Chapter TenA TRYST WITH THE ENEMY
“Butwhat makes you so sure he will be there, Sally Rose,” asked Kitty, “if you haven’t had any word?”
She was curled up in the middle of the four-poster bed which she shared with her cousin. Sally Rose sat at the dressing table. A candle burned at each side of the mirror, and she was studying her reflection in its glass. She wore nothing but a thin cambric shift, and her feet were bare.
“He told me he would come in a week’s time, if not before. He promised it wouldn’t be more than that. When he got aboard the boat to go to theLively, he promised me.”
Kitty stared past Sally Rose’s golden head into the dark street. Their bedroom was over the kitchen, and she could hear Gran’s brisk footsteps trotting about below. Gran was roasting mutton to feed tomorrow’s customers, but she had sent the girls upstairs to get their beauty sleep.
“I’ve slipped out to our old meeting place in the graveyard every night, but he was never there,” she went on. “But tonight it’s Tuesday again, so he has to be. He just has to bethere tonight.” She pulled on a pair of delicate thread stockings, and thrust her feet into high-heeled slippers with roses on the toes.
Kitty eyed them disapprovingly. “As I remember the old graveyard, it’s full of holes and hummocks,” she said. “You’ll trip and fall in those shoes, if you go walking there.”
“I don’t expect to do much walking,” said Sally Rose.
Then a mischievous light shone out of her hazel eyes. “Kitty! Wait till you see what I bought today. The shops are full of bargains, with all the Tories gone out of town. You’ll have to help me, I think.”
She scurried to the clothespress, reached inside it, and brought out the most hideous contraption Kitty had ever seen. It was a pair of stays, she supposed, but what a pair! A long cruel case of whalebone and stiff buckram, high in the back, very low in the front, pinched and pointed like the body of some vicious insect. That it was covered with white velvet and sewn with brilliants did not make it any the less frightening. Kitty got a cramp in her stomach as she looked at it. Her chest tightened, and for a moment she had trouble in breathing. But Sally Rose had a gleam in her eye.
“I got this at the staymaker’s this morning,” she said. “He ordered it for a rich Tory lady, but she fled away to join the British in Boston, so he let me have it cheap.”
“I should think he might,” said Kitty. “Why it’s hardly a foot around the middle. You’re slender, but not that slender, Sally Rose. How do you think to lace it up?”
Sally Rose smiled engagingly and stepped into the dreadful garment, dragging it over her hips and around her slight form. “Oh, you’ll have to lace it for me, Kit,” she announced. “I’ll have a truly fashionable figure now. I always wanted one. Remember, Gerry’s been looking at those rich Boston ladies all the week long. I don’t want him to feel disappointed when he sees me.”
Kitty climbed down from the bed and went to her cousin. She picked up the ends of the lacings and began to weave them into the metal hooks. Sally Rose stood there beaming, holding the stays in place.
“Hurry and lace them up, Kit,” she urged. “It will be easier if I can slip out while Gran is still at her work. Before she comes upstairs, I mean to be gone.”
With a great effort Kitty drew the stays together at the bottom, clamping her cousin’s slim hips and belly into a frighteningly narrow space. The garment had been designed for a much taller girl, and came well down over the thigh, almost to the knee. It fastened at the bottom with a tiny jeweled padlock, and Kitty noted a similar one at the top. She hesitated.
“Does this unlock with a key?” she asked.
Sally Rose held up a tiny bit of gold on a satin ribbon. “Oh, it does, Kitty, and I have the key here. Isn’t it all deliciously clever?”
“I don’t know,” muttered Kitty. “Hold your stomach in.”
Sally Rose compressed herself to the utmost and closed her eyes. Kitty fastened the padlock and struggled with the lacings.
“Tighter! Tighter!” gasped Sally Rose.
Kitty pulled at the strong cord until it almost cut her fingers. It was waxed, and it had a toughness about it that made her think of wire.
After a moment she shoved Sally Rose up against the wall, sat down in a chair in front of her, braced her knees, and laboriously threaded and pulled till the task was over and she could snap the jeweled padlock at the top. Then she stood off to view her work.
Sally Rose looked like a long white worm standing up on its tail—or like a white candle, if you wanted to be poetic—but more like a worm. Her face was flushed, and she couldtake only the shortest, shallowest breaths, but there was triumph in her eye.
