Читать книгу The Last Gentleman - Shirley Barker - Страница 5

3.

“WE DO NOT LIVE

FOREVER, LYDIA”

It turned out that things were quiet for nearly a fortnight. Lydia spent much of her time in Frances Wentworth’s rose-colored chamber or down in the meadows where the South Mill Pond and the sea water from Puddle Dock almost flowed together to cut off Pickering Neck from the rest of the town. Here she gathered plantain and jewelweed to pound into unguents to help heal the consequences of my lady’s vanity. It was not all a matter of pride that kept the governor’s wife in bed, she learned, for truly the woman’s slight shapely body was ill-fitted for child-bearing. Much of the time she suffered racking sickness and visible discomforts that could not be laid to pretense, and Lydia, her quick sympathies aroused, strove her best to be nurse and companion and to ignore the complaints of the querulous tongue.

The fact that Frances had been a subject of gossip herself did not make her any more tolerant toward the failings of others, and Lydia was soon apprised of all the less savory happenings in Portsmouth during the time she had been away. She heard the names of the girls who were married soon enough to fool nobody, and of the wives who dallied too long in their back gardens with husbands not their own. Only one of these little acid news items interested her, and this was about the woman for whom Frances reserved the greatest scorn. The recounting of it also provided the reason why John Wentworth had not inherited the property of his uncle.

Benning Wentworth had governed New Hampshire for more than a quarter of a century, and certainly grown no poorer in administering the duties of his office. In fact, the old man had finally retired under the threat of an investigation which his nephew, then in England, strove gallantly to avert. Some years before this, a childless widower at sixty-four, he had married his housekeeper, Martha—or “Patty”—Hilton, a girl of twenty-three. Lydia had been only a child then, but she could still remember how all the gossips’ tongues were wagging and all the town divided upon it, some holding Patty a worthy and accomplished young woman who would be an ornament to her husband’s sprawling mansion at Little Harbor, others reviling her for an adventuress and a servant risen above herself.

In any case, no child born to the couple lived more than a few days, so it had been commonly assumed that John, the popular nephew who had saved his uncle’s name before the King, would succeed to the property just as he succeeded to the governorship.

Alas, it had not fallen out so, Frances explained venomously, her fine eyes flashing and her delicate fingers tearing at a cambric handkerchief. None of them would have denied Madame Martha a competence. She could have had an attic bedroom and a place at the kitchen table in any one of a dozen houses belonging to her husband’s kin. But no, the old fool had left her his huge house and all his money, besides the five hundred acres reserved for him in every town in the province chartered during his administration! So poor John had nothing but his salary and the allowances made him by his indulgent father, while this slut, who was fit for nothing but to juggle slop pails in a tavern, now queened it over Portsmouth, an enormously rich woman!

And worse, the heiress had remarried two months after her husband’s death—Frances passed over this very hastily—to none other than Colonel Michael Wentworth of the English branch of the family, the handsome officer who had come to this country as the boon companion of the disinherited John!

And worse, Patty had borne her second husband a daughter; might, perhaps, bear him a son! After all, the old hag was thirty-odd, but still blooming and buxom. When the King was choosing a new governor for the province thirty years from now—! Frances fairly wrung her hands as she envisioned Patty Hilton’s possible son weighed in the balance against the son she herself was determined to bear.

Lydia had no particular feeling about Patty one way or the other, but she sought to comfort Frances by saying that she remembered Colonel Michael well, his fiddle-playing, his love of fine clothes and the gaming table, and she was sure his wife would find him a costly bargain. In time he would lighten her purse for her. One had only to wait and see.

But Frances had flung her hands out, knocking a frail china cup to the floor.

“In time! I want to see her ruined now!”

*

It had been a relief from the tasks of the sickroom when Frances insisted she get on with the work of instructing the governor’s nieces, and one sharp bright morning about a week after her arrival, she was seated with a little group around the mahogany table in the dining room, her eyes upon them as they worked at their set tasks. Betty and Ann Wentworth and their friends, Mary Purcell and Becky Appleton, were fair, well-mannered little girls, biddable and deft to work bright yarn into samplers. Sis Claggett, daughter of Wyseman Claggett, the King’s Attorney, was quieter, more awkward. She had, Lydia noticed, the black burning eyes and sharp features of her father, and looked not at all like her mother, Lettice Mitchell, who had been a reigning belle. Frances had had much to say about the misery of Lettice’s marriage, and a reflection of that misery certainly showed in the face of the unhappy child who kept snarling her wool and pricking her fingers. Lydia was very gentle with Sis, and none of the others seemed to notice or resent it.

