Читать книгу The Last Gentleman - Shirley Barker - Страница 6

4.

THE CONTRARY

WAY

The tea ship sailed on Sunday under fair skies and a brisk wind, taking its delectable cargo off to Halifax where it should likely have gone in the first place. If the Portsmouth maids and matrons sighed over this new denial of their beloved beverage, they were too patriotic to do so audibly. Edward Parry paid the duty, insisting that the fault lay all with his agent in London, and that no man in town had a deeper regard for the good of his country than he. The Council voted to pay for his broken windows, but the “Committee,” leaders of that ever-growing group who resisted the new laws and taxes, made it their business to idle about the dock, to take themselves in small boats up and down the river, and to rejoice openly in the streets when the despised chests were wafted beyond Fort Point and away on the open sea.

John Wentworth spent much of his time in the State House, coming home only to his bed and his dinner, but when he did come home, he seemed to be his usual urbane self, more annoyed than deeply troubled by the rebelliousness of the people, not taking it to be any grave matter. “There is no great issue at stake here,” Lydia heard him tell Hugh as the two men sat over their wine late that Saturday night. “If they do not want to drink tea, I shall not order their noses held and force it down them. My duty—at the moment—is only to keep the King’s peace in this province; to see no violence is done to any man. And that, I mean to do. I wish the Castle had a stronger garrison. Captain Cochran is able and loyal, but what can he do with only five men, if we seek his aid against rising trouble? Hugh, we must see that troubles do not arise. Portsmouth men are neither stupid nor vicious. They are not like the rabble in Boston. I can govern them easily—if I govern well.”

Hugh took a deep draft of wine, and watching him, Lydia could not help but ask herself if he did it in order to avoid giving the governor a direct answer. His face looked graver and more troubled than the governor’s. Perhaps in England folk were better behaved, and he was not used to the easy freedom of colonial men, the way they took matters into their own hands.

On Sunday Frances came languidly downstairs for a brief time and strolled with Lydia and Dorothy in the garden, seating herself on a bench finally to enjoy the afternoon sun. The old beagle slept at her feet, and the tame squirrel that she fed and played with when she was in health, darted as near as he dared, fearing only the presence of the dog. The elm and beech leaves were beginning to yellow overhead, and the gold and crimson and russet colors of autumn lay on the formal flower beds that ran from the terrace at the rear of the house down to the grassy edge of the South Mill Pond. John Wentworth kept two boats tied to a small wharf there, and Lydia remembered how in the old days they used to go rowing on the tranquil, dark water above the dam. She looked at Frances, at the ungainliness that had begun to afflict the slender figure, and dared not to suggest that they should go rowing now. Dorothy had brought a pair of sheers and roamed among the flowers, cutting the blooms that pleased her. Once she was well out of earshot, Lydia spoke.

“Frances,” she began cautiously, “it is as you say. Dorothy has a great winsomeness about her. I am sure that it draws the men. But do you think—have you noticed—that she has shown a liking for any particular lad?”

She had not spoken to Dorothy about that morning on Spring Hill, not having had a fit opportunity, and she would not tell the governor’s wife about it now. For one thing, if she did, she would have to admit that she went there herself, and Frances would taunt her unmercifully. Frances would not need to ask why she, Lydia, went to the flax shop. She would have known. Still, Lydia could not forget the matter, nor did she think it was all wanton curiosity. Dorothy had been placed in her charge. Dorothy was a very young girl in a country not her own. Her friends owed her their watchfulness and protection.

Frances flicked away a yellow leaf that had settled on the velvet cloak she kept drawn around her.

“Man? She does not know what a man is for!” she jeered, and one could not mistake the crudeness of her meaning. “These English girls have all passion bred out of them! They are as lacking in ardor as the wool sack their chancellor sits on. They call that a symbol of England’s greatness in the cloth trade, Johnny tells me. But bloodless maids like her are a symbol of England’s decline!”

Lydia was a little bewildered that Frances should flare up against her young guest in such an abandoned way. She sought to divert her.

