by Fortune Kent
“…and he rowed you across to the island. How you enjoyed those outings, your mother wrote, picnicking on Sentry Island, hunting for Indian arrowheads, exploring the fortifications left from the war. Your mother never went. A place of evil, she said, but your father scoffed.” The old lady sighed.
“Are those the ruins of the fortifications I saw from the ship?”
“The ruins? Oh no, old George Krom built the ruins not more than ten years ago. The Rhine. You know, in Germany. Authors compare the Hudson to the Rhine—the river, the mountains. But we have no castles, no ruins. George always said he didn’t have the inclination to build a castle, which really meant he didn’t have the money, so he built ruins.”
“You can build ruins?”
“Certainly. We have fine ruins here in the highlands now. On summer evenings when the moon is full the young people sail out to the island. The ruins are beautiful with the moonlight on the water and the mist rising among the columns.”
Mrs. Worthington, who had been leaning back with her head on the lace antimacassar, sat forward and looked intently at Beth.
“What is the secret of the island?” she asked.
“I…I…” Beth stammered. She felt the color leave her face. The room was silent except for the ticking of the clock. 7:40. Beth looked about her desperately.
“I have a strange feeling about the island,” she said at last. “A feeling I can’t define. A secret? I’m sorry, I don’t know, I don’t remember.”
“I’m surprised.” Mrs. Worthington resumed rocking. “How old were you? Eight? A secret, your mother said, between you and your father, shared with no one.” The old woman rocked slower and slower. Her voice was drowsy. “We’ll never know,” she said.
Beth went to Mrs. Worthington and saw she was asleep. Dreaming of the good times, Beth hoped. Listening to the clippity-clop of her son’s horse galloping past the gatehouse, knowing they would gather the next day in the big house and dine together and talk and laugh. Dreaming of a time when there was only one headstone in the family plot.
Beth leaned over and kissed the old woman lightly on the forehead, then hurried to her room and slipped off the maroon muslin dress and pulled on the old black frock she had brought from Ashtabula. The weather had turned mild, and she decided not to take her shawl.
She tiptoed down the back stairs. At the bottom a side door and a window overlooked the porch. She had accompanied Mr. Bemis on his rounds the night before and knew he locked every door before ten o’clock. She had observed, however, that he only glanced perfunctorily at the windows.
She had planned her strategy with care, yet now when the time came to act she felt a surge of shame. I’m not harming anyone, she insisted to herself. I owe it to myself and the Worthingtons to learn as much as I can of the anti-renters. I may even be able to help.
Still, when Beth went to the window, she could not suppress a strong feeling of disloyalty. I must go on, she thought, easing the latch to one side. A casual observer would be confident the window was securely fastened.
Beth slipped out the door into the warm, moonlit night. The grass of the lawn was soft beneath her feet. She stopped at the edge of the trees, listening. Was she being watched? Followed? She heard only the sigh of the wind in the branches over her head.
She entered the woods on a path which plunged directly to the mountain road rather than following the winding driveway. Fallen leaves rustled under her feet. The path, so well defined when she walked to the road a few hours before, was shadowed, and the trees, benign and protective in the daylight, loomed threateningly in front and on either side.
A noise behind her. Footsteps? She waited. The sound stilled, but not before she knew someone or something was stalking her. Beth left the path and concealed herself behind a large rough-barked tree. Silence. She heard a crackle, an exploratory movement. Silence again. She held her breath, feeling the throbbing of her pulse. A scurry in the leaves. An animal? A growling bark.
“Thunder!” she gasped. She bent to him, fondled his ears, pointed him back to the house. “Go home,” she commanded in a whisper. The dog started back along the path, hesitated. She stamped her foot. “Go home,” she repeated and heard his feet patter away along the path.
She reached the road in a few minutes and half-ran, half-walked down the hill, ready to hide in the undergrowth if anyone came. The only sound was the murmur of the creek somewhere in the trees on the far side of the road. In the distance a church bell tolled the hour. She was late.
