Chapter FiveTHE GREAT IPSWICH FRIGHT
“I can’tthink whatever put you up to such devilment, Catherine,” sputtered Granny. “’Twas bad enough for you to spile your new hat, without giving your father’s gun away.”
“I’ve told you over and over again that I didn’t give him the gun,” sighed Kitty. “I only loaned it to him. He promised to bring it back. He looked like a lad who’d keep his word.”
Granny clucked to the raw-boned sorrel horse and tugged expertly at the reins as the animal plodded round a curve in the sandy road.
“Tom, Tom, the piper’s son/He ran away with Father’s gun!” sang Sally Rose under her breath.
“Hummp!” snorted Gran.
Kitty looked across the plowed fields to where the Merrimack flowed behind a hedge of willows. They dipped their long green boughs in the flooding stream, and here and there the water gave back a flash of bright sun. How peaceful everything looked in the soft April afternoon. How hard it was to believe that the lads she knew might be facing the redcoats’ bayonets only a few miles off. But everyone did believe it.Everyone was frightened and apprehensive. Folk turned out everywhere to shade their eyes and watch the roads that led southward, Boston way.
It was more than twenty-four hours since Tom Trask had made off with the old blunderbuss, but Granny was still scolding about it. She would have scolded more, probably, if there hadn’t been so many chores for all of them, getting supplies ready to send after the Minutemen. All day yesterday they had baked, and this morning she and Sally Rose had gone from door to door collecting old linen for bandages. Then Uncle Moses Chase brought the borrowed wagon and suggested that the three of them might help by driving into the country to see what they could procure from the cellars and smoke houses of the farmers round.
“If you’d let it go to one o’ the Port lads—say Dick Moody, now—I could have understood,” Granny rambled on. “Why, I don’t know how many years that gun has been in our family! My grandmother told me it was brought from England in the days of the coming over. Her father got it in trade for an old horse down in Plymouth County.”
Kitty gave a sudden giggle. “Tom said it looked old enough to belong to Adam,” she said. She pulled her bonnet off and felt the warm sunlight on her brown hair, felt a warmth inside her when she said his name.
“Hoity-toity, so we call him ‘Tom’!” cried Granny.
Sally Rose reached out and caught her grandmother’s ruffled taffeta sleeve. “Granny,” she said, “there’s a farmhouse down that cart track under the shagbark trees. Uncle Moses said to call at every place and not miss a single one.”
Kitty gave her cousin a grateful glance as Granny turned the sorrel off the highway and into a rutted lane. Stone walls bordered the fields on each side of them, and little brooks of water flowed in the gutters, draining the wet black land. In one field a plow stood abandoned in mid-furrow, and half adozen cows waited patiently at the bars, but nobody came to drive them off to pasture.
“Can’t be anyone at home,” said Granny, “’Bijah Davis lives here, and he’d never treat his animals so.”
As they drove into the yard of the weathered farmhouse, a young woman came to the door, a pale young woman with a baby in her arms and two toddlers pulling at the skirts of her blue calico dress. A half-grown yellow cat ran between her feet, almost upsetting her.
“Land’s sakes, Nance,” cried Granny. “You’re looking poorly this spring. Is ’Bijah round somewhere?”
The young woman shook her head. “’Bijah took his gun and put for Cambridge,” she answered. “I wrapped him up a clean shirt and a hunk o’ corn’ beef. I don’t know when he’ll be home.”
Granny tut-tutted. “Many gone from around here?” she wanted to know.
“Pretty nigh all the men,” said the young wife sadly. “Like you say, Ma’am Greenleaf, I been poorly this spring, but I got both bake ovens going just like other folks, I can tell you. We’re cooking up victuals to send after the lads. Two oxcarts has gone already, and by tomorrow we can fill two more.”
Granny nodded in agreement. “We’re doing the same at the Port,” she said. “Don’t suppose you got any foodstuffs you could spare us, something you don’t need for your own?” She pulled out a beaded purse and fingered it significantly.
Nancy Davis put up a hand to smooth back the stray wisps of hair from her forehead. “Could be some eggs in the haymow where the hens steal nests sometimes,” she murmured. “Could be. I ain’t had the gumption to go look.”
“We’ll go,” cried Sally Rose eagerly. “Come on, Kitty.”
