Banners

by Diane Carey

  Armistead came to his feet. He knew an order when he heard one. He stepped after her, following as closely in her footsteps so as not to accidentally step on the storm flag’s edges.

  At the other end of the room, she led him to an unmarked door, very old and made of the same wood as the wall. She went in first, and stepped aside for him to enter the main loft.

  For all his chatty ways among civilians, George Armistead fell as dumb as if he had been physically stricken. In his periphery he saw Mrs. Pickersgill smile like a fox beside him, but he could not make his neck move to look at her. Only then did he realize he had stopped breathing.

  For there it was.

  The main loft was endless as a magic mirror. It stretched into the distance before George Armistead and seemed almost to fade into the haze of floating dust shrouding the farthest wall. Not one bit of the floor escaped being carpeted by red, white, or blue. Simple, bright, new primary-colors.

  The scale shocked him. Until now, there had been only numbers. The vast loft could barely accommodate the masterpiece stretched out before him. Now he felt the first sensation that he had done something historic. Here before him was the picnic blanket of titans.

  Armistead looked down at his feet, where the blue field began, a solid blue field except for a single star that had been sewn in. To his left, a Negro girl was down on her knees and elbows, placing a second star—canted the other way from the one near him. The flashing effect. But this star was two feet across. Two feet. Next to the star, his boots looked like little doll boots. He felt like a speck.

  “Grace is placing the second star,” Mary explained. “We use a method called ‘reverse appliqué,’ which means that we sew the star onto the flag, then fold it over to the opposite side, then cut the blue field away from the star and sew down the edges. That way, the stars are only one layer thick and light can shine through them. It also reduces weight, of course.”

  “Do you have an invoice for me yet?”

  “When we’re finished,” she said. “I will be charging about four hundred dollars for the big flag and another hundred fifty for the smaller one.”

  “What? You can’t be serious! That can’t cover the cost of the fabric alone!”

  “Oh, it pretty much covers the cost of the fabric,” she assured.

  “What about the thread? The time and labor? Your assistants?”

  “We don’t mind.”

  Bewildered, Armistead said, “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do.” She looked at him. “It’s our country too.”

  The flag lay peacefully as a cat being combed. Not as elaborate as most national flags, this flag proclaimed a hope for the pieces, the industrial pieces of it, to come together in something new, like the states themselves. It was, after all, just a symbol. A gathering of yarns, of thread and dye, patched together the same as any quilt. Pull it apart, rearrange the patches, and any symbolic gravity would disintegrate. It did not proclaim perfection, since perfection was an elusive puzzle of a million pieces, nor did it pretend to grandeur, but made its statements simply, grasping no regality or representation of any family or name, holding no subordinations, no heraldic devices. No royalty could claim it or tame it. The world had nothing else like the flag of the United States.

  “So this is it,” Armistead finally uttered, scarcely above a whisper.

  At his side, the proud mother of the miracle asked, “Pardon me?”

  “This is the reason I was born.” He laughed, overcome. “I’ve always wondered.”

  She was smiling. Her round face made a joyful glow when she smiled.

  Together they gazed at the spectacle before them. In a riot of impropriety, the major took the lady’s hand and held it in both of his own.

  “And you, Mary Pickersgill, my superb artisan. All generations of Americans will know your name.”

  Into the Fray

  THE HOME OF MAJOR GEORGE PETER, U.S. OFFICER

  GEORGETOWN

  “WHY DO I DO this?”

  “Stand still. You’ll fall off the stool.”

  “Farm boys, country gentlemen, church elders, cattle ranchers—this one’s a street cleaner!”

  “Then put him in charge of sanitation.”

  “Oh, I can assign them. How am I going to arm them?”

  “Let them bring their own rifles.”

  “Shall I also have them bring their own heavy guns and caissons? Perhaps one can bring a cart of apple pies for dessert. At least most of them are well-off sufficient to afford their own uniforms.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And they dream that they can dazzle the English with the sparkle of their epaulets—stand still!”

