Chapter TwoIN READINESS TO MARCH
“Insolentplowboy!” exclaimed Sally Rose haughtily. She stood in front of the mirror wreathed with gilt cupids, her palms flat on the mahogany dressing table, and stared at her own reflection, curls loosened and falling over the shoulders of her white cambric night robe, her eyes narrowed and glinting coldly in the candlelight. Then the coldness dissolved away, and she giggled.
Kitty, lying sprawled on the patchwork counterpane that covered the great four-poster bed, giggled too, uncertainly. Sally Rose had moods that changed so fast she was never able to keep up with them. So, as usual, she didn’t try, but spoke her mind in her turn.
“He wasn’t a plowboy, he was a logger,” she said. “Maybe the owner of a whole forest as big as this parish. Some of them are, you know, those up-country lads. And he was too smart for you, Sally Rose. He knew you were making fun of him.”
Sally Rose sat down on the counterpane and hugged her knees. She looked thoughtful. “Yes, he knew,” she said. “But when I said the same thing to Johnny Pettengall, Johnnythought I meant it. Inside, I almost laughed myself to death. I wonder why I couldn’t fool that backwoods boy, when I could fool Johnny.”
“Maybe because he’s older,” suggested Kitty. “He looked older, anyway.” She got up, went to the chest, and blew the candle out.
“Yes,” reflected Sally Rose, “older, but not really a man—not so much as twenty.”
“Is that how old he is?” Kitty demanded. “Come on now, Sally Rose. Tell me all about him.”
“About who?” asked Sally Rose. “The logger? Tom Trask was his name, he said. I don’t know anything about Tom Trask, except that I caught him kissing you. I wonder why you didn’t stop him. If Granny finds out—”
“I didn’t have time to stop him,” retorted Kitty severely. “And don’t try to change the subject. The ‘him’ I want to know about is that British officer. Captain Malory of the Twenty-third.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Sally Rose uneasily. She, too, left the bed, and went to stand between the patchwork curtains at the window. It was nearly midnight. Late moonrise silvered the sky over Plum Island, and the young leaves stirred restlessly in the sea wind, hiding the quiet darkness of Granny’s crocus and daffodil beds in the garden below.
“You know you really want to tell me about him,” continued Kitty. “You always want to tell me about the lads you’ve taken a fancy to.”
Sally Rose did not turn, and when she answered, her voice was very quiet, with none of the usual merry undertones that made it so charming. “Oh, but this is different, Kitty. You guessed right—he is twenty. And Father says he’s an enemy.” She laughed ruefully. “In fact, Father says he’s a damned lobsterback, and I mustn’t see him again. But I sent him a note to tell him where I was going, and maybe.... But howdid you know he was British? You only heard me say his name.”
Kitty could feel her face burn in the darkness. She still felt ashamed, though it hadn’t been her fault, really.
“I read it in a letter,” she said with some stiffness, “the letter your father wrote to Granny, telling her why he was sending you here. I went down to meet the postrider, and when he handed me a letter addressed to C. Greenleaf, I never thought that it was for Granny instead of me, and so I read it. Of course she’s Catherine, too.”
“What did Father say?” asked Sally Rose. Her voice had a worried sound.
“It began, ‘My dear,’ instead of ‘Dear Mother’—that’s why I didn’t know it was for Gran, and I kept on reading. He said ‘I’m worried about our little girl.’”
Kitty paused, and Sally Rose did not question her any further just then. Both girls looked through the window, over the roofs of the town, at the wide dark waters of the Merrimack flowing seaward.
Fifteen years ago, about this time of the year, Caleb Greenleaf had taken his wife, Becky, and his married sister, Anne Townsend, for a little jaunt on the river in the April sunshine. The young mothers had left their baby girls with Granny Greenleaf, and gone happily aboard his small fishing boat, and no one had foreseen the sudden mad wind, the squall of snow that would engulf them. Afterwards, Granny had brought up orphan Kitty, but Job Townsend had taken his motherless daughter back to Charlestown to his own people. The tragedy had brought him close to his mother-in-law, however, so that he still addressed her as ‘My dear,’ and spoke of ‘our little girl,’ and there had been much going back and forth between them.
For a long moment now, the girls stared at the dark river.Kitty was the first to take her eyes away. She did not refer to the old, sad loss, of which she knew they were both thinking.
“Your father wrote that he was sending you to stay with us for a while,” she said quietly, “to get you away from that British officer you’ve been stealing out with. He said this—this enemy—puts on a homespun shirt and leather breeches, pretends to be one of our lads, and goes wherever he likes, on all the roads round Boston.”
Sally Rose gave a soft little laugh. “Yes,” she said, “Gerry does that sometimes. But I like him better when he wears his scarlet coat and his sword. He’s sure handsome enough to make any girl forget about Johnny Pettengall.”
