The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (10 page)

After Jane had worn down over Nate, she thought she might sleep but discovered instead that Otis lurked behind her brother, Otis and all she had learned afresh of him from Aunt Gill. What might Otis’s family have thought of his choice of wife? Had Otis married her, despite her Tory views, only because she was rich and beautiful? Or had he only discovered her views after they were married? If the first, he’d earned his suffering. If the second, perhaps he’d earned that too, for not looking past the
sum
to the
parts
before it was too late to do so
.
Or perhaps the wife had earned it for presenting herself dishonestly. Or the pair together had earned it, just as she and Phinnie Paine would have had to share the blame for their own mismatching.

There Jane came around to her brother again.
Keep to Paine.
And who was he to say? His last great infatuation had been over a runaway indentured servant who’d gone off to Philadelphia in search of a father she’d last seen a decade before when he’d sold her into servitude. What use his advice then?

O
N THE TWENTY-FIRST
of July Jane read in the
Gazette
that the governor had dissolved the General Court in response to the legislators’ efforts to have him removed. On the twenty-second her grandfather sent word that being free of his duties he was off at the week’s end for Satucket, and to send with the bearer any letters Jane wished him to convey. Jane had rushed to her pen and ink, but once again had difficulty in beginning. It was one of those irresistible summer days that had persuaded even Aunt Gill to open the window, and a breeze wafted over Jane like a beckoning hand. She could smell the usual town smells of excess humanity, but behind it she could smell the cleaner smell of the sea—diluted and disguised, but still recognizable as the one she had long known. She allowed her mind to waft away with the breeze to Satucket, thinking to bring her letter to better focus, but a bee had wandered in along with the breeze and begun to knock distractingly against the upper part of the glass. She watched the bee for a time, but at length pulled away and went back to her letter.

Trouble awaited her in the first line. Thus far Jane’s letters home had been written as if in continuing answer to the original request from Mehitable for news of her safe passage, and the letters had therefore been addressed to Mehitable alone. Now Jane found herself allowing of a question—was it time to include her father’s name in her address? She turned again to the window, to watch the bee fumble his way out, and continued to sit staring out at the chimney tops, thinking of bees.

She had been six or seven years old, her own mother dead, Bethiah’s mother not yet arrived, the stepmother in between having put Jane at the task of cracking hazelnuts while she went about the week’s baking. It was summer—perhaps late summer—and the door had been left open in the hopes of capturing a breeze to offset the oppressive heat of the oven. Jane had grown tired of cracking nuts and was taking a little rest, pushing damp hair off a damp forehead with an even damper hand, gazing out the door with longing, when a bee zigzagged through it and into her father’s empty office. Jane had slid off the kitchen bench and raced in after the bee; as seemed to be the habit with all bees, it had gone straight for the window and begun to bump against the pane. Jane took off her shoe and smacked the bee, crushing it impressively, but at the same time putting a good-size crack in the glass.

The operation made enough noise to bring her stepmother running; her stepmother made enough noise to bring her father running; the whole history of the crime was laid bare in front of them: the crack in the glass, the dead bee on the sill, the shoe in Jane’s hand.

“What the devil are you smashing up my windows for?” Jane’s father cried.

“To keep the bee from stinging you, Papa.”

It wasn’t the kind of answer that could have saved Jane, and indeed it had not—she was sent out to scrub down the necessary house in place of eating her dinner—but her father never did fix the pane, and years later, so many years that it couldn’t possibly have been the first time he had repeated it, Jane overheard him telling the story to his then-lawyer, Mr. Doane: “ ‘To keep the bee from stinging you, Papa!’ ”

So Jane sat, thinking about the bee and writing nothing, when a second message arrived from her grandfather—he would not be able to leave town after all, due to new matters that had “chained” him again.

