The Sot-Weed Factor (66 page)

"But the story of Susan Warren and Elizabeth Williams --"

" 'Tis true, the whole of't, save for one detail: it is the story of the poor girl's plight when I was brought to Mitchell's. 'Twas my likeness to her, and hers to Elizabeth Williams, that had fetched the high price he paid me: soon after he'd enthralled me with his opium, he murthered Susan in a fit o' rage, and buried her as Elizabeth Williams!"

" 'Sheart!"

" 'Twas necessary then," Joan declared, "to hide his crime, for he wanted no attention brought to bear on his business. Therefore he sought out William Smith at Malden and told him the girl had died o' pox; then, to be entirely safe, he promised to make Smith a wealthy whoremaster on condition he avow me as his daughter. The cooper's greed got the better of his sentiment, and of course I had no say in the matter."

"But marry!" Ebenezer cried. "This Mitchell's a greater fiend than his master Coode!"

"I know not who is Mitchell's master, or whether in sooth he hath one, but I know there is some monstrous plot afoot. Mitchell is freighting his opium to every quarter of the Province, and girls like me are set a-purpose to pox the hapless Indians."

The image of this latter, together with the memory of his behavior at Mitchell's and his share of responsibility for her plight in general, were too much for Ebenezer to endure: he was seized with a fit of dry retches that left him lying exhausted across the bed.

" 'Twas merely as a test I mentioned Joan Toast's name, to gauge your feeling for her; and another when I bargained to swive ye for my boat fare: had ye spurned me I'd have marked it to my ugliness, inasmuch as ye'd meant to rape me on the
Cyprian
when I was comelier. Yet when instead ye had at me in the bedchamber 'twas still no flattery, for ye declared ye'd play the virgin yet at Malden with Joan Toast."

"Only let me die for shame!" Ebenezer wailed. "Fetch me a pistol from below and take revenge for all your suffering! Or summon John McEvoy and tell him what you've endured on my account -- I shall share his pleasure in murthering me!"

"I have already seen John McEvoy," Joan replied, "in this very house, not six weeks past. He had heard of your loss of Malden and sought me out through Burlingame whilst ye were ill."

"How must he loathe me!"

"E'en ere he'd seen the state I'd come to," Joan said glibly, " 'twas his greatest wish to kill ye."

"Then fetch him in to shoot me, and have done with't!"

"Hear me out." Joan moved to stand over him at the edge of the bed. "I told him we were man and wife, albeit ye were still virginal, and I loved ye yet despite my sore afflictions; and I told him that for your misfortunes, and my own, and his as well, no one of us could be blamed alone, but all must share the guilt. At last I said I love him still, but not as I love my husband, and that if he did ye harm, 'twould but be injuring me as well. Then I sent him away and bade him return no more, for
A woman may have at once threescore o' lovers, but only one beloved at a time.
I have had no news of him since, nor do I wish any."

Ebenezer was too overwhelmed to speak.

"Here is six pounds your father gave me to flee Mitchell with," Joan concluded briskly, laying the money on the counterpane. " 'Tis enough for one fare, and two hours in the curing-house will earn the other. The bark
Pilgrim
sails from Cambridge on the early-morning tide, to join the fleet at Kecoughtan."

"You are too good!" the poet wept. "What can I say or do to show my love?"

"No man can love the wreck ye married," Joan replied. "But if ye truly wish to ease my chore, there is a thing I'd have ye do."

"Anything!" Ebenezer swore, and then realized with horror what she might ask.

"I see your fear upon your face," Joan observed. "Put it by; 'tis not your innocence I crave."

"I swear to you --"

"Pray don't; 'twere a needless perjury. I ask ye but to wear this fishbone ring ye gave me, that hath such a curious value with some planters, and give me to wear in turn your silver seal ring: 'twill make me feel more a wife and less a hedge-whore."

" 'Tis little recompense," Ebenezer said, and though in fact it gave him considerable pain to relinquish the ring his sister had given him, he dared not show his feelings when he pulled it from his finger and Joan slipped the larger fishbone in its place.

"Swear to me thou'rt my husband!" she demanded.

"I swear't to Heav'nl And thou'rt my wife, for ever and aye!"

"Nay, Eben, 'twere too much for me to crave, and you to swear. I dare not hope ye'll even wait."

"May some god strike me dead if I do not! How can you think of't!"