The doctor’s white house gleamed in the moonlight. Beth saw she had a choice. She could follow the road for another quarter of a mile and go over the creek on a stone bridge, or she could try to cross fifteen feet of rushing water. She came to a clearing in the trees and could see rocks placed step-like over the stream.
Beth edged her way down the dirt path to the creek and carefully placed one foot then the other on the first stone. Six more stretched ahead, each about a foot in diameter. She moved to the second step, more confidently to the third. The remaining four were wet from the splashing of the water. Onto the fourth rock without mishap. The next was uneven and she extended her toe, feeling for a foothold.
Yip, yip, yip. She turned, lost her footing, and as she fell, saw Thunder barking from the bank behind her. The water closed over her head, and she knew again the terror of her nightmare. The bottom was muddy on her leg and side, and she struggled to her knees, then to her feet, cold and wet, standing in water to her thighs, her clothes hanging heavy on her body, hair straggling on her face and neck.
Slipping and sliding, she climbed the far bank. She looked back. The dog had disappeared. She made her way across what appeared to be an overgrown garden, knocked at the door, the water oozing about in her shoes and dripping from her sodden dress.
“My God,” Matthew said, “whatever happened to you?”
“I fell crossing the creek,” Beth told him.
“In here.”
Beth sighed. No fuss, no bother, matter-of-fact. He held her lightly by the arm and led her into the living room where she held out both hands to the roaring fire.
“You’ll have to stay here and dry yourself,” the doctor said. She could see the firelight dancing in his glasses. “Wait for me and I’ll take you home when I get back from the meeting.”
“Let me go with you. I’ll dry out soon enough.”
“I must leave now. They depend on me to write letters and do other literary chores. Many of the farmers can neither read nor write.”
“Haven’t you anything I can wear?”
He paused and she saw his face tighten as though with pain. Was he thinking of his wife? He shook his head. “No, nothing. Only the costume.”
“The costume? Show me. Please.”
He went to a closet and brought out a yellow-patterned garment. Matthew held the sheet-like cloth in front of himself, the hem coming to his knees.
“Plain-spun calico,” he said. “With this over your clothes and with your head covered”—he held up a calico headpiece with holes cut for eyes, nose, and mouth—“Beth Worthington becomes another tenant farmer.”
“You expected me to wear this, this disguise?”
“All the men will be wearing similar. And so will I.”
“Let me try them on,” she pleaded. “My clothes are drying already.”
“All right,” he agreed. “I’ll dress in the kitchen.”
The door clicked shut. Beth removed her shoes and stockings and piled her dripping dress and undergarments on a wooden rack beside the fire. She couldn’t wear them, she realized, for the dampness would come through and clearly outline her femininity.
The warmth of the flames tingled on her bare skin, and she hurriedly held the towel in front of her. How would the calico feel? she wondered. She put her arms into the flowing sleeves and slid the loose garment over her head.
Beth examined herself in the full-length mirror on the side wall. You couldn’t tell. Like a nightgown except the cali
co pricked her skin.
An insistent rapping on the door.
“Come in,” she gasped.
“Good, you’re ready.” Matthew, gowned and masked, reached out and grasped her by the hand.
“But…” she began.
“You must not have been as wet as I thought,” he said. “You’d never know you just emerged from the creek.”
He can’t tell, she thought. I can do it. In for a penny, in for a pound, Mrs. Shepherd had always said.
“The shoes,” she said. “And may I borrow some stockings?”
He returned with long woolen men’s stockings and stood over her while she pulled them on. The shoes were a tight fit, but the dampness did not come through.
Once more he took her by the hand. “Come with me,” he said, and they hurried into the night. She trembled as she felt the air caress her body, naked beneath the calico robe.
Chapter Eleven
“This way,” Matthew said and led Beth around behind the house. She expected he would go to the barn and take the gig, but instead he turned when they reached the stable and they walked along a dirt wagon road.
