Читать книгу Rabble on a Hill - Robert Edmond Alter - Страница 9

The house was packed the next night. Even the aisles were jammed. It was Standing Room Only. And once again the famous jousting scene between Robin Hood and Little John was a howling success. Benny was in a hysteria of happiness; he was forever attempting to throw his spindly arms about Shad to give him brotherly hugs . . . and Shad was forever giving him hasty, brotherly, straight-armed shoves away.

Benny’s only worry concerned the expense of burning up a fresh backdrop every night (and two on Saturday); and Nat’s and Shad’s only worry concerned the unpleasant possibility of not escaping in time from under the burning backdrop some night.

After the show Nat and Shad sat before the tarnished mirror to remove their greasepaint, and Shad said: “Jessie and the other boys want to see you and that birchbark you got. We can skip over there right now. There’s a mob fight going on over to the Common, and we ain’t likely to run afoul of no patrol tonight.”

Nat paused for a moment, staring at his grease-sheened reflection in the mirror. In a way he was a little doubtful of becoming personally involved in the hotbed of Boston politics. In another way he was impulsively glad, excited. But one way or another it seemed inexorable—and had been ever since he had unwittingly darted into that alleyway off Tremont Street.

“All right,” he said simply.

Greene’s warehouse had the damp, heady odor of brick walls long submerged in wine. The square façade was dark and shuttered for the night. It seemed to bear the somber aspect of a business building brooding over the wistful memory of old, happy, by-gone commercial days, as if watching a ghostly parade of long-gone customers coming and going. But then all the mercantile houses in Boston bore the same scar, ever since Gage’s Port Act.

Shad gave a tricky knock on the heavy slab door, and a minute later the spark of an eye appeared at the peephole.

A hoarse voice seemed to issue from the eye. “The word?”

“Doc,” Shad said.

“Doc who?”

“Oh for grab’s sake! Doc Warren, that’s who! You bent-headed old coot! Now open up! Who do I look like to you—Lord Rawdon?”

The eye winked away with a throaty chuckle. Shad grinned at Nat.

“That’s Ed Norton, Jessie’s head clerk. He’s a great one for passwords and secret signs and all that hocus-pocus.”

The door swung open, and they stepped into tomblike darkness. Nat jumped when he suddenly heard the hoarse voice right at his shoulder.

“The Committee is waiting for you in the cellar, Shadrach.”

“Shadrach?” Nat repeated. He heard Shad clear his throat.

“Ed, if I could just see you, I’d take you by the ears and ankles and pull you inside out and see how you looked hoppin’ about on your nose!” The disembodied Ed chuckled at Nat’s side, and gave Nat a nudge in the ribs.

“That’s why I ain’t about to strike a light, Shad,” he said.

“Is Shadrach really your name?” Nat asked.

“Well, what did you think it was—Shadow?” Shad fumed.

Mutely they stumbled along a narrow blind corridor to a door which opened to the pale glow of a slush lamp on a shelf. Ed—seventy years old if he was a day, as bald as a new-born baby, with a hooked, red-veined nose which suggested that it was his habit to sample every keg of wine received by the establishment—picked up the lamp and led them down a flight of breakneck stairs to a cellar so dank and malodorous that Nat wanted to turn around and go upstairs again.

You couldn’t see the walls for the barrels barrels barrels of spirits. French wines, Spanish wines, Italian wines, rum from the Caribbean, brandy from New Orleans, African Madeira . . . you could get befuddled just from looking at it, let alone smelling it.

A cluster of men were sitting around a small table bearing a burning whale-oil lantern. They were pawing through a clutter of maps, and a blue-gray smoke coiled voluptuously over their heads as they puff-puffed contemplatively at their clay pipes.

“Paul,” Shad called. “This here’s Nat Towne I tolt you about.”

A stocky, pouchy man of about Shad’s age, with a greasy smile and excitable eyes, stood up and welcomed Nat with his hand.

“Hi, Nat. Shad says you ran into some trouble last night. But here, meet the boys. This is Billy Dawes, an express rider.”

Nat shook hands with a well-setup young fellow who winked at him gaily. Then he met Jessie Greene, the owner of the warehouse: a short, blocky man with a squarelike figure; his head too. He had a bland face and a mild smile and a firm handgrip.

Then there was a dour, lemon-faced man called John Boyd, who handed Nat a damp hand like a limp fish; and Mathew Commings, who right off the bat told Nat he’d been a participant in the Boston Massacre; and Harvey Allen, who wore a thick red beard and who had deserted from His Majesty’s navy five years before; and finally, at the head of the table, Doctor Joseph Warren.

