Prelude to Glory, Vol. 6

by Ron Carter

  Prissy’s nose wrinkled. “No. He didn’t say anything about that.”

  Margaret raised a finger. “Stop the bickering and listen.” She read on.

  “I was privileged to accompany Captain Jones to a meeting with Benjamin Franklin in Paris, France, two weeks ago. As you know, France has entered the war in our favor, and there is good reason to believe that Spain will soon follow. The British are greatly disturbed when they consider what could come of it. Should France and Spain decide to do so, they could invade the British mainland, with every reason to hope for success.

  “Doctor Franklin is acquainted with the activities of Captain Jones, and requested an audience with him, and myself. He had much good to say about our activities and informed us he had requested permission from Congress to instruct us to sail up the Thames River, set fire to London, and burn Buckingham to the ground. Congress has not yet responded to Doctor Franklin’s request. I can not imagine the mischief it would cause if we were to do as he suggested, but it would certainly stir up considerable consternation.”

  “What’s Buckingham?” Adam asked.

  Brigitte frowned at him. “Where the King lives in London. Now hush and listen.”

  “Captain Jones chooses to remain in these waters, waiting for such an event. At the present time he is beginning to use French ports for repairs and supply and is working with the French to acquire a larger and heavier ship than the Ranger, perhaps a converted French ship which he intends to name the Bonhomme Richard, in honor of Doctor Franklin’s writing of ‘Poor Richard’s Almanac.’ He is also attempting to establish a small squadron including two or more French ships. There is talk the French may assign to his command the Alliance, the Pallas, and perhaps the Vengeance. We shall see what comes of it.

  “Tom Sievers has become a fine sailor and remains with us. He is ever mindful of my welfare; I could not ask for a better companion and have become much attached to him. He sends his regards and best wishes to all of you.

  “Caleb is now the man of the house, and I trust he is doing well. He has the ability; my sole concern is that he has a bitterness from the loss of Father. I can only say, Father gave his life gladly for the cause of liberty, which he valued above all else. It is for us to carry on in his absence.”

  Margaret swallowed hard and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. Adam’s face clouded at the sight of his mother’s sadness, and he yearned to throw his arms about her and comfort her, but he sat still, battling the impulse to cry. Brigitte spoke quietly.

  “He didn’t get our last letter. He doesn’t know Caleb’s gone to the war.”

  Margaret squared her shoulders, drew a deep breath, and continued reading.

  “I concern myself about the matter of Brigitte and the British officer, Captain Richard Buchanan. He is a worthy man, but is as loyal to England as we are to the United States. I believe a union between them would finally lead to great unhappiness for one or the other. I can only hope that time will resolve it.”

  Margaret stopped and turned her head to look at Brigitte. She could not remember how many times she had pleaded with Brigitte to realize the impossibility of anything good coming from her declared love for the British Captain Richard Arlen Buchanan. He had marched out of Boston with the British army on March 17, 1776, for New York, and Brigitte had heard nothing from him since. Her letters to him—more than fifteen of them—had all gone unanswered. Margaret’s stern words had drawn nothing but stubborn defiance. Brigitte would wait for him forever!

  Margaret shook her head and continued to read.

  “News of the battle at Saratoga reached us lately, and I am sure Billy was there. When next you write, could you inform me about him? Where he is, and if he is well? I would also like to know more concerning his friend Eli Stroud. It is a comfort to me if his friend is loyal and true to Billy. Please tell Dorothy I think of him often, and of her and Trudy, and they are in my prayers constantly. I do not know if I would ever fully recover if Billy were lost.

  “Last, I inquire about Kathleen. Scarce an hour goes by that she is not in my mind. I do not hesitate to tell you I have the watch fob she made and gave me nearly ten years ago. It is wrapped in oilskin inside my jacket, next to my heart. I am informed that her mother insisted they leave America for England when it was discovered her father was a traitor. I understand he has never been heard from since the court sentenced him to exile. I can not tell you the pain that is in my heart knowing the awful time Kathleen has endured. I do not believe she will remain in England forever. If you can learn anything about her at all, it would mean more to me than you know to have word. If she is in England, and I could learn where, I swear I would lead a landing party from this ship to take her and her mother and Charles and Faith by force and bring them home where they belong.

