Читать книгу Fire and the Hammer - Shirley Barker - Страница 4

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November, thought Silas Marvayne, is a time for the old to look at the young, and marvel and remember that season of love and the beauty of it all, for God has so ordered that it does not come twice to any man, since no man is strong enough to bear the wonder of it twice. Silas sat in the blue-gray dust of the stonecutter’s shop, southeast of the Frog Pond, at the foot of the burying ground, and sneezed the powdered granite out of his nostrils where it settled invisibly on his ruffled shirt and black velvet waistcoat. He looked up the hill under the twisting elm boughs, lower, to the brown grass and tilted headstones. That way, he knew, would come youth and love. Not fox him, any more, settled merchant of Newburyport, Massachusetts, grizzled, and forty-nine years old, and on too good terms with life to want what was gone from him forever. But he could still look with delight at the youth and beauty he had begotten, that was destined for some other man. He sat between his two cronies, smoked his pipe, and drank his rum, and read the paper aloud—but he waited for his daughter Lass.

They were three men there in the shadowy, timbered shop, with its diamond panes facing westward, away from the town, straight at the side of the sharp hill of the dead; young men no longer, and it was autumn and the yellow leaves were falling—the end of a long, mild autumn in a troubled time. Silas Marvayne was tall and lean, with eyes the color of sea water, a sharp, thin face, and black and silver hair; Silas who had wanted to be a poet in his youth, when he was reading Ovid in the grammar school, but also a Silas who had loved women from about that time, first the shy girl sweethearts, then his wife and his baby daughters, and loving them meant that he wanted to give them the good things of the world. So he had burnt his foolscaps, and gone out with this father’s ships, and come home to his father’s counting house, grown to be a master hand at both, and on the whole he had found it good. He knew the look you must give a shilling to turn it into a guinea, and that was no bad thing to know, but when the fog blew down from the east country and a warm wind stirred the pussywillow buds along the spring brooks, he thought sometimes, wistfully—But I wanted to be a poet.

This afternoon he had come up from the wharves below Market Square to sit with his old friends, Dr. Timothy Fletcher, who had looked him in the eye on a ghastly birthing night fifteen years ago and told him that his wife Ann would die before morning—which she had—and Job Corey, the stonecutter, who had given him his only son—save for those two limp boys of Ann’s who never breathed at all. Job, shot in the back in the French and Indian War, had walked bent double ever since, but he had gotten and raised more boys than he could feed or the parish either. It was his fourth son, Crispin, who had shipped for Silas as a cabin boy at eleven, and gone out a master at nineteen, Crispin who would be his son-in-law. The young men were out now, with the privateers, or fighting somewhere across in New York or the Jerseys, but the older men could gather here in their teeming river town, and plan for tomorrow, and remember yesterday.

Silas laid down the paper to fill his pipe and pick up the earthen mug from the hearthstone, for Job had a little fire burning there, and he liked his rum with a taste of warmth about it, not puddle cold. Now he began to read again, as the shadows thickened in the corners of the room and the salt wind whirled yellow leaves against the window panes.

“ ‘Item—from Boston. The enemy have landed their main body at Eastchester—we lost twelve men, but we killed five hundred—New York Island is still in our possession. The salvation of America depends upon our next engagement. It will be the destruction of the British army or ours.’ ”

Job, black-browed and stone-dusty, spat into the fire and poured himself another mugful. “Salvation of America! Hell and damn! When I was called out twenty years ago, they told me that was to save America. My dad was killed at Louisburg, and his dad at Port Royal, an’ what was they up there for, but to save America? Now I got four boys gone from home for the same thing. How many damn-all times we got to save America anyway?”

Dr. Timothy swallowed thirstily, then lifted his mild, brown eyes in the square-bowed spectacles, and looked at Job and spoke, a little drunken, as always. The doctor had seen too much suffering, tried to mend too many sorry predicaments, known too well what bitter destruction the flesh can bring upon the spirit, and been destroyed, in turn, by his own compassion.

“I think maybe, Job, every man has got to save it once—in his time.”

“Cris sent me a letter,” Job raged on, unmollified. “You want to see what he said? You want to see what to hell he said?”