“Is England declining, then?” she asked mildly.

The fire died out behind the lovely distorted face, quite healed now from the rash that had briefly marred it. The governor’s wife sagged wearily on the whitewashed bench.

“I do not know,” she murmured. “My governor thinks not. He thinks it will go on to further greatness, to absorb the whole world; and our best hope for the future is to cling to it and to follow in its way. But Hugh Giffard who comes but lately from there is not so certain. He says there are rebellious spirits in that country, too, who seek to overturn all the old ways. He told me—we talked often—before I became swollen and ugly, when I was still fit to talk to a young man—! Help me to the house, Lydia! I am unwell! Oh I am weary of this horrid burden that waxes greater every day! I am almost willing to miscarry. Then I should be the quicker myself again.” She staggered uncertainly to her feet.

Dorothy dropped her half-gathered marigolds and ran to help Frances inside, innocently concerned, and unaware that she herself had been the subject of their talk. She offered to run for Dr. Hall Jackson, or to send Henry, the Yorkshire footman, but Frances scoffed feebly at the idea and announced that she would do well enough once she was safe in her bed and warming herself with a cup of hot tea. She was right in this, and after the scare she had given them, settled calmly down for a quiet nap. Lydia then withdrew to her own room and napped too. Perhaps that was the reason she found herself wakeful that night.

*

The household had retired early, its master and his aide still being away in the town. Dorothy had taken a book of Pope’s poems from the library, smiled, and said that she thought she would read for a while, and gone away to her little room behind the great chamber where Frances lay. Lydia climbed into her own four-poster bed under the blue counterpane, but her mind stayed clear and sharp, and her eyelids would not close. Once she got up and stood in the window for a little while, the curtains blowing round her. It was a dark night, the moon being but a few days old, and when she saw a figure coming down the street she had to peer very hard before she could recognize him. It turned out to be Tom Pickering, and he carried his gun and powderhorn. He must have been hunting, she thought. She hoped he carried them for no worse reason. In any case, he was going home to the South Mill. That meant he looked for no more trouble now. Portsmouth seemed to be quiet again, and God send it would remain so. She thought uneasily how Tom had predicted the King’s troops could overwhelm this town, just as they had done in Boston. She could understand the little reasons for all the unrest, but she felt there must be a greater reason behind it that she could not understand. It was not in the nature of things that men should upset themselves so much, take down their guns and call out the troops over a simple victual like tea.

She watched the pattern of stars over the river, the lights going out in the houses along the waterside. Finally she grew chilled and crept into bed again. This time it seemed that she might sleep. She imagined herself going down to Spring Hill, and surely she meant to go there when another Friday came, this time without Dorothy, this time with no young maids in her care. She would go into Neal McIntyre’s shop and ask—not for flaxseed or Virginia tobacco. She would ask if they had seen—

Suddenly she started wide awake. It had happened again, just as it happened that first night—the light step on the stair. Jumping out of bed, she flung her cloak over her night shift and slipped her feet into a pair of embroidered felt slippers Frances had given her for quiet walking about the house. She tiptoed into the hall.

Then she paused a moment, seeing no one on the wide stairs, broken by the landing midway and reversing themselves. Candles burned in the wall sconces, for it was the custom of the house to keep them lighted until the governor himself had retired to bed. It seemed unlikely that anyone could have taken themselves out of sight with such speed. Then she remembered the inner staircase, narrow and winding, that ran between Frances’ chamber and the small room behind it, down to the dining room below. Someone—Dorothy, perhaps—had descended that staircase, was even now moving about the house, perhaps outside it, engaged in some secret thing!

Lydia ran noiselessly down the wide stair and into the dining room. No candles burned there, but the table was set for breakfast, covered with linen and much silver, and a streak of light shone on the whiteness of the tablecloth. The light came from the kitchen. She tiptoed that way and peered around the edge of the door frame into the low-ceiled, shadowy room.

