Читать книгу Lydia Bailey - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 8

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I hadn’t been wrong when I was sure I had lost Bailey’s case. From my cell on the second floor of the Suffolk County Jail I heard the poor man brought in, coughing and coughing; heard him taken upstairs and along a corridor opposite the one my cell was on. As I listened to the key rattling in the lock, the coughing went on and on, interrupted only by the breathless silences that meant horrible bursts of spattering bright blood.

The sound of that coughing beat upon my brain like hot hammers, and my inability to do anything to help Bailey drove me into a frenzy. I shouted for a prison guard; listened in vain for a reply; shouted again at the top of my lungs. Then I rattled my cell door and bawled and bellowed until the inmates of the other cells set up an opposition roaring of their own, telling me hoarsely to shut up, wanting to know if Mama’s boy had hurt his finger, and calling affectedly, “Guard, guard! Please come in and sing me to sleep.”

I waited until they’d stopped their hooting; then I got as close to my cell door as I could and spoke to them earnestly.

“Listen!” I said. “Listen carefully and you’ll hear the coughing of a dying man, sent to this prison by a rotten judge for doing nothing whatever except trying to tell the people the truth about rotten politicians and their rotten politics. I’m that man’s lawyer, and I’m here because I tried to protect him in court before that same rotten judge. I’m sorry to interrupt your meditations, or your naps, or any games you may be playing; but I want all of you to know that I’ll do my best to tear this damned jail to pieces if they don’t let me go to that client of mine and do what I can to ease his last hours. I wasn’t making that racket just out of cussedness!”

When nobody said anything, I went to the standing bed-place in the corner of my cell, threw the straw mattress on the floor, and contrived to kick off the side-board from its supports. Using this as a flail, I beat the cell door with it, all the time bellowing for the guard, so that the uproar was deafening.

That did the trick, and two guards instead of one came running up from the floor below. “Here, here, for Jesus’ sake!” one of them shouted. “Any more of that and you’ll get yourself rolled in a stays’l and have a bucket of slops jammed down over your head!”

“Now look,” I said. “Do you know who I am and why I’m in here?”

“Contempa court,” said the same guard. “Using disgusting language to a Soo-preme Court judge. Also four hundred dollars’ fine.”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s near enough to show you that I’m not a menace to society.”

“I dunno about that,” the guard said cautiously. “Fellers can’t go sassing judges in court without making other people think that maybe everybody can sass judges. Then where’d we be?”

“Listen,” I said firmly. “Chase put me in here because he’s determined to destroy free speech in this country and to punish every man who insists on using it. Are you in favor of free speech?”

“I dunno whether I am or not,” the guard replied; “but by God if you go to busting up these beds, I’ll put you in a strait-jacket. Those beds cost money, by God.”

“But,” I told him, “all I want is to be allowed to leave this cell long enough to help my client, Thomas Bailey—the man you can hear coughing himself to death.”

“The doctor’s with him,” the guard said. “There ain’t nothing you can do for him.”

“That’s not the point. The point is that he’s my client and I’m not a criminal. He needs me, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t have my help. Will you be an honest man, a merciful man, and let me go to see him?”

“How in hell can I do any such thing?” the guard demanded angrily. “You’re in jail; and when you’re in jail you’re in jail! You can’t go running around like a damned goat! You’re a prisoner, and it ain’t for me to let you stop being one.”

“I see,” I said. “If you had the authority, you’d probably do what I ask; but since you haven’t the authority, you aren’t willing to do something that might get you into trouble.”

“That’s about it.”

“Then get the sheriff for me,” I said. “The sheriff can do anything he wants in this jail.”

The guard snorted. “Who, me? Me bother John Riley? Goddlemighty, John Riley’s too big a man to bother with little stuff like this!”

Not all the talk in the world, I realized, would get me anywhere with this pig-headed man, and I suspected that if I weren’t careful I’d find myself in solitary confinement, where I’d be of no use to Bailey or anyone else.