  “And who’s going to train them with every new term of enlistment?”

  “I’ll train them.”

  “I’d let you. You can teach them to swab out the guns and load them and fire them. Of course, that would require that we could actually find a gun.”

  Major George Peter had been a soldier all his life, a veteran of the Ninth US Infantry, the Army Corps of Artillerists and Engineers, the Regiment of Light Artillery, commander of the field artillery company that had made the march from Baltimore to Washington at an astounding six miles an hour just to prove that it could be done, and then had marched to New Orleans to test the stamina of the artillery they were moving. Still, he didn’t know what to do with the patchwork of recruits that came and went from his sphere of influence running a militia company here in his own neighborhood. He tried to remain stationary as his sister-in-law pinned the hem of his new uniform trousers while he stood balanced upon a kitchen stool.

  “If only the damned British would make an attack, we could just bring everybody forward and have it out.”

  “Your language, please.”

  “I do apologize—no, I don’t.”

  “And don’t be inviting evil. Sure it will answer.”

  “Let it come.” He balanced as he scanned the list of new recruits. “If I could just have these men for longer enlistments … then I could train them effectively, instill solid discipline and make—”

  “Then they would be regulars instead of militia and none of their jobs would get done on the home fronts,” she said. “You would’ve had them drilling and marching about for the past two years, all for nothing.”

  “Not nothing,” Major Peter insisted.

  He started to say more, to go into the timeless arguments between army regulars and home-front defenders, for he knew them all, but he was interrupted by a knock on the front door.

  “There’s another one.”

  “Stay on that stool while I answer the door,” his sister-in-law said, and climbed to her feet.

  As she went into the hallway, he warned, “I will not receive a guest from atop a perch like some drunken sparrow, madam.”

  But he was still up there when she came back.

  “It’s Mr. Key,” she announced.

  “Thank goodness. See him in.”

  Finally he did get down, dismaying of his appearance, for his uniform jacket was in some other room, having a seam repaired, and his suspenders were showing.

  He turned just as one of his more pleasant neighbors appeared in the archway.

  “Frank! Do come in. I was afraid you were another starry-eyed fool with the Union Jack in his sights.”

  Francis Key held his hat at his side and seemed to be working on his posture. “Thank you for seeing me.”

  “Some legal matter?” Major Peter asked. “Or is this a social call?”

  Self-conscious, Key smiled. “I would never make a social call in the middle of the day without announcement.”

  “So a legal issue?”

  “No … no, not a legal one.”

  “Well, very well, then, what can I do for you? Do you want a cool drink, or—?”

  The skinny lawyer took a long glance at Peter’s sister-in-law, who was simply standing by, not even pretending that she wasn’t busy and that he wasn’t interrupting. She didn’t
care whether he was comfortable or not. This was a woman who had seen and judged soldiers and citizens all her life. As the granddaughter of General Washington’s wife, she had lived in the midst of a mosaic of every kind of American. She folded her arms and watched him, waiting to see whether the hemming of the trousers was going to continue or there was some other business worth doing which she could horn in upon.

  George Peter knew she had that effect on people. He counted on it.

  Uneasy, Frank Key went from one foot to the other, quite uncharacteristic of him, for usually his physical demeanor was subdued and drew little attention.

  “Yes, I did come for a specific reason,” he said. He looked at the major. “I would like to offer my services as a recruit in the Georgetown Field Artillery. I want to be a militiaman.”

  1814

  FELL’S POINT

  APRIL 14

  “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO this world?”

  The French Jew sat in his rocking chair in the parlor of his rented area, a place he had taken as a temporary affair but had come to regard as his home. He had been thinking of purchasing the building, since Fell’s Point too had become so comfortable for him. His neighbors had become accustomed to Pdut’s occasional explosions of temper, so that barrier had been eliminated. She had become less eruptive over the past several months, another incentive to remain as long as possible. She did not take to new places. That small mind of hers.