“You’d better take this basket,” said Gran, reaching under the wagon seat. “And don’t be gone long. It’s nigh on tosunset time. When we finish here, we’ll start home.” She turned again to the farm wife. “I suppose folks is pretty well stirred up around here.”
The young woman nodded. “That we be. Nervous and on edge till we’d run a mile if we was to hear a pin drop. Fear’s about us on all sides, just the way I’ve heard my grandmother tell it was down to Salem in the witchcraft time. It’s because we don’t know what’s happening, I think—nothing since the first word. Sure, the British was driv’ back to Boston once, but maybe they’ve marched out again. Maybe our lads couldn’t stop ’em, and they’re headed this way. And how can I tell whether ’Bijah be still in the land o’ the living or no!” She began to cry.
“Folks is all upset at the Port, too,” said Gran soothingly, getting out of the cart to go to Nancy.
The girls scurried into the mossy-roofed rambling barn, climbed to the loft, and began searching through the hay.
“Which are you the most worried about, Kit,” asked Sally Rose. “Dick, or—?” She sneezed violently and wiped her eyes and nose with a lace handkerchief. “My, this hay dust makes me think of the time when I was little and got to playing with Father’s snuffbox. Which one? Tell me, Kitty.”
“I’m worried about all of them,” said Kitty slowly. “Even your wretched Gerry. I wish men would keep their guns for deer and wild ducks. I don’t see why they have to kill each other.”
Sally Rose shrugged. “I know,” she said. “I don’t understand it either. But you have to realize, Kitty, some things about men we’ll never understand.” She pulled a large brown egg out of the hay and placed it carefully in the basket. “I wonder,” she said thoughtfully, “if the men on both sides were all shut up in gaol, just how the women would go to work to settle the matter.”
“I don’t know,” said Kitty, adding two more eggs to theircollection, “but I’m sure there’d be cups of tea for everybody.”
“Tea doesn’t have much to do with this war, Father says,” went on Sally Rose quickly. “And Gerry says the same. They both say it’s to decide who will rule America—King and Parliament, or the men who live in this country.”
“I should think King and Parliament would have enough to do at home,” answered Kitty. “What’s that? I thought I heard someone shouting.”
Both girls sat up in the shadowy mow to listen.
“Turn out! Turn out! For God’s sake!” thundered a hoarse voice from the highway.
“Maybe he’s brought news of the lads,” cried Sally Rose, upsetting the basket in her haste to scramble down the ladder. Forgetting the eggs, Kitty followed her. They ran out of the barn and across the yard under the hickory trees. Granny and Nance, with the children straggling after them, had already started up the lane.
A black-coated rider came spurring toward them from the direction of the Port, waving his cocked hat with one hand and whipping his horse with the other.
“Turn out!” he shouted. “Turn out, or you will all be killed! The British have landed at Ipswich and have marched to Old Town Bridge! They are cutting and slashing all before them!”
He paid no attention to the huddled group of women, but galloped past.
“Turn out! Turn out!” he panted. “The British have landed at Ipswich!” His voice grew fainter as he rounded the end of a low hill and swept out of sight.
They stood looking at one another. “If you ask me, his wits are addled,” said Gran stoutly. “He had a mad look in his eyes. I’d want some further word—”
Then a chaise hurtled down the road, swaying from sideto side, driven by a lean woman with gray hair streaming about her shoulders and a swansdown hat hanging on one ear. “The British!” she choked as the chaise went rocking by.
After her came a young couple on horseback, and then three farm wagons loaded with family groups and household goods. A wooden churn fell off and rolled into the brimming gutter, but they did not stop to retrieve it; they drove furiously on.
Nance stood there, as silent and rooted to earth as one of her own hickory trees. Kitty and Sally Rose held hands tightly and looked at each other, uncertain whether to laugh or be afraid, waiting to see what would happen next.
Then it seemed as if half the Port went streaming by. Gran stood at the side of the road and waved her beaded purse at the mad rout of chaises and wagons, but nobody would stop for her. Finally a farmer hastened by on foot, leading a plow horse that had gone lame. She stepped up smartly and caught him by the front of his tow-colored smock. “Young man, what is the meaning of this?” she demanded.
