The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (24 page)

Our future.
The words hung in the air as dead as the thing itself, dead as a thing never born. Phinnie had stopped speaking, no doubt waiting for Jane to answer, but she couldn’t raise a single word—Phinnie had said too many of them for her to sort them through. He had drained his tankard and picked up his hat when the first ones came to her.

“And how my father loved
you.
”

It sounded bitter and cold, not the way she wished it to sound, but she couldn’t think how to sweeten or warm it, because it was true.

THE NEXT DAY A
note arrived from Jane’s brother.
Dear Sister—I am in receipt of your letter; ’tis just as well; Mr. Adams should have made a hash of you. Indeed, if you can’t speak to the cause, best you don’t speak at all. I remain as I always have remained and always shall remain—Your Most Affectionate Brother.

There was no letter from her father.

A
T THE FIRST
of April Otis came by. In all Jane’s brief acquaintance with the man he had been finely dressed; this day he came in a soiled shirt, without a coat, his knee buckles unfastened. They were at supper when Mrs. Poole ushered him in; he stood at the keeping room door and peered at them as if he’d somehow arrived at the wrong dwelling.

“Welcome, my friend,” Jane’s grandfather said. “Will you join us?”

Otis looked over the table. “I will make thee think thy swan a crow.”

“You might at that,” Jane’s grandmother said, “but I believe you’ll find ’tis tasty just the same.”

Otis stared at her. “The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.”

“Come, sir,” Jane’s grandfather tried again. “ ’Tis no devil here—none but old friends.”

Otis looked in evident perplexity from face to face. He came around the table and leaned down until he could claim a fairer view of Jane’s. Did he know her? Jane was not at all sure of it.

“Truth is the trial of itself,” he said to her. “What can we know or what can we discern when error chokes the windows of the mind? No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth!”

“Mr. Otis,” Jane’s grandmother tried yet again. “If you please, it would be our greatest pleasure if you would sit and take some food with us.”

“I must cudgel my brains no more about it!” Otis cried and bolted out the door.

Jane’s grandmother started to speak and faltered. “ ’Tis . . .’tis all nonsense he speaks now.”

“Not all,” Jane’s grandfather answered. “He gave us Ben Jonson; Shakespeare. ’Tis Sir John Davies, I believe, who speaks of windows of the mind; Francis Bacon the vantage-ground of truth; he came back to Shakespeare at the end. ‘Cudgel thy brains no more.’ Poor, tormented creature; if only he could do so. I fear . . . I fear—” He stood up. “I must see him safe.” He followed Otis’s path out the door.

Near midnight Jane’s grandfather sent a note that he would be in attendance until Otis’s brother arrived, that plans were under way to deliver Otis into the care of his family at Cape Cod. Jane woke to her grandfather’s tread on the stairs in the early hours, to low voices coming from behind her grandparents’ chamber door. It went on long, but it didn’t keep Jane awake; she was now awake on her own account, thinking of Otis, unable to free her mind of the man. He had leaned down to
her.
He had spoken to
her. What can we know or what can we discern when error chokes the windows of the mind?
The solitary sentence held in it all that Jane had wrestled with since March the fifth. But she had put the fifth behind her along with her decision about Hugh White. Why must
she
cudgel her brains about it so?

Because of Captain Preston. Jane’s brother might think it all about Hugh White—Jane might once have thought it all about Hugh White—and her brother might absolve her from testifying about him, but he couldn’t absolve her from testifying about Captain Preston. But why must she care about Captain Preston when others didn’t? The captain stood so close to hanging he might look up and see the shadow of the rope, and his lawyer had voluntarily tied his own hands in Preston’s defense. And yet she must care. And why? Because Phinnie was wrong. It
was
her concern. If they hanged a man for a thing he did not do, it might be because of a thing she did not say. It didn’t matter who Captain Preston was or what he stood for or even whether or not Jane liked him, although, in fact, she did. She must say what she believed she saw. And she must soon discover if Otis—or Bacon—was right: that there was no pleasure comparable to standing upon the vantage-ground of truth. Judging by the great wave of nausea rising up in her chest, she held her doubts.