“We could drive at least part way,” he said, seeming to read her thoughts, “and we would if only my horse and carriage were less well known. I hope you don’t mind; it’s but a short way.”
“I came prepared to walk,” she replied. In her hurry to keep pace with his long strides, she found she had to concentrate on her footing, and for the moment forgot her strange raiment and, more particularly, the lack of clothing other than the calico.
The hood was tight, and she perspired in the warm early evening. “May I remove the mask,” she asked, “at least until we meet others on this path? I’m certain I’ll have time enough to hide my face.”
Matthew pulled off his hood, and she thought she saw him smile down at her in the darkness. “I agree,” he said. “The moon plays hide and seek among the clouds and conceals you well enough for now.”
They proceeded in quiet companionship. I am at ease with this man, Beth noted with unexpected satisfaction. He never challenges me or seeks to dominate. He accepts, takes me as I am and not as he might wish to have me. I could travel far and fail to find his equal. And time may bring the rest.
“Matthew,” she spoke his name and liked its feel upon her tongue. Her breath came quickly, almost in gasps, and she spoke slowly so he wouldn’t know her weariness. “This meeting, Matthew—what brings the anti-renters here tonight?”
Matthew slowed his pace and seemed to ponder what his words should be. How much to tell, how much to conceal from this new lady of the manor? How to convince without revealing all, how to win her to their side and not compromise his comrades?
“By actual count,” he spoke at last, the words keeping pace with his slow yet steady gait, “two hundred and twenty-seven families live on the Worthington estate, each and every one ensnared within a perpetual vassalage.”
“A vassalage?” she asked.
“No other word suffices. Now and forever fettered to the land they cannot own. The system began with the patrons over two hundred years ago: the Dutch lords receiving sixteen miles of riverfront each, the tenants paying yearly tribute in wheat and one day’s work, paying all the taxes yet having no rights to the timber on the land nor to the minerals in the ground. The Dutch were ousted, the English came, but little changed; in point of fact, the tenants’ plight became the worse.”
“The Revolution. Many times I’ve read the rebelling colonists fought to own the land.”
“And so they did. The ancestors of these same men you’ll see tonight, some still living, fought and fell at Brooklyn Heights and Saratoga and on our own Sentry Island. They suffered and died at Valley Forge. They won the war and then they were betrayed.”
“Betrayed by whom?”
“The same old sorry crew—the politicians, the monied aristocracy, the speculators in land. Governor Seward sympathizes with our cause, but his hands are tied by the gentry in the senate and their covey of solicitors. We are left with only one recourse.” His voice had risen as he reviewed the grievances he knew so well.
“I am no court you must convince,” she answered. “My foster father was one of the first utopians, believing every citizen to be perfectible if only given half a chance. And together with that hope he also believed each man should be free to own and till his land and live in peace.”
“I did not mean to seem an advocate,” Matthew said, “especially since I’ve come to despise so many of that breed, purveying their smooth-tongued arguments in favor of those who reward them the most.”
The track had been level, skirting a stream smaller than the one into which Beth had fallen, and they had come this far with little difficulty. Now Matthew turned from the wagon path and started along a narrow trail zigzagging up a gentle slope. The scattered clouds covered the moon, and he reached for her hand and held it gently in his.
“You asked about the gathering tonight and I rambled. You lead me to speak, it seems, much more than was my wont before we met. Here, come, we’ll keep to the edge of this clearing; there is only a little way to go.”
“I’m glad. I wondered how much farther I could walk.”
“Along the side of the clearing, through the woods, and we arrive. Tuesday a week is Rent Day. We decide tonight what we must do when the Worthingtons’ agent tries to collect the rents.”
The moon flowed from behind a cloud, and Beth saw shadowy figures in the clearing striding purposefully in twos and threes up the hill. With reluctance she released his hand, replaced her hood, and watched the doctor do the same.
