, a chance to let the idea sink in that the marriage was ending. He could almost hear them say it. They didn’t want to make him angry enough to change companies and leave them behind while he was so valuable an asset. A big flag.

  “I’m not ready yet,” he said. “Excuse me. I really must be on my way. Thank you for … that.”

  He tried to step back toward the street.

  The other man’s voice called him back. “But, Captain—there is more.”

  Boyle hung his head and groaned. “Mr. Yambrick, please release me.”

  “Please … in here, sir.”

  Yambrick moved into the chandlery’s wood-floored shop, waddled a few steps, then turned. When Boyle followed him in, with his cane he poked at two large burlap-wrapped parcels the size of couch cushions lying next to each other in front of a display of ship’s cabin lanterns and binnacles.

  Tired of riddles, Boyle asked, “What’s this?”

  “Suffice to say your message was received. It sounded urgent, so action was taken to satisfy the request. I humbly say that I had a small part in finding these goods. They arrived through the blockade at three o’clock this morning.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Bunting, Captain. Four hundred sixty-nine yards of first-quality English bunting.”

  Amazed, Boyle reached down and lifted one of the packages partly off the floor. “Is that right?”

  Yambrick gazed down at him, pink-cheeked and almost bashful. Mischievously, he asked,

  “To whom would you like it delivered?”

  Fortifications

  BALTIMORE

  AUGUST 2

  STICKY HEAT BLANKETED THE city of forty-six thousand, seeping into every clapboard seam, plaguing every beast of burden, cooking manure in the streets until it steamed, seeking entrance through every crack like an infestation. Thick air clogged every lung and turned hair to wire as Major George Armistead climbed out of the rowboat that had brought him from Fort McHenry across the inner harbor to the City Dock. He ordered his rower to wait, then began to walk up Great York Street.

  Sweat dribbled down his back under the blue wool uniform jacket. He felt it on his neck, his scalp under the hat, and was almost tempted to stride right into the blacksmith’s furnace, where at least the heat would be dry. He paused for a moment at the smith’s open yard to inhale the hot dry air and look at the chimney backs, anvils, stovepipes, and bathing basins arranged for sale between him and the furnace itself, where three men without shirts worked as if hell were their natural home. He started to move on, but paused again at a temporary wall of pegs hung with fishhooks, loops of wire, metal buttons, and sewing needles. On the ground was a large box full of cart springs. Wise sidelines, he thought, marveling in the ingenuity of business people. Where there was a demand, some industrious citizen would conjure up a solution.

  His chest felt heavy, constricted. Every breath was tight. He felt people’s eyes upon him, noticing him, thinking about him. The city was watching him, wondering which day might be the last day of their lives or the last day of being Americans. They were going on with their daily lives, but there was more happening in every unspoken word, every silent glance. They read every day about the battles in the north a
nd the west, the dangerous hunts at sea, and almost every one of them knew someone who had fought, or someone who had been lost to a British warship out there on the ever-present sea. What did he mean to them, a man in an Army officer’s uniform? Could he come through on the promise his uniform made?

  He walked on, wishing he had arranged for a horse. The faint breeze from the harbor dissolved as the neighborhoods folded around him in a brutal blanket. The less pleasant smells of city life began to assault him, an oily scent of industry overlaid with the aromas of fresh cabbage, onion, turnips, and all manner of ripe vegetables being transported by wagonloads from farms to the markets. There was also, unfortunately, a whaling ship currently docked at the inner harbor and even from this far away he could still catch a whiff of the ghastly soup saturating that ship. It would never go away and that old brig would never be anything but a whaler. He hoped it would sail away soon and take its boiled-down cargo on to the Nantucket lamp makers or wherever it was going.

  Feeling nauseated, he increased his pace through the neighborhood, looking forward to going back to the fort, where the smells were familiar ones and the at least the chance existed for a breeze off the Patapsco.

  At 60 Albemarle, he approached the Queen Street door, as he had been told was the door for business clients, and knocked.

  When no one came, he knocked again, louder. Then again.

  “Hello!” a voice called from behind him. “Ahoy!”

  He turned to see a milkman holding up his wagon only paces away.

  “Yes?”

  “You’ll get no answer there today, Sergeant,” a grizzled and very short gentleman croaked.

  “Oh?”

  “No, sir, not today, or tomorrow, I don’t think, General. The ladies are all off at the brewery.”

  “I beg your pardon? That is slander, sir. Do you claim that this fine family is—”

  “No claims, just truth, y’know. They’re off at Brown’s, stitchin’. Been there every day for days and weeks now. Working.”

  Armistead stood down his defensiveness. “Oh, I see. And where is this Brown’s?”

  “Jump up on the wagon, Admiral. I’ll take’ee there.”

  The next block. That was the entire ride. A few houses.

  Still, the little man had taken great self-satisfaction from ferrying Armistead these few steps.

  There, occupying almost the entire block, was Brown’s malt house. This was a brewery, a business, so the major didn’t bother to knock, but just stepped in. He spoke to a boy of no more than ten, who gestured through two more doors and up a short stairway to a non-descript storage room. He knocked, then opened the door.

  There, Mary Pickersgill was just pulling a roll of thread from a wooden box. She looked flushed with the heat, and was wearing a simple blue cotton dress, a white apron. and an ordinary cotton cap. Her hair was tied up under the cap.

  “Major,” she greeted. “What a joy. Come in, please. How are you?”

  “I feel like an egg being poached,” he admitted.

  She laughed. “But this is what we dreamed of during last winter’s raw frosts!”

  “True enough. I’m about ready to swim back to the star fort just to get some relief. A milkman told me that you were here. I’m sorry to come without announcement.”

  “Perfectly fine. How are the fortifications coming?”