“God Almighty, are ye deaf, Mother?” he growled, spitting tobacco juice into the dust of the road, just missing her dainty kid slipper. “The British ha’ come ashore. Come ashore at Ipswich, and hacked their way past Old Town Bridge. I rode over twenty dead bodies as I come from there. They’ll be at the Port now, heading this way.”
For the first time Kitty began to feel that this was not some ridiculous mistake. Her throat grew tight, and her nerves began to tingle with fear.
“Where is everyone going?” she cried.
The farmer turned to answer her. “They’re all trying to get across the river into Hampshire,” he said. “Some’s for the woods and swamps nearby. Better get along yourselves. You’ll be the safer, the further you can go.”
He urged his old horse forward again.
Gran turned back from the highroad as another half dozen wagons rattled past. “He looked like an honest lad, and he saw it with his own eyes, Nancy,” she admitted reluctantly. “You bundle up the children and whatever food you’ve got on hand, and come along in our wagon. I’m going to drive as hard as I can for Haverhill Ferry. I trust we’ll get across.”
Nance, bewildered and numb with terror, tried to follow out Granny’s instructions. Back in the kitchen she fumbled through the bin, brought out a sack of potatoes, and stood there helplessly, holding it. Gran reached past her. “Take the apples, instead,” she advised. “They’ll taste better if we have to eat them raw.”
Finally the young wife got herself, the two children, and the shawl-wrapped infant into the wagon. She sat on the seat with Granny, and Kitty and Sally Rose crouched on a sack of turnips a farmer had given them early in the afternoon. How long ago that seemed! In the gathering twilight they drove swiftly along the winding river road.
The lower Merrimack Valley above the Port was not sparsely settled country in those spring days of 1775. There were farmhouses and parish churches and crossroads villages scattered all about it, and few dwellers there who could not see their neighbor’s chimney smoke or the lights of his kitchen when they looked out at night. But now the peaceful district was overrun with strangers and refugees streaming through.
Kitty and Sally Rose huddled together on the turnip sack for warmth, looking back down the road every now and then, to see if the British were in sight, if the glare of burning towns lighted the sky. But all they could see were the frightened folk of Essex County hurrying for the swamps and the forests, for the low hills of New Hampshire Colony across the wide dark stream.
Women, and a few old or feeble men, were toiling across the farmyards here and there, carrying favorite gowns, orchests of silver, or pewter teapots to conceal them in wells and hollow trees. And from almost every doorstep strong arms laboriously hoisted old folk and invalids into carts to haul them away.
“What do you think’ll come of it, Kit?” asked Sally Rose in a low worried voice. “Do you think Gran will take us over the river to Haverhill? I don’t want to go to Haverhill. It’s a sleepy country town, and it’ll be worse than the Port, with all the lads away. I’d almost rather get caught by the British, I think.”
“But they’re cutting and slashing all before them,” Kitty reminded her grimly. “That farmer said he rode over twenty dead bodies on the way.”
“Well, I do not think they would cut and slash me,” said Sally Rose, smiling confidently in the dark. “Oh, Kit, look there!”
They were passing a tiny cottage half hidden by leafy apple trees. An armchair had been placed firmly on a scrap of lawn, and in the chair sat a man with a lantern beside him and a musket across his knees. He was enormous, and almost perfectly round. “Let the British come!” he shouted, and waved his musket. “I be too fat to budge for ’em! I’ll stay here and shoot the bloody devils down!”
A little way farther on they came across a group of women bending over another woman who lay on the ground in the curve of a stone wall. Granny hesitated, and then drew rein. “Is the poor critter sick?” she called to them. “Can I help? Perhaps we could make a place for her.”
A tall woman in a gray shawl straightened up. “No, thank’ee, Ma’am,” she called crisply. “It’s only Aunt Hannah. She wheezes so with the asmaticks, her noise would give us away to the British. We’re going to cover her over with leaves and let her rest, all snug and out of sight, here by the wall.”
At that Nancy Davis began to laugh. She laughed and laughed, and then she began to cry. Gran slapped her face hard and drove on. “None o’ that foolishness, Nance,” she said severely. “Mind your children. ’Bijah would expect you to. Kitty and Sally Rose”—she lifted her voice—“is all well with you back there?”
