SH06_War

by Edward Cline

  Vishonn volunteered, “True enough! If it were not for Mr. Hunt’s assurances and encouragement, we should not be able to act at all. We shall govern only on the sufferance of our county’s citizens. We should do nothing that will provoke any resentment against us. We must be cautious.”

  “Once justice has been served on Mr. Frake,” said Carver Gramatan, “there will be no question of the legitimacy of our authority. Prosecuting Mr. Frake may seem an outlandish and risky thing to do, but it will serve to establish our authority in the strongest terms. And, as you have just now pointed out, Mr. Vishonn, we will have the support of Mr. Hunt and his authority. I see few difficulties ahead of us.”

  “It must be impressed on both of them that there is a higher authority than their own reason and vaunted liberty,” insisted the minister, who was still contemplating the fates of his two nemeses. “And on others, too. That authority is God, His Majesty, and Parliament, in that order.”

  Cullis frowned. The minister was beginning to annoy him. He said, “Dear sir, the committee must announce its authority and intentions. I propose that we leave it to you to compose that decree.”

  “It would be my pleasure, Mr. Cullis,” replied Acland brightly. He smiled in anticipation of the task. Mayor Corbin, who was riding beside him, blinked in astonishment; no one in Caxton had ever seen the minister smile before.

  The other men readily agreed to this proposal.

  Cullis himself smiled. He recalled the note that Hugh Kenrick had sent him two days ago, a note that was pedantic and insulting in its implications. He turned to address the men riding behind him. “We are the sun, sirs, and shall decide when it is day and when it is night.”

  Reece Vishonn, who had read some books, suddenly and worriedly frowned as he remembered the story of Canute, the eleventh-century Danish king of England who, in a failed demonstration of his omnipotence, ordered the tides to cease. But he said nothing. He hoped most earnestly that the committee of safety would be exempted from such an embarrassing phenomenon. And, in lieu of the setback of Jack Frake’s rescue from jail, he could only wonder at the attorney’s levity.

  Some hours later, the committee rode boldly into Caxton and visited the jail. Mrs. Tippet, who was left alone by George Roane and had armed herself with her husband’s musket, immediately came out of her house and handed her husband a letter delivered by Henry Buckle not an hour before. Buckle, they knew, was John Proudlocks’s cooper, and was not a member of the Company that went to Boston. When Sheriff Tippet opened and read the letter, he gasped and passed it on to Edgar Cullis, who in turn passed it around to his colleagues.

  They immediately repaired to the Gramatan Inn for another meeting on what to do. After much loud and frustrating debate, they decided, in order to assert their authority, and on Carver Gramatan’s suggestion, to close Steven Safford’s tavern, noting that it harbored rebels and encouraged unlawful assemblies against the Crown. Safford’s Arms was a less formidable foe than were Jack Frake and the Company. Sheriff Tippet volunteered that Safford had been late in paying the most recent tax assessments, as well.

  “What about Fern’s?” asked Gramatan, referring to a disreputable tavern close to the bluff that overlooked the riverfront.

  “It is patronized by hands from the ships and the river trade and other low fellows,” said Vishonn. “It is better to leave them some place to go, for otherwise your fine establishment here will be crowded with them, and we should be reluctant to favor you with our custom.”

  “Excellent point, sir,” agreed Gramatan, liking not only the idea, but the way in which it was put.

  And when Edgar Cullis and Reece Vishonn returned to their homes, they found letters waiting for them, as well, identical in wording to the one received by Tippet. All the letters had been signed by Jock Fraser and John Proudlocks, and challenged the authority of the Queen Anne County committee of safety.

  * * *

  Hugh Kenrick refrained from returning to the Caxton jail, for John Proudlocks had alluded to some action he planned to set his friend free. When that would happen, and how, Hugh did not know. Presumably Jock Fraser would be a partner in that action, and men from the Queen Anne County Volunteer Company would probably join them.

  He refrained also because Proudlocks had not invited him into the conspiracy. He could not fault the man for that. He wanted to see Jack again, and apologize to him. And he wanted to see Proudlocks again, to thank him.

