The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (25 page)

T
HE NEW COURTHOUSE
on Queen Street had put its courtroom above-stairs; Jane climbed the steps as if they led to her own personal gallows. Once inside, the size of the crowd and the number of uniforms in it further alarmed her—a thick bar ran the length of the room, separating the onlookers from the principals, but nothing separated the two sides of the audience, and so many members of the army and navy and customs mixing so tightly together with the town’s inhabitants seemed sure to promise a brawl.

On the other side of the bar Preston stood in the prisoner’s box, his coat appearing to glow redder than those of his fellow soldiers, being set off to itself as it was. Next came the lawyers’ tables, almost as congested as the onlookers’ area, with three barristers for each side; next came the clerk’s table, the jury box, and the judges, seated in the prime location before the fireplace. The five wigged and robed justices might have seemed to Jane all that the law should be had she not remembered Henry’s stories of contrived illnesses and disappearances, and when she looked at the jury she could only remember that they came from the streets of Boston, with their minds as set against the soldiers as the cobbles on which they trampled. So Jane thought until she heard her grandfather whispering to her grandmother about one juror from Braintree and another from Dorchester and one who made his living baking bread for the Fourteenth Regiment.

Jane took up her station near the bar, a grandparent on either side;
she had expected some jostling and even taunting, but the crowd—inhabitants and soldiers alike—were solemn and courteous. So, this was not the street. This was the world of law. She looked again at Preston, wanting very much to know what he was thinking. Was it:
Here now is my sham trial begun,
or was it:
Here is Jane Clarke to speak of the man in the cloak, and here on the jury is the man who bakes my bread; perhaps I will have justice done me after all.
Nothing in Preston’s face or carriage gave the least hint of either. He stood tall, his mouth again fixed in that grim, hard line Jane had come to know so well from her dreams. All Jane might venture to read in him was that he was done with begging. Whatever happened, Jane doubted there would be any more letters of gratitude printed in the paper.

The first of the Quincy brothers—the loyalist Samuel Quincy—opened the prosecution’s case with a description of the night of March the fifth much as the papers had described it: roaming bands of off-duty, armed soldiers looking for trouble and finding it at the corner of Exchange and King, the noisy but harmless crowd gathering, Preston ordering his men to load with powder and ball, to fire and fire again. Jane watched Preston as Samuel Quincy spoke and saw in him no change.

Samuel Quincy’s first witness, Edward Garrick, the young apprentice wig maker who had tussled with White, told what he had to tell with fervor, but it had little to do with Preston. The second, Thomas Marshal, stated with certainty that whoever had given the order to fire, it made little matter, as Preston had had enough time between the first and later shots to order his men to recover and thereby prevent further bloodshed—an opportunity he had ignored. The next witness, Peter Cunningham, could only insist he’d heard Preston order his men to prime and load.

But the next witness, William Wyat, caused the first rumble through the courtroom.

“I heard the defendant give the orders to prime and load. I heard him give the order to fire. I heard him say, ‘Damn your bloods, fire, be the consequence what it will!’ ”

The other Quincy brother, the cross-eyed patriot Josiah Quincy, arose from his seat and approached the witness.

“This was the only cry for fire you heard, sir?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You heard no calls for fire coming from the crowd?”

“Well, some.”

“People in the crowd calling on the soldiers to fire.”

“Well, to tease them, like.”

“Knowing they could not fire without an order. The crowd calling over and over, ‘Damn you, fire’?”

“Words of that sort.”

“Damn you, damn your eyes—”

“Well, yes. But it was Preston gave the order.”

“And which order would that be?”

“All of them! To prime, load, fire.”

“And how did you know it to be Captain Preston giving the orders?”

“I’ve seen him enough on his way to his parties about town, haven’t I? And he had his captain’s sash and epaulets on, hadn’t he? How many captains do you think there were out there on that corner?”