Silas put down the Essex Journal. “You’ve heard from Crispin—since Lass has?”

“I couldn’t say. I heard this morning.” He pulled from the pocket of his tattered homespun breeches a sheet of paper, crumpled, bearing a patch of square, black writing. Silas took it and read aloud, in the even, droning voice he used in his counting house.

Dear Father:

Send me a gun so I can trade this rifle for a pair of breeches, though we be so ill-equipped ’twill soon be the fashion here to go with a bare backside. Since Long Island we have found that the British cannot aim as we do, but fire in volleys and depend on closing with the bayonet, which calls for a musket, so ’tis that I want, or the price thereof. We was last paid when we was mustered out of Beverly in July. Great Franklin talks of arming us with bow and arrow, but I doubt I could wield the damn things. If you have no money for the musket, never mind, as I have a small and a great hunting knife by me, and I had two fists before I had either. These will do well enough for such of them as I have talked with. They claim this is to be no war but a fox hunt, and they come to America to kill peasants. This notion will undo them quicker than cannon. May this letter find you and my mother well.

Your son,

C. Corey

Dr. Timothy set down his mug and ran his hand back over his forehead, tilting his powdered wig awry.

“Bows and arrows? I’m surprised at Mr. Franklin. I remember he come here once twenty years ago. First Church steeple got struck by lightning, and he wanted to study on it. Said church didn’t burn because of a wire that ran through the bell tower, an’ clock, an’ all, straight into the ground. I thought he was a smart man then. Anyway, I’m glad to know Crispin’s well. As you must be, Silas. Hasn’t he stood as a son to you in the trade, doesn’t he have your business at his fingers’ ends, isn’t he marrying Lass?”

“He is if he ever gets home from war and Lass’ll have him. She changes her mind every time the wind veers.”

“What woman don’t?” said Job crossly.

“Huh? Not yours, sure. After bearing you ten sons.”

“Wager it?”

“No—oo. I haven’t known much of women the last fifteen years.”

“Hannah Hildreth—?”

Silas’ blue eyes lit up with rage and he slammed his mug down on the rough plank table.

“By God, any man who talks about Hannah ain’t worth my fist in his face. He’ll get my boot—elsewhere. She’s kept my house since Ann died, and reared my girls. I’ve asked her in marriage twenty times, but you know why she couldn’t, as well as I do. Her husband went on a voyage their wedding week and was never heard from. She’s got no proof she’s widow—and until she has—but you hold your tongue about Hannah Hildreth. I’d rather have her beside me in a fight than the best man in Newbury port.”

He stopped, out of breath, and refilled his mug.

“I didn’t speak no harm of Hannah,” said Job sullenly.

“That he didn’t, Si,” said Dr. Timothy, swaying forward a little. “All town knows Hannah’s a good woman. She’s cooked and cleaned for you, and mothered Sally and Lass. If she lay in your bed as need arose—it’s none of our affair.”

“You’re drunk, Tim,” said Silas magnanimously, reaching over to fill the doctor’s mug.

“I am, praise God,” answered Timothy Fletcher, settling back and folding his hands across his flowered waistcoat. “What else is left for a doctor who’s failed at his trade the way I have—so many times—Even my best friend’s wife I couldn’t save.”

“You did all you could for Ann,” said Silas-bleakly. “You need some more wood, Job. I’ll fetch it.” He stepped into the shed at the rear.

“Ann Marvayne was a pretty woman,” muttered Job reflectively, “but not if you was to put her beside old Mistress Marvayne—her that was Peg Magoon.”

“Peg Magoon!” cried Timothy, all his wits opening out like a flower. “That wasn’t a pretty woman. That was beauty. The fountain and spirit of it. All in a Scotch-Irish redemption lass, wrapped up in a peat-stained shawl. When he was old, old, and I was a young man, I talked to the captain who brought her over sea. He’d shipped two girls that voyage, he told me; Peg Magoon from Derry and Margery Brown from Cork. Margery was the pert one. He says to her, ‘An’ what are you going to America for?’ ‘Why,’ says she, ‘to marry and raise governors for them.’ ”

“I heard that story,” said Job, smiling quietly, “heard it from my mother that was a girl with Peg—and look how it’s all come out that way. Here’s Margery’s son a general—General John Sullivan of New Hampshire. God knows what he’ll govern later.”

