War (17 page)

Roger stood up. “Yes, sir. Thank you.” He hesitated for a moment. “Sir, Mr. Manners left my company a day ago, and did not say where he was going. He left not so much as a note. His effects are gone from our room. He was still under my orders. Have you any knowledge of his…whereabouts?”

A slight smile broke the ice of Gage’s temperate expression. “At his
request, I have reassigned him, and sent him to Montreal to report to the officer in charge of the garrison there. He left yesterday aboard a mail packet bound for Quebec Province.” The general chuckled. “After so much time in the tropics, I thought a good dose of a Canadian winter would do the puppy some good.”

Roger screwed up his face in disbelief. “Did he request that particular assignment, sir?”

Gage’s smile broadened. “No, Captain. The order came as a surprise to him. I expect he was wanting to be sent to Barbados, or to some other salubrious clime.”

Roger was secretly pleased that the general had not liked Manners, either. It was just as well that the lieutenant was out of his own reach now. “Yes, sir,” Roger said. “I shall await your orders, sir.” He saluted, turned smartly, and left the general’s office.

When he returned to the tavern, he took out pen, ink and paper and began to compose urgent letters to his wife, Alice, to his father, and to Hugh Kenrick. Days later, after he had introduced himself to other army officers in Salem, he had practically memorized his response to the rumor, apparently begun by Lieutenant Manners and propagated by members of the general staff who arranged Gage’s interviews and screened correspondence to the general, that he was a traitor and sympathizer with the rebels: “Stuff and nonsense, sir. You will note who was ordered to Canada, and who remains here.”

He sentenced the tin gorget, wrapped in a length of torn hose, to the bottom of his baggage.

* * *

A chill, late October gust swept off the York River and caused them to lean closer to each other. Jack Frake and Etáin were taking what they knew would be one of their last evening strolls this season on the grounds atop the bluff of Morland Hall. In the gathering twilight, faint, shimmering yellow lights were beginning to appear on the opposite bank in Gloucester.

As they moved along the path that paralleled the edge of the bluff, Jack turned to gaze at the lights in the great house. It was too dark for his wife to see the frown in his expression. He said, without warning or preamble: “I do not want you here when it begins. For my own peace of mind, I must know that you are in the safest place possible.”

“Where?” Etáin did not need to ask what he was talking about. His study desk was strewn with Williamsburg
Gazettes
and newspapers from other colonies, and correspondence from other chapters of the Sons of Liberty. This afternoon, John Proudlocks, Jock Fraser, and other men had come to meet her husband in the study, where they discussed the resolutions of the August convention in Williamsburg, and news of the debates in the congress in Philadelphia that was beginning to filter south.

She did not intrude on the meeting, but quietly served the visitors ale and cider and left the room. She had stayed long enough to hear her husband say, “Some counties are not even waiting for a second congress. They have passed resolutions to recruit militia companies and to stock up on powder and ball. We have ample stores of those, but have no effective militia. Mr. Vishonn is the colonel of this county’s militia, but he will not commit himself to calling it up. He is holding out for reconciliation, or a civil answer to the congress’s petition. So, we are on our own, and must make our own arrangements.”

She left the room then, knowing that the news was dire and that Jack would tell her it. Her husband, John Proudlocks, William Settle, and many of the tenants had helped move the powder, ball, and arms from Morland’s ice cellar to the cellar of the abandoned Otway place shortly after the raid by the Customsmen.

“In the enemy’s camp,” Jack said without emphasis.

Etáin furled her brow in confusion.

He looked down on her face. He could not see it well in the hastening dark, but he could sense the question in it. “With your parents, in Edinburgh. For the duration.” After a few years in Glasgow, her father’s firm, Sutherland and Bain, had reassigned him to Edinburgh to oversee the North Sea and Baltic trade.

Etáin shook her head. “I wish to be here, with you, when it begins, and for the duration.”

Jack said, with finality, “No.” He paused. “You are one of the things I shall be fighting for. You, and Morland, and liberty. Morland may perish in the fight. We may even be conquered, and liberty vanquished, for a while. I may need to go into hiding, or I may become a prisoner. But you will remain sacrosanct. I wish to carry with me at least the knowledge that you are apart from it all…from all the bloodshed, and destruction, and cruelty that are sure to come.” He paused. “With you safe from harm, my mind will be clear and my hand free to act.”