ON THE FIRST OF
August Jane woke to the clashing of all the town bells. Bells at the off-hour meant
fire,
and Jane had been in town long enough to know the different tolls—the church nearest the blaze would begin and the others take it up as the news went around, but today they set off all at once, nearly indistinguishable one from the other, except for the Anglican church with its royal peal of eight bells, and the sour note at New North. No matter the reason, the tolling of King’s Chapel always sounded sad, but for some reason today it didn’t; it swelled and rose and sang out in a happy cascade, joining the others from all quarters. But if not for fire, for what then? Jane was at the window, looking at the blank skyline when the china in the cupboard began to rattle, and behind it came the rumble of a queerly repetitive thunder. She looked up at the sky a second time, and saw nothing but clear blue to the horizon. She dressed in a hurry—Aunt Gill’s voice was now ringing out as well—and rushed her aunt into her clothes and down the stairs, the old woman for once as eager as Jane to get below. They arrived in the front hall just as Prince was coming in from the street with the news.

“ ’Tis the town sending off the governor.”

Aunt Gill gripped Prince’s arm. “He’s gone?”

“Set sail on the
Rippon.
Or would do if he had the wind. Ship sits dead in the harbor.” He slipped out the door again.

THROUGHOUT THE DAY THE
cannon and bells crashed on, and Jane couldn’t help summoning some feeling for the unpopular governor, forced to lie offshore and listen to the merriment caused by his departure, until Prince came back again, grinning his imbecile grin at Jane, reporting that the
Rippon
carried with her thirty-six thousand ounces of Custom House silver, custom paid by the inhabitants of the town. Prince continued to go in and out, reporting to his mistress: townsfolk now lined the shore, jeering at the still becalmed
Rippon,
a great pile of wood was being assembled on Fort Hill for a bonfire, drink was going around and firearms were being discharged into the air, the one no doubt in relation to the other. Jane wished her aunt would order Prince to stay at home and tend to his chores, but he continued to come and go and report, to no good effect for Aunt Gill. Any joy she might have felt over the town being rid of its tormenter seemed overridden by the strain all the noise took on her nerves. She sat white and still in the front room, undistracted by the newspaper or any conversation Jane struggled to offer. Jane brought her some tea but had to hold it to her aunt’s lips in order for her to get any of it down.

AUNT GILL DID AS
poorly by her supper. As dark came down, a wide fiery band of yellow painted the sky above the roofline—the bonfire on Fort Hill. So brilliant was the effect of the flames that it would have been visible all the way across town; it would have been visible across the harbor aboard the
Rippon;
and it was certainly visible to Aunt Gill. That was when Jane learned that Aunt Gill didn’t do well with fire, either—she turned pale and flushed in turns; she wanted to be taken up to her bed, but then asked to be brought down again in case the fire escaped the hill and she got burned up in her bedclothes. Only when Jane insisted the fire had subsided would she agree to go back up again, but long after Jane thought her aunt settled for the night she heard steps on the stairs, and went into the hallway to find Martha coming down them. Jane hadn’t heard Martha go up and was startled to see her. Jane was also startled to see Martha carrying a thick, leather case, the kind her father used to hold his most important papers.

“Is there some trouble?” Jane asked.

At first it appeared Martha would pass by without speaking. Jane said sharply, “Martha! I ask if there is trouble here.”

Martha lifted her eyes and fixed them on Jane’s ear. “She told me. Secure her papers in the cellar.”

“She told
you
?”

Martha pushed past Jane and continued down the stairs. Jane continued up them. Her aunt appeared to be asleep, but this could now give Jane no comfort—what kind of instruction could a sleeping woman have given Martha? Jane looked down at what she could see of the shrunken form, nothing but a gentle rill beneath the coverlet, but the cloth rose and fell too rapidly for any kind of peaceful dreams. Jane touched her aunt’s shoulder. “Aunt. Do you sleep?”

Silence.

Jane nudged the shoulder harder. “Aunt.”

The old woman started up. “What? What is it? The fire!”

“No, no fire. I only wish to ask you . . . I must ask you, did you instruct Martha to secrete some papers for you?”

“What’s happened? What happened to my papers?”

“Did you ask Martha to take them to the cellar?”

“T’won’t burn in the cellar.”

“We shan’t burn, Aunt.”

She grasped Jane’s hand. “You’re keeping watch?”

“I am.”

“I may trust you in this?”

“You may. In all things.”

“Will you stay with me till I sleep?”

Jane sat down on the edge of the bed and stayed there until her aunt’s grip on her hand loosened. She stood up but leaned down again to make sure the old woman had remained undisturbed—the illumination from the window just tipped the sagging, papery eyelids and the now-peaceful smile of a trusting child. Jane leaned down and kissed her aunt’s forehead as she would, indeed, have kissed a child. She went below to hunt out Martha.