“But,” went on Doctor Timothy, his eyes fixed straight ahead, staring at the fire, “Peg didn’t say nothing at all. She didn’t need to. Captain looked her over good, an’ then he had her locked in the hold till they got into Boston Harbor. She had so much of what a man wants that he couldn’t keep her safe any other way.”

Job swallowed and felt the liquor rise in him. “I never talked with no captain about her, but I heard something else of Peg Magoon and not from my mother either. I heard one man say for all her beauty he wouldn’t have her—not if she was offered to him on a tray with handles.”

“I hadn’t ever heard that, Job. Why didn’t he want her?”

“Because he said she’d be no good to him; no good ever to a man she didn’t love, and he could see in her eyes that she’d never met her man. He said most women’ll take what the Lord sends them for a husband, and make the best of it, and be happy—but Peg wouldn’t. He said she could marry a man an’ live with him forty years an’ bear his children an’ in her heart still be a maid. Could that ever be, Tim?” He appealed to the doctor.

Timothy nodded his head sadly. “Could be, yes. Not often, but with a one like Peg. I hope it won’t happen, again—in our time.”

Job muttered, and Silas, who had rejoined them in time to hear the last words, bit his lower lip. Both of them spoke together. Both of them said the same thing.

“She’s marrying Crispin.”

“A fine lad, a fine lad,” rumbled the doctor. “Just because two women look the same—it don’t mean they must be alike. But I never saw two before—’twixt whom there was no difference at all.”

Silas had known his mother as a great beauty, turning softly into a delicate old lady, but there had been no closeness and love between them. She had borne him, and seen to it that he was fed and cleaned and looked after, but she had paid scant attention to him and even less to his father. John Marvayne spent all his time in the counting house. Peg walked in the garden, sat idly by the upper windows, watching the sea, singing low Gaelic songs to herself, talking sometimes with Lass, when Lass was growing. She died when Lass was eight, and she herself a two years’ widow. Her son had scrupulously followed her last request; the square granite marker he had paid Job to set over her grave on the burying hill bore two words only, “Peg Magoon.” Now in the mellowness of rum, and twilight, and late autumn, he remembered that her last living gesture had been to flout the Marvaynes, to deny that she had ever borne their name. She had always been a stranger to him, always wanted to be.

Silence settled between the three friends. The talk had gone a way none of them liked, and Job tried quickly, clumsily, to set it back.

“What else be in the paper?” he asked, bending over his work bench, chiseling away at a death’s head on a small slate gravestone.

“Well—nothing we don’t know. No more of the war. Only home things.”

“I like them better.”

“Timothy Dexter, at the Sign of the Glove across from Somerby’s landing, has deer, sheep, and moose hides to sell, and a quantity of good blubber; also olives by the jar, lemons by the box, ironware, sherry, and good Lisbon salt by the hogshead.”

“Timothy Dexter’s crazy. That’s all that ails him,” said the doctor, smiling gently into his mug. The others nodded agreement, and Silas went on.

“Stephen Hooper’s got raisins and oil, I see. So’s Enoch Titcomb. Enoch’s also offering potash and Philadelphia flour. Joe Choate’s got in some more West India rum. Knott Martin by Amesbury Ferry has black silk handkerchiefs. Bishop Norton has bar soap, crown soap, Poland starch, and French hair-powder. They’re selling a prize cargo at Dan Marquand’s wharf next Wednesday. Here’s notice of four dollars’ reward for a runaway slave named Seneca—about forty—who made off with a red coat, a blue coat, and two pairs of buff breeches.”

“He won’t be caught. Too many here feels the way you do, Si, an’ you’ve spoke your mind loud and often.”

“Oh, I’ve bought and sold most things in my time,” said Silas, bending over to knock his pipe bowl empty on the hearthstone, “but I’ve never bought black flesh. I was aboard a slaver once, first year I went to sea, and I never had stomach for the business after.” He continued to read. “Jonathan Jackson has sugar, coffee, cotton wool, rum, madeira, claret, cocoa and Cadiz salt, ship’s bread and indigo.”