As if only to get the last word, thin as it was, Josiah Quincy said, “This we shall determine, sir.”

THE NEXT WITNESS, JOHN COX
, came up to the bar and gripped it as if he’d like to leap over it in his eagerness to help get Preston hanged. “It was the captain ordered the soldiers to fire,” he said. “The captain in his sash and epaulets. He said it once—he said ‘fire’—and then he said it again: ‘Damn your blood, fire, let the consequence be what it will!’ ”

The witnesses spoke so closely to their depositions that Jane felt as if she was at one of Henry Knox’s play-readings. She looked again at Preston—if he had read the printed accounts none of this would surprise him—and indeed, he remained as impassive as before. Josiah Quincy rose again—a handsome man if it weren’t for the eyes—but all he did for Preston was to draw out of Cox an even more vigorous repetition of what he’d already said—more harm than help to Preston.

After Cox, the justices decided the day was too advanced to go on and that court would be adjourned until the next morning—the news brought Jane’s grandmother leaning across Jane to her husband. “I’ve never heard of such a thing! A trial gone beyond a day? Whatever will those poor jurors from the outlying towns do?”

“They’ll be sequestered in the gaol-keeper’s house.”

“The lot of them? To sleep on the floor?”

“Bedding will be brought in. Food and liquor as well; ’tisn’t the old days where they were starved till the verdict was delivered. But the one who will suffer greatest from such a hold-over is Captain Preston.”

Yes, thought Jane—the words that will hang in the jurors’ minds all night will be:
Damn your blood, fire!

ON THE SECOND DAY
it was as if someone had wrapped each member of the courtroom in string and pulled hard on the end, the inhabitants bouncing upward while the soldiery dragged down. Preston in his box had grown, if possible, more grim; he did not look at Jane. Of the five judges and six lawyers on the opposite side of the bar, only Adams looked serene. Did he think to win either way?

The first witness of the day was a man named Bliss, who testified with certainty that someone in the soldiers’ line had indeed called out the order to fire, but he could not say that it was Preston. When he recalled that Preston had been standing in front of the guns most of the time, Jane looked to see if the jury had made note of the significance; half the men looked blank; the other half looked bored.

The second witness was Henry Knox. The loyalist Samuel Quincy began by asking Knox to describe the scene as he’d arrived, and there Henry looked at Jane, as if in some sort of signal. Or was it a warning? “I was escorting a friend to her home on Royal Exchange Lane. As we came upon the sentry at the Custom House he was being pestered by a group of boys. He was scared, but in no danger, and there was no need for him to raise the alarm.”

Jane looked to John Adams, waiting for him to object to such an overstepping, but he did nothing. Henry went on to describe his conversation with Preston and the events as they had been recorded in his deposition. Samuel Quincy then rose to thank him, not only for his testimony, but for his noble efforts to forestall the crisis that had nonetheless befallen the town.

Josiah Quincy rose. “Could you tell me, Mr. Knox, how many times you heard the call to fire?”

“It came twice from the soldiers’ line.”

“And how many times from the crowd?”

Henry hesitated. “I don’t know.”

“But you heard the crowd so call.”

“I did.”

Josiah Quincy likewise thanked Henry, but he hadn’t helped either, or so Jane believed.

And neither did Benjamin Burdick, who only reiterated what Henry had said—that a call to fire had come from the soldiers’ line, although he couldn’t say for sure that Preston gave it. Robert Fullerton was much the same. Daniel Calef was not.

“I heard the officer who stood on the left in the line give the order to fire, twice. I looked him in the face and saw his mouth move. He had on a red coat, yellow jacket, and silver-laced hat.” It was the perfect description of Preston’s uniform. He went on, in case there was any question: “The prisoner is the officer I mean. I saw his face plain, the moon shone on it. I am sure of the man.”