  It occurred to Hugh that whatever action Proudlocks took would put many county citizens in open conflict with each other over the committee of safety’s precipitous assumption of authority, which was a dubious authority in the least. After all, he reflected, during his political career here, the county freeholders had almost always evenly divided themselves during the elections in their choice of burgesses between Edgar Cullis, the epitome of “moderation,” and himself, the epitome of “radicalism.”

  For the moment, he contented himself with finishing a letter of condolence to his sister, Alice, about Roger’s death. He had delayed writing it for two days, for he kept imagining the effect it would have on her. Not to mention on his and Alice’s parents. He could not be certain that any fellow officer of Roger’s in Boston had devoted time to the sorrowful duty.

  He finished the letter, signed it, and added it to a pile of letters for Mr. Beecroft to enter into the letter book, then take to Safford’s Tavern to await a mail courier. The others were to Otis Talbot and Novus Easley in Philadelphia, and another to a bookseller in New York, inquiring about some books he had ordered before he left for London half a year ago but which had not yet arrived.

  For a moment, he sat at his desk, toying with his brass top. He wondered if Jack Frake had been freed from the Caxton jail yet. Then he rose, found the two letters from Roger, and put them inside a leather portmanteau. Then he searched for another sheet of paper, and smiled to himself for the first time in days. He put that in the portmanteau, as well. He left the study and strode outside to the stables.

  Jack Frake was indeed home. Several armed men from the Company stood in a group near the porch of the great house. Their mounts were tethered together at one of the railings. The men doffed their hats in greeting to Hugh as he rode up. He returned the greeting, and added his mount to theirs.

  Ruth Dakin, a servant, answered his knock. He asked to see her employer. She left him in the hallway and went to the study to announce his visit, and came back a moment later and escorted him into the study.

  Jack Frake sat at his desk. Jock Fraser and John Proudlocks stood before it. All three turned to him when Hugh entered the room. They exchanged silent nods of greeting.

  Proudlocks said to Jack Frake, “Jock will ask two men to stay here as guards. The others can go home. We must leave, as well, to see to our own business.”

  “Fine,” said Jack Frake.

  Proudlocks and Fraser left the room and the house. As the men passed by Hugh, Hugh said to Proudlocks, “Thank you for your thoughts this morning, sir.” Proudlocks nodded in acknowledgement.

  Through the study window Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick watched the men collect their mounts and ride off.

  When they were gone, Hugh turned to his friend and said, “I apologize for leaving you the way I did in the jail.” He paused. “John found me later and reminded me of who I am.”

  Jack Frake smiled. “You would have remembered, in time, if he hadn’t found you.”

  Hugh brought forward his portmanteau. “I wish you to read something. Letters from Roger. His last to me, from Boston. Please understand that I do not intend them to be an excuse for me, or a rebuke to you. I merely think you should read them.” He paused. “And then I have something marvelous for you to see. Would you read his letters?”

  Jack Frake nodded.

  Hugh took the letters from the portmanteau and handed them to Jack over the desk. Then he sat down in a chair in front of the desk to wait.

  Jack finished reading the letters, and looked up at Hugh. “I see. I
suppose he was a good man, Hugh. Loyal, diligent, and not a shirker. But, he was at Charlestown.” He put the letters aside. “I think that the war that is coming will claim many of his caliber.” He handed the letters back over the desk to Hugh.

  Jack Frake this time did not end with a note of regret. As he reclaimed the letters, it was then that Hugh fully appreciated Proudlocks’s allusion to the man’s rock-solid soul, and why so many had shipwrecked themselves on it, and hated him for it. It was then that Hugh fully grasped that Jack Frake was the best friend he could ever have — and ever had. All his past and dearest friends were from the old world. Jack Frake was of Hyperborea — of the new world. Of a new country. A country they had both sought and found.

