Johnny Tremain (23 page)

Fear had overcome the Lytes as they had sat down to eat. Bread broken and never eaten. The roast of beef, with Yorkshire pudding sticking in the cold gravy. A bowl of salad was still fresh. Wine in the slender goblets. Already the great house did not seem to have been abandoned for a few hours only but for years. It was as if a witchcraft had been worked upon it. Johnny saw that Cilla had started to get the silver together.

'Where's Mrs. Bessie?'

'She left earlier than we did, in a farm cart. But—you know—she'll be all right.'

Cilla went to work packing the silver, and she built up a little fire on the kitchen hearth so she might have hot water to wash the dishes. Neat by nature, she would leave the house tidy.

Johnny took the lantern he had left on the kitchen table and walked through the silent house. He could see that every window in the lower floor had been broken, but no one had entered. He went upstairs. Lavinia's room; and strewed about it things he had never seen before—stays, kerchiefs, patchboxes, ribbons, fripperies. It smelled faintly of lavender.

He went to Mr. Lyte's room. The great four-poster soared to the ceiling. A damask dressing gown—and Mr. Lyte's best wig on a wig rest. Off the big chamber and one step down was a smaller room designed as a dressing room. Mr. Lyte seemingly had used this as an office. Here was his desk, and above it a painting of his favorite ship, the
Unicorn.
And here, judging by the tipped-over chair and the rumpled rugs, Mr. Lyte had had his all but fatal fit. It had caught him as he had been packing his more important papers—papers he wished no one to see. Johnny picked up what looked like a leather-bound book. It had been hollowed out, turned into a box. In a bookcase no one would suspect it. He glanced at the papers within. Every one of them, he saw, Sam Adams would be thankful to get. These he put in his pocket. Other books were scattered on the floor. Johnny picked up a heavy Bible, hoping that this, too, would prove to be a box. He put it on the desk and opened it. There were sheets of paper between the Old and New Testaments. Here a man might write his genealogy.

So ... the first Jonathan Lyte had been born in Kent in sixteen-something ... and he had married a Matilda something. Had come to Boston and had four sons and three daughters. And they (all seven) had sons and daughters, and so on. Now he was coming to the generation in which he might expect to find his own mother. Here, indeed, was Merchant Lyte himself and his daughter Lavinia, the two sons who had drowned at Guadalupe, the girls dead in infancy. He even found that Aunt Bert (who had stayed on at Boston with her own servant). He found one Lavinia Lyte after another. One married an Endicott and one an Otis. Neither was the right age for his mother.

Scratched out in such a way he had at first thought it was a mere decoration on the elaborately written page, there was another name. It was Lavinia Lyte. He held the lantern closer. Born 1740. Married to Doctor Charles Latour, both of whom had died of plague in Marseilles shortly before his own birth. His mother had told him he had been born in France and that his father had died before his own birth. But why Doctor Charles Latour? And why had his mother's name been scratched off the family record? But nevertheless, this was the spot—the very spot where he might hang his own few meager leaves to the Lyte tree.

Although in his day-dreaming he had often pictured himself a nephew, grandnephew, or even a grandson, of Merchant Lyte, he had never once believed the relationship was that close. Now he checked over the generations. His grandfather, Roger Lyte (dead now for twenty years and builder of this very house), had been the younger brother of Jonathan Lyte. Johnny himself was the merchant's grandnephew.

He took his knife from his pocket and cut the pages from the family Bible. Sometime they might be of use to him.

Cilla was calling him. She wanted him to help her carry the heavy boxes and hampers of silver to the chaise. On the side-board, as yet unpacked, stood the four standing cups of the Lytes.

'Which one is yours, Johnny?'

He looked them over carefully. Only a silversmith could have told them apart. The base of one had been ever so little bent and straightened again.

'This is my cup.'

'Take it now.'

'No.' He set it down and turned restlessly to Cilla. He could not say to anyone what went through his mind—not to Cilla, not even to himself. He acted and spoke blindly.

'It's no good to me. We've ... moved on to other things.'

'But it isn't stealing to take back what Mr. Lyte stole from you.'

'I don't want it.'

'What?'

'No. I'm better off without it. I want nothing of them. Neither their blood nor their silver ... I'll carry that hamper for you, Cil. Mr. Lyte can have the old cup.'