Robert Goddard came next, the troubling Robert Goddard who had identified Preston in gaol as the officer who had given the order to fire; at first Jane was unconcerned, as he seemed to be slow-witted, but when it came to the important moment, he grew all too clear.

“A sailor or a townsman charged up and struck the captain,” he said. “The captain leaped back, drew his sword, and cried, ‘Damn your blood, fire!’ ”

There John Adams stood up. “What makes you say the man might have been a sailor, sir?”

“ ’Spose it was how he looked.”

“How he was dressed?”

“Like that, yes.”

“So he was dressed as a sailor.”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did, sir. Thank you.”

Adams sat. Jane was not awed. He had achieved his goal of establishing that at least one of the troublemakers had come off a ship, likely from outside the town, but Goddard’s identification of Preston stood firm. Perhaps deadliest of all, so did a motivation: Preston had been struck and thus would demand his revenge.

Nine more witnesses were brought to the bar, but they neither added nor subtracted to what had gone before. They didn’t need to. Samuel Quincy reminded the jurors in his summation of the damning testimony by Calef and Goddard. He spoke of the massacre as an act “accompanied with those circumstances that show the heart to be perversely wicked,” and so the Crown closed.

John Adams rose to open the case for the defense and no doubt he gave a stirring speech, but Jane heard none of it—it was as if Samuel Quincy’s words, “perversely wicked,” had clamped her ears closed. The words had brought her again to Winslow’s horse. Why had Adams declined to accept that case when he had agreed to accept the
qui tam
? Perhaps he thought her father guilty of that particular crime and not the other. Perhaps he thought her father too “perversely wicked” to deserve his skill, a skill of which Jane continued ignorant thus far.

Jane came alert when the first defense witness was called, but there too it seemed to Jane that John Adams fared poorly. He called up the importer from the Brazen Head, whose entire purpose, it seemed, was to testify to the summons for Preston and the Main Guard. The next two witnesses attested to like matters. The fourth witness testified to Preston knocking up the soldiers’ muskets after the firing had occurred, and perhaps there some valuable momentum might have been gained, but there the court adjourned.

J
ANE EXPECTED TO
appear among the witnesses the next day, and the thought of it brought on a Mehitable-style headache that carried her away from the supper table. She lay down on her bed in all her clothes, unequal to all the extra movements required to undress. She closed her eyes and immediately saw the moonlit snow, the snapping jaws of the crowd, the line of soldiers, Preston’s red coat. Then what? There was what she believed she’d seen and heard. There was what her brother wished her to have seen and heard. There was what Henry Knox and, to a degree, John Adams wished her
not
to have seen and heard. And there was that merciless, grinding, pounding between her ears.

JOHN ADAMS CAME TO
greet her as she entered the courtroom. “Ah! My favorite witness! Are we ready to do battle?”

No, thought Jane; never had the events of March the fifth jumbled about so in her mind. She knew that a sleepless night could jumble things well enough by itself, but there was this other thing, this sense that she was being asked to carry something large and she was too small to even see around it. If Hugh White had indeed attempted to slay her brother, should she not thirst with him for his revenge? If Preston had indeed given the order to fire, must she not judge it a transgression of the severest kind and wish him punished accordingly? If, however, Preston had not ordered his soldiers to fire, but in the normal bedlam had failed to collect his men in time, should he not pay some price for that as well? But if he were to pay a price, should that price be his life? She looked at John Adams. She said, “I fear, sir, you expect too much.”

“Why, I expect you to say what you saw and no more.” He peered down at her, every bit the foremost lawyer in town now. “And no less.” He walked away.

ADAMS’S FIRST WITNESS, JOSEPH
Edwards, testified that it was the corporal, not the captain, who had ordered the soldiers to prime and load their muskets.

“And what makes you certain it was the corporal?” Adams asked.

“The chevrons on his sleeve, sir,” Edwards said. “In the moonlight they looked like rips.”