  “I close as I began. Do not concern yourselves with me; I will be all right. I love you all more than words can say and yearn for the day we can all be home once again, in a time of peace. I invoke the blessings of the Almighty to be with you until such can be our happy lot.

  “With love and every good wish,

  “Your obd’t son and brother.

  “Matthew Dunson.”

  Margaret laid the letter flat on the table before her and tenderly smoothed it with her hand. Adam saw her chin begin to tremble, and then she leaned her head forward and for a few moments her shoulders shook with silent sobs. Adam could stand no more. He stood and went to her and put his arms about her shoulders.

  He did not know the words he should speak, so he stood there in silence, near tears himself, wishing with all his heart he could take away his mother’s terrible fear and pain.

  After a time, Margaret straightened. Brigitte handed her a handkerchief, and Margaret wiped away the tears. Then she stood and reached to pull Adam into her arms and hold him close for a time, heart bursting, saying nothing. When she released him, she stepped back, and by strength of will she took charge of herself.

  “Well, the Almighty has answered our prayers. Matthew’s well. And we’ve got much yet to do before bed. If we don’t pay attention, we’ll burn supper. Brigitte, get changed. Tomorrow’s Saturday and we’ve got soap to make and put everything away. It won’t do to have a littered backyard in Boston on the Sabbath. Prissy, get washed and set the table. Adam, run up to Dorothy’s house and tell her we have a letter from Matthew. We’ll bring it in the morning between soap batches.”

  The table was set and supper waiting when Adam barged through the front door, panting for breath. “Dorothy said she got a letter today from Billy. She said a lot of mail came in from soldiers all over. She’ll come here tomorrow after supper, if that’s all right.”

  Margaret brightened. “Dorothy and Trudy coming? Good. Let’s take our places for supper. We’ll make hot chocolate and tarts for when they’re here.”

  Adam grinned and Prissy squealed as they took their chairs at the table. They blessed the food, and talk flourished as they worked at their mutton stew. Thick slices of homemade bread and butter and jam disappeared as they chattered about everything in Matthew’s letter.

  In the quiet of the evening, with the day’s work done, Margaret gathered her small brood about the dining table, and they silently bowed their heads while she offered her thanks and invoked the blessings of the Almighty on her loved ones. In the hush of late evening, each sought his or her own bed, to drift into sleep in the darkness, seeing images of tall ships at sea and Doctor Franklin and Paris.

  * * * * *

  Vibrations from the silent padding of feet in woolen slippers on a hardwood floor reached from the kitchen through the parlor and down the hall into the warm, dark recesses of Adam’s slumbering brain. In the street came the faint call, “Five o’clock. Misty morning.” He stirred in his bed, then settled for a time while the part of him that never sleeps identified the sounds as friendly and gently began the process of bringing him from the world of peace to the world of reality.

  Awareness slowly rose up through the
many layers of increasing consciousness, and his eyes opened in the quiet blackness of his bedroom. For a moment he lay there in the soft warmth of his goose-down quilt, curled on his side, searching for what had wakened him. He felt what he could not hear, and his brain said it was his mother moving in the kitchen, and that the voice from the street was the morning rattle-watch calling out the time and the weather. Then, against his will, his thoughts came together piecemeal.

  Saturday. Make soap. Grease, ash, leaching, lye, fire. Mother. Always Mother. The war. Father buried, Matthew gone, Caleb gone. Only Brigitte and Prissy and me. Mother alone. Got to help. Got to get up.

  He willed himself to throw back the bedcovers and swung his legs over the side of the bed onto the oval braided rag-rug and stood. With half-closed eyes he opened the door into the dim light of the hallway and walked toward the archway to the parlor, past the dining table, on into the kitchen, toes curled upward from the cold wood floor. He squinted against the yellow lamplight and stood there in his nightshirt, hair awry, with the aroma of fresh-baked sweet tarts and cooking oatmeal heavy while he watched his mother’s back while she worked.