Dorothy Giffard at fifteen was much older than her companions, and Lydia had set her a more complicated task. She bent her brown head over a strip of tambour work and sewed swiftly, her fingers seeming to move by themselves, her thoughts away somewhere beyond the confines of John Wentworth’s dining room. It was as Frances had said, Dorothy possessed no great beauty. Gray eyes in a rather pale little face, a tilted nose, a wide mouth, and a childish body. But whenever she smiled her face lighted up with warmth and friendliness and gentle merriment—and Dorothy was always smiling. Feminine as lace ruffles and roses and soft scent, she needed none of these trappings and showed little interest in them. In some ways, Lydia thought, Hugh’s sister was still a child with the other children.

Just then Betty Wentworth spoke up, putting down her wool and needle.

“Lyddy,” she said, “did you know they broke Mr. Parry’s windows last night? Ann and I heard the shouting after we went to bed. There was an uproar all over town.”

Lydia’s thoughts went back to the night before, a moonless night with a fresh sea wind that blew up from the Piscataqua when she opened her windows before she went to bed. Pickering Neck lay far enough in the country so that a disturbance could have happened in town without her knowing it, but Edward Parry’s house was no great distance away. True, she had heard shouting from the wharves and in Puddle Lane; a coming and going downstairs; John Wentworth raising his voice, and strange voices replying. Thomas Macdonough, the governor’s secretary, had gone in and out. But she had heard nothing of broken windows.

“I know naught about it, Betty,” she said, going over and picking up the child’s work. “You have made this great E crooked. It gives the whole of ‘Eternity’ a queer look.”

Ann giggled. Betty uttered a small disgusted sigh.

“So you will have to pick it out and do it over, I think,” went on Lydia calmly. “And you have used so much scarlet already. Why not try blue?”

“I heard Mr. Parry’s windows got broken,” said Betty insistently, “because there’s a ship came into the harbor last night at sunset bringing him whole chestfuls of tea.”

The younger girls had dropped their work and were watching Betty. Dorothy Giffard’s fingers moved to and fro, and she did not lift her head.

Dorothy was English, of course, and whether American merchants bought tea and American women drank it meant nothing at all to her, Lydia reflected. She had already learned that the ban upon tea-drinking was not so strong in New Hampshire as in Massachusetts. Many of the towns had signed to prohibit it, but others had not. Tea appeared in Frances Wentworth’s household regularly, but Frances shrugged her shoulders and insisted she had signed no pledge and she had no quarrel with the East India Company. The governor explained, overhastily, Lydia thought, that they were only drinking up a supply bought before the non-importation agreement came in. But if Betty was right, if a shipload of tea now rode in the harbor—would men swarm out to destroy it as they had done in Boston last December? Lydia felt that she was a patriot, as David had surely been, but she did not approve of the riotous ways of Boston. She sought to find an answer for Betty.

Just then she heard Governor John’s voice calling to her from the library across the hall. “Lydia! Oh, Lydia, will you come here and aid us?”

She smoothed her skirts and her hair. “Dorothy,” she said, rising, “I must go to the governor. Will you help the girls when they need it, and if I am not back by ten”—she flashed a look at the small gilt clock on the mantel over the tiled hearth—“will you go to the kitchen and tell Prue to send a pot of tea to Mrs. Wentworth.”

Dorothy looked up from the gilt design growing so rapidly under her fingers. She smiled her warm smile that went always deep to the heart. “Oh, I’ll take Fanny the tea myself,” she answered. “And the girls—never fear it! We’ll work like bees in blossomtime, won’t we?” She winked across the table, and the little group beamed and giggled in agreement, for they loved Dorothy.

There were books around the walls of the library, but not too many books; a dying fire on the hearth, for the morning had been chilly; a bunch of yellow and white Queen Margarets unskilfully arranged in a brass bowl. The household wanted its mistress’ touch, Lydia thought, and wondered how much she herself might be expected to undertake in this way. She looked last at the men, still feeling herself all in confusion whenever she thought of Hugh Giffard. Though they had been living in the same house more than a week, they had never once met each other after that first night. She had taken her meals upstairs with Frances and been busy with her duties. He, no doubt, had tasks of his own to see to. But now—She stepped toward them, smiling.

