Our Own Country: A Novel (The Midwife Series) (11 page)

“I
shall
see him, and I shan’t wait to dress. If your father wishes to see me in my shift, so be it.” She stepped from the bed, hair loose, her ample bosom showing beneath her shift. I fled at once, to warn Papa that Lizzie, undressed, arrived.

I decided to check upon Mama and found Dr. Bullfinch within, sitting by her bed with his hand upon Mama’s wrist. Her arms lay helplessly by her sides, and her eyes were now open, though she appeared to see nothing.

Dr. Bullfinch stood to greet me.

“How is she?”

He shook his head.

“Very low, I’m afraid. And you, Miss Boylston? Do you wish me to attend to you? I have laudanum—it is very effective.”

“No, thank you. I am well enough.”

I curtsied and left the chamber. Standing in the dark hallway, unsure of where to go next, I suddenly felt as if I were in a small bark, lost upon a dark sea, unmoored, and that those around me were as flickering candles upon a distant shore.

Tuesday was Jeb’s funeral. It was held at King’s Chapel in Boston. Other families of fallen boys were there as well. Colonel Prescott arrived toward the end of the service and condoled with us a short while. Before taking his leave, he handed Lizzie a letter. She read it, hardly breathing. I should have liked to know the words she read, to hear the voice she heard speaking to her from the page. Perhaps, hearing Jeb’s voice, I would begin to feel—for nothing touched me then. In this I shared something with Mama, who walked ramrod straight, as if she had ceased being human altogether.

Many guests gathered at our house after the funeral. No one seemed to care that crates stood everywhere. Papa’s library was half-packed, and piles of books were strewn about in tall piles. I drifted silently among the guests, thinking how our friends—those who remained in Cambridge—must have pitied us our Rebel son. Once the guests had left, Papa spoke to Lizzie for a long while, periodically weeping with her. They were as one in the openness of their grief.

I stood at the base of the stairs, peering into the parlor, unseen by them.

“But I insist,” Papa was saying. By the slow shake of her head, I gleaned that Lizzie refused whatever Papa had offered.

Cassie soon passed me, coming through from the kitchen. She did not stop but moved to attend Papa and Lizzie. When she left the parlor, holding two mugs, I moved to her and asked, “What do they speak of?”

Cassie hesitated a moment. “He tell her she must come to Portsmouth. Braintree ’ees too dangerous now. But Miss Elizabeth, she refuse. She say she has women to tend, and a farm to run.”

“Thank you, Cassie.”

“Your papa ’ees right, but she won’ listen.”

“No,” I said. “She wouldn’t.” I turned and mounted the stairs to my own chamber. There was little more to be said to anyone.

Later, when I came downstairs to bid Papa good-night, I found him at his desk, his head in his hands.

“Come, Papa,” I said. “Rest awhile.” I took him by the shoulder and we mounted the stairs together. Only then did I notice that Lizzie’s chamber door was ajar. I peered in, holding my candle before me: the bed was neatly made. The gown she had borrowed lay primly upon it. Papa, revived at once by fear, descended the stairs two at a time, heading to the stables. Star, the Narragansett pacer my parents had given the couple as a wedding gift, and a little mare, which we later learned belonged to John Adams, were gone.

“Damn that woman!” Papa said as he climbed the stairs. “She’s gone off!”

I said nothing. Two days later, dressed in black and wearing an armband, I left with my parents for Portsmouth.

Part II

14

JULY 1775. IN PORTSMOUTH, THE WOODEN HOUSES
from olden days still stood by the marshy riverbank. The paths dipped and swayed, and only the very center of the town flattened out to accommodate a market and shops. Three churches formed a triangle in the town’s center. An old fish market stood near our new house, on Spring Hill. From the parlor window of Uncle Robert’s house, I could watch the fishermen as they coasted in to shore after a good morning’s haul.

My chamber was a pretty, sunny room with two windows looking onto Deer Street and two facing east, toward the river. From those windows, I had a broad view of the Piscataqua, Kittery Point, and Badger’s Island. If I stood close to the easternmost window, I could make out Pest Island, where Portsmouth’s citizens went to take the cure for smallpox. Uncle Robert slept in the room across from me, and my parents occupied a large, quiet chamber in the back of the house, behind the staircase.

Above me, in the old nursery, lived a mousy girl named Phoebe. She was about sixteen or so and served as a chambermaid. Recently she had been keeping house as well, since Uncle had let go several house servants. In a small chamber across the hall from the nursery lived a man whom I presumed to be a lodger. But I did not meet him before near two weeks had passed, as he rose before dawn and returned after dark. However, I heard his footsteps upon the stairs.