There was a prideful note in Sally Rose’s voice as she shook back her yellow hair.
“But he’s British, Sally Rose! He’s one of the King’s men who’ve captured Boston, and closed the port, and made so much trouble for the people who live there. Dick says they’ll march out and start shooting at us any day now. You’d be better off with a New England lad—even that logger.”
Sally Rose sighed. “I know,” she said. “Wars are hard on a girl, Kit. I know I’m supposed to hate the British, but how can I, when they are so handsome—when they have such gallant manners! I’ll bet wars don’t mean a thing to those cupids round the mirror. Love doesn’t know Whig from Tory. But why does he have to be—”
Three sharp taps sounded on the other side of the bedroom wall.
“Granny’s cane!” cried Kit softly, lowering her voice to a whisper. “That means we’re keeping her awake. But there’s so much I want to hear. How you met this Gerry, and—”
“Hush!” breathed Sally Rose, remembering Granny’s outbursts of short-lived peppery wrath. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
They slipped into bed and lay quiet, side by side, armsrelaxed on the counterpane, watching the moonlight along the wall. First Kitty turned over and sighed. A few minutes later Sally Rose did the same. Finally Kitty sat up and punched her pillow. “I can’t sleep,” she said.
“Neither can I,” said Sally Rose. “I feel as if something were going to happen.”
Below them in the town the church bells began to ring.
They rang and rang, and kept on ringing. Kitty could see them in her mind, tossing wildly in their belfry, high over Market Square. She sat up higher in bed. Sally Rose sat up, too, and reached out for her cousin’s hand.
“It must be a house afire,” said Kitty. “Can’t be a ship in trouble. The wind isn’t that strong.”
She jumped out of bed and ran to the window, but no hot glare lit the sky, only the cold pale light of the April moon. Now a noise of shouting broke out in Fish Street, growing louder every minute. Lights flickered behind the windowpanes of the small wooden houses all about, and went on burning, steady and strong. Shadows moved across them. People were getting up.
Kitty turned from the window. “Let’s get dressed!” she cried. “Maybe Granny will let us go and see what it’s all about.” But Sally Rose was already fastening her petticoat.
Pulling large winter shawls about them to hide half-buttoned bodices and yawning plackets, they tiptoed into the hall, but Granny had got there ahead of them. She stood at the top of the stairs, small, and neat, and wizened, looking as if she were ready to go to church on a Sunday morning, her costume complete, even to gold eardrops and a chip bonnet with ostrich plumes. She had a lighted candle in one hand, and her cane, which she carried but seldom used, in the other. She opened her mouth to speak to them, but was interrupted by a heavy knocking on the front door and a man’s voice shouting for Timothy.
Timothy Coffin, Granny’s hired man who tended the garden and split the firewood, came tumbling down from his tiny attic chamber. Gnarled and weathered, not much younger than his employer, his arms were half in, half out of his woolen jacket, and he carried an old flintlock, like himself, a veteran of the siege of Louisburg thirty years ago.
“Git out o’ my way, women,” he shouted, as he tore past them. “I’ll bet it’s them varmints. I knowed they was about to strike!”
Granny peered after him in bewilderment, as he fumbled with the lock of the heavy front door.
“Does he mean the Indians?” she asked. “When I was a girl I used to hear stories—but it seems they’re too scarce hereabout to cause any trouble now.”
Timothy finally got the door open and stood there, listening to a hoarse excited voice that spoke in the dark outside. Suddenly he turned around.
“I’m off, Ma’am Greenleaf!” he called to Granny. “Them British dogs has struck at last. I signed the pledge for a Minuteman. I swore to hold myself in readiness to march whenever I be ordered. An’ I be ordered now.”
“If you’re going far, you’d better take some food with you,” said Granny smartly. “Take all the bread in the cupboard, and the cold chicken—”
“And the plum cake,” interrupted Kitty. “We cut a plum cake yesterday.”
“Where are you going, Timothy? Where did the ‘British dogs’ strike?” asked Sally Rose, her eyes looking large in her white face.
Timothy did not answer her. Instead he ducked into the kitchen. The front door yawned open, and through it they could hear the terrible clamor of the bells, the lift of excited voices as the townspeople hastened by.
“Come, girls,” said Granny. “I aim to learn what this commotion is all about.”
They followed her out of the house and along High Street, past the Frog Pond and the new training green laid out where the windmill used to be.
A crowd had gathered in front of the Wolfe Tavern, and they paused at the outskirts of it. Torches flared all about, lighting up the portrait of General Wolfe that hung on a pole near the tavern door, flickering on the windowpanes along Fish Street and on the startled faces of the Newburyport folk. Fashionable flounced ladies stood side by side with barefooted fishwives from Flatiron Point, while toddlers clung to their skirts, and urchins raced here and there, shouting with shrill voices, as if they played some sort of exciting game. Most of the men were gathered round the tavern’s high front steps, and new arrivals kept elbowing their way forward every minute. The throng bristled everywhere with gun barrels; a flintlock, a fowling piece, an old queen’s arm.
