The Seekers (32 page)

With a grin, Jared leaned down, whispered, “Shirt.”

“Oh, don’t!”

“Corset!”

“You
mustn’t
say those words aloud!”

He laughed. “Going to report me to Aunt Harriet?”

The small, lovely girl shook her head in a serious way. “No, you get enough punishment on your own. I hate it when she takes the rod to you.”

“At the slightest pretext!” He started for the crates.

“It’s no wonder. You’re not polite to her.”

“Amanda, she despises me. I’m sorry to say that about your mother, but it’s true. Politeness has nothing to do with the thrashings—which I’m not going to allow much longer, I’ll tell you. After all, I’m thirteen years old.”

Stunned by the declaration, Amanda stood stock still. Jared strode straight on to the crates and climbed on the lowest one.

“Where are you going, Jared?”

He pointed. “Up to Mr. Dawlish’s roof peak. There should be a splendid view of the harbor.”

Holding her bonnet, Amanda looked upward. “It’s too steep!”

Jared shrugged. “For you. Wait there.”

“No! I want to come with you.”

Jared glanced both ways along the alley. He heard a dray rumbling in the street that crossed one end of the narrow passage behind the ice house. But he saw no people. He crouched down on the crate, extended his hand, smiled a dazzling smile.

“All right. Take hold.”

Amanda was lithe and strong. In spite of her skirt she climbed the swaying pile of crates with little difficulty. Jared pulled himself up past the gutter, flung a knee onto the roof. A moment later he helped her up. He braced himself on the shingles, let her crawl ahead of him toward the peak. He saw her as a silhouette against the clear December sky.

Up here the wind tugged and gusted. Jared’s cap blew off, skittered out of sight down in the alley. He paid no attention, amused at Amanda’s panted complaint.

“If I dirty this cape Mama will thrash me too.
Why
do you always have to do whatever comes into your head, Jared? If you’d just stop and think first—”

“That would spoil all the fun.” His smile turned faintly bitter. “I only do what your mother expects of me—”

“Don’t be unkind again—!”

“I’m not. It’s a fact.”

Clinging to the shingles, she breathed hard. “But you know what gets you into trouble. And you go right ahead! You always have to see sights from a roof, or—or dash off to the next corner to look at what’s beyond—”

“Because”—Jared strained to keep from slipping—“because I usually don’t like where I am at the moment, and I want to see where else I might go.” His eyes hardened. “I don’t get caught
all
that often—”

“That’s because”—looking back at him from the peak, Amanda drew deep breaths—“you’re a boy. It’s easy for you to go wherever you please. If I want to, I can’t.”

“You’re on the roof, aren’t you?”

“It’s too high.”

“No one forced you to climb up!”

“Oh yes,” she countered with utter seriousness. “You did. I want to do whatever you do, Jared. But sometimes that’s very hard for a girl.”

“You’d be wiser not to be such a good friend of mine,” he said, still working his way upward by means of his knees and his elbows.

They hung over the peak side by side, gazing at a panorama of rooftops and, beyond, the piers of the South End where ships bobbed at anchor. Seaward, the harbor islands stood out with great clarity. The islands broke a horizon line that seemed incredibly distant.

The brisk wind gave Jared’s cheeks a stiff, raw feeling. Yet the cold, pure light flooding down exhilarated him, produced a sense of freedom that was all too often lacking in the crowded streets below.

Amanda’s assessment of him was entirely correct. He
did
like to gaze on new sights—collect them, you could say. Maybe it was because he was always unhappy in the confinement of Uncle Gilbert’s large, comfortable, but somehow unfriendly house on Beacon Street. Jared despised being at home—or in school—anywhere, in fact, that he was supposed to be. He much preferred turning unfamiliar corners, or rattling through the shipyards, or hunting for coins in the muck beneath the piers.

“Oh!”

Amanda’s cry jerked him back to reality. One of her tiny gloved hands shot out helplessly. A gust of wind had blown the bonnet from her head—the ties had evidently come unfastened during her climb. He saw the bonnet sailing into the next street.