“Now my dress and petticoat, Kitty, if you’ll be so good. Oh wait till Gerry sees me! He’ll be so o’ercome with admiration he’ll scarce know what to say!”
“He’ll be o’ercome, I don’t doubt,” said Kitty. “Especially if he tries to put his arm around you. You feel like a stick of cord wood.” She fastened the gauze petticoat over the stays and then brought the sky-blue muslin gown Sally Rose had laid out on a chair.
Was life going to be like this always, she wondered somewhat wistfully; helping Sally Rose to dress, letting Sally Rose in when the evening was over; herself never dressing up, never meeting anyone, never going anywhere? She wished that Tom Trask the logger had the daring British Gerry had. Gossip said that the New Hampshire men were in camp in Medford, and Medford wasn’t much farther than Boston. But he had no way of knowing she was so near him, of course. Perhaps when things got quieter after Concord Fight, he’d gone back to Newburyport to return her father’s gun. But now it seemed that battles were threatening again. Perhaps—
“Now my gold gauze kerchief and my scent bottle,” panted Sally Rose.
Kitty brought them. “Are you ready now?” she asked, trying to keep the envy from her tone. It wasn’t Sally Rose’s fault that she felt lonely and neglected, not Sally Rose’s fault at all.
“Yes, I’m ready,” sighed Sally Rose. “I’ll go down the back stairs, I think, and through the garden. Good-by, dear.” She held up her soft cheek.
Kitty brushed her lips against it. “Good-by, Sally Rose,” she said. “Don’t get into any trouble, and come home soon.”
Sally Rose laughed a little uneasily and made an awkwardmotion to step forward. But she did not step forward. She stopped suddenly, twisted her body, or tried to, and put her hand to her side.
“My, a bone jabbed me,” she said.
After a moment she tried again to move forward. This time she succeeded in taking three little hobbled steps. Then she swayed clumsily, tripped, and fell on the rag rug. There she lay like an overset turtle, unable to rise.
Kitty stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth to choke back her laughter. Then she ran forward and struggled to hoist Sally Rose to her feet.
“I—I don’t think I can walk in this thing,” gasped Sally Rose. “It’s like having two feet in one breeches leg. And the bones hurt me. And it’s getting late. Take it off, Kit. Take it off at once. Here’s the key.”
Still trying to keep back her laughter at the other girl’s ridiculous plight, Kitty pulled off the blue dress and the petticoat and fitted the tiny key into the jeweled lock. It refused to turn, and she twisted it gently.
“You’ll be in a pickle,” she muttered, “if it should break.”
“Don’t you dare break it!” squealed Sally Rose.
Kitty worked the key this way and that. Below in the tavern kitchen Gran’s voice lifted up the words of an old hymn. Through the open window drifted the scent of garden flowers in the warm dark. Her hands got sticky with sweat. She kept dropping the wretched little key.
“Hurry!” pleaded Sally Rose. “I’m afraid he’ll come and not find me. I’m afraid he’ll go away.”
Desperately Kitty twisted the bit of metal.
“It’s no use, Sally Rose,” she said at last. “I can’t make it work. What will we do?”
“Cut the lacings, I suppose,” sighed Sally Rose, “and I’ll try to wiggle out through the gap in the middle. I don’t care much. I never should have bought it. Maybe the staymakerwill take it back. Get my shears. They’re in the workbox in the top drawer.”
“But you left your workbox in the kitchen,” said Kit. “I saw it there when we were scouring the pots after supper. All the other shears and knives are there too, and if I went down, I’d have to explain to Gran.”
The two girls looked at each other in dismay. Sally Rose bit her lip. “Yes, you would,” she said. “And whatever excuse you made, she might come back upstairs with you, and then I’d never get away. Can’t you break the lacings?”
“I doubt it,” said Kitty. “It’s the toughest cord I ever saw.”
“Try.”
So Kitty yanked and tugged and twisted, but the cord refused to break. Sally Rose was hopelessly trapped.
They were silent for a moment. Then she clenched her soft hands and stiffened her mouth. “I’ll have to go just as I am,” she said, and tried to walk again. Again she fell.