Etáin stopped and said with sudden anger, “Or, you may die somehow, in the fighting, or be hanged or shot, as a prisoner! You are asking me to possibly never see you again, to be apart from you, and to imagine you, beyond my reach, beyond my help, amongst all that bloodshed, destruction and cruelty! Imagination can be worse than the reality, Jack!” She was angry with him, the first time ever, and did not feel the tears in her eyes.

Jack turned to face her and smiled for the first time this evening. “True. Imagination can be worse. And, yes, I might even die.” He raised a hand to touch her face, and felt the tears, then held her by the shoulders, his expression turning grim with determination. “Or you, if you remained here. You see, if anything happened to you, I am not sure I would want to go on fighting…or living. If Morland were destroyed, it could be rebuilt.” He gripped her shoulders more tightly. “
You
cannot be replaced.”

“Nor
you
, Jack,” whispered Etáin. She moved closer to him and rested her forehead on his chest. She was remembering her governess, Millicent Morley. It was said that she flung herself off the cliff into the sea at Tragedy Point at Falmouth, after Redmagne was hanged and gibbeted. All this time, she was never sure why her governess believed she could not live without Redmagne. For her, it was a subject of occasional and brief wonder, for Jack had always been here, in the great house, or in the fields, or in Williamsburg. The question had seemed superfluous, because he was always somewhere close.

She trembled now, because she no longer wondered why Millicent Morley had flung herself into the sea.

He drew her close to him and said into her hair, “I want you here with me, always, Etáin,” said Jack. “And you
will
be with me, always, when I am alone, doing what must be done…in the coming years.” He paused. “Just as Skelly and Redmagne have always been with me, all these years.” He chuckled softly. “You reminded me of that yourself, Etáin, some years ago, when you thought then there would be war, and I told you I wished they could be here.”

She nodded in recollection. “And you will be with me, whatever the distance between us,” she said. She realized only after she said it, that she had surrendered to his wish, and would go to Edinburgh.

“It will be for years, Etáin,” he warned her. “Many years.”

She did not look up at him. “I will write my parents. When shall I leave?”

“Early spring,” said Jack.

O
ne evening in December, about a week after the new Parliament had opened, Hugh took Reverdy to Covent Garden to see a restaging of George Colman’s comedy,
The Jealous Wife
, a loose adaptation of Henry Fielding’s
Tom Jones
. He did not care for Fielding’s novel, but had selected the play from a number of productions as the most promising. He had heard that Colman’s plays were well done. It was their fourth meeting since Reverdy’s return from Bath. She seemed happy to see him again, but there was an oddly bleak manner in her delight that he could not yet fathom.

To his surprise, Reverdy eagerly approved of the choice. “They say that Mr. Colman is beginning to eclipse Mr. Garrick in the theater,” she said to him the afternoon he proposed the outing, “and that he is raising the theater to the stature it once enjoyed.” She chuckled in amusement. “Mr. Garrick, it seems, is too busy
acting
as a messenger between Lord North and that protégé of Lord Rockingham’s, Mr. Edmund Burke. Mr. Burke and Mr. Garrick are members of Dr. Johnson’s club, which is very odd, for I have heard that Dr. Johnson cannot abide Mr. Burke’s politics.”

“Perhaps not,” Hugh demurred with an invisible shrug. He did not care to discuss Dr. Johnson at the moment. Nor Edmund Burke, the new member for Bristol whom he thought likely to become Lord Chatham’s heir in oratory in the Commons. He had met him briefly in the coffee room of the House the second or third day after the new Parliament opened, and was impressed by his apparent advocacy of the colonial cause. “The theater will revive entirely, once the office of Lord Chamberlain is abolished, and when the theater licensing act is repealed.”

“Must you always color a subject with politics?”

“Yes, when the subject has been the object of politics, as the theater has been. You know that politics is not incidental to my interests. And, there is no Lord Chamberlain in America.”

She was tempted to reply that there was little produced in America that a Lord Chamberlain could censor or approve. Instead, she remarked, “It is unfortunate that Mr. Garrick has not been knighted. Perhaps someday notable artists will receive proper recognition for their contributions to the nation.”

Hugh said, “He has done well enough without being bestowed the king’s pleasure.”