“What can I do, sirs?” she asked.

They sat together at one side of a delicate snake-footed table with a sheet of parchment spread upon it. The parchment tended to curl at the edges, and they held it flat with some difficulty. John rose and placed a chair for her just opposite his own.

“Sit here, Lydia. Hugh and I want to study this map. Will you hold the far corners of it and keep it from rolling itself together?”

Lydia sat down and grasped the corners of the parchment, and John went back to his place beside Hugh. Hugh looked up and smiled faintly, so faintly that Lydia did not respond. Perhaps he was ashamed of their adventure and wished to forget or deny it. After all, they were both in service, but she was a far lesser servant than he. Handsomer than she had remembered him to be, his hair seemed even more burnished, his eyes set farther apart. She looked down at the map. She knew that she was looking at it upside down, and tried in her mind to make the adjustment, to see what the men must see. What she saw was a rough, irregular triangle drawn in heavy ink, its apex toward her and its uneven base close to the governor and his aide.

John Wentworth had pulled a length of wax candle from its sconce, using it to indicate the points he wished to make.

“This is a small but faithful copy of Captain Holland’s map, Hugh. An excellent survey he made, and much needed, though I thought the Assembly would never vote the wherewithal to pay for it. If you call on the men of this province to shed their blood in the public interest, they will do so valiantly, but if you call on them to spend their money, they will hem and haw, and say it has been a poor harvest year and they have left their purses at home. At the word ‘tax’ they fall down in an apoplexy!”

“ ’Twas not so different in Boston, from what I could see while I was there,” answered Hugh, “nor in England, either. It’s in the nature of man to rear back from the word ‘tax’ as from the Old Serpent. Where are we sitting on this map, Johnny?”

“Here, sir,” and the governor pointed with the candle end. “This, you see, is Portsmouth. This loop close behind it is Great Bay where the rivers gather—a vast inland sea ringed with salt meadows and fine farmland. I have seen no place like it for duck-hunting in the fall. It catches the little streams that drain God’s part of the province, the counties of Strafford and Rockingham.”

Hugh laughed, she thought, a little self-consciously. “You know, John, I am strange here, so deal gently with me. I’m a Yorkshire man myself, but I wouldn’t say one county of England was more under God than another county. Are you saying that about New Hampshire? What other counties be there?”

John Wentworth explained, not patiently, but eagerly, as if he enjoyed making the explanation. “There were no counties, lad, till a year or so ago, when I set them up for a better handling of things. There be five now, Rockingham, Strafford, Cheshire, Grafton and Hillsborough—”

“Three of the five, I see, are named for English friends of yours.”

“Friends of mine? Yes. I like to hear their names said over. I like to remember my days in England, and as for ‘Strafford’—I haggled with myself when I named that one, Hugh.”

“It was for the old earl, of course. That ancient kin of yours, Thomas Wentworth, beheaded in Stuart times.”

“Yes—yes, it was for old Thomas. He acted the part of a bloody knave, and yet, I confess I find a great deal to admire in him still. So long as he climbed no higher than ‘Sir Thomas Wentworth,’ he prospered, but little more than a year after he became Earl of Strafford, he went to his death on Tower Hill. Strafford! The name has proved unlucky to the Wentworth name. Once I dreamed in an ill night after too much wine, of a voice that rose in myself and spoke to me. ‘My doom is in Strafford!’ the voice said. I wonder if it could mean—?”

He fell silent, drumming with the candle end on the table.

“This new-formed county of Strafford then? Is it an unruly section that it should doom you?” Hugh asked, bewilderment in his tone.

“Strafford unruly? No, ’tis quiet farmland. There’s naught to doom me in Strafford. But let us get to the business. When I say Strafford and Rockingham are God’s part of the province, I mean that their leading townsmen are men who will conform—I think—to the interests of the King, the province, and themselves. For I consider that these three are the same.”

“And then—beyond God’s part of the province?”