Kitty helped her up and led her to a chair. “Sit down, Sally Rose,” she said gently. But Sally Rose could not sit down.
“I guess it’s no use,” she murmured, reluctant, almost tearful. “You’ll just have to go and tell Gerry I’m sick, or something. Tell him to come back tomorrow night. I’ll surely be there.”
Kitty hesitated. She didn’t know quite why. Was it because Gerry was British and she disapproved of the British? Or was it a deeper, stranger thing—a sort of foreboding? A fear, and yet an eagerness, too.
“Are you sure you want me to, Sally Rose?” she asked.
Sally Rose stamped her foot, or tried to, then writhed as a whalebone jabbed her. “Of course I do,” she cried. “Go quickly, do, and come back and tell me what he has to say. Then we’ll have to get the shears and cut me out of this thing. Oh Kitty, go now!”
And so it was that Kitty Greenleaf slipped away to Charlestown’s old graveyard that night to meet her country’s enemy, her cousin’s exciting young man.
An eerie little wind was blowing through the town that night, a warm wind, and it had the tang of sea salt in it, and the heavy sweetness of the new mown hay on Bunker Hill. It ruffled Kitty’s hair and cooled her hot face as she walked through the empty streets, past the Two Cranes, the courthouse, and the meeting house with its tall white spire rising against the dark. Few of the windows were lighted, but down by the docks she could hear the familiar cry of the watch, and over the bay the lights of Boston shone out bright and clear. It was hard for her to remember that Boston was no longer a friendly town.
When she reached the graveyard she felt her way along the low wall that protected it from the street. Shadow lay thick about the grassy mounds inside, and crooked elm boughs meeting overhead shut out the thin glow of the starlight. There was no moon.
Leaving the wall she blundered forward, now and then brushing against one of the old headstones. She knew what they looked like well enough: short thick slabs of greenish slate with a death’s head at the top; some of reddish sandstone; beyond them the granite tombs where the great families lay. But she could not seem to find the path that would lead her through. And then, somehow she did find it, and groped her way to the wall on the far side with the open fields beyond. He was standing there, just as she knew he would be.
He carried a dark lantern, half open now to let a little light shine through, and he wore the rough shirt and breeches of an American farmer. Sally Rose would have been disappointed had she hoped to see the scarlet coat. As he heardher footstep on the worn grass he drew in his breath sharply.
“Ah, Sally Rose!” he whispered, and turned the lantern full upon her.
“I—I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I’m her cousin Kitty. She sent me to tell you—”
And then suddenly, to her own horror, in spite of the awe she felt for this handsome young stranger from the enemy camp, in spite of the need to keep this tryst in silence and secrecy, she began to giggle. She couldn’t help it when she thought of Sally Rose trapped in the stays; of her pretty, angry face on top of the body of a pinched white worm. She put both hands to her mouth and rocked and rocked with stifled mirth.
Then she realized that he was shaking her. “Stop it, Kitty, if that’s your name,” he said. His voice was firm but not unkind. “Where’s Sally Rose? Tell me what you are laughing at? I want to laugh, too.”
He had put the lantern down and was holding her by both shoulders. She could not see his face, and yet she knew what he looked like. She would always remember him, she thought, from that day when he marched past the Bay and Beagle and she was standing at the door. Suddenly she found herself telling him all about the stays and Sally Rose.
He kept very quiet until she had finished, but then he did not laugh as she had expected him to do. When he spoke again, his voice had an impatient sound.
“I’ve often heard the men in barracks say—the married men, that is—that women have no sense at all. And I guess they be right. I’m sorry Sally Rose did such a foolish thing. I—I wanted—tonight it really mattered that I should see her.”
“But she will be here tomorrow night, sir,” answered Kitty, not quite sure how one addressed a British officer whopretended not to be a British officer. “It will be such a little time till then.”
“A little time,” he muttered, “but much may happen in it. I may be here tomorrow night—but I trust she will not be.”
“What do you mean?” faltered Kitty.
A bough rustled a few yards off, and he flashed his lantern that way and listened. After a moment he spoke again in a lower tone.
“How does it happen you womenfolk are still in Charlestown? I understood that it had been evacuated.”
“Oh, it has been—nearly. But Granny says she will not abandon my uncle’s property here until she must. She says she will stay and try to keep it intact for him, if she can.”