  “Satisfactorily, I would say. The men are drilled every day in operations for repelling a landing party from several directions. We’ve covered our powder supplies with sandbags and built battery platforms. I’m also provisioning in anticipation of extended siege.”

  “Oh, Major, such frightening portents.”

  “We must curb our fears and be ready. We have no idea when these things will happen in Baltimore, but we are certain that indeed they will happen. The inevitable is not such a burden when one is prepared.”

  She nodded. The dread lingered in her eyes. “Our city …”

  Armistead was lost for words. He could explain the fortifications, the drilling, the preparations and provisioning, but at the end of the lecture there would be only that void of the unknowable. There was no promise he could make that her home and her family were safe from invasion. If Fort McHenry were to fall, then Baltimore would fall. The British would be victorious and encouraged, power mad. The Chesapeake would collapse, commerce would vanish, and martial law at the whim of the Crown would be here with no resources to push it off again as once the United States had done in its slim and reckless beginnings.

  The lady’s voice shook him out of his inadequacies. “You’ve come to see your flags in progress.”

  “If it can be allowed?”

  “Certainly. This way. We found enough bunting, thank goodness. We were able to get to serious work by the second week. Well, of course, we did other things to start, like cutting patterns and laying them out.”

  “Patterns? Of what?”

  “To get the proportions of the stripes right, for instance. And the size and placement of the stars. I wanted to see the cantons before actually cutting the bunting or the cotton. I had to decide how to place the stars.”

  “Really,” he uttered, displaying his complete ignorance of women’s commercial operations. His wife was fond of tending honeybees and growing flowers, but she did little in the form of domestic making. She was one of the nation’s very important people called customers. Without customers, who could have a business? She bought the family’s clothing rather than making it, bought curtains and pillows, bought churned butter and baking supplies—well, she did bake quite a lot. She supplied the cakes and cookies and pies for the fort, and for three churches when they had their little ice-cream socials.

  And she cooked masterfully. She oversaw all the victuals and cooking for the entire complement from their little officer’s quarters there.

  But sewing—a complete mystery. Being situated at the mouth of the harbor next to a city, Fort McHenry’s men had the luxury of sending clothing and boots, livery, and belts to the city’s professional shopkeepers for repairs or replacements. Unlike a frontier fort in Michigan or Indiana, they needed not repair things themselves. It was a comfortable place to be stationed and at times he wondered if he and the men weren’t spoiled.

  “I hope the heat in the loft won’t make you dizzy,” Mary said as she led him up two sets of stairs.

  He smiled at her, enjoying her unshrinking personality.

  In this building, the smells were completely different from outside. The cloying and somehow exotic aroma of fermentation, smelling like sweet oatmeal and potatoes, was in the air and the very walls. Not a bad smell, actually. Manly.

  As Mary led him into the loft, Armistead muffled an emotional gasp. In the room about twenty feet square, was a large and somewhat rumpled American flag, stretched almost wall-to-wall, with two young women on their knees at work with needles and spools of colored thread.

  Both young women had their hair tied back in kerchiefs, as Mary did, and one girl’s hair was also braided tightly, probably to avoid its falling forward while they worked in this awkward face-down position.

  “These are my nieces, Margaret and Eliza Young,” Mary said. “Girls, this is Major Armistead, who commissioned these banners. No, no, stay where you are and continue work. So, Major, it seems your authority extends beyond the fort, for my girls almost came to attention.” Armistead started to speak, but was overtaken by a sudden cough. The loft was dusty.

  “This is your storm flag, Major,” Mary went on. “Twenty-five feet by seventeen, as you requested. As you can see, the stars are five-pointed, just the same as Fort McHenry. I rather like that.” She knelt beside the field of blue and picked up the edge of the fabric. “You can see here that the bunting is a very open weave.”

  “I can almost see through it,” he agreed.

  “In order for the flag to hold together and not beat itself to shreds, the stitches must be angled slightly up and down every stripe and every place the flag is pieced.”


  “May I touch it?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He knelt and rubbed the fabric between his thumb and fingers. “Very light-weighted, isn’t it? You said it would be.”

  “But durable. Notice that we have double-stitched around the outside edges and the sleeve on the hoist.”

  “Will the big flag have a sleeve also?”

  “Oh, yes. The strain will be distributed evenly up and down the hoist.”

  “Ingenious.”

  “Skills passed down for thousands of years, then from my grandmother to my mother, to me, to my daughters, nieces, servants, and any other woman who wants to learn to support herself.”

  Mary was proud of the work, but also she was proud to be working. Armistead, a soldier all his life, often took for granted the position he held, assuming the Army of the United States would be a permanent fixture. But Mary Pickersgill—civilian, craftswoman, widow, mother—was appreciative of the chance to work and, through work, rise.

  “Seems downright magical to me, ma’am.” He tilted his head, scrutinizing the field of stars. “The stars don’t look … straight. Is it the way I’m standing? They don’t look lined up.”

  “They’re not soldiers,” she told him with another knowing smile. “The points of the stars are canted slightly to the left or the right. This provides an illusion similar to sparkling when the flag waves. A kind of flashing effect.”

  “I must say, ma’am, this is admirable skilled work. I had no idea there were so many elements involved. I can say with confidence that I certainly came to the right person. Have you begun work on the big flag yet?”

  She appeared a bit surprised. “You did say you wanted it as soon as possible.”

  “I did, but now that I see the level of expertise required for such a process, I know I shall have to wait for all the elements to be correctly done, and gladly I will. I had no idea. No idea! Please accept my compliments and take it positively when I say you and your troops are as martial as the best brigade of Army Engineers.”

  “I wonder what you’ll call us when you see the next loft. Come with me, Major.”