She stretched both hands toward the vanishing hat. “It’s gone!”

“Amanda, don’t let go—!”

His warning came too late. She began sliding.

In panic, he grabbed for her elbow, missed. She slid further down the roof.

“Grab the guttering if you go over!”

Thankfully, she did. As he negotiated his way down the shingled incline, scraping his palms and his kneecaps, she hung from the edge of the roof. Then she disappeared. He heard a clatter as she struck the crates and toppled them.

By the time he slid over the gutter, dangled, then dropped, she was picking herself up from the cobbles. Ruefully she examined her cape. Mud and a long rip were her rewards for joining her cousin’s little excursion.

She stamped a foot, as if that would somehow make the damage vanish. Her dark eyes filled with tears. Jared retrieved his sodden cap and wadded it in his coat pocket. To conceal his gloom over the little adventure ending badly, he scowled.

“Here, Amanda, it’s only a cape. Don’t snivel so.”

“Do I care a penny for the cape? I’ll get the rod and so will you!”

He pulled her against him, comforted her. She was probably right.

Eyes on the ice house door in case Dawlish came charging outside, he knelt. He began to dry her tears with his cuff. He noticed a raw place on the back of his left hand, which he’d scraped sliding down.

Blood oozed, bright scarlet. And the same thing happened that always happened when he chanced to cut himself. At the sight of blood, nausea churned his stomach and welled in his throat. For a seemingly endless moment, he was totally unable to move—

At last he wrenched his hand down, thrust it under his other arm, closed his eyes and applied pressure.

Puzzled, Amanda forgot her own difficulties. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I—I’m fine.”

Slowly he withdrew his hand. Thank God the scrape was superficial. The blood no longer oozed. His nausea lessened.

As usual, the reaction mystified and unsettled him. Why should the merest nick of a finger bring on that awful turmoil in his belly? That complete immobility?

Deep within himself, Jared had long ago answered the questions in a way that produced a feeling of utter hopelessness—and a secret conviction that Aunt Harriet was right in all she thought and said about him. He
did
have a quick temper, a wayward nature—and in some manner he couldn’t fully comprehend or explain, he was being punished for it. Because he
deserved
punishment—

Jared could find no other way to explain the riddle of his uncontrollable sickness, always of short duration but always paralyzing.

He forced himself to glance to the ice house door. It remained closed. Evidently Mr. Dawlish had retreated to another part of the big building and hadn’t heard them clatter off his roof. That was one bit of luck, anyway.

“Are you sure—?” Amanda began.

“I’m perfectly all right. Let’s be off.”

He closed his bigger hand firmly around hers. The bedraggled cousins started for home, and the inevitable reckoning with Gilbert Kent’s wife.

On the way, they passed a knife grinder singing a bit of New England doggerel:

Our ships all in motion,

Once whitened the ocean,

They sailed and returned with a cargo.

Now doomed to decay,

They are fallen a-prey

To Jefferson, worms and embargo—

Though national and international politics held little interest for Jared, he had a good deal of knowledge about both subjects. His uncle discussed them often at meal time.

Thus he knew the three-year-old song was connected with the troubles currently besetting the United States, troubles that seemed to weigh more and more heavily on Gilbert Kent as one month succeeded another.

Almost alone among rich Bostonians, Uncle Gilbert had supported the former president, Mr. Jefferson of Virginia, just as he now supported Jefferson’s chosen heir, President Madison. As a result, the Kent family had lost numerous friends.

Jared didn’t understand all the reasons. But he did know that the bitter political feud between his uncle and men of similar position in the community went back at least to the early part of the decade, to what New Englanders termed the foul murder of the Federalist, Hamilton, by the Republican, Colonel Aaron Burr. Actually, as Jared understood it, Hamilton had not been murdered at all. He had died in a theoretically illegal but perfectly fair match with dueling pistols.

Gilbert said contemptuously that because of “fossilized adherence to Federalism,” Massachusetts and its neighboring states were becoming an alien island in the republic. He claimed most upper-class Bostonians were hysterics, falsely convinced that New England was being “submerged” by a “Virginia junto” which controlled the government.

