Читать книгу Fire and the Hammer - Shirley Barker - Страница 7

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“Thee’ll be a sight to see when thee’s with child. Lass. Thee’s so tiny,” said Sally Bye, standing in front of the mirror that hung over the mahogany dresser in her bedroom and preening at her own reflection, conscious that in her ninth month, she herself looked very well; full and heavy, but not graceless or misshapen. Sally was a tall girl with a placid face and fair hair shining in the glow of the candles she had lighted against the morning dark. A wan, reluctant sunrise faintly yellowed the sky over Buckingham Mountain, but grotesque patches of shadow still clung to the frosty meadows outside, to the depths of chamber and hallway.

“Likely I will,” said Lass, her blue eyes laughing as she tied on her hood and drew her cloak round her, for she and Sam were off that day on a shopping trip to Trenton, “but I shan’t worry about it this week.”

“Hmm! Well, maybe in a month or two you will. You are marrying Crispin at New Year’s, aren’t you? Father mote that you were. My! I hope I’ll be up by then.”

A faint shudder of distaste swept through Lass suddenly, as if she’d eaten spoiled meat at breakfast. Oh! She didn’t want to marry Crispin, she thought. She had wanted to marry him once back in Newburyport before—But now—Aloud she said, “Sally, how do you always think to say ‘thee’ and ‘thy’ in the right places when you’re with Sam?” Mahlon was a Quaker, and he would say “thee” and “thy” in the right places. He had grown up saying them. Mahlon would have a mother who would expect any girl he brought home to say “thee” and “thy.”

Sally’s brows drew together. As she grew conscious of her speech it became hopelessly mixed. “I’d forgotten, Lass—not seeing you for a year—how your mind does go from one thing to another like a bee in a cloverbed. I was talking about thy wedding, and now thee’s off on the plain talk. What does thee want to know about it for? Thee won’t talk it with Crispin. He went to First Church, same as we did.”

“I still want to know how you do it.”

Sally had taken Sam’s faith when she took Sam, and the faith had, a little more cautiously, taken her. Now she answered thoughtfully. “Well—I try to pretend ‘you’ and ‘your’ are wicked words and I must never use them. But it’s more in feeling ‘thee’—”

“Sally,” shouted Sam from the foot of the stairs, “isn’t Lass ever coming? Ruth’s here, and the horses are ready.”

“In a minute, Sam. I want to go over the shopping list with her.” Sally pulled a folded paper from the pocket of her flowing pink apron. “It’s so good to have a woman to help with these things again. Sam tries, but he has no judgment—even Father was better. Now I want sweet oil and oil of peppermint, and flannel and molasses, and wooden button moulds, and two packs of fine-eyed needles—and see if you can get some catnip and rosemary. The herb garden’s run wild—Sam’s mother’s been dead three years, you know—and I did what I could with it in one season, which wasn’t much. But next year—”

“Who is Ruth?” asked Lass, playing with her bonnet strings.

“Oh, Ruth Gwydion. The school teacher. A strange, quiet thing. Her father brought her over the sea from Wales when she was a little girl. And then he died. There was something wrong about him, I think. But everyone loves Ruth, she’s so kindly—and good with the children. She brought me some bittersweet the day before you came, and happened to say she wanted to go to town, and I told her Sam meant to go this Saturday and she could ride with him as well as not.”

Ruth! Ruth Gwydion! The name one of the Doan boys had flung at Mahlon that night at the Anchor a week ago! If he put his hand in another girl’s bosom, Ruth Gwydion was someone who would mind. “Sally,” she asked soberly, folding the shopping list into smaller and smaller squares, “does she—is she the sweetheart of one of the Doans?”

Sally put her hands on her hips and stared at Lass.

“Now wherever did you pick up that story, and you scarce here seven days yet? Hannah’s sure given you her nose for news. It’s something they whisper about her, but I myself don’t believe it—none of the Friends do. I’ve never seen a sign—yes, Sam, we’re coming.”