Jane looked at the jury and could see the image printed across every single face: the moonlight, the sleeve, the “rips.” Two other witnesses came forward and testified to Preston’s attire—the sash, the silver georgette, the officer’s sword—and Jane saw that imprinted as well; they would not be confused.

“Jane Clarke!” Her name had been called. She stepped forward. Adams approached and smiled at her, and with the smile a strange thing happened—she no longer saw the foremost lawyer in Boston but the man who had cradled Mehitable’s babe, the man whose night jar she had emptied, and the thing he had asked her to do seemed instantly simpler. To say what she saw
.
Not to judge Preston’s act, or to decide on the price that should be paid for such an act, but to say what she saw. Jane laid her hands on the bar; to her great amazement, they lay still.

“Would you be so kind as to describe for me, Miss Clarke, what you observed at the corner of Exchange and King on the night of March the fifth?”

Jane began. The boys pestering the sentry, the name-calling, the challenge over the bill. She described Hugh White striking the boy, the increasing crowd, the chunks of ice being thrown, the appearance of clubs, one club being thrown and striking a soldier. Adams never stopped her, even as she described the attack by the crowd, until she described the man in a dark cloak moving behind the soldiers.

“Can you better describe this cloak, Miss Clarke?”

“It was blue or black. A material like velvet or plush.” As she said it Jane saw that the jury saw it, and Jane saw exactly why Adams had brought up so many witnesses to testify to Preston’s uniform. There was the red and the silver and the yellow on the one hand, and the blue or black velvet or plush on the other; they could not be confused.

“And what did this gentleman do when he moved behind the soldiers?”

“He walked back and forth behind them, encouraging them to fire. The captain was at least three yards distant and for most of that time standing in front of his men. It was only when Captain Preston was struck that he stepped back. This was at the same time that the man in the cloak touched one of the soldiers on the back and said ‘Fire, by God I’ll stand by you,’ and immediately upon his speaking the soldiers fired. That is to say the main of the soldiers fired. There had been a single shot fired previously at the time the soldier had been knocked to the ground.”

“And you’re positive this man who touched the soldier and spoke these words was not Captain Preston?”

“I am. He was at a good distance from the captain. He wore a dark cloak, as I said. He worked his way out of the crowd and behind the soldiers, no doubt with such intention in mind.” She had gone too far, to even it up for Henry Knox having gone too far, but again, no one objected. Indeed, around the courtroom skirts and shoes and coat sleeves scraped and rustled and an involuntary murmur broke loose; inside the noise Jane heard for the first time the very great importance of her testimony for Preston. This or that or the other one could say that Preston had not given the order to fire, but if he hadn’t, who had? Jane was the only one thus far who had been able to offer an alternative. She was the only one who had spoken out loud the obvious motive of some in that crowd, to incite the very incident that some had prayed for, the incident that would get the soldiers removed.

Adams said, “And after this unfortunate incident, after citizens and soldiers alike had been brought to the ground, what happened then, Miss Clarke? Tell us, please. Tell us, what did you do?”

“I tended to the wounded inhabitants.”

“And among the inhabitants, did you find anyone you knew?”

My brother
.

“I found my brother.”

“You found your brother wounded by these British soldiers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You found your brother wounded by these British soldiers,” Adams repeated. He walked the length of the jury box, and returned to Jane again. “You found your brother lying bloodied in the street, and yet you came here to testify on Captain Preston’s behalf. Why, Miss Clarke?”

“Because the truth of it should be known.”

“
Because the truth of it should be known.
Thank you, Miss Clarke. For your testimony, and for the human decency that brought you here. We all thank you.”

Jane stepped back and waited for the pleasure that was to overcome her there on her lofty vantage-ground of truth, but the only thing that overcame her was an exhaustion so complete she could barely stand.