“Let’s not go any farther, Gran,” pleaded Sally Rose. “There are lights at the inn we just passed by. If the folks haven’t run away, maybe they’ll have beds for us. Maybe if we hide in bed, the British will ride on and never know we’re there. I don’t want to go to Haverhill, Gran.”
“When I say you’ll go to Haverhill, to Haverhill you’ll go,” said Gran, and drove on into the night. “I hope I can make the ferry in time.”
Kitty sensed the note of anxiety in Gran’s voice, and that frightened her more than anything that had gone before it. Not when the smallpox struck and folk lay dying in every house in town, not when a great tree crashed through the roof in the midst of an autumn storm, had she known Gran to feel afraid. She looked over her shoulder again, and then around her at the dark fields, the thickets here and there along the road. Frightened women had come this way in other times, she knew, when Indians with tomahawks lurked behind every tree. She had heard, too, of the dreadful times at Salem that Nancy spoke about, when the devil had walked abroad in Essex County, or folk thought that he had, though they never saw the devil. The most terrible fear, she thought, is the fear of an unseen thing. A British Army marching toward them with drums and banners and bayonets would not be so terrible as the shadows that might hold any nameless menace, the shadows drawing closer in....
She turned to Sally Rose, but Sally Rose was humming a little tune. There was boredom rather than terror in her hazel eyes. Sally Rose had found one redcoat to be a gallant andhandsome lover, so she believed they would all be that. But Kitty had heard tales of their cruelty to Boston folk. She remembered that blood had been shed at Concord Fight and on Lexington Green. She crouched on the turnip sack and shivered with cold fear.
Somehow the road seemed to be less crowded now. No one had passed them for half an hour. Then they met a little group of horsemen slowly riding back. Granny hailed them.
“Are you headed for Newburyport? Is the battle over? Where are the British?” she wanted to know.
The leader took off his cocked hat, and Kitty noticed that he had a bald head and very black eyes. “We begin to think the British are in Boston and have been there all along, that they never stirred from there. We have found no trace of them, and we scoured the countryside. The whole commotion is either a sorry jest or a coward’s error, it seems. At least, we have recovered sufficient courage to ride back toward Ipswich and see.”
“I suspected as much,” said Gran, tightening her mouth.
“Ho hum!” said Sally Rose.
The men rode off, and Gran pulled the wagon to one side of the road. They were facing a small common with a white steepled church at the edge of it. Houses clustered round about, darkened and deserted, their doors hanging open, their inhabitants fled away. Overhead the elm boughs tossed eerily in the light of the cold moon.
“Get out, girls, and stretch your legs,” Gran ordered. “Then I’m going to turn around and drive back to my own house at the Port. You can come with me, Nance, if you’re afraid to bide at home.”
“I’m not afraid any more,” said Nance wanly. “Not if the British are still in Boston. Do you think they are still in Boston, Ma’am Greenleaf?”
“I feel sure of it,” declared Gran firmly. “Well, the Biblesays the young men shall dream dreams. That’s what that lad who said he rode over twenty dead bodies must ha’ done. Let’s all go over to the church steps and give thanks to God. Dream, joke, or error, I don’t care which it was. It’s over now, and high time we went home.”
The two children were asleep on the seat of the wagon, but Nance carried the shawl-wrapped baby and held it in her arms as they knelt on the church steps of gray old stone. Gran lifted up voluble thanks to the Almighty, and Kitty’s attention wandered. She watched a husky youth who had been hiding in the crotch of a pear tree climb sheepishly down and sidle off, gnawing a piece of salt pork. He had apparently taken provisions to his refuge, in case the British kept him treed for a long time. The sight of the pork made her hungry, and Nance must have seen it, too, and thought of food, but not for herself. The minute Gran rose from her knees, she asked if they could wait while she suckled the baby.
“Why of course,” said Gran heartily. “My, there’s not been one peep out of the little thing. I trust it hasn’t got smothered in all this uproar.”
Nancy sat down on the step, carefully pulled the shawls away, and bent her head while the others stood looking on.
Suddenly she screamed. They peered closer.
“God save our souls alive!” gasped Granny.
Sally Rose giggled. Kitty swallowed and made no sound at all.
In her haste Nance had wrapped up the wrong creature, and now it was the half-grown yellow cat that slept peacefully in the crook of her arm.