  Margaret’s thick, ankle-length robe was drawn tightly about her, and the single braid of her long hair hung low on her back. Adam stared for a moment, aware that she yet looked much like the beautiful woman of her youth. The lines in her face and the graying of her hair had begun with the death of John and the leaving of Matthew and Caleb to fight the British. In a world torn by war, with no money coming in from John’s flourishing work as a clockmaker and master gunsmith, they worked, or they starved.

  She took in laundry to earn money to feed the twins, Adam and Priscilla, and maintain their home in the central section of town. For Margaret, John was still everywhere in the house he had built, largely with his own hands, and in the flower beds and fruit trees he had planted and nurtured. The five bedrooms, parlor, dining room, and kitchen were solid, unpretentious, durable, comfortable, and the huge stone fireplace and carved oak mantel and the large, handsome mantel clock he had crafted, all spoke to her of him.

  To help make ends meet, at age seventeen, just five days after the burial of her father, Brigitte had taken work in the neighborhood bakery, then become the first woman teacher in their midtown school. Later she took an after-hours and Saturday position with the ladies shop owned by the professional spinster Charity Pratt, the most notorious gossip within miles. Many who came to the shop with PRATT’S FINE LADIES APPAREL painted in the front window did so, less to purchase the high quality clothing inside, than to partake of Charity’s decidedly un-Puritan-like, titillating snippets of information about almost everyone on the Boston peninsula.

  By practicing rigid frugality and fierce discipline, Margaret and Brigitte were somehow able to keep food on the table and the bill collectors at bay. By painful experience, they learned to paint the fence that enclosed their yard and trim the fruit trees and work the flower beds. Over time, each member of the family learned their place and duty, but the grinding sameness of their days left them exhausted and reduced the need for talk.

  Margaret spoke to Adam without turning. “Wake Prissy and Brigitte and get dressed. Breakfast soon.”

  She glanced at her son as he walked back into the darkness of the hallway, and a familiar ache rose for a moment in her heart. Eleven years old—the man of the house. Steady. Maybe too steady, too thoughtful, for his age. Too much on his young shoulders. Too much. She heard him rap lightly on Brigitte’s door, then Prissy’s, and then close his bedroom door. Inside, he lighted the lantern, made his bed, and dressed.

  Margaret was stirring dried apple slices into the steaming oatmeal when Brigitte walked into the kitchen, dressed in a plain, worn, gray work dress and old shoes, her honey-colored hair brushed back and tied with a bit of string.

  Margaret looked at her and pointed to the cupboard. “Set the table while I wash. Send Priscilla for cream and butter.”

  Without a word Brigitte opened the cupboard door and lifted four pewter bowls from their place. Prissy appeared in the archway, yawned, and sat down at the table while Brigitte set the bowls. Prissy wore an old, faded, blue hand-me-down work dress, high-topped work shoes, and a heavy work apron. A white bandanna tied behind her head covered and held her brown hair.

  Brigitte glanced at her. “Fetch the butter and cream. Mother says.”

  Prissy looked annoyed, stood for a moment, then picked up a lighted lamp and walked out the kitchen door into the dark, chill April morning. She shivered, then paused to look eastward, where the deep shades of night were yielding to the coming of a new day. A morning mist hung damp over the town, rapidly thinning as it moved inland on a freshening salt breeze coming in from the Atlantic. For a few seconds she listened to the familiar mix of harbor sounds—ship’s whistles, clanging bells, the creaking of eighty-foot masts, and the faint voices of men shouting orders—as they drifted in from the docks that ringed Boston on three sides. The deep-water seaport was waking to the labors of a new day.

  She walked to the root cellar, covered with two feet of dirt and sprouting grass, set the lantern on the ground, and grasped the handle to the door with both hands to heave it upward against the prop. She descended the seven steps, pushed open the lower door, and entered the dank darkness. In the yellow lantern light she picked the butter plate and jar of cream from the middle wooden shelf to her right, closed the door, climbed the stairs, and let the top door fall slamming. She entered the kitchen and set the plate and jar on the cupboard.

  Brigitte frowned. “You know better than to drop the cellar door.”

  Prissy ignored her, and Brigitte continued. “Set spoons and cups.”