  She sat on top of the sideboard, certainly looking absurd to anyone who passed by the window and happened to glance in. At least she was doing something not so absurd while she perched up there—she was sewing. She never made anything useful, but only made stitches up and down rags. Sometimes she hemmed the rags. When she ran out of rags, she began tearing apart their clothing in order to stitch random hems in them. He had hired a darkie girl to teach her how to make rosettes in order to keep her from dismantling their entire wardrobe, which resulted in every bed sheet’s now having a thousand rosettes. Quite uncomfortable. He was about to hire the girl again to teach the idiot how to make nose snoods or sleeping caps. Napkins, anything. At least there would be some use to the useless.

  He was sitting in his rocking chair, but he was not rocking. Instead, despair and defeat darkened his whiskered face to a point that Pdut had stopped talking hours ago.

  “It is a disaster,” he moaned. Again he held a newspaper in his hands, as he did every day, but this was a Dutch newspaper. Each week several foreign newspapers were delivered to his house. The news was not always accurate nor always the same, but he could at least piece together a reliable picture.

  At the foot of his chair lay four other newspapers from four other sources: Spain. Belgium. England. Paris. They all delivered the same suffocating news.

  Napoleon defeated at Leipzig. His army shattered, retreated, a bloody litter of corpses left behind by the tens of thousands. Paris captured. The Emperor finally forced to abdicate. Banished to an island in utter humiliation. That ugly word. Exile.

  “We will save him,” he spoke aloud to no one.

  Pdut sewed and nodded. Stitch … stitch … stitch … stitch …

  “It’s only an island,” he thought on. “Men like the Emperor are not so easy to crush.”

  He stood up and began pacing the room slowly, thinking.

  “We are a banking empire. We span Europe. We are bigger than France, bigger than England. And I … I have influence here. If England is no longer distracted with Napoleon, they will come here to beat down the Americans. While they are distracted with the Americans, we can rebuild Napoleon. He will build a little army and we will add to it. We will crown him again. Yes!”

  He clapped his hands then paced with more vigor.

  “Yes … yes … this is challenging.”

  Pdut’s beady black eyes turned up from her sewing to look at him with an uncomprehending expression, as usual.

  He waved a dismissing hand at her and went back to pacing. “I wanted to own a privateer, to keep the English spread thin on two fronts. If the English make a full-scale war here now, they will be distracted while we build our plans to crown the Emperor again. By drawing the full fury of the English here, the Americans will crumble under the assault of the Crown and be destroyed. If this is destined to happen anyway, we have the power to make it much worse. The English will have to defend this continent, and their own land in their own waters—weakened. It’s at least a chance, is it not? A strategy? We must antagonize the English, fire the furnace. How … how?”

  He paused to think further, letting his mind grow quiet as it combed possible outcomes.

  “If men like Tom Boyle are supplied with sufficient artillery— bigger ships, more guns—they will be more likely to challenge armed ships. That sounds like him, doesn’t it? His partners want to give him a new ship anyway. What if we find not just a new ship but a great ship? A ship that will give him ideas? Exploit their intrepid nature. If those men like him, if they have enough power to challenge the blockade itself …”

  Stitch … stitch … she was watching and listening. Sewing without even looking at her work.

  “I shall write to my contacts immediately, tonight,” he said. “This minute. We shall use our resources to stir up trouble and see what bubbles out of the pot.”

  Stitch … stitch … stitch … stitch …

  A New Ship

  NEW YORK HARBOR

  JUNE 24

  A YEAR ON GUARD. From summer through winter and into summer again had been a shuddering time. Skirmishes, battles, attacks, raids, feints, a stumbling calendar of activity that left no one feeling victorious.