At first she drew a sigh of relief. Yes, the light footsteps must have been Dorothy’s, for Dorothy stood here before her, a single candle burning on the table between them. But the girl’s purpose seemed so innocent, now it was known. Bunches of dried herbs hanging thriftily from the rafters overhead almost touched her hair as she balanced herself on a three-legged stool to reach up to the higher shelves of the deep closet built into the wall beside the great hearth. In this closet, Abby, the cook, and Prue, head housemaid, kept the baked meats, loaves, and pastries ready for the table, to save themselves from running too often to the shelves in the cellar beneath. Dorothy had grown hungry, that was all. She wanted a biscuit or a sweet cake to munch on before she went to bed.

As the tenseness ebbed out of Lydia she felt ridiculous and a little ashamed to have distrusted her young friend. She was about to step forward, explaining that she, too, had come downstairs for something to eat, and now they could share a late supper together, when she heard another sound, dull, soft, and repetitious, on the far side of the kitchen. She turned her glance in that direction.

The sound was caused by Bugler, the governor’s old beagle, tapping his short thick tail on the floor. Bugler sat solemnly in front of the door that led to the back steps and the garden, most effectively blocking it. His front feet were firmly planted, and the whites of his eyes showed. Lydia made ready again to step forward, ready to laugh. Bugler’s appetite was a family jest. He had to be confined at mealtime, and whenever food was consumed in the house he demanded his share. Worse than a tithing man!

But just then Dorothy stepped down from the stool and withdrew from the closet. Lydia noticed with surprise that she was not carrying a cake or a sweetmeat, or any other dainty refreshment fit for a young woman. In her hands she held a large ham bone, still covered with luscious pink meat. She looked over her shoulder once, but Lydia remained safely hidden inside the shadows of the dining room. The girl approached Bugler. The old dog stiffened himself and stood there menacingly, still blocking the door. He growled low. He tilted back his head, and Lydia braced herself, expecting to hear him give his unearthly howl.

But Dorothy moved too quickly. “Here, Bugler,” she cried sweetly. “Here, lad!”

She placed the ham bone on the wide stone pave before the kitchen hearth under the shadow of an iron kettle swinging on its crane. The years dropped away from the old hound. He shot forward, spry as a six-months puppy, and oblivious of anything else, with a sob of delight, he sank his teeth into the tallowy richness of the ham.

Dorothy gave a little laugh and slipped through the unguarded door.

Swiftly, almost without thinking, Lydia hastened after. Once outside, she found herself in the kitchen-garden patch to the right of the terrace, a tangle of vines and overgrown herbs at this season of the year. Dorothy moved forward as if on a well-known course, and Lydia followed as cautiously as she could, glad that her felt slippers made no sound, feeling every sharp stone, every gnarled tree root against the soles of her feet. They passed through a narrow wooden gate into the lane that led between the Mill Pond and the highway. Dorothy took the latter turn and headed for the town. She could not think to go back to Spring Hill! The shops would all be dark and shuttered late on a Sunday night.

Keeping about a hundred yards behind the slim form, uncloaked and plain to see in its white wool dress, Lydia hurried forward, holding her own cloak wrapped tightly around her, aware that she had nothing but her night shift underneath. No one else seemed astir in darkened Portsmouth as they crossed Prince Street, Queen Street, and came into Market Square, but lanterns burned all yellow about the watch house, reflected from the walls of the North Church, and lit their path a little as they turned into the Paved Street. Madame Wibird had a light in her kitchen windows at the rear, and many candles shone from Captain John Moffat’s mansion house, as if nobody had any thought of going to bed, but darkness covered the little low shops and humbler houses along Spring Hill.

The street drew ever nearer to the Piscataqua now, and Lydia could hear the tide sucking at the wharves below her, lost in the shadows on her right. She could smell, above the fetidness of the river, the clean salt tang of the sea. Her attention wavered for a moment as she strained her eyes trying to peer toward it, to make out flooding water from embankment, afraid lest she should unwarily stumble over the line between. In that moment she lost Dorothy. She realized suddenly that no figure moved ahead of her; a streamer of mist now and then, or a stray cat searching for fish heads in the gutter, but Hugh Giffard’s sister had vanished from the sloping street. Lydia had a sudden conviction that if she were to hasten home to John Wentworth’s house she would find the girl eating her supper at the kitchen table, flinging the scraps to Bugler as he crouched nearby on the floor. Was Dorothy a witch woman out of old time, who could come and go, unseen and at will? Even Ma’am Hooper in Newburyport had never pretended to that power.