They did not know she was there, Lydia thought. She might have been the painting of Queen Caroline hung on the wall, an ivory statuette on the mantel, or an old reflection still held in the looking glass. But she knew they were there; at least, she knew that Hugh Giffard was. When she let herself think about Hugh, it was not the man himself that disturbed her, so much as her response to him, the quickness and the wantonness of it. Years ago when she was a young girl here in Portsmouth and a man had put his hands upon her and his mouth on hers, she had held stiffly from him and withdrawn herself. Then she had married, and learned to respond to David in the ancient and hallowed way. But with David dead she had made the mistake of thinking of herself as again a single woman and a virgin. Alas, she was the one but not the other, and what a difference lay between the twain. She had learned that night in the Flying Stage Coach that she was vulnerable now as she had never been before. Not whole and strong in her own honesty, not sure but what her own flesh might betray her to the unforgivable thing. If Frances had been of a different nature she might have asked counsel from Frances, but Frances, she felt, would laugh and shrug her pretty shoulders and say, “Well, if you want him, and he wants you, why tarry? We do not live forever, Lydia.”

John Wentworth pointed again with the candle and went on talking.

“Why, beyond God’s part of the province lies its middle and its west, where the two great rivers drain down. Our own stream, Piscataqua, has but a short course and no hinterland. Here on the far edge, Hugh”—and he traced the tortuous line running up the right of the map as Lydia saw it—“lies the Connecticut, its banks sparsely settled as yet, but full of rich valleys and townships chartered already, in my uncle’s time. But its waters ran to the sea in harbors beyond New Hampshire. Its trade flows all to the province it was named for, whence many of its settlers came. It is not of us. It is of Connecticut in its thinking.”

Hugh smiled, inclined to take the matter lightly; flashed a glance at Lydia, which she was well aware of although she did not meet it. “Why if ’tis of Connecticut, ’tis of some vast limbo beyond God,” he jested, “and we in Portsmouth would better ignore it. This crooked line through our center? Is that a river too?”

“Yes,” said John Wentworth slowly, “that is a river, a river deep out of our mountains and our heartland. The Merrimack! It flows from north to south, and then it crooks east to the sea, but it does not crook soon enough.”

“You mean God was in error when He formed New Hampshire?” asked Hugh, jesting still.

“Sometimes,” answered the governor ruefully, “I think He was not even about at the forming. I think He had done as any country gentleman may do, and gone up to London on holiday.”

“You think God’s a country gentleman?”

John Wentworth frowned. “Forgive me if I blaspheme, but if He were to turn out to be so, I would still worship him in Queen’s Chapel with a glad heart. My meaning is—in terms of the surveyors with rule and line, the mapmakers, and then the merchants who come after—the Merrimack River does not carry the country’s produce into Portsmouth Harbor as it ought to do. Instead it flows beyond our borders before it seeks the sea, and takes much of our lumber and provisions and handmade wares down to Newburyport in Massachusetts. You remember, you passed through Newburyport.”

“I remember Newburyport,” said Hugh, and darted a swift glance at Lydia. She felt her face turn hot, but if the governor saw, he did not notice. He went on talking.

“The men who live beside this river take their thinking from Massachusetts, too, I fear, and are much in sympathy with the rebellious antics of Boston. Nor are they all English folk. East of the river, somewhat south of here, and within our own county bounds, I must admit it, lies a wide townland called ‘Londonderry’ settled by the Scots who inhabit North Ireland; next to Portsmouth, our largest town. I have loyal friends in Londonderry. Captain Cochran, who commands our fort, is one of them. So is Colonel Holland, who keeps the tavern there. They sent a tribute to my grandfather because he ‘cherished their small beginnings, showed them civility and kindness, and defended them.’ But nevertheless, they are, for the most part, a crude, craggy, obstreperous people there, of a different race than yours and mine. But here we sit in Portsmouth, Hugh, like figures on a strip of false painted scenery in a theater, our backs to a great emptiness, all our wealth directed into other provinces because our largest rivers flow that way.”

“Did you ever think, Johnny,” asked Hugh, toying with the pipe he had taken from his pocket, still eying Lydia, much to her discomfort, “of applying to rule in another province? A province where the rivers run as you desire them?”

“I am a New Hampshire man,” said the governor austerely. “There is no other province I would care to rule. While I have not yet quite conquered the greater challenge, I would surely not be off about the lesser thing. That is not the way of a man.”

“Your pardon, Your Excellency,” chaffed Hugh, “but if you like God’s design so ill, perhaps you have found a way to amend it.”

John Wentworth’s face lighted. His gray eyes shone with triumph and a belief in the future.