JANE ROSE EARLY, WASHED
and dressed herself, made up her bed, and sat down on its edge. She listened and heard her grandmother’s steps on the stairs; she continued to sit. When she heard her grandfather’s heavier tread, she leaped up and opened her door, giving her grandfather a start.

“Jane!”

“I’m sorry, sir. But I have a question I needed to ask, and I wanted to ask it before you left on your business. It concerns Mr. Adams.”

Jane’s grandfather looked his surprise, but without hesitation he folded up like a crane and sat down on the next step. Jane sat on the step above, the better to even their heights. “I once talked to you about making a deposition at my brother’s request. I told him I could not say what he wished. He accepted that answer.”

“Then I would call the matter settled.”

“That aspect of it is. But I might be able to give some other testimony in favor of Captain Preston. My brother knows nothing of this.”

“I see.”

“Don’t mistake me, sir. My brother is not my concern. Or rather, he is not my
total
concern. I have some concern over Mr. Adams.”

“Mr. Adams!”

“I well know his political sympathies do not lie with the soldiers. If I were to go to him with something I saw that aided Captain Preston, if I were to take the trouble to myself, knowing I should make unhappy those I love—” Jane paused. “I only wonder if Mr. Adams is sincere in his effort.”

“Ah! I see. There, perhaps, I may be of some help. I have known Mr. Adams some years now and may say without reservation that he is the hardest-working, most honest man I know. You may have no fear that he will apply all of his considerable talents to freeing Captain Preston.”

Except if it required putting the town on trial along with the soldiers. But
that
could not be Jane’s responsibility. In truth, she’d known her responsibility from the minute Otis had peered into her face and begun to speak.

JANE AND HER GRANDFATHER
conspired together. Mrs. Poole was sent with a note to Adams’s office which would occupy Jane’s brother on an errand and leave Jane free to speak without him present. Indeed, when she arrived, the lawyer was alone at a desk so covered with books it required him to hold his elbow in the air as he wrote. On seeing Jane his eyes first widened in surprise and then dampened. “Miss Clarke! How touched I was to receive your most expressive letter on the loss of my darling Susanna. You, who never laid eyes upon her!”

For a minute Jane stood puzzled. Of course she’d seen her, seen her in Adams’s arms—and then she remembered. It was only the father’s love she’d seen as he’d held Mehitable’s babe and thought of his.

Adams blinked, regaining himself. “I do hope you don’t come to me with some trouble of your own, Miss Clarke.”

“No, sir, I come to you with some help for Captain Preston.”

She explained herself. Adams’s round eyes grew rounder as she talked, first with disbelief, then with relief, and finally with an honest man’s joy, which she wished with all her heart she could better share.

HENRY KNOX CAME,
and
the minute he stepped into the keeping room Jane knew she could not tell him of her visit to Adams. He would learn of it in due time—that was the way of things in town—but he would not learn of it today, from her. This self-imposed silence pressed so heavily on her that it took her some time to catch up to what Henry was saying to
her
. Jane was working at pies, and Henry had come around the table to examine her work. She’d just laid out the pigeons, peppered and salted her lumps of butter and stuffed them inside; as Henry lifted his eyes from the pie to her she at first mistook one kind of hunger for the other.

“Times are coming to a head, Jane,” he was saying. “Times are dictating a man’s behavior, prompting him to think ahead of himself and his circumstance, suggesting to him that the day must be seized before all is swept away before him.” He paused. “Perhaps, Jane, you recall something of my living situation. Perhaps you remember that I live with my widowed mother and younger siblings and work to provide their keep and care. One might think this left no room for another, but such is not the case; my mother has reached that age and state of health where she is ready to sit back and let another take her place at the hearth.” There Henry paused and looked at Jane, waiting for her to speak.

Jane looked at Henry and saw again her image in his eyes, but somehow her image had now taken on the coloration of her stepmother Mehitable. She said, “So you are in need of a housekeeper, then? Perhaps my grandmother would know of someone who might suit.”