At the corner of Deer Street Lydia hesitated. Beyond Deer Street the houses thinned out into salt grass and crooked trees where the old Cutts orchard ran down to the outlet of the North Mill Pond. Dorothy could have hidden in the shadow of the Customs House, of course, or she could have gone on to the ferry, but at this hour nobody would be likely to set her over to the Kittery side—if that was where she wanted to go. Had the girl dashed into some friendly doorway that opened to receive her and then discreetly closed itself again? She looked up the hill to the Deer Tavern, a square-built, solid old house, and saw a light behind its narrow panes. Spring Hill, and now the Deer Tavern! Dorothy was only going over the ways her own young feet had gone! She remembered those ways well.

But her feet were older and more tired now, burning in their thin slippers, and the dank river air seeped through her cloak and the flimsy garment beneath. She felt sure that Dorothy had gone into the ale house. Well enough, for Dorothy! Dorothy was a maid, and young, and must follow her destiny. She, Lydia, was a widow woman, all staid and sober now, with nothing ahead. She should go home and wrap her hair in curling bobbins and read her Bible till she fell asleep.

But no, she thought. Dorothy was hardly a maid yet, scarcely more than a child, too young to be trusted with her own destiny. She had come from the placid life of an English country house, and she should not be left to herself in a rude waterfront tavern where hard-drinking sailors from the wharves and hard-drinking woodsmen from the back country were used to coming. Dorothy should have known better! What was she doing here, anyway? Half angry at the girl, wholly curious, shaken with emotions she refused to think about, Lydia walked swiftly forward to the nearest of the two lighted windows, paused as close to it as she dared, and peered inside. Three men sat at a table with cider mugs in their hands. A whale-oil lamp burned on a wall hook above their heads, shining also on a picture of King George III hanging upside down. The men had shaggy hair and leather jerkins, and she did not recognize any of them. After a moment she moved to the other window.

Behind its dusty panes stood an oak table, small and round like the first. No lamps burned in this end of the room, but lights and shadows flickered through it, so Lydia knew there must be a fire on the hearth which she could not see because of the heavy nail-studded door. Dorothy Giffard sat at the table, her back to the window, and facing her, gazing at her intently and with tenderness, sat a young man. They did not drink, though there were glasses and a wine bottle before them.

“You came at last!” Lydia heard the young man say.

At first she thought she did not know him. He had dark-red hair drawn into a queue behind, and lying in wide shining waves across the top of his head. His handsome boyish face was all alight as he bent forward toward Dorothy. He wore a linen shirt and a homespun coat, decent, but hardly in fashion, and the lean barrel of his musket rested against the table beside him. Now he reached across the table and took Dorothy’s hand. Dorothy leaned forward, too, and twisted her shoulders in a playful gesture. Lydia heard her laughing, heard them whisper together.

“Dan MacMurray,” Lydia said aloud, letting the taste of it linger on her tongue, the sound of it stay in her ears for a long minute.

After the words died away, she stood there silent, conscious of the fall night around her, mild, now that the wind had lessened; of the stars overhead, the black river slipping seaward below the hill, and the deserted streets of the harbor town. She was conscious, too, of the lighted window, and the pair beyond it who talked as lovers; that she herself stood outside the lighted window. She felt lonelier than she had ever been in her whole life. Not even when she bowed her head by David’s new-made grave in the midst of a March blizzard, had she felt so much alone.

Then she heard a sound behind her.

“I thought ’twas Lyddy March,” said the familiar voice, close and caressing, and still with an edge to it, an edge that could cut her deeper than any knife Dan MacMurray had ever brought with him when he came down from the farms of Londonderry. She turned slowly, feeling a curious peace inside, as if her heart had ceased to beat and her blood to flow; stood there and looked at him.