Much of the current disagreement between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans had to do with the French conqueror, Bonaparte. Bostonians called him the Antichrist. In an effort to keep America from becoming embroiled in hostilities between the so-called Antichrist and his traditional enemies, the English, Jefferson had bottled up American shipping. Imposed something called the embargo.
Dambargo
was New England’s name for it.

The embargo was the only one of Jefferson’s policies that Gilbert had reluctantly disavowed. It was disastrous for New England’s economy. Her merchants could not trade with England, France or any other foreign country. Her ships stood idle in port, protective barrels capping their masts. The other boys at Jared’s academy jeeringly referred to the barrels as “Mr. Madison’s teacups”—Madison, then Secretary of State, supported and implemented the president’s strategy.

Finally, the embargo was canceled—only to be replaced by the Nonintercourse Act. The Federalists considered it just as noxious as the embargo, since it still prohibited trade with Britain. That it also prohibited trade with France made no difference—France was the enemy, the Federalists shrilled, and why didn’t America wake up to that fact?

Meantime, both Britain and France continued to interfere with American shipping. The British were particularly guilty. Their squadrons blockaded the American coast. Their frigates and ships-of-the-line stopped and boarded American vessels at will, supposedly searching for runaway English seamen who preferred to sail under the stars and stripes because American naval discipline was less cruel and capricious. The tensions at sea had all but nullified Jefferson’s attempts at neutrality—and had produced an atmosphere in which the word
war
was mentioned more and more frequently.

New England wanted no part of a war with Britain. The rest of the country felt differently. Everywhere but in the northeast, people had cheered the preceding May when they heard the news of an encounter between a United States frigate and a British corvette.

The frigate
President
had mistaken the corvette
Little Belt
for a much larger and more infamous vessel,
Guerriere,
which had a long history of causing trouble for American ships in coastal waters. When
Little Belt
refused to answer
President
’s hail or raise identifying flags, there was a chase, then an exchange of salvos. The engagement ended with nine dead and twenty-three wounded aboard
Little Belt.

Although the U.S. government offered to settle the resulting claims, many people said
President
’s action was completely justified, considering that three Americans had been killed, eighteen wounded and four alleged British deserters seized when H.M.S.
Leopard
stopped and searched America’s
Chesapeake
in international waters in 1807. That four-year-old incident hadn’t been forgotten.
President
had settled the score—and if the British wanted more of the same, they could have it! Were, in fact, begging for it. Despite diplomatic attempts to get the British to cancel their Orders in Council—the orders authorizing seizure of seamen on American vessels—the orders still stood.

So now, in 1811, practically all the nation except New England felt Britain should be called to account. Jared had heard Uncle Gilbert say that the settlers in the states and territories of the west were actually demanding war, to stop a rash of new forays by the Indian tribes supposedly taking orders from Canada.

Just a month ago, the activities of the tribes had driven the Americans to action. The prime troublemakers, the Shawnee Tecumseh and his brother the Prophet, who preached a mystical doctrine of Indian supremacy, had been fomenting a union of all the tribes, a union whose purpose was to halt the encroachment of white settlers. As Tecumseh’s voice gained more and more listeners around council fires in the north as well as the south, General William Henry Harrison took to the field to stop him. In a stunning defeat, Harrison’s small army routed Tecumseh’s braves and razed his headquarters, the Shawnee village on Tippecanoe Creek in the Indiana Territory.

But Tecumseh was only at bay, not defeated. The Indian threat could materialize again—particularly since the British had a financial stake in driving the Americans from the fur lands around the Great Lakes and beyond the Mississippi.

Furs remained the west’s prime commodity. The expedition of Captains Lewis and Clark had only heightened the fever for exploration and exploitation of the Louisiana Purchase. Near the slopes of a great north-south mountain chain in the far west, Lewis and Clark said, beaver and other fur-bearing animals teemed. Thus America was in a race for control of the territory—

One evidence being the 1808 chartering of the American Fur Company headed by John Jacob Astor.

The German was already something of a national legend. Every boy Jared’s age knew his name and his story.