Martha Peake (37 page)

N
ow here was an occasion when I might have expected my uncle’s assistance, for the incident I must next recount involves no moot question of republican principle, being a matter of
espionage
, rather. But the old man was most reluctant to tell me what he knew, and became truculent when I pressed him; and for no good reason that I could see, beyond the usual sport he had in frustrating me. What I had learned from the letters was this: that late in the afternoon of an unsettled day in the March of 1775 a dank salt fog came down on the cape, and within an hour all that could be seen of New Morrock were a few yellowy patches where lamps in windows down by the port shone weakly into the gathering gloom.

The next morning the fog had lifted a little, but still it clung to the trees up behind the house, and hung like a curtain at the harbour wall a half-mile out from the dock. From the hill the town was visible through a thin scrim of mist. Figures could be glimpsed moving about on the dock, and among the boats pulled up on the shingle nearby. But there was a muffled aspect to the world, and in the Rind household they moved about quietly, and spoke little, all strangely affected by the weather, all but the younger children, who were eager to be out. It was an hour or so after they had risen, with the day’s work well started, that Silas came in and told them that something
peculiar was going on below, and Martha, lumbering at once to the window, saw that a crowd of people was forming down on Front Street, all of them staring out to sea, though nothing was visible beyond the harbour. The children were at once impatient to go down the hill, so Martha and Sara took them off.

Even before they reached the port they began to hear strange noises carrying across the water—a loud creaky rumbling that spoke of timber and rope, and could surely belong only to a vessel of some kind, and then a
grunting
, and a slow, muffled plashing, as of oars; and then what sounded like shouting, these various sounds all indistinct, all thick-blanketed in the wet fog so as to suggest a picture of men, timber, hemp, boat; but what men? What boat?

On the dock the people of New Morrock turned murmuring to one another, but none attempted to halloo the vessel, nor did anyone pull a boat down the shingle and row out across the harbour. No, they stood and watched, and Martha was soon aware that several members of the militia had come down to the dock with their muskets. And so in silence they waited for the creaking thing bearing down on them through the fog. Then it emerged; and they gazed at it in astonishment.

It was a large rowboat filled with men, crowded to the gunwales with men, men heaped on men, ragged, desperate men, straining at the oars, and moving forward with the incoming tide with huge effort. From the stern of this overloaded boat, which sat so low in the water that even in the calm of the harbour the sea slopped in over the sides—from the stern, where a single stout figure stood over the others, manning the tiller, a clutch of ropes was stretched taut, hauling some greater vessel through the fog behind them.

The men in the boat turned with shouts and cries, rising up and waving as they glimpsed the dock and the waiting townspeople, the oars flailing wildly now, several men tumbling into the sea and striking out for shore, others clinging to the sides of the boat and flinging their arms in the air. Some shouting from the dock, when it was observed that among the men crowded into the boat were several
who wore the familiar red coat of the king’s army. Boys ran back into town to raise the alarm, but it was at once clear that if these redcoats wished to fight they chose an odd way of coming at their enemy.

Once more silence fell upon the watching Americans. Sara slipped her arm into Martha’s and the cousins drew close together. Silas, mounted on horseback, clattered onto the dock now, followed by the remainder of the militia, Nat Pierce directing them into ranks.

Then all at once the prow of a ship broke through the fog. A cry from the people on the dock, who at once pressed forward on all sides, but were held back by the militia. The prow of a sloop—for a sloop she was, and a sloop-of-war at that—towered over the crowded boat, and it was strange indeed to see the great height and bulk of the empty vessel dwarfing the boatload of men below, her figurehead the deep-breasted torso of a queen. On she came, this flightless bird of the sea, and it was at once clear to the watching crowd why she was towed: she had lost her mainmast. Though not her flag; the Union Jack hung limp and tattered from her bowsprit.

Silas sat deathly still upon his horse, and about his pressed lips flickered a suggestion of wry contempt. There was laughter now among the waiting crowd, for here came the hated English, the enemy, the oppressor, but unmanned, unmasted, and undone. Martha glanced about her and soon found Adam among the ranks of the militia, tall as any man there and his hair tumbling out from under his hat. The militia stood stolidly to attention on the dock, their muskets shouldered, but the mood of the people around them was charged with derisive antagonism at the sight of the broken ship and its labouring crew. Then all at once Martha fell silent, her eyes fixed on the bare-chested officer at the tiller of the rowboat. For she knew him, yes she knew him—he was Captain Hawkins.

Captain Hawkins. Oh, she remembered that combative little man, she remembered how he had strode about the bridge of an American ship and given orders to the master of that ship; and she remembered his utter assurance, his confidence in the authority of his uniform, and his own proud self, and it aroused in her a mixture
of warm emotions, for she also remembered his kindness to her in the captain’s cabin, more than kindness, a genuine paternal sympathy. Now he had his spy-glass to his eye, as he stood at the tiller and coolly surveyed the dock, the town beyond, the hill, the cliff, and the forest above, where the fog still hung heavy in the trees.