Joan shook her head and turned the silver seal ring on her finger. "I must go to the curing-house now in any case," she said grimly. "The ring will help."

For some time after her departure Ebenezer lay fully dressed across the bed, still overcome by all he'd learned that evening. The candle, freshly lit after supper to illuminate the completion of his poem, had long since burned low and was extinguished by the slight draft from the hallway upon Joan's exit. In one hand he clutched the money she had left him; he fingered the fishbone ring and prayed wordless prayers of gratitude to whatever gods had granted him this means of escaping his father's wrath on the one hand and suicide on the other, and at the same time of discharging, in some measure, his awful obligation to Joan Toast.

"What business hath a poet with the business of the world?" he asked himself rhetorically. "With properties and estates, the tangled quarrels of governments, and the nets of love? They are his subject matter only, and the more he plays a part therein, the less he sees them clearly and entire. This was the great mistake I made in starting: the poet must fling himself into the arms of Life, e'en as I said, and pry into her priviest charms and secrets like a lover, but he must hide his heart away and ne'er surrender it, be cold as the callous gigolo, whose art with women springs from his detachment; or like those holy fathers that wallowed once in sin, the better to hie them to their cells and reject the world with understanding, so the poet must engage himself in whate'er world he's born to, but shake free of't ere it shackle him. He is a keen and artful traveler, that finding himself in alien country apes the dress and manners of them that dwell there, the better to mark their barbarous custom; but a traveler nonetheless, that doth not linger overlong. He may play at love, or learning, or money-getting, or government -- aye, even at morals or metaphysic -- so long as he recalls 'tis but a game played for the sport of't, and for failure or success alike cares not a fart. I am a poet and no creature else; I shall feel conscience only for my art, and there's an end on't!"

This reflection he had launched by way of justifying his flight with Joan; by the time it assumed the tone of a manifesto, however, a new thought had occurred to him, so abominable that he thrust it from his mind at once, and yet so fascinating in its wickedness that it thrust itself back again and again.

"Ah God, that I should e'en conceive it! And whilst the poor wretch toils and shivers in some salvage's embrace to earn our passage!"

But for all he called the notion unthinkable, it was already thought, and the more he reviled and railed against it, the more tenacious grew its hold upon his fancy. After forty-five minutes or so he found himself saying, " 'Twas nowise her doing that the great Moor split her, and poxed her, and got a black babe in her, for all her opium and whoring, she is the same Joan Toast I love, nor was her character disfigured by Mitchell's purgatives and abuse, that ruined her hair and teeth. 'Twas saintly faith and charity to leave me this money, e'en though 'twas my own father she had it from, and that by fraud. What's more she is my wife: it matters naught in the eyes of Heaven that Richard Sowter may not be empowered to make marriages, or that I wed her under duress and she me under a false name, or that in the eyes of the law she hath committed scores and hundreds of adulteries, while our marriage hath not e'en been consummated! I must wait for her return, and in the event she hath not poxed six poundsworth of filthy salvages, I must in conscience give Father's money back to her, and suffer his wrath after all -- which will be so much the greater for her jilting him! Thus runs our Christian code of honor, and though as poet I'm but a guest, as't were, in Christendom, still a guest is bound to honor the rules of the house."

Yet bound by what, if not the very code in question? As best he could estimate, his time was running short: he rose from the bed, put a heavy coat about his shoulders, and searched out his ledger-book. Though he could not make out the verses in the dark, he sang in his head the fierce conclusion of his satire and hugged the notebook to his breast.

But at the darkened exitway he was flooded with a sweat of shame. "Nay, what am I doing! For all I'm more a poet now than ever in my life (and thus obliged to no soul save my muse nor any institution save my craft), and for all my pledge runs counter to the poet's creed and to the vow made long before to Anna, yet damn it, I have given my word, and sealed it with the rings!"

This was the final anguish. As he tiptoed down the stairs and out the back door of the house, he saw his sister's drawn and hardening features; as he stalked across the dark yard to the stables he recalled her presentation of the ring, and his answering nervous vow to make her dowry flourish. By the time he found some visitor's saddled horse and mounted, the image of Joan Toast had somehow got blurred with that of Burlingame, on the one hand, and his own cause merged in some way with Anna's on the other, so that the two pairs stood in an opposition no less positive for its being, presently at least, not quite identifiable.

A cold December wind swept over Cooke's Point and froze the tears on the poet's cheeks. He pressed his heels into the horse and cried "May some god strike me dead!" but clutched the bank note tightly lest he lose it in the dark.