As Lass walked out of Sam Bye’s front door and across the narrow stone porch, she wanted suddenly to run back to where Sally stood waving at them, to hide forever in the tall, high-dormered house set in the oak grove. She did not want to go down into the yard where Sam stood holding his horse and her own, where another horse waited, and on its back a girl she did not know. But she went. And then, when she looked at Ruth Gwydion as Sam presented them, her fears vanished and she choked back a laugh of relief. For Ruth Gwydion was hardly pretty. She had a dark, serious face, dark eyes with green flecks in them, too heavy brows, the hair growing too low on her forehead, a generous figure, a full, sweet mouth. She was no match in looks for Lass Marvayne.

Sam helped Lass up on the sorrel that had been Sally’s when Sally could ride, and they started off, taking the trail, all fallen leaves and dead fern, that ran west around the end of Buckingham Mountain into the Durham Road. South they went, and then east at Pinetown, heading for the Delaware over half-frozen brooks, past fields yellow with dry cornstalks, and green with winter wheat.

“I think we’ll go down this side and cross at Beatty’s Ferry,” explained Sam. “I doubt we’ll get home tonight, but I’ll see to decent lodgings for us. Will thee mind, Ruth?”

“No. No, I’ll not mind, Brother Bye, but will not thy Sally? Will she not be afraid—without thee—and her time so near?”

Did she imagine it, thought Lass, or was Ruth chiding her for not staying with her sister? Why, Sally had wanted her to go! She pouted. Sam went on reassuringly. “Oh, she has two maids in the kitchen—one old and seasoned—and there are men in the fields to send for aid if she needs it. Sometimes I think that she likes to be by herself a little, now and then.”

He had never thought that of Sally before Lass came. He wondered if she had sent for the girl remembering only the laughter and bright life of her, forgetting how perverse Lass could be—in little ways only, and of course, not meaning to. He sighed. Sally was never perverse. He sensed that Ruth would not be. Along the riverside they rode, under a pearl-gray, sunless sky, passing scattered farms with here and there a tavern sign swinging above a wide front door, having little to say to one another.

It was nearly midday when Sam led them down to the water edge and out on a flat wooden scow moored level with the bank. Two men stood on the sodden plank floor already, one leaning against a willow basket full of brown eggs wrapped in straw, the other with two suckling pigs in narrow slat boxes. As they shoved out on the broad, shallow stream, Sam pointed ahead of them. “Look, Lass! That’s Trenton.”

You could have set all Trenton down on the Training Green at Newburyport, she thought, and still had enough room left over to hold muster day. Two parallel streets ran up a gentle slope, lined with houses of frame, brick, and stone, and a great many people seemed to be astir there, women in bright skirts and farmers in russet, with a pepper-and-salting of Quaker gray; all come for the Saturday Market, or business at the post office and county court, or to meet the stage from New York or the sloops from Philadelphia. Gigs and wagons crowded the gutters, and two greasy shafts of smoke poured up from tall chimneys above ugly blackened buildings massed at either side of town, the iron works and the steel works, Sam told her; lighter smoke rose up from the paper mill, and no smoke at all from the grain mills to the south. He pointed downstream to the famous rose gardens at Bloomsbury Court, all gone to haws and dead leaves with autumn, and to the brown stain of Stacy Potts’ tanyard, half up the hill, and across from the sturdy brick bulk of the English Church. But there were no tall steeples, and an apple orchard crept in between the iron works and the Quaker Meeting House on the east side. Two creeks wound downward to the Delaware, their mouths sluggish and stony, and all before the town lay a carpet of reeds and yellow marsh grass, protected from the force of the full current by a crescent island of sand and alders. Then the scow grated against the Jersey shore, and they were leading their horses out through the frozen weeds, up Calhoun Lane and into Trenton, past the gray stone barracks with white porches stark in the thin yellow sunshine.

“We’ll stop here first,” Sam said, carefully looping the three sets of reins to a bit of fence beside a sprawled, frame house that was almost a mansion, with twin porches on its front and a pump close by. “And if Abe Hunt doesn’t have what thee wants, we’ll try Alex Calhoun’s on our way out of town, though Abe has the larger stock. I’ve no business in Trenton, but with Thomas Middleton—on the Maidenhead Road.”