At last the spy-glass came to rest, and it was evident upon what it rested: the single mounted figure on the dock; and Silas in turn gazed at the gazing officer.

The children grew quiet and stood close to their parents as they stared out across the harbour at the overcrowded boat and the looming vessel it dragged through the misty water in its wake.

It was another hour before the boat approached Rind’s Wharf, where men now stood ready to take the ropes flung from her bow and haul her in. English sailors and English soldiers, soaked and chilled after their long night at sea, scrambled wearily onto the planks, and a moment later their officer joined them. He stepped out of the boat unafraid, seemingly unwearied by his ordeal, and gazed keenly about him at the silent Americans.

The militia stood in ranks at Silas’ back, still with arms shouldered. Giles Hawkins strode down the wharf to the laughter of the watching Americans, his chest bare and his britches soaked, but his head high and his gaze firm. He spoke a few words to Silas and lifted his hand. No one on the dock could hear what he said, and for a long moment they waited for Silas’ response. If there were some present who wished to see Silas spurn the Englishman’s hand, if there were even a few present who would have the militia march these wretched men off to some quiet cove and stand them up before a firing squad—none spoke, for Silas had already made it known how he wished them to conduct themselves. They waited in silence, and there was barely a murmur when Silas leaned forward in the saddle and gave the Englishman his hand.

The family were all in the kitchen when Silas came home late in the afternoon. He wore an expression Martha had come to know well, the angry, set, sober face he seemed always to bring back from Pierce’s. He came in through the scullery and his eye sought first not his wife but Martha, and the look he gave her alarmed her, for she found it difficult to read, there was in it something quizzical—skeptical—irritable also—but approving withal, or at least suggesting a sort of dark amusement. He did not trouble to make clear what he meant by it, for he sat down without a word, and only when he had eaten did he tell them what they might expect in the days to come.

The
Queen Charlotte
—for this was the name of the sloop, and a hated name too, Charlotte being the king’s wife—had been on patrol up the coast. The ship’s master, an Englishman unfamiliar with these waters, had been surprised by a storm out to sea: waves thirty foot high and a gale that came up without warning and tore through his canvas before he could get any men aloft, all this in the middle of the night and no moon to help them see what they were doing. Four men coming up out of the hatchway before the mast were lost at once, swept overboard by a sudden great wave; and it must be said there was no heart in Maddy Rind’s kitchen so hard set against England that it did not feel pity for those poor sailors.

It took the wind a very few minutes to bring down the mainmast, which lay across the deck with its rigging all tangled and the loose shrouds flapping wildly like some great white gliding creature brought up from the deep. Still the wild nor’easter clawed and howled about the vessel, and it was then that Giles Hawkins had struggled up on deck with an ax, and amid the shrieking fury of the storm hacked the mainmast free and cut loose the rigging. Liberated of her burden the ship found some measure of stability, and somehow they survived the night; and the following morning were driven
toward the coast before the wind died away and they found themselves adrift in the fog.

Captain Hawkins, said Silas, was then faced with a hard necessity: he must strip the
Queen Charlotte
of her cannon and dump them overboard, and put his men in the boat, which by chance had not been swept away in the night. Then they would haul her to some natural harbour.

“And,” said Silas, one eyebrow lifted, and with a curl to his lip, “by great good fortune they found shelter with us.”

“What now?” said Adam.

“What now indeed,” said Silas; and told him that the
Queen Charlotte
must be refitted in New Morrock before she could return to Boston.

“Refitted here,” said Caesar.

Silas nodded, his chin on his hands.

“A new mast,” said Adam. “Sailcloth and rigging.”

Silas nodded. Martha glanced from father to son, but could not read what else passed between them.

“And the redcoats?”

“I have put them in the George.”

This was an old dilapidated wooden structure on stilts, down the far end of Front Street. It had prospered in the days before Nat Pierce opened his establishment. Only a very few of the old fishermen continued to drink in the George, the reason for its unpopularity being its name. Now it was to be used as a billet for the soldiers. A greater irritant to the inflamed passions of this patriot town would be hard to imagine, and Adam said so.

“Those passions,” said Silas, “must be contained.”

There were only the two voices now, Silas’ and Adam’s, and the others in the kitchen stayed quiet and still, all but Sara, who moved around lighting the lamps. Silas did not have to tell his son that if the militia attacked the redcoats it would set the colony ablaze. A massacre on that scale could not be concealed.

Adam pondered, then said: “What does the Englishman say?”

“He is with me,” said Silas. “There must be no trouble. You must all help me.”

He looked round the table, looked closely in the lamplight into the faces of his worried family. His gaze came to rest on Martha. “Much depends on it. Perhaps everything.”

Late that night Martha lay awake and stared at the ceiling, where a stray shaft of moonlight had picked out a long pale rectangular patch on the plaster. Her hands were under her nightshirt, on her belly. Silas’ words turned in her mind. “Much depends on it. Perhaps everything.” What was everything—America? Was America everything? To her it had become so. America was the world into which her child would be born. But as she thought of Giles Hawkins she felt a profound unease, for she had not admitted to Silas that she knew the man.