“These disguises,” he whispered, his breath soft upon her face, “were copied from the garb the so-called Indians wore in Boston many years ago when they threw the tea into the harbor.”
The path ended and in the woods Matthew held the branches aside for her. The rough going lasted only a hundred feet or so before they came out into a field. A man, masked and robed, a black armband around his sleeve, challenged them, and Matthew said “Seven sentries.” Beth heard the password repeated as others left the woods.
The field was several hundred feet across with trees on every side. The loose earth told her this land was under cultivation, but from the many stones mixed with the dirt she guessed the farm, like so many newly cleared on the hillsides, was marginal at best.
The ground sloped upward away from Beth and Matthew. Three bonfires flared, and she saw the many masked men who had preceded them clustered about the fires talking, their calico costumes eerie in the firelight, some white, some patterned in bright colors, others motley.
Matthew had gathered pieces of wood while tramping under the trees, and he motioned her to stand still while he walked on to a huge pile of stumps, branches, boards, and logs in the center of the field. Matthew and the other latecomers had to hurl their firewood above their heads, so high did the tower rise.
Matthew returned and extended his hand to her. She smiled to herself when he squeezed her hand, and she returned the gesture while he led her to one side of the field. Many of the men stepped respectfully aside to let him pass, and one hastily concealed what she guessed to be a jug, but none approached or spoke.
“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll return for you as soon as I can. Whatever you do, don’t leave this spot.” He stopped with her in the shadow of an oak, somewhat behind the crowd of men.
“All right.” She tried to keep the trepidation from her voice, having supposed he would keep her with him wherever he went.
Matthew strode away, circled one of the fires, and went on to greet a group beside a wagon on the high side of the meeting ground. He was soon lost among them. The flames leaped and dwindled, the moon seemed to speed across the mackerel sky, and the masked and costumed men moved as in a strange haphazard dance, making shadow and substance merge and break apart before her eyes.
A drum throbbed, slow, pulsating, boom, boom, boom, and the men grew quiet and surged toward the wagon. What
had been a collection of small unrelated groups united and was one.
Four men, dressed all in white, climbed atop boards placed from side to side over the wagon bed. With a start Beth realized the men around the platform all wore white, while among those waiting in the field she could find only colored costumes like her own. Matthew, she knew, wore white.
The shortest of the men on the wagon raised his arms, an unnecessary gesture for there was no sound save for the crackling of the fires. “Ten days from now,” he said in a voice both deep and strong, “Rent Day will be upon us.” He paused. “What do you intend to do?” Another pause. “Hear Big Thunder’s message and ponder well his words.”
As the drum resumed in a quickened tempo, the short man stepped back and the crowd stirred. “Big Thunder,” someone called.
“Big Thunder, Big Thunder,” they all took up the chant.
On seeing him, Beth felt a shiver of excitement despite herself. He was a tall man, head completely covered by a hood. Beth, careful not to leave her designated place, moved aside a pace to try to see around the flames and through the waves of heat and acrid smoke.
The man they called Big Thunder held his right hand high, and on this signal the drumbeat ceased, the chant was stilled. He stood immobile, calm, and let the seconds sift away as though he waited for the sand to drain from an hourglass visible only to him.
“Slaves!” he called them, and they murmured “No” and “Never.” His voice was low and Beth, along with all the others, strained toward him.
“I call you slaves,” he told them, “because slaves you are. Slaves to the rent which keeps you poor, slaves to the land you cannot own, slaves to the manor lord who cares naught for you or yours.”
The words came to her through the hissing of the fire and the shifting of the crowd. As though I had been left here purposely where I could see and hear yet discover little of the man. Could this stranger calling himself by a preposterous Indian name be the very man who brought me to this place? Yes, she thought, his voice is similar, and then she wavered, for Big Thunder projected his voice and the tone was sharper than Matthew’s and the hood muffled many of his words. Beth shook her head. She was not sure.