“It’s been known since April that we might burn the town any day.”
“I know. But time goes on, and you do not do it, and we grow less afraid. And all the while our Army is growing larger and more strong.”
“So is ours,” he retorted. “Three new generals arrived from England; martial law proclaimed in Boston yesterday. General Gage denounced you for rebels and traitors. If you don’t disband and go your ways in peace soon, we’re coming out to make you go.”
“Then I suppose there will be a battle,” sighed Kitty. “I’ll never know why it is men can’t settle a squabble without trying to kill each other.”
Again he flashed the lantern on her face and held it there a moment. Then he spoke to her from out of the dark, and his voice had a different sound.
“You know—Kitty—I don’t think I understand it either. I never really wanted to be a soldier.”
“A captain,” she corrected him. “A captain in the Twenty-third.”
“Ah yes, a captain. I can hear the watch coming down thestreet, and we cannot leave here until he is gone. Sit down on the grass.”
Indeed it was the watch, and she could hear him shouting as he turned the corner by the brick well. “Ten o’ the clock, this thirteenth night o’ June, and the weather fair. Town’s empty, Sons o’ Liberty gone to camp, Rogues and Tories to Boston!”
The young Englishman drew her down in the shadow of a flowering quince tree. She sat there straight and proper and he sprawled with careless grace beside her, not alarmingly near.
“No, I never meant to bear arms, and how I came to do it is no matter, but I, too, wish England and America could settle their differences without spilling blood. Do you think I am a coward, Kitty?”
“No,” she said slowly. “I do not think that.”
The voice of the watch grew louder. He must be passing very close by.
“I have cursed the Americans, and yet I am not sure I was right when I did it. I have gone amongst them some, even been kept in gaol by them, and yet I can’t see that they’re any worse fellows than I. I cannot help thinking that I myself might have been an American. Except for a choice a man made some hundred and fifty years ago. The right choice, of course—and yet—”
Kitty felt her blood stir in a different way now. She had been thrilling to his strangeness and his handsomeness, and the excitement of this secret meeting. But now she had the uncanny feel that there were ghosts about. Mighty ghosts, ghosts of countries coming together, here in the dim starlight in the shadow of Bunker Hill.
“You an American? How?”
He settled comfortably in the grass. “Listen, Kitty, I’ll tell you more of myself than I ever told Sally Rose. I do notknow why, unless it is because you are less distractingly fair. Alas, I am afraid I like overwell to talk, Kitty.”
“So does everyone, it seems,” murmured Kitty. “But what happened—a hundred and fifty years ago?”
“I like to talk, I suppose, because my mother was a strolling player, and famous for the way she spoke her lines as well as her good looks. She traveled the fairs and market towns, and everywhere she was made welcome and a stage set up for her. My father was a West Country farmer, and a dull husband I think he made her. I cannot recall her too well. But it was through his blood that I might have been born an American.”
The voice of the watch was fading now, down by the tannery and the distilleries, but Gerry Malory kept on talking.
“My father would shake his head, I remember, whenever anyone mentioned America. ’Twas a legend in our family that once an old grandsire of ours, about the time I mention, had journeyed to Plymouth and watched a shipful of people leaving that country to settle in this one. That he thought for a time to go with them, but decided against it. Sometimes I wonder if he had gone—”
The watch was coming back. They saw the light he carried. It wavered to and fro. Then it stopped just at the wall of the graveyard. Gerry Malory sprang hastily to his feet. “Kitty,” he whispered, “go back and tell Sally Rose—I don’t know when I’ll see her—but tell her to get out of Charlestown. We’re getting ready to move against the Americans. I don’t know when. At least by the end of the week. Some say we’re for Dorchester Heights, and some say Bunker Hill. Tell her to be gone. And you go with her—Kitty.”
He vaulted over the low wall and disappeared in the darkness between the fields and the flats along the river. Kitty peered after him, but she saw only a scatter of fireflies and a light mist rising from the earth. She was not afraid of thewatch, but he did not challenge her as she crept back to the Bay and Beagle. He did not know she had been keeping a tryst with the enemy. Well, she had been, and felt herself none the worse for it.
She, too, was wondering what would have happened if old Grandsire Malory had taken that ship so many years ago.