He watched Ruth sharply. There were those who said one of the Doan boys was her lover, those who affirmed it was not well to talk in her presence of anything it would be harm for the Doans to know. He remembered that time last spring—before anyone had really taken the boys seriously—“boys” they were still called, from Moses whom he knew to be twenty-six, to Mahlon who could be scarce nineteen—when they had hurt no one really, only gone whooping around the countryside at night, cheering King George and stealing a few horses. They had ransacked the school house, he knew, and the small stone cottage beside it, which the Meeting had allotted to the teacher. The story ran that six Doans had gone in that night, and only five been seen to ride away. Nobody was quite sure which one had stayed with Ruth, if any of them had. And she kept her eyes down, and spoke always so modestly, and was often so rarely moved in Meeting. His wife liked and trusted her. But for himself—He watched her quietly; tried to find some clue in her changing eyes; failed utterly.

Then Lass startled and exasperated him by crying out brightly, “Oh, yes! Sally said the Middletons had some tax money they’d raised in the Jerseys; that you were going to get it and take it to Philadelphia.”

Ruth Gwydion’s lashes lay long on her cheek.

“Lass,” said Sam sharply, “hold thy tongue.”

“Why?”

“At home—I’ll tell thee.” He turned to Ruth, heavily cheerful. “Can thee get what thee wants at Abe’s?”

She smiled. “Yes, I think so. He has ordered two books for me from Philadelphia. I want some spice and sugar, and silk facings for a hood.”

Sam guided them to the right of the twin porches and turned to leave. “When thee’s done trading, I’ll be over by the Court House.” He motioned to a stone building with two flights of tall, iron-railed steps leading up the front to the second story, the barred windows of the jail beneath. “There’ll be lawyers in, from all over Hunterdon County, and I’d like to hear from the east, if I could—what news of the army.”

He walked away, and Lass turned, her hand on the iron latch that would open Abe Hunt’s store, and looked back into the peaceful, ordered bustle of King Street. Coaches, wagons, gigs, farmers’ barrows—wheels turning everywhere, she saw—for Trenton was a travelers’ town, halfway between two great cities, near halfway between New England and the South. Below its slope, little flecks of white sail wafted the river boats up to the gray-brown-green-changing rapids that marked the falls of the Delaware—not like the great, salt-crusted sails of the sea-going ships that would be riding in the blue water about Newburyport that morning. She should be homesick, she thought. She tried to be homesick. But she had never been able to lie to herself. If she were in Newburyport where she had been born and lived all her life, she would be homesick now for Bucks County where she had never been before last week, where the Doan boys rode black horses down a wild ridge under the moon.

From the Market House beyond the square stone post office, a cow lowed plaintively and fowl hissed and cackled.

“Shall we go in?” asked Ruth, smiling, putting her hand over Lass’s hand on the latch.

Once inside, the girls separated, each taking her own way among the goods spread out on shelves and counters, toward the pot-bellied iron stove against the rear wall. Lass half lost herself in bolts of blue and orange-rosy wool, trying to pick out a piece for a present for Sally’s baby, and, looking up, she missed Ruth altogether, but it was only for a little while, and then she discovered the teacher, her shopping finished, sitting quietly on a heap of full grain sacks in a corner, reading one of her new books.

They went out finally to find Sam and stow their purchases in the saddlebags he had brought, and he took them to the Fox Chase tavern, a frame house just past the head of town, where Mistress Bond, a trim woman in a ruffled cap and blue linen bodice, who favored Sam as a well-known traveler in these parts, served them with hominy soup and bacon and dried cabbage, wine custard and spiced ale. Ruth ate well and daintily, and Lass licked her lips over the humble richness of the food, but Sam seemed quiet, ignored half his hostess’ friendly sallies, and cleaned his plate as if it were hard work for him. Sunset had dwindled into a swirl of blackish gray clouds and a sharp wind blew on Jersey out of Pennsylvania as they finally left Trenton behind them and rode between worm fences and bare apple orchards. And in a mile or so, came the snow. It was a wet, white snow that turned into water when it touched any substance, either flesh, or field, or stone, and the wind drove it in eddies everywhere, a chill wind that pierced through wool and fur and leather. When they dismounted at last, and huddled, rapping at the front door of Thomas Middleton’s spacious brick farm house halfway to Maidenhead, the full night had come on, though it was barely five o’clock, and they could not have been any colder or wetter if they had just been fished out of the Delaware.