The Poet Encounters a Man With Naught

to Lose, and Requires Rescuing

T
hroughout the frozen
fifteen miles between Cooke's Point and the wharf at Cambridge, Ebenezer shivered not from the wind alone, nor again from the simple self-revulsion that came and went in clonic spasms, and between the seizures of which he could affirm the cardinal value of his art and the corollary value of his independence; what shook him mainly was his fear that Joan might follow, or that he would be recognized, apprehended, and returned to Malden as a fugitive from his late indenture. It was not yet dawn when he arrived at the county seat: the inn and courthouse were dark, but in the creek-mouth loomed the
Pilgrim,
her ports and masthead lanterns lit, and about her decks as well as on the wharf men toiled by lamplight to fit her out for the turning of the tide. Now nearly set, the moon hid all but the morning star; it pleased Ebenezer to imagine that it hung over the meridian of London like the star of old over Bethlehem, guiding him to the cradle of his destiny.

"There's a figure Henry Burlingame would make mincemeat of," he reflected, and tethering his horse, made his way nervously towards the wharf. "I know not whether I am Magus, Messiah, Lazarus, or the Prodigal."

He had not gone far through the laboring stevedores before a hand fell lightly on his shoulder and someone behind him asked, "Are ye quitting Cooke's Point so soon, Master Laureate?"

Ebenezer spun around to face his captor, but the man he saw, though distantly familiar, was no one whose intentions he could confidently assume to be hostile. It was a dirty, ragged old fellow with much untrimmed beard and no wig, thin as a skeleton, who had been coiling lines nearby.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

The fellow showed great surprise. "Ye do not even know me?" he cried, as though the possibility were too good to be true.

Ebenezer scrutinized him uncomfortably: barring a metamorphosis nothing short of miraculous, the man was not Burlingame, McEvoy, Sowter, Smith, or Andrew Cooke, and neither his dress nor his occupation suggested the county sheriff.

"I do not, nor why you accost me."

"Ah now, fear not, Mister Cooke, sir. I care not whether or wherefore ye sail, nor would it matter if I did: ye can see yourself I'm but a wharf rat, and could not stop ye."

"Then prithee let me go," Ebenezer said. "I must find passage out to yonder ship at once."

"Indeed?" The stevedore smiled a toothless smile and squeezed the poet's arm. "Is Madame Cooke sailing with ye, or doth her business keep her at Malden?"

"Put by your hand and your impertinence this instant," Ebenezer threatened, "or I'll have you sacked!" His voice was angry, but in truth he was terrified at the prospect of apprehension. Already a gentleman standing some distance behind the stevedore was watching them with interest.

"There's little ye can do to injure me," the stevedore sneered. "At my wages 'tis no threat to sack me, and I can't sink lower when I'm already on the bottom. Ye might say I am a man with naught to lose, for I've lost it all ere now."

"That is a pity," Ebenezer began, "but I do not see --"

"Know that not long since I was a gentleman, Master Poet, with horse and dog, wig and waistcoat, and sot-weed fields aplenty in my charge; but now, thanks to you, sir, 'tis a good day when my work so wearies me that I sleep o'er the growling of my gut, and I go in tatters, and harvest naught but vermin, chilblains, and blisters."

Ebenezer frowned incredulously. "Thanks to
me?"
Suddenly he recognized his detainer and tingled with alarm. "Thou'rt Spurdance, my father's overseer!"

"No other soul than he, that was deceived by your father, conspired against by your unholy friend Tim Mitchell, and ruined by yourself!"

"Nay, nay!" Ebenezer protested. "There is more to't than you know!" To his distress he saw the interested gentleman moving nearer. " 'Twas my poor innocence undid you!"

" 'Tis you, not I, that are benighted," insisted the stevedore. "I know ye granted Malden away in ignorance, and I know as well as you Tim Mitchell is not Tim Mitchell, nor Susan Warren Susan Warren. But I know too old Captain Mitchell, for all he was erst a wicked and unnatural rogue till some years past, hath lately been in the power of your friend Tim! 'Tis Tim Mitchell that is the grand high whoremaster, whoe'er he is and whoe'er he works for; 'tis he that oversees the opium trade from New York to Carolina; 'tis he conspires with Monsieur Casteene and the Naked Indians; 'tis he made the contracts with your father and the rest to turn their manors into brothels and opium-houses, now the sot-weed market's fallen, and woe betide the honest overseer that will have none of't!" He grasped Ebenezer's other arm as well and crowded him backwards toward the bulkhead. "If he be not ruined by some ninny like yourself, that knows not black from white, he will be sacked by's crooked master; if he make the evil public, all his neighbors will turn on him as one man, lest their pleasures be curtailed, and if he dare make trouble for your nameless friend --"

"Beware the bulkhead, sir!" the approaching gentleman cried, and drew his shortsword.