The lamplight from the tavern shone out upon him, his dark hair stirred into wisps by the sea wind, his gray eyes hard to fathom as river water, his craggy features and full throat that seemed to grow like the trunk of a young tree from the open collar of his deerskin hunting shirt.

“Black Dan” and “Red Dan,” they had been called in the old days, and likely now; cousins named alike, so that for the difference, men called them by the color of their hair; inseparable, in spite of the five years between them. But Red Dan had been a freckle-faced urchin then, more likely to take off his shoes and go wading in the sedge beyond Cutts orchard than to sit in the tavern where she and Black Dan were sitting. Red Dan was a boy no longer. He had grown tall and poised, and his freckles had faded. He was sitting with a young girl in a tavern. She, Lydia, and Black Dan, his face lined and a little older, stood facing each other almost as strangers in the open street.

“Who else would it be?” she asked him sharply, trying to arrange her stiff and unresponsive features in a smile. “ ’Tis not likely I’d loan my face to any other woman in Portsmouth to walk abroad with.”

He laughed, slow and teasing. “I thought ’twas you,” he said, “when I saw you skulking past the watch house like a Penacook brave hoping to scalp somebody. What be you after the lass for? She’s safe wi’ my cousin Dan.”

“He’s grown and changed, has he not?” said Lydia uncertainly. “At first I did not know him.”

“Aye,” agreed Black Dan cheerfully. “Taller than I be, now. Takes after his mother’s folk, more like Aunt Jean.”

“Your Aunt Jean was ailing when I went away, ailing badly, you thought. Is she—?”

“Aunt Jean died,” he answered soberly, “after you left. That first winter. Dan and I be all alone now, except for Graunie. She raised us, you know—or tried to, God help her!”

She was silent for a moment while her thoughts ran back over all that he had said. Then she asked, “You followed us from the watch house?”

He nodded. “Went there to talk wi’ the watch after they closed the Marquis of Rockingham. Folk can put up their guns and go to sleep tonight, now they’ve got rid of the tea ship, so the town’s quieter than the backside o’ Moose Mountain. Not a game going anywhere, and nowhere but here a drop to drink. Canna’ see what a man should come to the Bank for. I can have me a higher time in Londonderry.”

“I know you can,” snapped Lydia, angry at him suddenly, just as in the old days, angry because he mattered so much to her. “A high time with Jessie, I suppose.”

He laughed again, but this time a harshness had replaced the gentle teasing of it.

“Now I know for sure you’re Lyddy March. You went out o’ here quarreling, and you come back the same way. I told you years ago you ought to fight fire with fire. If you’d make me welcome like Jessie does—”

“I’ll never make you welcome like Jessie does,” she retorted. “There be other ways for a man and woman than that. Honest and respected—!”

“I know there be, but I’ll have none o’ them,” he told her. Then his eyes lighted and his mood changed. “Now that we’ve settled that,” he said, “I’ll walk back to the governor’s wi’ you, and hear about all that’s happened while you been away.”

“How did you know that I was living at the governor’s? That anything has happened?”

“I got a tongue, Lyddy. When I saw you go by, I asked the watch. He knows the gossip in town. He’s paid for knowing. He said you’d been at John Wentworth’s house for a fortnight past. It’s where I’d most likely have thought to find you. And to a girl wi’ a face like yours, there’s plenty bound to happen. You look good to me, Lyd. I watched you close while you was spying on Dolly through the window.”

She felt her heart thaw and start to beat again and her blood to flow. “If I look good to you, Dan MacMurray, and you want to walk with me to John Wentworth’s house, why you may do so. But first one or the other of us must go inside and fetch Dorothy. She is only a child and should not be in the streets so late. Dan can come too, the four of us together.”

He twisted his felt cap in his hands. “Oh come now! Leave them alone a bit. She’s none so much a child. You’d trust her wi’ Dan MacMurray, sure?”