Henry blinked. “Well . . . yes. Thank you.”

JANE’S GRANDFATHER BROUGHT THE
talk home to dinner—Preston’s trial was to take place at the May sitting of the court—and it was as if his words sailed through the air and got caught in Jane’s throat.

But out of that same air Jane’s grandmother said, “Perhaps after the trial we might return to Satucket.”

Jane’s grandfather’s eyes came up from his pie to fix on her. He said, “ ’Tis impossible for me to leave town at present. You know this.”

“Indeed I do. I was thinking to take Jane. Only to see how the house fared over winter. ’Twas more work last spring than I anticipated.”

A canopy of weight, heavier than cheesecloth but lighter than a bed rug, draped itself over the table. At length Jane’s grandfather said, “You’ve not been here six months.”

“Long enough for an empty house to need tending. Lord, when I think what might await—why, it has suffered a hurricane since I last saw it! And only think of Jane. When has she last seen home?”

Jane’s grandfather turned to her. “ ’Tis true, I don’t think of you, Jane. Your work here is ended—no doubt you’re anxious to return to Satucket.”

She was. She wasn’t. She’d by now received her father’s answer to her letter, which was that he had chosen not to answer it. She had heard from Bethiah and Mehitable and neither had made mention of it. If she returned to Satucket it would be as her grandmother returned—for a visit. Her grandmother wanted desperately to see her home, but what did Jane want? It would be necessary to see her father, of course, but she had no idea how he would greet her. She thought of Phinnie’s description of them that day in her father’s office—it had seemed like such a simple affection as he described it. But it would not be a simple thing now, if it were a thing at all.

She said, “I should like to see Satucket and help my grandmother if you would permit it.”

Jane’s grandfather smiled. “Ah, Jane. You do not escape so easily. I do not permit or deny—you must consult your own wisdom in this.”

Jane tried to imagine such words issuing from her father’s lips and couldn’t.

THE MAY TRIAL WAS
postponed. At the end of the month the news arrived from England that the Townshend duties had been repealed, all but the tax on tea, and talk of it consumed the dinner table for weeks. Jane could see some gain for the pocketbook but little for the principle and was pleased to see that for once her brother, Henry, and her grandparents were all in accord with her view of it.

Talk of the trial resumed in June and continued through July and August, trapping Jane and her grandmother in town. Jane did her best to keep hands and mind occupied, and her grandmother saw that she was fitfully if not steadily employed—she nursed the neighborhood children through a dysentery epidemic, poulticed a chest and an ankle, lanced an abscess, salved some burns, and treated any number of cases of worms.

Nate began to come by more often, Mrs. Lincoln’s husband having come to collect her at last—he seemed in better spirits than he had all through the fall, winter, and spring, but Jane could find no reason for it. She had refused to offer up testimony incriminating Hugh White. She had told him of her pending testimony regarding Preston, and he had said only, “Mr. Adams informed me of it.” Afterward it occurred to her that Nate might not want Captain Preston handed all the blame for the assault, leaving Hugh White guilty of nothing but obeying his officer’s order, but she was too glad to have her old almost-happy brother back again to cudgel her brains long about it.

Henry Knox continued to stop by. He must have heard of her pending testimony in favor of Preston, but he said nothing of it. Neither did he speak again of his housekeeping. Now and again he looked at Jane as if he were waiting for her to either send him away or to offer to engage herself, but Jane wanted neither thing, without entirely understanding why. She could not brand him with the Phinnie complaint; he spoke openly and honestly to her, and she felt she knew him well enough, but day by day as she observed her grandparents in their ordinary relations, she began to learn something of another kind of marriage than the one she’d observed in her father’s house. What she did not know was what it was that made it that kind of marriage, but before she entered into one herself she was determined to find out.

Phinnie Paine did not come at all, which was just as Jane expected.

WHEN THE TRIAL WAS
rescheduled for October, Jane paid little heed, assuming it should be pushed off again as it had been so many times before. When it wasn’t she felt almost as betrayed as she’d felt when she’d discovered Aunt Gill copying out of her letter book.