“Jonathan Jackson’s house ain’t so fine as yours, Si,” interrupted Job. “I asked the carpenters, an’ they say it ain’t.”

East on the high street, overlooking town and harbor, the richer merchants were beginning to build great, square, three-story houses, and Silas’ own was roofed over now, waiting for the carvers to finish the balustrades and panel pieces. He had bought painted French wallpaper, and busts of Plato and Socrates, like old Judge Lowell used to have, but his heart was not in the building. It was not for him. Lass and Crispin would be the ones to love and grow old in it, and overflow it with children.

“Jonathan Jackson,” he said, “has got a wife to put in his house.”

It was inevitable then that they should drink a round to Ann Marvayne, inevitable that they should remind him he still had Sally and Lass.

“How is Sally?” asked the doctor, brightening up, with the air of a man who mentions happier things.

“Well enough. Her time’s at Christmas.”

Only a year ago it had been, that he had taken his older daughter, Sally, when he went to Philadelphia to do business with his friend and brother merchant, Robert Morris. And after their first few days there, Sally had been busier than he; busy falling in love with Sam Bye, then the head clerk for the firm of Willing and Morris, now back on his farm in Bucks County, trying to raise money for the Congress. Love and marriage had come to Sally Marvayne, all between two full moons, and she had not returned to Newburyport. Now she would bear a child before the year turned, and she had written and sent for her sister, Lass. He carried the letter uneasily in his pocket. He had done nothing about it, but he knew that he must. Next week, he himself would be gone, gone to sea for the first time in years, to run in powder from St. Eustatius in the Dutch West Indies. There was another notice in the paper, one he had not read to his friends, but had done much thinking upon. Dame Eleanor Druitt had opened a day and boarding school near the Assembly House, on October twenty-eighth. She would teach English, French, needlework, sewing and embroidery, drawing, darning, and mending rich laces. Lass, at sixteen, knew none of these things. He began to doubt if she would ever know them. She knew how to ride, and row, and bring a sailboat in through the salt creeks that wound across the marshes, and shoot squirrels out of the walnut trees along the Merrimack. Sally had diligently followed the tasks Hannah set her and grown expert at them. Lass had simply ignored them and run off to the counting house, so he had taken her with him, trading in Boston, fishing at the Isles of Shoals, gunning for deer across the Piscataqua in York County. The matters Eleanor Druitt taught would be good things for the mistress of his new mansion to know. But Sally wanted her sister.

He stared soberly at the dying fire. Dr. Timothy nodded. Job lighted a fat candle in the iron sconce swung above the work bench, where he still pottered over the death’s head. The sun had gone down in red behind the graveyard hill.

Suddenly Timothy stirred and shook himself awake. “That gun Crispin wanted? You got the money, Job?”

“I got it,” interrupted Silas hastily. “I’ll be in Philadelphia—ten days—two weeks from now. I’ll buy him a gun. I’ll see he gets it.”

“Do you know just where he is?”

“They’ll know in Philadelphia.”

“He’s with Glover, sure, and that’s bound to be near water.

“General Glover!” chortled Job proudly. “As I taught to make shoes when he was a young man.”

“You did?” cried the doctor in surprise. “I never heard that.

“Where you been? It’s stale news now. I was always a Newburyport man, but my wife Alice come from Marblehead, an’ when we was first married, we lived there, an’ I made shoes—the work I was born to in my father’s cobbleshop—an’ young Johnny Glover learned the trade of me.”

“But you didn’t stay by it—either of you.”

“No. He left to sell fish, an’ rose to be a merchant, an I learned stone work of Alice’s father to please the old man, as he hadn’t a son to leave his tools to, an’ I had three brothers wanting mine. But when Johnny was raising men to go fight the British, I told Cris if he meant to get in this war, he better go with somebody like that we knew an’ trusted. An’ I was right. Glover’s Marine Regiment of Marblehead—the Fourteenth Massachusetts! They done some proud work.”