“No,” said Lydia, “I’d not trust her with any man named Dan MacMurray—not in the front pew in the meeting house in the time of prayer. The minute folk had their eyes closed he’d—”

Dan touched her arm. “You’re too late, Lyddy,” he said as if it pleased him. “They be already gone.”

Lydia glanced quickly through the window. He had spoken truly. A fat aging couple sat in their places now; the man, doubtless the host, wearing a dirty white apron, his companion with a shock of coarse gray hair falling into her eyes as she bent to her glass to drink. Lydia pulled away from Dan and hurried over to the low flat steps of the Deer Tavern, jerked open its nail-studded door. She stood there facing the few occupants, remembering to hold her cloak tight.

“Where are they?” she demanded. “Dan MacMurray, I mean and—?”

The man in the dirty apron laughed at her, throwing back his head. “Why they be up and gone, Dan and Dolly. Through the alley door some time ago. Doubt they’s still anywhere in this part of town, ma’am.”

Gazing up and down the room, Lydia thought that the man had probably told her the truth. She shut the door behind her and stepped into the street.

“I shall tell her brother of this when I get home,” she said to Dan. “He’d not want her tempted to wicked mischief.”

They walked silently into the Paved Street and back through Market Square. All the houses were dark now, and the watch was crying midnight. Lydia wondered when Dorothy Giffard would come home.

“I wouldna’ do that, Lyd—tell Dolly’s brother, that is,” said Dan coaxingly, seeking for the favor. “Dan means her no harm. He first saw her in the Spring Market two months back, when the governor’s wife sent her there to buy fruit in black cherry time. He got in talk wi’ her, for she’s a sweet friendly lass. Now whenever he comes to the Bank to sell linen or flaxseed, they meet; sometimes at Neal McIntyre’s, sometimes at the Deer. She’s close-mouthed about herself, but she says her brother is in the governor’s service. What sort of work does he do? Is he a gardener, or a he-cook, or a horse-handler? He blacks boots, maybe?”

“He’s the governor’s aide,” retorted Lydia proudly. “ ’Tis a position of honor. And he’s better born than anybody in America.”

“Well, God a-mighty,” answered Dan MacMurray without raising his voice. “I thought we was all born the same way—o’ woman, that is.”

She could not argue that, so she made him no answer. They did not talk any more, and in a few moments they were passing under the elm trees on Pickering Neck and John Wentworth’s house loomed just ahead of them. A light burned in Frances’ chamber, and a warm yellow glow filled the fanlight over the front door. They stopped and stood still together at the gate. He reached for her hand.

“I’m glad you come home, Lyddy,” he said. “I was afraid you might marry somebody else, since you couldna’ marry me. But I’m told your name is March still.”

She felt suddenly too tired to explain that to him tonight. “You’re coming back?” she asked anxiously. “You’ve said naught about yourself. There’s so much to ask and tell. Next Friday—”

He shook his head. “I doubt it. I’ll likely be deep in the woods somewhere by then, spotting trees to mark the course o’ the governor’s new road. But I’ll be coming back. You’ll wait awhile longer, if you’ve waited this long.”

He looked into her eyes a moment, and then his own eyes widened and a hardness came across his face. She could see him plainly in the light of the lantern swinging from a pole near John Wentworth’s front fence, the lantern hung across the street on the small shabby house where Daniel Fowle printed his weekly newspaper.

“And dinna’ you go telling any tales that’ll make trouble for Dolly and Dan. If you do—” he paused a moment, and she stared at him in quick apprehension, “it’s the end o’ your knowing Dan MacMurray. I’ll never look your way again.” He jammed his felt cap down on his head, and strode away toward Market Square.

Lydia looked after him, then turned and crept toward John Wentworth’s back gate. She felt confused, and tremulous, happy and unhappy, and tired to death. All she wanted was to sink into her bed and lie still. She did not care what time Dorothy Giffard got home.