“Yes, I think I have done that, Hugh. We can run roads where there are no rivers! I have a scheme in mind to link Portsmouth and Canada—unto Quebec, even—by roads that will make our little capital here into the greatest mart of all the colonies, passing Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. I plan fine things for my province! Let me show you where these roads will lie, marked out and already a-building. The first will run from the tidewater town of Durham—here—north to the rich river valleys of lower Cohos. The second—”

A great clatter sounded in the hallway, the rasp of heavy boot nails on the polished floor boards, and the squeak of an erratic boyish voice demanding attention.

“I be here with a note! A note for the governor! I knocked and knocked! Be there nobody home at all? ’Tis a note from my master, Mr. Parry! Whole town’s set by the ears about this damned tea!”

Lydia let go the corners of the map and ran into the hall. A young male creature, half boy, half man, in patched breeches and a ragged shirt, stood there holding a folded paper in his hand. Just as she reached to take it, John and Hugh came out of the library. Hugh turned a look of honest surprise on the messenger.

“Is it the custom here, Johnny,” he inquired, “for prentice boys to curse in the front hall of the governor?”

John Wentworth shrugged. “New Hampshire men,” he said, “speak their minds wherever they happen to be. What’s the trouble, Jonas?”

The youth thrust the paper unceremoniously into the governor’s hand. “Mr. Parry’s writ down here what he wants,” he piped, “I got to go back to the docks, Your Excellency. There’s a ship unloading!”

“Not the tea ship?” asked the governor quickly.

“Naaa, not that! The Gull from Barbados—rum and molasses, likely. I’ve not been aboard her yet, but I got to go. Go and help unload or I’ll miss my wages.”

He stamped out, not looking back, and Lydia shuddered as she heard his boots scrape across the floor. Fortunately they seemed to leave no mark. John unfolded the paper, and his eyes ran quickly over the message inside. Then he crumpled it in his hand.

“Ned Parry’s as nervous as an old woman!” he cried impatiently. “Complains about a great uprising last night, and says whole town’s plotting to burn his warehouse and unsettle his family. As near as I could find out, a handful of wild lads and Negro servants went looking for excitement and threw a couple of stones through his parlor window. There’s been talk against him, but no real violence—and there won’t be. I’ll admit it was unlucky his London agent shipped him this cargo of bohea he never ordered, but all he has to do is pay the duty and reship it to Halifax, the way he did when the same thing happened last June. But now he throws himself on our protection! Well, he shall have it. I’ll speak to the magistrates, especially Jack Fenton. He was one of the Queen’s Royal Irishers, and if there should be a fight, he can handle it. I suppose I’ll have to call a meeting of the Council!”

With a gesture of disgust he took his beaver hat from the table at the rear of the hall and clapped it on his powdered hair, strode out of his front door into the crisp autumn sunshine. Hugh Giffard followed him, not stopping for a hat, and Lydia watched him go, his slim shoulders straight, his stride easy and unhurried as if he were off to a cock fight or the gaming table. Hearing a noise behind her, she turned. Her pupils, massed in a little group, stood there watching her with eager, expectant faces. Betty again spoke out as their leader.

“Lyddy,” she said, “we heard it all. We heard Uncle Johnny say things have got so bad he has to call the Council.” No story ever lost anything by Betty’s telling it. “Mary’s been watching at the window, and she says everybody from the South End has gone by this last half hour. They’re all heading toward Market Square. We want to go too.”

Lydia hesitated, feeling herself as eager as they. She had almost made up her mind to refuse, to herd them back to their sewing because that seemed the more orderly and sensible procedure, the thing Frances would expect of her. Then suddenly her heart rose in rebellion. “Why not,” she asked herself, “do the thing I want to do, even if it is foolish—when it is such a little thing?” She looked quickly into the wide mirror that hung along the passage to the library and garden, and found no fault with herself, her high-piled curls or the careful loopings of her blue Holland gown.

“Very well,” she said. “We’ll get our bonnets.”

A few minutes later they emerged from the governor’s house just in time to meet a powerfully-built young man with a sharp jaw, sharp eyes, and a cocked hat. Lydia had not seen him since her return to Portsmouth, but she recognized him at once, for his was a face well-known there.

“Tom Pickering!” she cried, stepping toward him.

“For God’s sake, Lyddy March!” he exclaimed gruffly. “Very sight of you puts me in mind of those fried pies your mother used to make when she was cooking for us. Never tasted the like before nor after. God rest her soul! Haven’t seen you since Noah’s flood. Heard you was living out of town!”

They swung into step together, following the elm-lined road that wound toward Market Square, the girls trailing along behind them.