A ban was in place in the town, and we were to eat no meat at all, and fish only twice a week. It hardly mattered, for I had lost my appetite. I grew so thin that Cassie was at her wit’s end, and even my mother noticed. She had only that week found her voice after near three weeks of silence. It was exactly the same voice, yet I could not rid myself of the sensation that this rigid being at our table was but a clever simulacrum of my mother.

“It’s not fashionable to be so thin, Eliza,” the automaton remarked one evening.

“Oh, leave the poor girl alone,” said Papa. “Can you not see how ailing she is? Lord knows I would be, left alone with the pair of us.” I caught my father’s eye and smiled wanly. Papa, though having regained his senses, seemed to be ailing as well. Since w
e’d
left Cambridge, he had developed a slight cough. He kept clearing his throat as if something were stuck in there.

The week of our arrival, the town was buzzing with news that Governor John Wentworth had fled his mansion and was holed up at Fort William and Mary, just a few miles south of town. Then, late on the second of July, we learned that George Washington had taken command of the new Continental Army in Cambridge, lodging at the Vassal house. Had we been there, we no doubt would have made his acquaintance. I could not help but think how overjoyed Jeb would have been to meet the general.

The news of Washington’s arrival in Cambridge served to galvanize Portsmouth into two camps: those of us who dared not leave our homes, and those audacious men in the streets who celebrated His Excellency’s new command.

One might be tempted to think that the loss of a son on Breed’s Hill would have made my parents eager to embrace the Cause. But instead, Jeb’s death pushed them in the other direction. They cared nothing for the ideology of Independency. To them, the war was a senseless plague best cured by an immediate return to the status quo.

Mama no longer felt comfortable going abroad and kept mainly to her chamber. Uncle lived to eat and speak of his son, my cousin George, a lieutenant under General Gage in Boston. I thought my uncle’s proud talk about his son tactless given our recent loss, but many families found themselves, like us, in the awkward predicament of having fathers or sons behind enemy lines, and it was difficult to pretend otherwise.

Uncle Robert was older than Mama by several years. Life had been good to him, apart from the death of his wife several years earlier. He was a broad-shouldered man in his prime, perhaps forty-five years of age. His hair, though white, was yet intact. He enjoyed the pleasures of life and had a particular fondness for food. The results of this fondness were less noticeable than they might have been, since a London tailor cut him very smart costumes, made of the finest silk and wool.

I spent most of my time in the kitchen. Unlike in our home, my uncle’s kitchen was spacious and bright, though often quite smoky. All of the servants, save Cassie, smoked tobacco in clay pipes. Sometimes the smoke grew so thick that my eyes stung, and I would beg Cassie to open the door. The back door provided a shortcut through the garden to Front Street and the Whipple property, whose slaves came and went as if our kitchen was theirs.

My uncle’s coachman, an old slave named Jupiter, liked to linger in the kitchen as well. He might have been seventy or ninety—impossible to tell. When Cuffee Whipple, a young slave known as the best fiddler in all of Portsmouth, came over, he and Jupiter played music together. Sometimes, Cuffee brought his violin; at others, he drummed with spoons while Jupiter twanged out notes on his Jew’s harp. The two of them playing together was a comical sight, as Jupiter was a tall, skinny beanpole of a Negro and Cuffee was smaller than I. They made a stirring ruckus until Jenny, Uncle’s cook, sent them packing with a shrill cry.

Jenny was a plump, red-faced woman of about fifty with thick legs and arms. She had her own cottage at the back of the property, having lived with her husband, the caretaker, until he died several years earlier. Jenny was used to the Whipple slaves entering her domain, but she resented Cassie, whom she clearly saw as a threat to her authority. It was painful to watch Jenny scold Cassie as if she were a green scullery maid.

While the kitchen was smoky and hot, and while Jenny’s bullyragging made me sometimes wish to intervene, the kitchen’s conviviality consoled me. There, I felt less alone.

In the evenings, after the heat of the day had passed and the sun had descended behind the westward end of our hill, I would walk down to the edge of the water and watch the ferryman bring the shipwrights home from their long day at the shipyard. I would squint at the water, turned red by the declining sun, and at the sight of the approaching men—tired, dirty, and scorched—I finally allowed the tears to come. The sight of these young men, one of whom might have been Jeb, thawed my heart. The pain was welcome, in a way, for there were times I had feared that I had become as unfeeling as my mother.

One such moment that first week of July, when tears nearly blinded my vision, I collided with one of the disembarking shipwrights.

“Oh!” I said. “Excuse me.” I wiped my tears and looked up, where I found the bluest eyes
I’d
ever seen. They were not cool sky blue but almost aqua, like the blue of an Old Dutch painting. And these eyes were set in a very tan, handsome face.