Thomas and his wife were a frail old couple, looking strangely alike, bent, with bloodless faces and thin silvery hair that made Lass think of haloes round the heads of holy people in the books in Mr. Lowell’s library that he used to let her look at when she was a little girl. A plump, black-eyed serving maid ran merrily about, fetching wood, water, and mulled ale, corn cakes and ham, setting out more lights, mending the fire. The Middleton house had a look of comfort; very old pine furniture, a wide hearth, turkey-red cushions, and a dresser full of pewter and heavy silver. Here, too, Sam was a familiar presence, it seemed, welcomed and loved, and he and the girls were soon drying themselves on a broad cushioned settle before the blaze, yielding without argument to Mistress Middleton’s plea that they would stay the night.

Lass had been trying to answer her hostess’ motherly questions about Sally, when she heard Sam say to Mr. Middleton, “Perhaps thee and thy wife had best leave. Better to lose thy house and goods than something dearer to thee. To thy son in Philadelphia, perhaps—”

“Thee thinks he’s coming this way?”

“Washington? Yes. I heard it in Trenton this noon. He must mean to retreat across the river, for he’s sent the word for us to gather up every boat and raft that we can find. Dan Bray and Jerry Slack are seeing to it. He won’t harm thee. He honors Friends if he cannot understand them. But after him will come Cornwallis, maybe Howe, maybe the hired Germans. And they spare no one. Truth is, Brother Middleton, our whole army’s in flight! And men deserting every day! I don’t know what’s to save our country.”

“This will help,” said Thomas Middleton quietly, shuffling his old feet in their felt slippers to a corner cupboard, thrusting an iron key into a massive lock. He drew forth a leather bag, and carrying it close to him, crossed the room and held it out to Sam.

“For the Congress,” he continued soberly. “Two hundred pounds I have gathered among Friends in the Jerseys who deem it unfitting to fight, but will share their substance—and one hundred of my own.”

Snow hissed against the pane outside, the wind threshed in a tangle of cedar boughs about the house, the candles flickered, and the fire roared in the stone sheathing of the chimney. Everyone grew silent, fearful, not knowing why. Then the night turned all alive with shouting, and heavy blows sounded on the oak-paneled door. Sam paused, irresolute, the money sack dangling limply in his fingers. It was the old Quaker who moved first, half shoving, half dragging the younger man to the cupboard, thrusting him in, turning the lock, throwing the key in the fire. Then he drew up his bent shoulders to pitiful straightness, gave one warning look at the women who had fled to the furtherest corner by the stairway, and went to fling open his front door.

“I am a man of peace,” Lass heard him say, but he was buffeted rudely to one side.

“Thee is an enemy of the Lord,” spoke Moses Doan as solemnly as a preacher in his pulpit. “The Lord meant America to be a free country, without congresses or tax collectors.”

In swaggered the Doans, quieter, less boisterous than they had been in the tavern, but going straight to their work. She saw Moses, in the lead, as always, and Joe, strutting a little, in a fur-collared cloak. She saw Levi and Aaron, grinning, as they started to rummage in the dresser drawer and the chest between the windows. She saw Abraham, suddenly turned handsomer than all the others, and striding toward the huddled women. But she did not see Mahlon, and Mahlon, she had heard, was the one often assigned to watch outside, while the others went at the work that took a tougher conscience. Not stopping to pull her wet cloak from the drying rack, unnoticed by old Thomas and the terrified women, she slipped behind Moses who had just seized Mr. Middleton by the throat, and ran out into the storm.

He was only a little way off, standing by the edge of the road in a thicket of wind-lashed willow trees, calming the six black horses, peering sharply this way and that through the night.

She flicked the snow from her lashes, brushed back the damp flame of her hair. She stepped boldly up to him.

“May I watch with thee, Mahlon Doan?”