“It’s not so little as you think,” I said. “I don’t believe all these other men around me think it’s so little, either. I think I could persuade them to do me the favor of saying so. Maybe if they started kicking their doors and shouting for the sheriff, he might decide to take a hand in it himself.”

My words had an instantaneous effect. From every cell came thunderous bangings and demoniacal howlings which sent the two guards running from door to door, threatening the inmates with dire punishment.

Thus freed from scrutiny, I took pencil and paper from my pocket, scrawled Harriet’s name and address at the top, and wrote:

Give the bearer five dollars when this is delivered. Your cousin is dying. Get somebody capable of standing in front of the jail and raising public hell with the sheriff himself.

I knotted a silver dollar in one end of my handkerchief and tied the other end around the note. Then I picked up the side-board from the bed-place and with it smashed a hole in the high barred window of my cell. I heard the guards behind me bawling angry warnings, heard the key rattling in the door; but by the grace of God I contrived to hang the handkerchief over the edge of the board, push it through the broken window and disengage it before the guards could get their hands on me.

I spent that night in solitary confinement in a black and windowless cell to which no sound could penetrate.

The same two guards took me out the next morning, and I could tell from the look on their faces that something had happened.

“Are you going to let me see Bailey?” I asked.

“It was like I told you,” the spokesman said. “You couldn’t ’a’ done a thing for him. He died last night.”

Not another word did they say as they took me back to the cell from which they’d hauled me on the day before. The window was broken still, but the bed had been fixed. I gathered that the guards regretted the harshness with which they had treated me, for when, half an hour later, a tumultuous shouting and thumping arose from the street outside, the spokesman brought me a high-seated chair from which I could peer through the broken pane and see a part of what was going on in the street below.

The cause of the turmoil was a raffish-looking old man with stringy gray hair, angry eyes, wrinkled stockings, a soiled snuff-brown suit, and a long black cane. At his elbow stood Harriet Faulkner, and on both sides of them were onlookers, all listening with obvious respect to his angry voice.

“What I have to say,” he shouted, “is going to be said to you, John Riley, and in public!” He shook his black cane at the jail entrance. “Open that door like a man, Riley, or I’ll stand here till every citizen of Boston is packed into this street! Then I’ll tell what I know about all the things that have happened since you’ve been High Sheriff of Suffolk County.”

He stamped forward and beat upon the jail door with his cane until the whole outer world seemed a-clatter.

I heard the double clank of the bolt; then the creaking of hinges, followed by a mellow voice, the voice of an orator-politician. “Now then, sir, nobody in Boston wants any trouble with Sam Adams, so you just be off quietly, sir, and save me the trouble of using force.”

So that was Samuel Adams! That was the man who, single-handed, had kept alive the spirit of rebellion in the American colonies, and by his persistent demagoguery had brought on a war that resulted in the deaths of untold thousands and the banishment of other thousands. He looked as if he hadn’t had a decent meal for a week, a clean shirt for a month, or a moment’s happiness in a decade.

“Force!” Adams cried. “You try to use force on me and I’ll blazon it to high heaven from every street corner in this town! Try to force me to conform to your ideas of right and wrong, John Riley, and I’ll raise such a dust in all New England that you and your jail and your judges will be blown to Hell, Hull, and Halifax!”

He thumped his cane upon the cobblestones. The crowds on either side shuffled their feet and stared unwinkingly at the jail door.

“What I’ve got to say,” Adams went on, “I can say in a few words. In this jail you’ve been holding two men who deserve the gratitude of every citizen of this country, and I want you and your jailers and the whole world to know exactly what I think about it! Those two men were deprived of their liberty because they did their best to save liberty for all of us—for you as well as for me! They were thrown into this jail because a bad law and an unjust judge dared to say that none of us have the intelligence or the right to question the decisions or the acts of the few men who accidentally govern this country. When you consent to hold those men in your jail, you’re as much as saying that a chosen few are justified in forcing the whole world to do as they see fit. Are you one of the chosen few, John Riley? Do you for one moment imagine your position gives you the right to impose your will on me or anyone else?”