The shipwright nodded and looked away at once. Was this out of deference to my tears? I thought it odd that he did not at least introduce himself, having careened into me. Instead he walked quickly up the hill. My eyes followed after him: He was young, though perhaps not in the flush of youth. Twenty-five, I guessed. He was not tall but shapely, his arms and shoulders made hard by his trade. He had a broad nose and full mouth, and his hair hung loose about his shoulders in very tight curls. It was brown yet with a top layer of sun-streaked gold.

I saw this man every day for the next several days as I took my walk before supper. Once, he was just descending from the ferryboat; several other times, I saw him walking along Front Street or heading up the hill. Always he nodded but said nothing, never gave his name.

I began to look forward to my solitary walks and the moments I would see the shipwright disembark. Seeing him—his strong form and handsome if somber face, his intelligent eyes in which I fancied I saw a certain pride, even superiority—my pain ceased for a few seconds.

Some time that sad, solitary July, I realized that I had been thinking about this shipwright as I lay in my bed at night. When I set my mind free to go where it would, I imagined the scene in which this shipwright stopped, bowed, and introduced himself. I curtsied and smiled, whereupon I could in good conscience offer my name and residence (just up the hill) and ask his name in turn.

I played this scene over and over in my mind, deriving the keenest guilty pleasure from it. But he would
not
introduce himself, and it was unthinkable that I should do so. I resolved to stop walking to the ferry at that hour, and it was with both relief and a crushing loneliness that, somewhere toward the end of that month, I ceased to see him.

I did not cease dreaming, however. It was as if my soul had grappled on to this lone source of pleasure, and I had not the will to let it go. All my fallen hopes, all my passion and heartbreak, I heaped upon the slender dream of this poor stranger! I knew it to be foolish—utterly so—and yet I could not help myself.

But perhaps such mad hope is not entirely wasted on the dreamer, for one salutary result was that I began to eat once more. The color returned to my wan face. Both Mama and Papa remarked that they were greatly relieved. They had feared I would literally die of grief, which surely happened in those days.

One hot morning in July, as we were finishing breakfast, a messenger came with a letter for my father. Papa paid the boy a few pennies, retreated into his study, and donned his spectacles.

“Hell and damnation!” he cried. Mama and I ran to find him standing with the letter in his hand. He turned to us and said, “There’s been a revolt on my plantation. My overseer has been murdered—his throat slashed! Half a dozen slaves have escaped. The estate’s in turmoil. I must go.”

“No,” Mama said. “You can’t leave us. Not now.”

“I don’t see another way.”

I left Papa’s study, and Papa closed the door upon me, though I was able to hear their continued argument through the door.

Three days later, Papa was on a ship to Virginia and thence to Barbados. He told us he hoped to return in time for Thanksgiving, but as it was a poor time for sea travel, this was not certain. Papa meant the heavy winds at this time of year, but we knew about the ships of war dotting our coastline, and we trembled for him.

Soon after Papa had left, we heard of a possible British invasion just to the north of us, and the people of Portsmouth began to flee inland. On this same night, a violent storm hit, making day of the night skies. The lightning, unremitting, sounded like trees cracking in half. In the kitchen, I came upon little Phoebe huddled in the arms of Jenny. They gripped one another in terror, believing that the world was coming to an end.

On this fearsome night, my mother made Cassie sleep in the hallway outside her chamber door. Uncle Robert, waking in the middle of the night, tripped over her and tumbled forward onto his hands and knees, frightening Cassie half to death.

“For God’s sake!” he cried. “Who’s this?”

The ruckus woke me, but somehow, Mama had managed to sleep through the commotion. I soon remedied that by rapping loudly on her door. “Mama! Mama!”

“A moment. I’m coming.” Mama opened the door to find Uncle Robert and myself, our candles flickering.

“Mama. Uncle nearly tripped and killed himself over Cassie.”

“Well, Brother, why did you not take a candle?” she scolded.

Before my uncle could reply, I cut in. “Why do you have Cassie lying on the hallway floor, like a dog?”

“We can talk about it in the morning.”

“We certainly will,” I replied. I then knelt down by Cassie, who was crying softly.

“Cassie have such a fright!” she said.

“Go back to sleep.” I hugged her. “Things shall be better in the morning.”

Suddenly I looked up to behold someone standing in the back stairway with a candle. His hair was undone and it fell in dark, tight curls about his shoulders. Dark legs stood out from a linen nightshirt that came to his knees. The light of the candle illuminated a pair of aqua-blue eyes. Our eyes met, and his flared at once in recognition. It was the shipwright!