'But your mother?'

'She didn't like it either.'

He came back when he had left the hamper and stopped by the kitchen hearth. Cilla had built up a little fire of fagots to heat water. He put his two hands on the mantelpiece and his forehead on his hands. He stood like that a long time. His grandfather had built this great house. His mother had played on the floor of this kitchen. Was it here his father had come—his father, the French doctor?...Doctor Latour the Bible had it. Here was mystery surely. Why not Doctor Tremain? And why had the Bible said both he and Lavinia Lyte died of plague in Marseilles: 1758—three months before he himself had been born? Does it matter? Does it—or doesn't it? No. He answered his own question aloud, and took from his pocket the heavy pages he had cut from the Bible, all written over with the names of his genealogy. He could not think now why he had ever cut them out. Slowly, tearing each sheet to ribbons, he fed them to the fire upon the hearth.

Then Cilla was asking him to close and fasten all the heavy shutters through the house. This would protect the interior a little, in spite of broken window-panes. His footsteps echoed through the vast, silent reaches of the house. One after another the heavy shutters slammed to and he bolted them. A protest of unused hinges and then a bang, and he went on to the next. The echo of his own footsteps.

'My grandfather built this house...'

'My mother knew it and loved it...'

'My father dead before ever I was born...'

Now, for as long as it stood, this would be a haunted house. He felt the ghosts waiting in darkness until he and Cilla were gone before they stepped forth to take possession. Merchant Lyte—soon enough he too would be back here. Miss Lavinia? She might live to be a hundred, but the time would come when, wilt she or not, she must return to this house. This haunted house, with its thin wreath of wraiths and his mother's among them. He had seen her face, heard her voice so clearly that night he had lain by her grave on Copp's Hill. He thought of her with love and a tender understanding (an understanding he had been too young to give when she had died), but he left the haunted chambers, echoing halls, and went gladly to the kitchen where Cilla was. For the dead should not look at the living—nor the living too long upon the dead.

Cilla, unaware of his emotions, looked about her with satisfaction. She had finished her work.

'Now it will be in good order when the Lytes come back.'

Johnny felt sad. He went to her and put his arms about her and his thin cheek against her hair.

'Cilla, they won't ever come back.'

'Never?'

'No. This is the end. The end of one thing—the beginning of something else. They won't come back because there is going to be a war—civil war. And we'll win. First folk like them get routed out of Milton—then out of Boston. And the cards are going to be reshuffled. Dealt again ... Shall I shutter the kitchen too?'

'Yes.'

Each time a shutter groaned, protested, and then came to with a bang, it seemed to say, 'This is the end,' and the words echoed through the house: This is the end. This is the end.

'My mother played on the floor of this kitchen. My grandfather was but a young man when he built this house, and I, a grandson, have better right to it doubtless than an elder brother.'

The house was still filled with midnight and ghosts, but as they closed and locked the heavy kitchen door behind them they saw it was close upon dawn.

'It is like a funeral,' Cilla whispered, 'only worse.'

So he knew that much of what he had been feeling, Cilla had also felt.

Along down Old Country Road, marching through the meager, half-light of the new day, came a company of Minute Men up and out early, drilling for coming battles before it was yet the hour to get to their chores. Left, right, left, right, left ... they did not march too well. A boy no bigger than Dusty Miller had put a fife to his lips, was trying to blow it. He made awkward little tootles. The men marched on past the defaced gates of the Lytes' country seat, never turning to look at them or Doctor Warren's chaise with Cilla and Johnny under the hood.

Oh, God help them, thought Johnny. They haven't seen those British troops in Boston. I have. They haven't seen the gold lace on the generals, those muskets—all so alike, and everyone has a bayonet. They haven't seen...

The chaise overtook and passed the marching farmers.

That musket which Rab did not have bothered Johnny. However, the soldiers never carried them while loitering about alehouses and wharves, or the stables of the Afric Queen. They stood guard with them. They drilled with them. They practiced marksmanship (very badly, Rab said), and now and then over at the foot of the Common they executed a deserter with them, but never, not once, as far as Johnny could make out, did they leave them about. Drilling, shooting, marching over, they stacked them at their barracks and there was always at least a sergeant guarding these stacked guns.