“Saved Washington’s whole army—that’s all. Sneaked ’em out of the trap on Long Island, away to New York in the middle of a foggy night, before Howe knew there was an oar in the water. The men from the western mountains are good shots—maybe. But they can’t handle a boat like the men from around here—Salem—Gloucester—Newbury—Marblehead.”

Silas smiled. “I remember Cris wrote Lass that all he’d done in this war so far was run a damn ferry boat.

“You wasn’t too eager for Crispin to go at first, was you, Silas? You must feel different—now you’re taking sides yourself.”

“Yes,” said Silas thoughtfully, “about this I’ve shifted minds like a woman. But I think now I know where I stand.”

“What’s changed you?”

“What changes the tide? It runs one way, and then it turns and runs the other, and then it turns again—and all that floats must go with it.”

He leaned forward, elbows on spread knees, chin in his cupped hands. “I tell you. Up to twelve years ago, England minded her own business and we minded ours. I sent ships to sea and I made money. Rum, molasses, flour, salt, fish, whale oil, naval stores—powder and shot in war time. Those were good times, and all I want is those good times back. Oh, I know—cargoes worth ninety thousand dollars in Nantes now are worth a hundred and forty thousand in Boston—but I’d rather have a free sea. Well—England changed—maybe some men know why, but I don’t know no more about it than I do about the tide running. Comes the Stamp Tax, and the Tea Tax, and Non-importation. They closed Boston port, even. They sold us out to the East India Company. They come up with a thousand laws like a nest of snakes to strangle our trade and drain off our money. We won’t have that, and we’ll show them we won’t. Newburyport’s a poor sea town—less than a thousand free men—but it can say no to King George of England, if it wants to, and he’s got to bide by it. We’ve burnt goods we didn’t want and hanged dummy tax collectors—pity ’twasn’t the real thing. And if they think they’ve killed our trade, they ought to hear the goods-for-sale I was reading tonight. There’s nothing raised, grown, or made that we can’t buy here in Fish Street or Market Square if we want to.”

“Aye. When they try to dam our trade, it’s like damming the Merrimack with pipe staves,” muttered Dr. Timothy. “With pipe staves—” he muttered, resting his chin on his brocade waistcoat.

“I always traded honest,” went on Silas hotly, “but I’ve traded both sides of British law.”

“Whole coast knows your shooting crews,” said Job admiringly.

Silas smiled, but his jawline lifted grimly.

“No man treads a deck of mine unless he ships his rifle with him and can shoot to kill at a hundred yards. My ships’ve never been troubled much, once they sight my flag. But I’ve turned a fleet of peaceful brigs into battle frigates, and I don’t like it. I’d rather have a free sea.”

“Do you think you’ll get it by siding with Congress?”

“I don’t know. But I know I won’t get it any other way. Never with English leave again. That’s why I’m putting all my ships to the arms trade to further the war. I’m taking one out myself next week, having lost a captain of yellow fever coming back from Trinidad.”

“I know,” sighed the doctor. “Ephraim Bartlett’s boy—born the fall of ’52. I delivered him the night of the great hurricane. The candles kept going out.”

“I remember that night,” mused Job. “Highest tide that ever come up the Merrimack.”

“Talking of such,” said Silas, “the night I was born, there was an earthquake and a howling wind that broke all the orchards down. I been in turmoil ever since, but I guess this war’ll be the worst yet.”

“But if you was agin the British from the Stamp Act on,” pried Job, “why was you of two minds about whether to fight?”

“Because I wasn’t sure—I’m not too sure now—that we ought to set ourselves up to be a separate country. There’s too much talk in the Congress. Too little business sense and too many fine ideas. All I want is to have things the way they were, and I’m not sure either side’ll give us that again. ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’ has a fine sound, true, but it would mean more if they wrote it, ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Free Trade.’ You can’t pursue happiness. It comes to you, or it don’t.”

“Statesmen and merchants measure by different rule,” Timothy said quietly. “Seems I read somewhere that you’ll see all manner of men put up in bronze: poets, scholars, kings, preachers—even a justice or two; but never a merchant—unless he pays for it himself.”