“There’s Johnny,” said Sally Rose suddenly, and sure enough, Kitty craned her neck and saw him standing with the other men, his hands gripping a heavy musket. He was watching the tavern door intently. He did not look their way.
“What’s going on here?” demanded Granny in a querulous tone. Everybody seemed to be talking at once, but nobody answered her.
A man wearing a blue coat and carrying a sword came out of the tavern and stood still at the top of the steps, looking round him. He held up his hand. The urchins stopped shouting. The bells down the street pealed a time or two and then were silent. The voices of the crowd died away. A sudden burst of spring wind lifted a heap of dead leaves from the gutter and swirled it high in the face of the round white moon.
The man on the steps began to speak. “Men o’ the Port,” he called out, in a voice that was low and deep, a voice that without lifting or straining itself could be heard in all the streets and lanes nearby, “New England blood’s been spilt, as some o’ you know. But for them that don’t, I’ll read the word the postrider brought.” He waved a paper aloft, then held it square in front of him.
“‘To all friends of American Liberty, let it be known! This morning before break of day, a brigade consisting of some twelve hundred redcoats ... marched to Lexington ... and on to Concord Bridge. Many were slain both sides, and the roads are bloody. Another brigade is now upon the march from Boston!’”
He put the paper down. “Men o’ the Port, such as signed the pledge, ‘We do enlist ourselves as Minutemen and do engage that we will hold ourselves in readiness to march!’ All such men to the training green! Fall in by companies! Come, lads! Up the hill!”
With a cheer the men surged up Fish Street, shoulders hunched and heads thrust forward, their guns gripped in their hands. With cries of dismay and alarm the women began to trail after them. Granny stood still, leaning on her cane.
“There’s Dick and Eben,” cried Kitty. “Dick!” She lifted her voice. “Dick, come here and tell me where they are going. Dick, are you going too?”
But Dick and Eben were hurrying after the Minutemen. They looked at the girls and waved, and then ran on.
“Ah, here’s Mr. Cary,” Granny exclaimed. “Now we’ll see what all this uproar is likely to lead to.” She trotted over to the minister who was moving swiftly up the street, his wig not quite straight, and the linen bands at his throat somewhat disordered. “Mr. Cary, tell me now, what does all this mean?”
The minister paused, adjusted his wig, and mopped his brow with a lawn handkerchief. “I’m afraid it means war, Madame Greenleaf. It was bound to come. They’ve oppressed us too far. But about this latest outrage—I myself talked with the postrider, and he was there and saw it all. A frightful slaughter!” He looked at the girls and lowered his voice, but they heard him all the same.
“He says that when he left, the whole rout was fleeing back towards Boston, but he heard Captain Parker say that if they mean to have a war, let it begin here. ’Twould seem they so mean, and that it has begun.”
“Who were the redcoats?” asked Sally Rose in a small tremulous voice. “Did he say if it was the Twenty-third?”
Mr. Cary looked at her sharply. “Who knows one redcoat from another, and what does it matter?” he demanded. “But I believe he did mention the Twenty-third. It seems they were not in the thickest of the engagement, but posted out to help their fellow scoundrels home to Boston.”
Sally Rose let her breath escape in a little sigh of relief. Granny tapped her cane on a granite horse block nearby to get Mr. Carey’s attention again.
“Well, what do our lads think to do about it? Why get folks out of bed in the middle of the night? Must we fortify the Port and barricade ourselves in our houses because there’s been a fuss in Lexington? Are the British headed for Frog Pond Green?”
Mr. Cary started to smile and then bit his lip. “Hardly that, but our companies will assemble and march from there. The word’s been passed for such men as are able to bear arms to make their way to Cambridge with all speed.”
“Huh!” said Granny. “Cambridge is a good ways off. I hope Timothy took the plum cake. Come, girls! Now that I’ve satisfied my mind, I’m going home.”
“Oh no, Gran,” pleaded Sally Rose, composed and sureof herself again, now that she felt reasonably certain her British Gerry had come to no harm. “I want to go up to the green and see them off. It’ll hearten them to have us there, to have us wave them good luck as they march away.”
“Nonsense!” snapped Granny. “The lads will have other things on their minds. They got no time now for yellow hair.”
The squeal of a fife and the solemn throb of a beating drum broke through the shouts of the crowd on the training green.
“But I don’t want to go back to bed,” pouted Sally Rose.
“And why did you think you were going back to bed, miss?” Granny demanded. “Parson Cary says there’s a war begun. That means we’ll into the attic and try to find those bullet molds I put away when I hoped we wouldn’t need them any more. They haven’t been used since your grandfather’s time, but I think likely they’re still there.”