Martha slept in a small room off the kitchen, but Martha was in neither that room nor the kitchen. Neither was she in the cellar; Jane climbed down to make sure and poked about among the cider jugs and firkins of butter and pots of cream and milk, baskets of potatoes and onions. She could find no leather case. She examined the dirt floor but could see no place where the hard-packed surface had been disturbed. As she came up the stairs Martha was just coming through the door.

Jane said, “What did you do with my aunt’s papers?”

The inevitable pause, so drawn out that Jane’s hand itched to slap the dead face into life. “Sister’s cellar’s better,” Martha said at last and turned away to slide a pot of beans into the oven.

Jane climbed the stairs again, tiptoed into her aunt’s room again. She was sure, or almost so, that she could see the glint of open eyes. She said, “Aunt.”

The old woman rose up. “What? We must go! The fire’s here!”

“No, not fire. I thought you should know. Martha says she’s put your papers in her sister’s cellar.”

“Her sister’s cellar! Oh, clever girl. Her sister’s house is nearer the water. Thank you, my dear, for troubling to tell me of it. I shan’t sleep, of course, but perhaps I’ll rest easier.” She closed her eyes.

Jane climbed the stairs to her own chamber, but if there was no escape for the governor at sea, there was none for her, either. Her room glowed through the night long after the bells had quieted, and as hard as she’d argued against it to Aunt Gill, Jane fully expected to hear the bells strike up again any minute, to warn of a nearby house ignited by flying cinders. In the end Jane gave up on sleep, went to the window, and stood watching the light-fingers play over the night sky like the aurora borealis. She breathed in and smelled it: the smoke; the ash; the hatred.

JANE HAD BEEN IN TOWN
well over a month when she received her first letters from home. Her stepmother had addressed her letter to
My Dearest Daughter
and signed it
Your Most Affectionate Mother;
there was nothing more in the words than the customary epistolary form, but it struck Jane queerly, never having received such words from her stepmother before. She read on, hovering over reports of each child’s health, the health of the creatures, the Satucket weather. And then:
I wake each morning in the false ease of believing you still among us, of listening for your determined tread upon the stairs, remembering at last how empty the day shall be because you are gone from it.

Jane set the letter down, stunned. She thought, again, of the early morning in the meadow, of following Mehitable through the dark, listening to her anxious argument for Jane’s remaining at home. Jane had assumed her stepmother had wanted Jane at home because of her heavy contribution to the running of the household—she would also, always, want any breach healed that might disrupt her husband’s humor—but rereading Mehitable’s last sentence, stopping on the word
empty,
brought Jane to think again.
Was
it possible that her stepmother might miss her? Jane was too far away and too lonely to be able to decide it one way or the other, but one thing Jane needn’t have pondered over long—her father’s name was not included beside his wife’s signature, nor did he send his regards to her within the content of the letter.

Jane remembered another day—a late April day of the sort uncommon in Satucket that carries both the memory of winter and the promise of summer. The branches had looked bare from the distance, but as Jane drew closer she could spot new leaves on the oaks and shadblow and cherry, fat buds on the lilacs. Jane’s father had sent her with a letter for the tanner, but Jane had grown distracted as she drew near the millstream—the herring—and the herring men—were at their most frantic and entertaining. She’d watched so long, mesmerized by the music of the water and the dance of the nets, that she’d forgotten about the letter altogether. Her father’s words when he’d called her to the office had faded from her memory long ago, but the look on his face lingered yet. To see such disgust and even dislike in a parent’s eyes, to see the thought flash as if written in script across his features that he wished her gone from his sight . . . Well, now she was gone from it. Perhaps forever.

Jane answered Mehitable’s letter at once, making greater effort with it than she had done heretofore. She began as she had begun before, with
Honored Mother,
but although the words looked different to Jane, she suspected they would look no different to Mehitable. She thanked her stepmother for the sentiments in her last letter, and inquired after her doings and health in a line unto itself, before inquiring in general after the rest of the children, hoping that might be noticed as something beyond the usual form. She made no mention of her father.