Sheriff Riley spoke up quickly. “All I can do is obey orders, Mr. Adams! When a man’s committed for contempt—when a man’s properly convicted by a jury and sentenced by a judge, what’s a sheriff to do?”

“What’s he to do?” Adams cried. “Good God, Riley, you have no business being sheriff of Suffolk County if you don’t know what’s to be done in a case like this! If you think there was good reason for jailing these men when they’d done nothing but try to preserve our liberties, you’re not fit to be an inspector of privies in this town, let alone High Sheriff of a county! And if you knew, as I damned well suspect you did, that they were improperly convicted and unjustly jailed, then it was your privilege and prerogative to treat them as honored guests. If either one was ill, you could have seen he had the best of care. If he was ill enough, it was your duty to insist that he be released in order to have proper treatment. But he died alone in your damned jail when he should have been in his own home, tenderly nursed by those for whose freedom he fought!”

“He’d have died anyway,” Riley said sullenly.

Adams raised his cane furiously. “That’s no defense, you fool! If you’ve got the spine of an eel, pick up your hat and get to Judge Chase as fast as your legs’ll carry you! Tell him every word I’ve said, Riley! Tell him there are some of us who haven’t forgotten why we fought the Revolution, even if he has—as the Adamses of Quincy have, and the Wolcotts and the Pickerings and the McHenrys have! Tell him he’d better authorize you to let your political prisoners out of this jail if he doesn’t want to step into a hornets’ nest that’ll make every joint in his body and his brain ache for the rest of his life! And don’t shut that door, Sheriff! This lady and I want to see Albion Hamlin, that other prisoner of yours—unless you’ve killed him too!”

I’d been brought up to hate Sam Adams as the one man responsible for all the tribulations of the Loyalists; yet when the jailer opened the door of my cell and Harriet walked in with Sam Adams at her heels, I found that I felt no trace of rancor toward him. He looked sulky and embittered, and—what was worse—he was unmistakably slovenly and dirty; but I’ve seldom felt more gratification than when that disheveled, angry-looking man took my hand and shook it.

“I’ve been sick, Mr. Hamlin, or I’d have come here sooner. Maybe I’d still be sick if Mrs. Faulkner hadn’t routed me out. You’ve done well, Mr. Hamlin. No doubt what you’ve done will be forgotten in five years, because these Alien and Sedition Laws are things people will want to forget as soon as they can; but you’ll always have the pleasure of remembering that you came out openly for what you knew to be right. Even if the whole world says you were wrong, you’ll still know you were right.”

When I fumbled for words to thank him, he made a grumbling sound, looked fiercely from me to Harriet, and added, “This young woman is smart. She’s a good friend of yours, and she’s got a quick brain. In my opinion, you can act on any idea of hers without creating any trouble either for her or for yourself.”

He glared at me sharply, as if to imply that I should ponder well his words. Then he said, “Good day to you both,” turned on his heel, and stalked stiffly out, almost as if offended.

We could hear his cane tapping on the floor of the corridor, so that I thought of Samuel Adams as an angry woodpecker, flapping away to drill holes in the wooden heads of men willing to sacrifice their country’s liberty to their own selfishness.

Sam Adams’s back was no sooner turned than Harriet Faulkner was in my arms. Her many kindnesses during the days and nights that I’d spent at her house, her unfailing attendance at the trial, and her open espousal of her cousin’s cause and mine, Chase’s cruel treatment of her cousin, and Bailey’s death, and now her instant and effective response to the note I’d sent her—all these left no doubt in my mind that she was the one woman in the world for me. The black veil and other mourning that she now wore, the weight of her slender body against mine, and the indescribable sweetness of her lips filled me with a melting tenderness. I’d have done anything for her—anything.

I remember only vaguely what she said to me and I to her. I was in a sort of weak and helpless daze, with no thought except to engulf her in myself—to draw her so close that she became a part of me.

“I lay awake all night and thought,” she said. “Beautiful dear thoughts, my darling!”