  Still, he thought, there was a lineage of thinking that could be traced back to those other friends, the lineage of a quest for the words that would identify what had moved Jack Frake and him all the years of their lives. Hugh was certain that he had found the words. He had written them down. He took from his portmanteau the paper that contained them, and handed it over the desk to Jack Frake. “I have found the words we have been looking for,” he said, not knowing that Augustus Skelly had bequeathed the same task to Jack Frake, but assuming that Jack Frake was in search of the words, as well. “There they are. I wrote them down after I left you in the Caxton jail.”

  Jack Frake took the paper and read the elegant handwriting on it:

  All the great arguments for liberty, for life, for freedom, rest on one great necessary and ineluctable condition: that one must source oneself, for everything else to have any meaning. God has nothing to do with it. The Corpus Mysticum of royal sovereignty has nothing to do with it. Nor the power of Parliament. Nor even of the Congress in Philadelphia. This is the truth which that body must recognize when it someday convenes to establish a just and lasting polity among us. One owns one’s own life; it is a thing that was never theirs to grant or give, covet, own, or expend; it is a thing never to be granted or surrendered to others, regardless of their number or purpose. That truth is the source of all the great things possible in life.

  Jack Frake thought: I have always known it, without thinking it. It was so simple a truth. He had never before encountered that particular formulation of what drove him all his life. Yet, if it was not sensed, and then thought, it could not be expressed. It could be found and expressed only by those who sought it. He remembered all the times when he would sit alone, during moments of peace and contentment and self-possession — before the fire in the Sea Siren tavern in Gwynnford, on a cold, windy beach on the Cornwall coast, waiting for contraband, or on quiet nights on his own porch here at Morland, and all the other times of untroubled solitude — and the words would hover on the edge of his mind, and seem to dare him to pursue them, but as he turned his consciousness to them, fly away in a playful taunt that nevertheless assured him that, sooner or later, he would find them.

  And he remembered the last time the words had not hovered just beyond his reach, but gripped him with a kind of solemn fury, and how knowledge of those unseen words had burned fiercely inside his mind as he retreated up Breed’s Hill in Charlestown, the words drawn there by the imminence of death, as reward for having risked his life in order to preserve it and all the great things possible to it, past, present, and future.

  He glanced up at Hugh with a smile of gratitude. “Yes,” he said with a simple nod of his head. “You have found them.” After a moment of quiet elation, he wondered how he could reciprocate the paper in his hand. He looked around at the clutter on his desk. His sight fell on the steel gorget. He picked it up and placed it on the desk in front of Hugh. “You saved my life, too, Hugh.” What else Hugh had done for him, did not now need to be named.

  Hugh smiled. Proudlocks had said that Jack Frake would never offer to show him the gorget. But he knew that Jack Frake was making an exception now, not in a vain gesture of boasting, but in grateful tribute. He picked up the gorget and examined the whorl that nearly obliterated Aude. How pointlessly ironic, he thought. As ironic as Roger’s death. No, he thought. Roger was there. He said to Jack Frake, “I almost wish I had been there, too, with your Company.” He nodded once in acknowledgement to his friend, then gently replaced the gorget. He pointed to the paper still in Jack Frake’s hand. “That is your copy, Jack. I made one for myself.”

  Then they talked of other things, including the letter from Etáin Jack had found waiting for him when he returned from Charlestown. Jack said, “She writes that all they talk about in Edinburgh is war, and how the colonies must be punished. She keeps her own counsel, however, and helps her mother in her shop. Mr. McRae found her a harp, and she practices on it often.”

  Their talk turned to the prospects for tobacco and other crops this summer. They went outside and strolled through Morland’s fields together. Jack stopped to inspect the newly planted tobacco transferred from the seedbeds, and the sprouting corn stalks. Then they turned to look at the great house in the distance.

  “This is the end,” said Jack Frake. “There is no going back to what it was. What was, cannot be perpetuated, cannot be regained. Should not be regained, or perpetuated, even if it were possible to go back to it.” He paused and looked at Hugh. “You know this.”

  Hugh nodded. He was thinking of Meum Hall.

  Jack swept a hand over the vista of Morland Hall. “I’ve known it for years. I’ve braced myself for the possibility of losing all this.”

  “I, too,” said Hugh.