"I cannot help it!" Ebenezer gasped, observing his peril. "This man --"

"Release him!" the stranger commanded.

Spurdance glanced wildly at the sword. "I've naught to lose, damn ye! This wretch and his devilish ally --"

The stranger smote him across the face with the flat of his sword, and before he could collect himself the point was at his gullet.

"Not another word upon that topic," the stranger said: "neither now nor later, else 'twill be your final word on earth." To the assembled stevedores he said, "This madman assaulted Master Cooke, the Laureate Poet of Maryland! If he's a friend of yours, fetch him out of here before I set the sheriff on him."

Though in all likelihood he had been recognized already, Ebenezer was alarmed at the proclamation of his name. Yet the stranger's manner quite awed the stevedores: two of them helped the injured Spurdance move off toward the inn, and another volunteered to ferry both gentlemen out to the
Pilgrim.

"I'faith, you've saved my life, sir!" Ebenezer said.

"My honor, Mister Cooke," the stranger replied. He was a short, swarthy, and solidly proportioned man, rather older than the poet; he wore his natural iron-grey hair and a short beard of the same color, and his coat, boots, and breeches, though simply designed, were of expensive-looking material.

"Yonder is the
Pilgrim's
gig." he declared. "I'm Nicholas Lowe of Talbot, bound for St. Mary's City."

But even as he identified himself his face was illuminated by the lantern of a passing stevedore: Ebenezer recognized the bright eyes and unfortunate teeth and gasped

"Henry!"

"Nicholas
is the name," Burlingame repeated. "Nicholas Lowe, of Talbot County. Are you traveling alone, sir? I understood you were a married man."

Ebenezer blushed. "I -- I must try to explain that, Henry, when there's time. But i'God, 'twas not for my sake you smote Spurdance!"

"No other cause," Burlingame said.
"A man may see his friend need, but he will not see him bleed.
And call me Nicholas, if you will, since Nicholas is my name."

"The things he said of you, and of Father! They dizzy me!"

"Sleeveless poppycock."

But Ebenezer shook his head. "What cause had he to lie? As he himself declared, he'd naught to lose."

" 'Tis not enough for trust that a man hath naught to lose," Burlingame replied, "if by virtue of that fact he hath somewhat to gain."

"Nor that he hath naught to gain," Ebenezer added bitterly, thinking of the attack on Spurdance, "when he hath much to lose."

"Yet remove all prospects for gain and loss alike, and for all your witness hath Truth for his mainsail, his rudder will be Whimsy and his breeze inconstant Chance."

"You'd have me think no man is trustworthy, then?" Ebenezer asked. "Methinks there is a motive in that cynicism!"

"What the saint calls cynicism," Burlingame said with a shrug, "the worldly man calls sense. The fact of't is,
all
men can be trusted, but not with the same things. Just as I might trust a sea-captain with my life, but not with my wife, so I trust Ben Spurdance's intention, but not his information. 'Tis only fools and children, or wretches blind with love like poor Joan Toast, that will trust a man with everything."

Ebenezer's face burned. "You know my shame!"

Burlingame shrugged. " 'Tis mankind's shame, is't not, that we are no angels? What have I learnt, save that thou'rt human, and Joan Toast such a fool as I described?"

"And I another!" the poet wept. "What was't but love for you that all these months hath scaled my eyes to your behavior, plugged my ears to your own admissions and the dire reports of others, and so deranged my reason that I justify your arrantest poltrooneries?"

"You believe that booby of an overseer," Burlingame said scornfully. "Why is't you do not swallow hook and leader as well, and believe those folks who say 'twas I brought Coode and Jacob Leisler together and set off the entire string of revolutions? Why not believe the gentlemen who make me chief lieutenant of the Pope or King Louis, or James the Second, or William Penn, or the Devil himself?"

"I believe no one any longer," Ebenezer replied. "I believe naught in the world save that Baltimore is the very principle of goodness, and Coode the pure embodiment of evil."