Silas smiled appreciatively. “Well—let the bronze go. I didn’t fight till I was driven to it. But when England sets out to treat us like we’re Bengal blacks and she’s the East India Company—there’s no other way. They want arms for Washington, and I’ll see they get them. But they’re advertising a free country, and come the peace and we win, I expect them to deliver it.”

And with his ultimatum came suddenly the sound he had been waiting for: girls’ voices, and a burst of thin, sweet laughter from the crest of the sunset hill. He stood up and went to the window.

Down the steep slope they came, a rout of laughing girls, jumping across the old stones laid flat like tables, circling the upright slabs as tall as they were; green, and pink, and russet skirts held back, their bright hair streaming under the skeleton trees. They had planned to go after shagbark hickory nuts behind the ridge that followed the river up toward Amesbury, Lass had told him, but they carried no baskets now, so they must have cracked and eaten as fast as they gathered. Lass, swifter and lighter than the others, was in the lead, holding her skirts higher, racing past the granite slab that read, “Peg Magoon.” He watched her come, and his heart turned over. He loved Sally, a trim, sensible girl, pretty, and well-ordered, and never any trouble to him; loved her like a daughter; but Lass was more than that. She was his daughter, too, but she was the wife he had lost and the son he had never had. Lass was his life. He had named her “Thalassa,” because he had been a poet in his youth and knew that “Thalassa” meant “sea”; because he had lived of the sea all his life, and knew all good things came to him from there.

When Lass reached the door of the stonecutter’s shop, she turned her head and waved at her companions. She was going too fast to stop, so she flung herself against the oak door, and hung, laughing, a moment, on the iron bands across it before she lifted the latch with impatient fingers and stepped inside. Once over the threshold, with the firelit room and the three men before her, she stood there, smiling at them, too breathless to speak, one hand clutching her left breast with a gesture of distress she never meant them to believe in.

Silas had measured his girls each year against the buttery door, and drawn a line to mark their height, and dated it in pencil. Lass’s line had stopped at five feet. He weighed her sometimes on the grain scales at the wharf, and once he had read the balance at a hundred and five pounds, but that was the day she had a stone in her pocket. Delicate-boned, thin-hipped and full-bosomed, she never decked herself with the jewels and laces Silas would gladly have paid for. He had taken this once for a becoming modesty, but that was before he had heard her tell Sally, “I don’t want them looking at my dress. I’d rather they looked at me.” Today she wore a slate-blue gown untrimmed, with a tight waist, a full skirt, and long sleeves ruffled with the same blue. She had left home at noontime with her hair piled high in curls and puffs, but it had all shaken down now and hung on her shoulders and the combs were gone. Her hair was red, not red-gold or burnished chestnut, but tawny, flamboyant red. Her eyes were blue, black-browed, long-lashed, her features small and straight. You could scan Lass Marvayne from top to toe and write down on paper everything you saw, but the person reading what you wrote would have no idea of her. You could say, as the old captain had said of her grandmother—“she had so much of what a man wants”—but that still was not enough to say. Lovely, burningly alive, with the confident, happy look of one who has never been hurt, or troubled, or frightened, or denied in all her life. That was Lass Marvayne.

They were not young men, there in the stonecutter’s shop, and they had known her from babyhood, but they all stood up when Lass burst through the doorway, and each of them felt that her smile was a light caress meant especially for him.

“Don’t try to talk till you get your breath back,” said her father gruffly. Job dragged a three-legged stool out of the corner and placed it for her. Dr. Timothy brushed the pipe ashes from his waistcoat.

Lass spoke quickly, still gasping a little. “We have to go, Dad. We have to go this minute. The Sally B.’s in. Our privateer. I saw her as we came down the ridge.”

“I doubt it. She’s not due for ten days yet, and you couldn’t tell our flag in the twilight.”

“Think I’d need the flag to tell one of our ships? She’s got a prize, too—at least, there was a strange schooner following her close on.”

“No?” Silas stood up. “If you’re right, I guess we better get down there. Job, you want to let her have Crispin’s letter—”

“Why, I’d be proud.”

He handed it to Lass who smiled glowingly at him and slipped it into the front of her dress.