  “When it is over — and there will be an end to it — perhaps I can return here, with Etáin.” He paused. “Somehow, I wish it would not happen. A man likes to live in peace, with his own ambition to move him. But, I’ve had my ambition, and my years of peace. For the time being, they are no longer in my future. We must remove Damocles’ sword from over our heads, once and for all.”

  Hugh chuckled. “Actually, it was the tyrant Dionysius the Elder’s sword that dangled over Damocles’ head.” Then he asked, “What will you do now?”

  “Perhaps stay long enough to see Governor Dunmore defeated. John and I want to go back north with as much of the Company as will join us and enlist in General Washington’s army. Mr. Robbins and Mr. Hurry can see after Morland — if this place survives the war.” Jack Frake studied Hugh. “And you?” he asked.

  “I must stay here,” Hugh answered, “and deal with my uncle’s emissary, the malign Mr. Hunt. Mr. Proudlocks recognized him from his time in London. I am certain that his presence here is neither coincidence nor happenstance.” He paused. “My uncle is my mortal enemy, and Mr. Hunt is his proxy. It is a matter I must settle — once and for all.”

  “And after that?”

  Hugh shrugged. “Perhaps join you and Mr. Proudlocks, whether or not Meum Hall survives.”

  Chapter 13: The Soldiers

  As British rule increased its grip and became more and more arrogant in a manner that could not be mistaken for the actions of a benevolent despotism, those who denied that the mother country was not capable of any despotism, together with those who applauded it for the sake of a perishing status quo, faded into the background of obscurity and irrelevance. Many prominent and not-so-prominent citizens of Virginia placed announcements in the two Virginia Gazettes stating their imminent departures for England. John Randolph, the Attorney-General, and Richard Corbin, the Receiver-General, bid farewell in the fall of 1775. Peyton Randolph, the former Attorney-General and now the Speaker of the House of Burgesses, completed his chores as a delegate to the second Continental Congress in time to return home and die in October of an apoplectic seizure.

  He and Richard Bland, who was now almost completely blind, had charged themselves with the duty of containing the “hot heads” of revolution among their countrymen and leaving open the chance of reconciliation with the mother country. Bland would die a year later. The “old guard” in all the colonies found themselves without a means to enforce their loyalties and without any convincing arguments that would counter the growing conv
iction that it was not only best to separate from the mother country, but absolutely necessary, if liberty were to be preserved and advanced.

  They and their fellow “moderates” and loyalists seemed to be swept away by the hurricane that came over Hampton Roads in early September of that year. It was an apt punctuation mark for the end of an era of accommodation and moderation, and for the beginning of the war.

  Other loyalists, embittered and shaken by the spectacle of what they perceived as rampant anarchy and treason, decided to remain and take up arms in the name of a status quo they presumed could be reinstated on the intemperate and reckless among them.

  * * *

  “My orders were to take the next available vessel from Barbados and proceed with my battalion to Hampton, where further orders would await me. Well, I am in Hampton, there are no further orders, and I am now in the damnable position of awaiting them, instead.”

  “A delicate situation, to be sure, Major Ragsdale,” agreed Jared Hunt. “From whom were you to expect further orders, may I ask?”

  “From Admiral Graves in Boston, I suppose. At least, my last communication from him was dated mid-June, two weeks after the captain of the Hare notified him of our incapacitation. My further orders will come from Graves, or from the Admiralty itself.”

  It was an early August afternoon. Jared Hunt sat with Major Eyre Ragsdale in one of Hampton’s better taverns, sipping ale and dining on cold cuts, and taking refuge from the suffocating heat outside. Ragsdale commanded the 6th Battalion of Marines, which totaled eighty men. The battalion would have arrived earlier, but the frigate Carlisle, on its first stop from Barbados, had also transported an army regiment to East Florida to replace two companies of the 14th Regiment, which were sent on to Portsmouth to aid Governor Dunmore. The Carlisle, Ragsdale, and his battalion had had to wait in Florida until Governor Tonyn approved release of the regiment to the homeless vice-regent of Virginia.