"Then I must make your disillusionment complete," his tutor said. "But now let's board our ship, or she'll make way without us." He started for the
Pilgrim's
gig, but Ebenezer tarried behind. "Come on; what holds you back?"

Ebenezer covered his eyes. "Shame and fear; the same that urge me on!"

"They are the
cantini
è
res
of all great enterprise and must be lived with."

"Nay," Ebenezer said. "This talk hath clipped the wings of my resolve: I cannot fly to England."

"Nor did I mean you to, but to St. Mary's City with me, on pressing business."

Ebenezer shook his head. "Whate'er your business, right or wrong, I am done with't."

Burlingame smiled. "And with your sister Anna as well? 'Tis she I hope to meet in St. Mary's City."

"Anna in Maryland! What new enormity is this?"

"We've not time for't here and now," laughed Burlingame, and led Ebenezer by the arm toward the waiting gig. "See yonder how the
Pilgrim
slacks her pendant? The tide is set to turn."

For a moment longer the poet resisted the familiar, urgent spell of his former tutor, but the news of Anna -- though he allowed for its being altogether false -- was too astonishing and intriguing to let pass. While they were being ferried out into the creek-mouth he fingered absently at his ring, as always when his thoughts dwelt on his sister, and it was with a little shock of regret that he felt fishbone instead of silver.

"What must Joan be doing now?" he wondered, and slipped the fishbone ring into his pocket lest it elicit questions from Burlingame.

Since he carried no other luggage than his ledger-book, it took but a few minutes for Ebenezer to sign on as a passenger aboard the
Pilgrim.
By the time the sun's rim edged the flat horizon the ship had left Castlehaven Point to larboard and was standing for the open waters of the Chesapeake. Both to warm himself and to avoid seeing Cooke's Point again, Ebenezer insisted that they go below, and demanded at once to hear whatever news Burlingame had of Anna.

"From what you told me in the Cambridge winehouse," he said tiredly, "she is more twin to Joan Toast than to me. Yet if in sooth she hath crossed the ocean, methinks her quest is not so chaste as Joan's. What have you learnt of her, Henry?"

"All in its place," said Burlingame. "To commence, you really must call me Nicholas Lowe. Your friend and tutor Burlingame is no more, but hath perished by his own hand."

"Nay, Henry." Ebenezer waved his hand wearily. "I am surfeited with poses and intrigues, and care not how or wherefore thou'rt disguised."

"This case is different," his friend persisted. "Nick Lowe's my legal name, I swear't. D'you recall what business it was first fetched me to Dorset, other than seeing you to Malden? 'Twas to find a Mr. William Smith, that had in his keepbg some fragment of John Smith's secret history."

"Marry, that seems a decade past! You mean to say you got the papers from your friend the cooper, and they proved your name is Nicholas Lowe?"

"Slowly, slowly," Burlingame laughed. " 'Tis rather knottier than that. I've yet to lay my hands upon the papers, but when I first learned they were in Smith's possession, I asked him as if from simple curiosity what befell Sir Henry Burlingame in that final portion of the history, and in particular whether any mention was made in't of his issue. His answer was that as best he could recall, naught happened to Burlingame at all: John Smith contrived in some wise to take the salvage doxy's maidenhead, and both men returned to Jamestown shortly after."

Ebenezer frowned. "What's this of maidenheads? The last I read was the piece you robbed the Jesuit of, that ended with their capture."

"That is the pity of't," Burlingame replied. "What the cooper hath is not Smith's history at all, but a piece of
The Privie Journall of Sir Henry Burlingame,
that tells of Smith's adventure with Pocahontas. 'Twas the first half of't you read in the carriage to Plymouth. Can you see the double import of this news?"

"I see it means your search was fruitless, unless there are more Smiths in Maryland to threaten with castration."

Burlingame laughed. "You little dream the relevance of your words! But aye, that is one implication of't: so far as I know, Smith's history ends where last we read; the rest either is lost or ne'er was writ, and Sir Henry's name appears no more in the records. When I learned this I called my search a failure, abandoned hope of proving my identity, and resolved to create one from the outside in. I went to Colonel Henry Lowe of Talbot, that once years ago I saved from Tom Pound's pirates and, after explaining who I was, prevailed upon him to save my life in turn by owning me as a son. Thus was Nick Lowe born, from nothing and without travail."