He was a moody, handsome man in his early thirties. He had a quiet smile and quiet ways. Lord Rawdon had publicly called him the greatest incendiary in all America, and Nat, frankly, had expected to meet a much more bombastic man.

“What’s yer tale, myte?” Allen asked abruptly. “ ’Oo was the cove what got done in in the alley last night?”

“I don’t know,” Nat told them. “He was in deerskins, I know that. And he had this powder horn Shad’s told you about.”

“And you never saw the assailant?” Warren asked.

“No, sir. Not to be able to recognize him again. He was just a shape in the dark.”

“May I see the roll of birchbark now?” Jessie Greene suggested.

Nat removed it from his neck and handed it over. Anticipatively, the Patriots—except Warren, who remained seated and calmly smoking—gathered around Jessie Greene as he unrolled the strip of bark and placed it under the lantern-light.

“It’s Abenaki, right enough. Unfortunately, I’m not as well versed in the language as I am with the Western dialects. Let’s see . . . as near as I can make out it is a message from some of the important sachems of the Androscoggin and Kennebec tribes, intended for the Seneca Nation.”

“Then it must be from Paul Higgins,” Warren suggested.

Jessie nodded, muttering to himself as he traced his finger down the bark strip. Nat looked at Shad. “Who’s Higgins?” he whispered.

“Chief of the Androscoggins. White boy the Abenakis stole and raised. Some call him a renegade.”

Jessie looked up and tapped the strip. “I gather that this is an answer to a Seneca question. I believe that the Senecas must’ve asked the Abenakis which side they would fight on in the event of a war between the British and the Americans.”

Warren removed his pipe from his mouth and leaned forward.

“And the answer?”

Jessie shook his head. “As I say, I’m a little vague—but it looks as though the Abenakis think they’ll fight for the British.”

The men around Jessie straightened up slowly. No one said anything for a moment. Then Billy Dawes yawned and stretched and said: “Which probably means we’ll have both Seneca and Abenaki against us if we have to fight the redcoats.” It didn’t seem to bother him much.

But the possibility obviously bothered the rest of them a great deal; especially Shad, who had fought Indians all his life.

Jessie looked at Nat. “Perhaps we’d better take charge of this message,” he suggested. And Warren roused himself, saying:

“Yes. It wouldn’t be advantageous for us if that message were to fall into the wrong hands.”

“I don’t understand, sir,” Nat said.

Warren tapped at his lower teeth with the stem of his pipe.

“Simply this: it would jeopardize our cause if the Senecas were to learn that the Abenakis were ready and willing to fight us. It would probably influence the Senecas into taking the same step.”

“But they’re bound to learn sooner or later.”

Warren smiled a small reticent smile. “As you say, Nat—later, in this case, will suit us far better than sooner.”

Nat hesitated, conscious of their eyes upon him. Then he tucked in his mouth and reached for the birchbark.

“I’ll see that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. But—I think I’d better keep it. You see, I gave my promise I would.”

They seemed to understand that. A promise to a dying man was considered a sacred thing.

“Just be very, very careful with it, Nat,” Jessie warned.

“Don’t worry, Jess,” Shad said heavily. “If anybody tries to get it away from him, I’ll bust their arm for ’em.”

The meeting seemed to have reached its conclusion. The Committeemen were knocking out their pipes and arising from the table, and Ed Norton went for the slush lamp to light their way upstairs.

“By the by, Nat,” Dr. Warren said, touching Nat’s arm with his pipestem. “How would you like to join our group? I believe Paul could always use another man. Correct, Paul?”

“Right, Doctor. Can’t get enough of ’em. Right now information’s our biggest weapon.”

Again Nat hesitated. Now—still a part of the inexorable pattern—he was faced with the decision. He met Warren’s steady gaze.

“Doctor, do you think it will come to fighting—war?”

Warren looked down at his pipe, speculatively, as though he half thought to discover something more than just dead ashes in the bowl.

“Yes,” he said finally, “I believe it will.” Then he looked up at Nat. “Are you afraid of fighting, Nat? Of being killed?”

“Yes, sir, I sure am,” Nat said candidly.

Warren smiled quietly. “So am I, frankly. I don’t mind dying, but I’m deathly afraid of being killed.”

“How’s that, Doc?” Shad looked bewildered.

“To die of sickness or old age, of natural causes, holds no horror for me,” Warren explained. “But to be killed by a bayonet or a musket ball . . . ” He shrugged, and knocked out his pipe in the palm of his hand.

“But if it comes to fighting,” Nat prompted, “you’ll still go through with it?”

“Yes, I will, Nat,” the doctor said simply.

Nat nodded. “All right, Doctor. So will I.”