When I tried to answer, she passed a black-gloved finger across my lips. “I thought of everything,” she went on. “I thought of our future—yes, and of what that terrible judge might do if ever you tried to pay him back for what he did to poor Cousin Thomas and to you and me. You have considered doing that, haven’t you, darling?”

“Considered it?” I laughed.

“That’s what I suspected,” Harriet said. “I told Mr. Adams I feared you’d have that on your mind, and he said you mustn’t. He said Chase has so much power that there’s only one way he can be attacked, and that’s through impeachment proceedings. He said the one sure way to get back at Judge Chase would be to escape from this jail.”

“But you don’t walk in and out of a jail as you do a courthouse!”

“Wait,” Harriet said. “Kiss me, Albion. Kiss me hard.”

Indistinctly I heard the guard’s voice. Harriet turned her face from mine and spoke over her shoulder. “Five minutes more,” she said softly. I felt her passing something to the guard through the bars: heard the guard say gruffly, “Only ten minutes more, Ma’am!”

He moved away, leaving the door-gratings clear, and Harriet stood with her back against the gratings. “I told Mr. Adams what I’d planned,” she whispered. “He said it couldn’t fail—that the sheriff’s frightened—that Riley wants you to escape. If you leave Boston at once, they’ll do nothing.”

From beneath her long cape she miraculously produced a bundle—a black dress, a black cape, a black veil, and a widow’s cap exactly like her own. “Quick, Albion!” she whispered. “Put on the skirt, then stand close to me and I’ll fix the cloak and cap and veil.”

“I can’t do this,” I protested. “What’ll happen to you?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. They won’t know anything about it for three hours, anyhow, because I’ll be in your bed with the sheet over my face. You heard what Mr. Adams said; it’s really his idea. When I’m ready, I’ll send word to Riley, and you can be sure he’ll get me out of here without any fuss. And I’ve every reason to be inside this jail, haven’t I? There’s nobody else to take care of poor Cousin Thomas. Now put on the skirt, Albion.”

I pulled on the sheath of black stuff, so long that it concealed even my shoes, and Harriet pinned it tight around my waist. She’d thought of everything—even the handkerchief with the black border which she pressed into my hand. “Now kneel down,” she said. She put the cape around my shoulders and fastened it in front; put the snug widow’s cap on my head, tying the black ribbons beneath my chin. To the top of the cap she fastened a black veil that hung almost to my waist; it had the same dry and dusty perfume of her own veil. She pulled me to my feet, turned me so that my back was to the door, placed her fingers against my lips, and whispered, “Don’t move”—then slipped over to my cot, took off her own cap and veil, and in a moment was between the blankets.

“Come and kneel beside me, Albion! Kiss me good-bye!”

I raised my veil for a long and breathless moment.

“Yes,” she whispered, as if in answer to a question. “Yes! Yes! Now listen! All the Kingfisher papers are in your room, underneath the picture you think looks like me. There’s money there, and a false beard. The money’ll last you until you reach Washington or wherever you have to go, and there’ll be more. I’m depending on you, Albion, to get me what I need from the Kingfisher. Here’s the key of the house: I’ll put it in your pocket, dear. When you’ve used it, hide it under the front step, the bottom door step; put it on the left side—nobody looks under the left side. Take the picture and the papers and the money, and be sure you’re gone from Boston within two hours. Will you promise? Quick, Albion, say you’ll promise!”

She kissed me again, kissed me hard, and I’d have promised anything. There was something about those kisses that reached deep down inside me and robbed me of everything but eagerness. “Now,” she said, “you’ll never be able to forget me, Albion!”

“Never as long as I live,” I told her; and I never have—though not for the reasons a man usually has for never forgetting a woman.

When the jailer rattled his key in the lock and threw the door open, he stood aside respectfully for me to pass out, and I, holding the black-bordered handkerchief to my eyes, went with bent head along the corridor, down the stairs, and out through the steel-barred doors; and I must have played my part of grief-stricken relative better than I had thought possible, for no man ventured to intrude upon my grief.