*

John Wentworth, Doctor of Common Law from Oxford University, Doctor of Laws from Aberdeen and Dartmouth College—the college he himself had helped to establish in a New Hampshire backwoods town—Captain General, Vice Admiral and Governor of the Province of New Hampshire, Surveyor General of His Majesty’s Woods in America, walked in the crooked lanes along the waterside. He walked alone, letting the wind blow through his hair. When he traveled as the King’s representative, he went with much pomp, in a coach, arrayed in gold and scarlet. When he went as a private man, he walked softly in old clothes. More troubled by recent events than he had been willing to admit, even to his own father, least of all to his aides and his household, he had stolen out of his house a few minutes before midnight to see if a walk in the night air would calm his spirits a little, before he went upstairs to the uncertain solace of his wife.

He strolled idly among the old cottages, alert for any sounds of disquiet in the town above, but under the moonless sky, Portsmouth lay dark and still. To his right, close by the water, rose up the bulk of his brother’s mansion house where his brother had died. He remembered when Thomas had moved his household there first, how in the blithe spring weather they had arranged the planting of the two young linden trees, on the front lawn. The trees did not stand tall enough to look over the housetop yet, but they would someday. Thomas’ trees! He hoped Thomas would say a prayer for him, if Thomas was safely established in the realm of grace.

Just ahead of him rose the old Wentworth house, foursquare and weathered, with a lilac bush by the front door. It looked to the river, past the Point of Graves and the thin spirey masts of ships running up the sky by the dock just behind, ships put in here from St. Martin’s, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Cadiz, Newfoundland, Guadaloupe, New York. His great-grandfather had kept a tavern in that house almost a hundred years ago, with liberty to entertain strangers and sell wine, beer, rum, and cider, so long as he suffered no gaming or other disorders. His license, yellow and torn, lay with the family papers still. But the tavernkeeper’s son had risen to be Lieutenant Governor, and the Lieutenant Governor’s son had become a rich merchant, and now, in him, the rich merchant’s son had become the Royal Governor, with many titles more. Where next was the tavern-keeper’s blood to go?

He thought of the riots in Boston and disturbing rumors from farther south; of the Congress meeting even now in Philadelphia to pool their knavish notions for upsetting the country; of the rebellion stirring in his own province, stronger in the back country away from the bulwark of substantial men in the old establishments along the sea. He thought of the child his wife carried within her as she lay safe in her rose-hung bed, surrounded with every luxurious thing. He intended to maintain and increase that luxury; had never before doubted that he would be able to do so. But of late the whole world seemed to run the contrary way. Perhaps this child would go back to tavern-keeping.

Governor John Wentworth stood still in the dark, in the shadow of the lilac bush beside his great-grandfather’s front door. He spoke to dead Samuel Wentworth, his great-grandfather.

“If he’s born to be a tavern-keeper, we’ll make him a good one, sir. I pledge you that,” he said.

A shiver went through him, and he felt unaccountable tears moisten his eyelids. He stared mutely seaward, past the Point of Graves. Something moved there—the flutter of a girl’s white dress, perhaps, with a thicker, darker shadow looming beside it. On the wind from the river he caught the sound of a girl’s laugh, a laugh he thought he remembered, but whose it was, he could not tell. Lovers, most likely, seeking privacy among the turfy graves of the dead. Well, the old dead would not cry out against them if they could. The old dead in their time had doubtless gone out two by two, at the dark of the moon, to seek privacy for love.

John Wentworth felt his ill mood dissolve away. He was himself again, governor of a province, trusted servant of the King, strong and competent, and sure. “Candor and reason are better than troops and ships to govern by,” he told himself, half-aloud. “I am honest with the New Hampshire men. Above all, they value that. They know I serve the King, but they know I come of the same stock as they, and serve their interests, too. They trust me, and so long as they trust me, order will prevail here. So long as I am honest with them, and do not betray—”

What had ailed him a moment ago? The result, no doubt of supping on oysters in wine at his mother’s plenteous table. He strode back to his fine house, whistling a ribald air current in the London taverns ten years before, cropping the wayside goldenrod with the light cane he carried in his ungloved hand.