“Yes, I’ve been living in the country near Newburyport. I’m a widow now. You’re likely married yourself, Tom.”

“No.” His eyes glinted, and his chin thrust forward even more sharply. “Mean to pick me a pretty girl sometime. Just haven’t got around to it. Still living with Brother John’s family and helping him run South Mill. Take a ship on a voyage now and then. This time next year, I expect I’ll be too busy fighting.”

“Fighting?” asked Lydia startled. “Fighting whom? About what?”

“Fighting them damned lobsterbacks of the King’s that’s taken over Boston. Johnny Wentworth will have a troop of ’em here to take Portsmouth any day now. Johnny’s a King’s man and ought to know better, being born here. Can’t blame an Englishman for kissing the King’s great toe, but Johnny ought to know better, Johnny ought. But I say”—he stopped in his long strides for a moment and looked down into her face—“you was coming out of his house! You living there now? You back waiting on that—that wife of his again?”

“Yes,” said Lydia slowly, as they began once more to move ahead. “I’ve come back to be with Frances—for this winter. But I do not think the governor has ideas of war. I have not heard him mention sending for any British officers. Only this morning I heard him making plans to build roadways for the good of the province.”

“And what’s to roll on those roadways? His Majesty’s cannon?”

“No,” retorted Lydia, “New Hampshire trade.”

They had reached the edge of Market Square now, but found themselves unable to go any further, the open space between the watch house and the State House was so packed with people. Lydia had not known there were so many folk in Portsmouth. It seemed as if the population of the town must have doubled while she had been away. She craned her neck trying to see some face she remembered, but everyone within sight appeared strange to her. There were more men than women in the throng, but not so many more; rich men and poor men alike, judging by their dress, and here and there a little knot of farmers or sailors, each keeping to its own kind. It was a colorful crowd, the men in coats of blue and scarlet and green, or the drabber russet and tow of mechanics and laborers; the women in stiff rustling silks, brocade, or printed lawn, most of them with little jackets or shoulder capes, for it had been an unusually early autumn, as often came to pass in a dry year. Frosts had set in already, and the air had a sharp edge to it, the mellow Indian summer more than a month away. At first she could not follow the words of any one voice in all the babel of chattering voices. Everybody seemed to be watching the State House, trying uneasily to press in that direction, but not trying very hard. It was not a tense gathering, she thought, and not a hostile one, assembled less out of purpose and fellowship than out of curiosity. After a moment Tom Pickering muttered an apology and slipped away from them, lost to sight immediately in the shifting, stirring throng.

Lydia counted the girls to be sure they still stood close about her. The younger ones with wide eyes and eager faces kept staring intently at the State House as they saw older folk do, but Dorothy’s glances darted this way and that as if she were looking for someone.

Lydia let her own gaze wander away from the blur of faces about her and look upward into the blue air, at the morning sunlight on the North Church tower, on the old gambrel roofs of the houses clustered round, on the older, pointed roofs with dormers jutting through. She looked down several streets and lanes and saw that the houses stood closer together than they had five years ago. John Wentworth’s governorship had been a growing time for Portsmouth, and he had fine things in mind for his province. She had heard him say so. Governor John—

“Governor John,” a voice was saying close to her shoulder, the voice of a fat red-faced woman in a mantle of green and purple plaid taffeta, “Governor John’ll talk his way out of this as he talks his way out of all. A slippery lad, but God’s love, we know he means us well. He’s one of our own.”

“What be a-going on here, anyway?” demanded her companion, a thin, somber-eyed woman clad in rusty black. “I just come up to Molly Treadwell’s store to buy me a fluting iron when I seen all this rout—”

“He’s called a meeting of the Council,” replied the fat woman complacently. “I been here since breakfast. The word was out about the tea, but folks gathered slow. Bye and bye, Johnny comes, and that English lad of his, and his secretary, Tom Macdonough. Then he sent for the others. See, there goes his daddy, Mark Hunking Wentworth, now!”

Lydia looked where the woman pointed and saw a sturdy form in a dove-gray suit with gold lace on his cocked hat emerge from the far edge of the crowd, pull open the State House door, and enter.

“Having his daddy on the Council,” babbled the voice beside her, “convenient for both of them, one might say! And look, there goes Daniel Rindge, his uncle.”

Another finely clad gentleman, swinging a cane, hastened through the State House door and closed it behind him. Lydia remembered it had been said back in old Benning’s time that the Wentworths and their kin-in-law kept the government of the province as a family affair.