He turned like a spring uncoiling.

“Watch for what? For Sam Bye?”

Lass misunderstood him completely. “Sam’s nothing to me. He’s my brother-in-law!” Her words tumbled out with a rush. He looked at her coldly.

“I’ve naught to do with either thee or Sam Bye,” he said.

She drew back a little and looked at him through the falling snow and the night that drew around them. He was bareheaded, and she watched the white flakes fall into the darkness of his hair and turn to drops of silver, watched the closed, unhappy darkness of his eyes, the grimness of his thin young face.

“No? Not ever?”

She gave him the smile that she had been giving men for sixteen years, and never before had one failed to respond to it, or failed to smile back. But now Mahlon Doan did not smile. Instead he growled.

“What is thee out here for?”

“What does thee think?”

He gasped, floundered for words for a moment, then he said, “Thee better get back inside.”

Just then came a sharp scream from a dormer window in the roof. Mahlon uttered a curse deep in his throat. “It’s Abe again. I wish he wouldn’t do that!”

“What?”

“I think—he’s—hurting some girl. Perhaps thee’s better out here. Were there girls in there?”

Lass looked him straight in the eye, feeling as if she had cut herself and was rubbing salt and lemon in the cut to clean it, knowing it had to be done. She had to know what he would say, how his look would change.

“Yes,” she said, “Ruth Gwydion,” and waited.

He shrugged his thin shoulders impatiently. “I know she’s there. He won’t hurt Ruth. Anyone else?”

“Mistress Middleton.”

“She’s old.”

“And the bound girl—”

“That’s it, then.” He looked moodily down the road toward the lights of Trenton pricking through the snow.

“Why won’t he hurt Ruth?”

“Why should he?” he asked, not meeting her eyes. “She’s a Friend like we are. She never harmed us. There are enough Whig women—”

A great hubbub was going on all over the lower floor of Thomas Middleton’s house, but no lights, and no more crying came from the dormer. She waited, not knowing what to do or say. Mahlon scuffed nervously in the snow.

“I wish he wouldn’t,” he said again, talking to himself rather than to Lass, dismissing her presence. She put her hand on the sleeve of his rough leather coat.

“Mahlon,” she said, with a look too sweet and direct to be sly, “doesn’t thee think it strange the bound girl hasn’t cried out again?”

“Why—why—? Does thee think he’s killed her?”

Lass laughed merrily in the face of his terror. “No, I do not think he’s killed her. I think she liked his looks so much that she stopped screaming so she wouldn’t frighten him away.”

He stood looking at her, utterly discomforted, following her words slowly. Before he could quite arrive at their full meaning, shouts broke out on the Trenton Road, cries of, “By God, this time we’ll kill the damn Tories!”

“Abe! Mose! Leave off now!” yelled Mahlon, whistling to the horses who followed him as he ran close to the house. Out spilled the Doans, just as a group of horsemen came spurring up the road. Someone fired a pistol. In the light that streamed through the windowpanes, Lass saw Moses clutch at his Quaker hat, hold it up to show the ragged bullet hole in the brim.

“Fire again!” he called, waving the hat, his swift horse leaping away in the night.

The newcomers halted their horses, trampling the snow to spume and mud, while they argued whether to go after the robbers or see how all fared with Thomas Middleton. They decided to go in. Lass followed after, pretending she had never been out. She watched them untie Ruth and the Middletons, ladle out hot water from an iron kettle on the crane to bathe the welts and bruises about the old Quaker’s head, let Sam Bye out of the cupboard, still clutching the money bag. Everything was indignation, confusion, epithets against the Doans, cheers that at least no blood was spilled and the taxes safe. It was only Lass who stared at Ruth Gwydion with covert questions. Where did you go, Ruth, and whom did you speak with when I missed you in Abe Hunt’s store? How did the Doans know there was tax money here? How did Mahlon know where you would be? It was only Lass who watched out of the corner of her eye when the bound girl crept downstairs, a look of wonder on her face, and stood staring out into the night. But it was all three of the girls who turned suddenly to each other, with a sisterhood between them, too terrible, too beautiful to name.