THERE WAS MORE TESTIMONY.
To Jane’s great relief a sailor named James Waddell now remembered that he had also seen the man in the dark cloak slip behind the soldiers. A Richard Palmes testified that at the time of the command to fire he stood next to Preston with his hand on his shoulder, and although he couldn’t say for certain the captain hadn’t given the order, he had not heard the words. A slave testified to the general unruliness of the crowd, their threats and assaults on the soldiers; the slave’s owner testified to the trustworthiness of the slave. Two more slaves and their owners testified in like manner. Several more witnesses, military and civilian, testified to Preston’s mild-tempered, prudent, and discreet nature. No doubt all of these witnesses greatly aided Preston’s cause, but Jane had felt and heard what had happened in the courtroom when she spoke and knew that her words had effected the great turn. The thought made her feel lighter and heavier in one.

ON SATURDAY JOHN ADAMS
gave his closing argument. The legal precedents he quoted were lost on Jane until he pulled something from a thing called
Pleas of the Crown:
“It is better five guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should die.” He followed it with a man named Blackstone: “Self-defence is the primary canon of the law of nature.” Next Adams proceeded to rip asunder each witness of the prosecution, and those he couldn’t rip apart he explained away as in error. But once he had done all that, he turned around and forgave them. “Man is a social creature,” he said. “His passions and imagination are contagious. The circumstances in King Street had a tendency to move all the passions. They have had a tendency to produce gloom and melancholy in all our minds. This may account for the variation in the testimony of honest men.”

He next reminded the jury of all the important points of the testimony for the defense, Jane’s central among them, but now she saw better the limits of her own importance. She had helped, yes, but if Preston were to be saved, it would be Adams who had saved him. Vindicated him. Or vindicated himself.

Jane thought—again—of Phinnie Paine
.

THE COURT BROKE
for
the Sabbath. For Jane, the day wore away as slowly as the cobblestones on the street, and she could only think how it must have passed for Preston in gaol, the jurors at the gaol-keeper’s. Jane’s grandfather attended meeting, but as was her usual habit even at Satucket, Jane’s grandmother stayed home. Ordinarily, Jane would have gone with her grandfather, but this day she decided to stay behind—there would be too many in the pews who disapproved of what she’d had to say in the courtroom.

THE TRIAL, THE FIRST
ever to go beyond a day, had now done the unheard of—it had gone into a second week—but when court resumed on Monday all that remained was for the prosecution to make its closing remarks and the jury to be charged. The jury retreated, but no one else left the courtroom. People began to mill about and greet their neighbors, but little of the chat had anything to do with the trial; it was as if all were afraid their talk might cast the wrong kind of spell.

Jane saw her brother Nate working his way through the crowd toward her. He came up and gave the smallest bow. “You did well.”

“I suppose from you that must mean I did not do well.”

Nate gazed at her with something almost of hurt. “I mean you did a difficult thing and you did it well.”

Jane laid a hand on his sleeve. “I suppose we shall see how well.”

Nate smiled and shook his head, as if there were no doubt, but no doubt of which verdict? He moved off.

Jane looked through the crowd, wondering if she might see Phinnie Paine. Surely if he were in town he would attend? She spied the kind of tapered back she had taken so often for his but refused to be fooled again. It turned and was Phinnie. The weight of her parting remark to him still heavy on her mind, she searched for some sort of greeting that might lighten it but could think of nothing fitting—to wave seemed too little, too call out seemed too much. Afterward, after he’d stared a time and turned away, she realized she’d left out the one thing that would have fitted best—a smile.

IT TOOK THE JURY
three hours to return Preston to his freedom. It took Sam Adams three minutes to begin his attempt to take it away. Jane had seen nothing of the man in the courtroom; he could not have expected John Adams, representing the defense, to have given his rebel cousin the floor, but perhaps he resented the prosecutors’ denying him a word to the cause. He stood now on the courthouse steps, his too-short arms waving, his voice pitched to a catcall, describing the jury’s verdict as the latest and grossest of all the recent miscarriages of justice the town had lately borne.