“What do they mean to do, you think?” asked the black-clad woman, whipping a tortoise-shell snuffbox from the folds of her gown and applying the powder deftly to each nostril.

“They mean to decide whether to let Ned Parry sell his tea or not. Could be they’ve got no choice. If they come out and give orders he’s to do it, there’ll be other Portsmouth men—not of the Council—will have a thing to say. I seen Tom Pickering go by, Jack Langdon, too.” She paused significantly. A moment later she spoke again. “Look! There goes old Atkinson, and he’s the last. They’re all inside now, for I watched ’em. Ah well, doubt if they’ll settle their minds before another hour. Let’s us trot over to the Marquis of Rockingham, and I’ll stand treat to a mug of cider—I’d never sign no pledge against that now! If they was shutting off cider instead of tea—”

They moved away. Suddenly Lydia found that her eyes were searching the crowd just as Dorothy’s had done a few moments before. This was a Friday. On other Fridays, she remembered, when she had lived here years ago, she would pile her hair three stories high and put on her brightest gown. On Friday the lads from the country would come trooping in, bearing their wares for Saturday market day. She stole a quick look at the girls, but they were still watching the State House and chatting with each other. Surely they could come to no harm, and if they took it into their heads to go home, the way was safe and plain. John’s nieces lived with their grandfolk in Daniel Street, and the others not much further away. Ten minutes she would steal, only ten minutes, only—. She stopped thinking, doubting, trying to make excuses for herself. For the second time that morning she moved in rebellion against her own good order. Perhaps there was a subtle tang of rebellion in the Portsmouth air and she had drawn it too deeply in. “We do not live forever, Lydia,” she heard Frances Wentworth say. She stole one more look at the girls, but they were not watching her. She turned and slipped away through the crowd.

Edging along the shop fronts at the head of the square, she finally reached the Paved Street, deserted except for an old woman with a willow basket and two boys teasing a Maltese cat, and hurried over its rough stones to where Spring Hill ran down near the waterside. At the foot of the hill, overlooking the wide blue river and the Kittery shore, stood the market house where the farmers brought their produce to sell, floating it down stream in the huge scow-like gundalows or conveying it more toilsomely by oxcarts and saddlebags from the back country far beyond the edges of the Piscataqua and Great Bay. Near Spring Hill stood a little dark shop where Neal McIntyre bought and sold flaxseed, a little shop where the men from Londonderry would always come. Flax was their cash crop, and brought almost as much as their linen, treated and woven by the old ways their grandfathers had learned in Ireland, better linen than anyone else could weave here. Sometimes on Fridays—! She reached the little shop, crooked and narrow, on a crooked arm of the street. She stood still in front of it, braced herself a moment, and then peered inside.

Her eyes were used to sunlight and they could see nothing at first, within the dim cave under the swinging wooden sign whose faded blue flax blossoms had all but weathered away. But she still had the use of her ears, and they served her well. From the interior of the shop she heard a bubbling laugh and a gay light voice that cried, “Later, then!”

It was the voice of Dorothy Giffard whom she had left behind her a few moments ago with the little girls in Market Square. Dorothy was coming toward her, about to step from the shop.

Twisting alleys ran down to the waterside in half a dozen places here, and Lydia fled into the nearest one. She stood there, leaning close against the mossy shingles of the wall beside her, trying to arrange her thoughts in some sort of order, wondering why she had felt a need to hide. Surely it should have been her part to accost the girl for straying from the others, to ask what her reason was, and to reprove her unless it seemed good. But she had not done this. She had slunk away as if she were the one in the wrong.

She heard Dorothy’s high heels go tapping over the doorstone in front of the shop and waited a moment longer before she peered cautiously around the corner of the wall. Dorothy was not going by the Paved Street, the way she, Lydia, had gone. Dorothy had taken off her slippers, clutched them in her right hand, and was running lightly across Madame Wibird’s garden, returning as she had doubtless come, by this straighter, more private path. Now she disappeared behind a lilac thicket. Lydia had no doubt that when she rejoined her pupils, Dorothy would be waiting in their midst, docile and innocent, as if she had never been away.

Sighing a little, quite put out of mind of what she had come there for, Lydia took her more dignified way towards Market Square, her back turned resolutely on Spring Hill where neither she nor Dorothy Giffard had any business to be.