Johnny and Rab dropped their voices, even in the privacy of their attic, when they discussed these muskets. The Yankee gunsmiths were working from dawn to dusk preparing guns, making new ones, but as long as Rab had a weapon and was, after all, little more than a boy, he believed he had no chance for a modern gun unless he got it for himself from the British.

'How soon,' Johnny whispered, 'before they march out ... and the war begins?'

'God knows,' Rab murmured. 'God and General Gage. Maybe not until next spring. Armies always move in the spring. But before then I must have a good gun in my hands. A man can stand up to anything with a good weapon in his hands. Without it, he's but a dumb beast.'

Johnny had never seen Rab so blocked by anything. Apparently he went through every situation without friction, like a knife going through cheese. Now he was blocked and it made him restless, possibly less canny. One day he told Johnny that he had a contract with a farmer from Medway who was making a business of buying muskets from the British privates and selling them to Minute Men. Rab did not like to ask his aunt for so large a sum. She had little enough to buy food. But she had said, 'Weapons before food.'

One morning Johnny knew Rab was meeting the farmer at market. He knew that the soldier, returning from guard duty, was going, absent-mindedly, to leave his musket on a pile of straw. It had all been worked out. But when he heard yells and shouts from the market-place and the rattle of British drums calling up reserves, he tore over to Dock Square. He had a feeling that the turmoil was over Rab's gun. He was right.

A solid block of redcoats faced out, presenting their muskets at the market people and inhabitants. The Captain was yelling to the churning hundreds. 'Get back, stand back, good people of Boston. This is our own private affair.'

'What's happened?' Johnny asked an old hen-wife.

'They've caught one of their own men selling a musket to a farmer.'

'Happens he comes from Medway?'

'So 'tis said.'

'Happens they caught more than the farmer and the soldier?'

'They caught three in all. They are taking them over to the Province House—for General Gage.'

'Gage is in Salem.'

'For some colonel, then.'

No mob gathered to rescue the two Yankees. All, by now, felt a certain confidence in the British way of doing things. A general, or even a colonel, had the right to punish a soldier caught selling his arms, and also anyone who tempted him.

Johnny tagged the marching soldiers, but it was not until they turned into the Province House that he saw the three prisoners. The British soldier was grinning, and Johnny guessed that he had been put up to this game merely to snare 'the yokels.'

The farmer was in his market smock. He had long, straight gray hair and a thin, mean mouth. You could tell by looking at him he had gone into this little business for the love of money, not for the love of freedom. Rab had been shaken out of his usual nice balance between quick action and caution by his passionate desire for a good gun. Otherwise he would not have mixed himself up with such a man. Rab himself was looking a little sullen. He was not used to defeat. What would they do to him? They might imprison him. They might flog him. Worst of all, they might turn him over to some tough top sergeant to be taught 'a lesson.' This informal punishment would doubtless be the worst.

The Province House was a beautiful building and as Johnny hung about the front of it he had a chance to admire it for over an hour. It stood well back from the rattle and bustle of Marlborough Street, with its glassy-eyed copper Indian on top of the cupola and its carved and colored lion and unicorn of Britain over the door. Behind the house he heard orders called and soldiers were hallooing—but worst of all they were laughing. And that was Colonel Nesbit's boy bringing around the Colonel's charger. There was a large group of people still standing in the street. The hilarity of the British soldiers did not ease their fears as to the fate of the prisoners. Johnny could hear the rattle of the men's muskets as they came to attention, and then, all together, four drummers let their sticks fall as one.

Out onto Marlborough Street, with the drummers in black bearskin caps first, and then Colonel Nesbit on horseback, came almost the entire Forty-Seventh Regiment, surrounding a cart. In the cart sat a hideous blackbird, big as a man, shaped like a man, with head hung forward like a molting crow. It was a naked man, painted with tar and rolled in feathers. Three times already the Whigs had tarred and feathered enemies and carted them through the streets of Boston. Now it was the British turn. The redcoats marched. The Colonel's horse pranced. The cart with its shameful burden bumped over the cobbles. One glance had convinced Johnny this was not Rab. The hideous blackbird had a paunch. Rab had none.