  Adam walked through the archway, now washed and dressed in faded, patched trousers, a threadbare shirt, and ancient shoes. Brigitte pointed. “Set the bread and jam and knife and the cutting board.”

  Adam reached for the breadbox as Margaret strode back into the kitchen. She was clad in a gray work dress, heavy faded apron, a bandanna holding her gray-streaked hair back, and old, cracked leather shoes. Without a word she used hot pads to move the steaming pot of oatmeal to the center of the table, then sat at one side with Adam, opposite Brigitte and Prissy. The chair at the head of the table was left vacant. Margaret could not yet bring herself to let anyone sit where John had presided for more than half her life. No one questioned the empty chair.

  Margaret surveyed the table. “Bow your heads.” In the quiet of their dining room she said her humble, daily prayer: “Almighty God, we thank thee for the blessings of a bounteous table, and our home. We seek thy grace this day. May thy spirit protect our loved ones and bring them home safely . . .”

  They all raised their heads on her “Amen,” and the food made its rounds. They ate in silence, each working with their own thoughts of the labors of the day. Hard necessity had taught them they had to make the soap to sustain Margaret’s laundry business—twelve large wooden buckets each year, six in the spring, six in the fall. This was the Saturday they sweated with ashes and tallow and tripods and kettles from dawn to dark for the summer soap.

  Finished with breakfast, they cleared the table, and while Adam and Prissy returned the butter and cream to the root cellar and the bread and jam to the cupboard, Brigitte and Margaret poured steaming water from the stove into a small wooden tub and washed and dried the dishes. Margaret hung the dish towel on its hook and turned to Brigitte.

  “Let’s get started. Tripod’s up. Water’s in the barrel, waiting. Six bushels.” She turned to Adam and Prissy. “Both buckets. Thirty pounds in all.”

  The four of them walked out the kitchen door into the golden glow in the east and went their separate ways.

  Adam and Prissy descended into the root cellar where each grasped the rope handle of a fifteen-pound wooden bucket of grease and tallow, accumulated from household cooking throughout the winter and strained through cheesecloth. Laboriously they climbed the stairs, one at a time, to set the buckets next to a three-legged tripo
d eight feet tall, with a chain and hook hanging from its apex. Next to the tripod was a huge castiron kettle with a heavy iron handle.

  Brigitte came from the woodyard near the kitchen door, clutching a rope tied to the handle of a bushel basket filled with ashes gathered through the winter from the great fireplace in the parlor. She dragged the basket next to a large barrel half-filled with water and walked to her mother by the tripod. Margaret gave hand signals, and all four of them seized the iron kettle and lifted it high enough to slip the handle over the tripod hook, then stepped back to watch it swing slowly to a stop. The tripod held.

  While Adam and Prissy gathered wood chips, then sticks, and finally split rungs of firewood and set them beneath the kettle, Margaret and Brigitte used small shovels to lift the wood ash from the basket and lower it into the water barrel, being careful to empty the entire basket without raising dust. Margaret stirred the mix while Brigitte went back into the woodyard where the chopping block and ax stood near the split kindling stacked against the wall. She lifted the lid of a great wooden box filled with ash, and carefully shoveled the basket full again, to drag it back to the water barrel. Again the two women carefully emptied the contents of the basket into the barrel, and Margaret continued to stir the mixture with a five-foot oak paddle. She raised the paddle, studied the timing of the drip, and went to the well for a bucket of water. She poured it into the barrel and continued stirring. Five minutes later she pulled a plug from the side of the water barrel, attached a grooved drain to the hole, set the bottom of the drain in a wooden catch tub, and watched the dark liquid begin to run from the barrel into the catch tub.

  She nodded in satisfaction. “Leaching well. The lye looks good.” She turned to Adam and Prissy. “Time to start it.”

  With the morning mist gone and the sun a brilliant crescent on the eastern skyline, Adam selected a long, slender sliver of firewood from beneath the kettle and trotted to the house. He raised the chimney on a burning lantern, held the wood in the open flame, then walked slowly back to the kettle, shielding the burning sliver until he knelt and carefully set it among the fine wood chips. He watched until they caught, then worked them until the fire was burning evenly.