“And, Tim—It’s on your way. Will you tell Hannah we won’t be home to supper for a while?”

Dr. Timothy tried to shrug his shoulders. “Well—I wouldn’t dare it sober—but as is—I’ll tell her.”

“Oh, her tongue rattles on, but just don’t listen. I never do.” He did not mind Hannah’s sharpness, did not mind that she was dark and square where Ann had been slight and golden. He did mind that while Ann had always wanted him to have what he wanted, Hannah wanted him to have what was good for him. “She don’t mean no harm,” he said. “Good-bye, boys.”

He opened the door for Lass and followed her into the chill dusk where the light of a crescent moon flashed from the copper weathervane on First Church steeple. Together, silent, happy in each other’s company, they skirted the sunken Frog Pond and turned into Fish Street, scuffing like children in the fallen, yellow leaves under the giant elms. Once Silas looked down at the top of Lass’s ruddy head, and thought of the night he always believed he had gotten her—that October night when the whole town celebrated the taking of Quebec; when they split and broiled a whole ox on a huge gridiron set up at the west end of Mr. Lowell’s meeting house, and everybody sang and drank to true British valor and the year ’59. He and Ann had walked home after in the dark, arm in arm, and gone to their bed with so much love. He was glad that it wasn’t of Lass that she had died, but of a stillborn son in the next year.

They turned down Fish Street toward the waterside, the shipyards, the warehouses, the ropewalks, past the old golden-brown houses of weathered pine trimmed with red, past the newer ones of brick. At the corner of Threadneedle Alley, by the Wolfe Tavern, they had to wait while Stavers’ coach, just in from Portsmouth, crossed in front of them on its way to the stables at the back. All the windows were lighted now, and the river flowed black below them, under a pale yellow sky.

“Don’t you want to know what Crispin’s letter said?” he asked, shivering in the chilly seawind, the seawind of autumn.

“Crispin? I don’t know. I suppose so. I can wait.”

Silas frowned. “He’s a good lad,” he told her, “and handsome.”

“I’m sure of it.” She smiled up at him, put her hand on his arm. “Let’s go the short way,” she said, “past the distilleries.”

“Well—if you want to breathe in rum. Myself, I’d rather drink it.” But he turned as she bade him. I better get Crispin home, he thought. No. I’ll send her to Sally. No time for the niceties of Eleanor Druitt now. Crispin can get leave and come to her there. I want her married to a good man I know will take care of her, and Crispin’s that. She’ll settle her mind to him, once they’re married. Left alone, maybe she’d look further and do worse. I haven’t raised her right. I’ve let her stay a child too long. I’ve made her safe from everything—except herself.

A sense of failure settled leadenly upon him, and he looked about the familiar landscape for reassurance, thought back to all the years that had gone over the town in his time, and he a part of it all: the days when the wild geese flocked so thick you could kill them by sixties with a club; when tall moose ran on the Old Town hills with branching antlers seven feet high. He remembered the great rains of 1740 with the houses of Haverhill floating past; the year the army of caterpillars cut a swath across the country, leaving no green thing. Young men had gone off to school at Cambridge, or to war at Louisburg when he was a young man, but he had not gone with them. And maybe he was wrong. He thought of the Titcomb battery trundling out its forty-two-pounders, and how Father Moody from York who’d signed as chaplain carried along a hatchet to cut the idols out of the Catholic churches there. He had stood by and watched it all, but now his whole life was changing; now, instead of sending other men out, he was going out himself. He felt an air of doom and sadness about him in this November that he had not felt in any fall before. When this year went out, much of the world he had known was like to go with it. He was committed to the new country and the coming time, and he didn’t know whether he was glad or sorry; sailing out on the late autumn sea, in the autumn of his life, to prepare the way for an uncertain spring.

“Oh, Dad—it is—just as I told you! And it was a prize! Our wharf’s all crawling with trussed-up British. Come on! Run!”

It’s come to this! he thought. Same blood as ours—but we’ve got them in irons—because it was either we or they. Oh, Christ, what’ll come of it all!

With Lass half dragging him, he let the past go, and ran, hard after her, toward the future.