  Tom Boyle stood under the porch of a cobbler’s ship and watched the rain drill into the street as if it had an attitude. Despite all the tricky travel between Chesapeake Bay and New York, he had managed somehow to arrive early. His thoughts were spinning. He had spent much of the winter on the hunt in the West Indies aboard the Comet, but with diminishing success. Though he captured other vessels, the Royal Navy blockade had become thick and efficient enough to recapture many of them. Flying around the Indies with a heavy price on her head, Comet was a tempting target had taken heavy damage. Many merchant ships carried guns now, and were ready to fight back if they weren’t protected by Royal Navy brigs or frigates. Though a swarm of American privateers now prowled the Atlantic, their effect had been blunted.

  Five months at sea, dipping into ports now and then for provisions and repairs, then out again, Comet’s legend grew and so did the price on her and on her captain. When he finally made port in Beaufort, North Carolina in March, he carried in his chest an unshakable foreboding that he wasn’t doing enough even as he grew more notorious. All this time, news of the war on land dribbled aboard maddeningly. Sieges on forts and towns, Indians slaughtering settlers in Alabama, the inspiring victory of Commodore Perry in Lake Erie, followed by a half-dozen disheartening defeats, invasions, sieges, captures and burnings. To be at sea was a cocktail of torments—he knew what he had to do and what he was capable of doing, and that the United States needed him and every privateer to harass the enemy in place of a true armed navy, and he could do all that well enough, but where were the British today? Where would they be tomorrow? Where would Boyle himself be when an attack came on Baltimore, on his own neighborhood, his house and family? Would his wife and children be forced out and be running in the streets with British regulars shooting at them, tossing torches into the residences? Would the family of Captain Tom Boyle, the famous privateer, exemplar of all American privateers, be the focus of some English officer’s revenge? How would other privateers hold their mettle if the spiteful British could capture Boyle’s family?

  When he was home, all he could think of was his purpose at sea. While at sea, he thought all night long, every night, of home.

  Now he was a captain without a ship. On the orders of the owners, he had delivered Comet to Wilmington, North Carolina. Clement Cathell had taken over and sailed her here to New York, where she had been sold t
o a syndicate. Boyle hadn’t been able to bring himself to follow her fate, but like the sad owner of a loyal dog he could no longer keep, he hoped she would get a good enough home, have her bruises and cuts mended and live the softer life of a coastal schooner. Then, there might be only the fate of being broken up for salvage.

  Now he too was in New York, but not for Comet. He felt her presence here, somewhere, in some little dock in some cove, wondering where he was.

  Not very rational. Boyle could calculate and strategize as coldly as a shark, usually. He tried to keep his heart out of his adventures. But there would always be a cloying hurt about losing a ship like Comet, which had saved his life and his crews’ a dozen times and more. She’d been quick and answerable—not all ships were—and he knew every moan of every plank and creak of the leather on the gaff jaws. He and the spunky schooner had been together for a long while, longer than usual even for just the merchant trade. From his cabin in the dark he could tell whether she was on course or not. Even if he were asleep, Comet would waken him if something came amiss.

  Could he expect that from his new ship? A new ship, only a year and a few months old, built in Fell’s Point, at least, in Thomas Kemp’s shipyard. He and Kemp were partners in ownership, along with a roster of Baltimore merchants. He had an idea that since the keel was laid on this new vessel, his fate had somehow been linked to hers.

  “Going to stand on the porch all day?”

  Boyle flinched at the familiar call, he hoped not too visibly, and shook out of his thoughts to look at the street, where John Dieter, Paul Mooran and Thomas Coward had just pulled up in a loaded open wagon drawn by one horse. He trotted out to meet them.

  “How are you, Tom?” Mooran asked.

  “All balls.” Boyle put his hat on. “When did you arrive?”

  “This morning,” Dieter said. “Picked up your parcels at the shipping yard and here we are. You’re early.”

  “Are you hungry?” Paul Mooran asked. “I’m hungry.”