A cold drizzle was falling when they emerged from the theater. They waited with others beneath the theater porch for a hackney to take them back to her brother’s house on Berkeley Square, and stood apart from the hubbub and jostling of the crowd. Hugh did not vie with the other theatergoers for a vehicle. He did not seem to be in a hurry.

Reverdy pulled up the hood of her cape and sighed, “Well, that was a suitable play for us to see.”

“Why so?”

“
I
am a jealous wife.”

“I did not intend any personal allusions in my choice of this play,” answered Hugh. “I chose it on Mr. Colman’s reputation.” He paused. “
Our
marriage cannot be described as a farce, as this play can be.”

“No, it cannot,” agreed Reverdy. “Perhaps, then…as a sentimental novel?”

“No. Our…union has been too fierce for mere sentiment.” He looked at her face, which was in partial shadow from the light of a nearby lamppost. “What are you jealous of, Reverdy?”

She answered almost immediately, “Your other wife, Hugh. Politics.”

“Do not ask me to choose between you,” he replied. After a moment, he added, “You are an element of a trinity of principal concerns in my world. Politics, or the liberty that may be had from it, is another.”

“What is the third element?” asked Reverdy.

“My life,” Hugh answered with a solemnity his wife had not heard in him in a long time. Nor in anyone since her return. The solemnity made her uncomfortable. She resented it. And with a bitterness she could not disguise, she answered, “Yes. Of course, there is always
that
.”

The slight did not escape Hugh’s notice. He said nothing for a long moment. Then, at his gesture, a free hackney approached them and stopped. He helped Reverdy into the vehicle, gave the driver the address, and boarded after his wife to take the seat opposite her.

A while after the hackney jerked forward, Reverdy asked, “Do you not think Mr. Colman stages a worthy play?”

Hugh shrugged. “The play is worthless, but it was well staged. And, many worthy plays are sadly ill-staged.”

Reverdy sighed in defeat. “Well, perhaps next week we can come again here, Hugh. The newspaper noted that Mr. Colman is staging
The Clandestine
Marriage,
which I believe he wrote with Mr. Garrick
.
Perhaps it will be a more appropriate one for us to attend.” When Hugh did not respond to this remark — she sensed that he refused to — Reverdy said, to fill the awkward silence, “Alice must be distraught that Roger has not returned, and afraid that he might be caught up in the troubles in Boston.”

Alice Tallmadge was inconsolable for several days after receiving Roger’s first letter in mid-November. She had since received a series of letters from her husband, expressing his hope to be able to see her again the next fall. “She is both. Well, at least he was not court-martialed.”

“It was foolish of him that day, siding with you against that Customsman! He should have known it would be reported!”

Hugh shrugged. “Perhaps he did know. But it was important to him to take that action. A right thing for him to do.” He smiled, for the first time this evening. “How is Miss Dilch?” he asked.

“She is fine. After reading about that Wheatley woman’s visit here, she has written a pound of poetry. One verse was even published in the
Evening Standard
, two months ago. James may try to find a publisher for her work.” After another long silence, Reverdy asked, “Have you seen your uncle?”

“No.”

After a moment, Reverdy braved, “I have, Hugh.”

Hugh turned in surprise to face her. “Why? Did he send for you?”

“No. I called on him, at Windridge Court, some weeks ago, shortly after I returned from Bath, after I got your letter there. I called on him when I knew he was not entertaining others.”

“But,
why
?”

“To see if some reconciliation between you and him was possible.”

Hugh shook his head. “It is not possible.”

“He agreed,” sighed Reverdy. “I abandoned that purpose early on. But our conversation was otherwise cordial. He asked many questions about you, and us, and Virginia.”

“My uncle’s curiosity has been proven many times a lair for the unsuspecting, Reverdy. Beware of his hospitality.” Hugh paused. “You should not have volunteered any intelligence about us or Virginia. Under the present circumstances, he is an enemy — ours, and the colonies’.”

“You are being unfair to him, I think,” ventured Reverdy in protest. “I could see plainly that he was miserable. He has not seen his brother your father and his family in years. He has communicated by messenger only with your father for so long. For company, he is surrounded by fearful servants
and conniving politicians and peers. His very words to me.”

Hugh scoffed in dismissal. “His
preferred
company for as long as I have known him.”

Reverdy ventured, “I think that if you made a gesture of conciliation to him, sunlight and peace would enter into all our lives, and all would be well…and we could be happy again.”

“Reverdy!” exclaimed Hugh with angry sharpness. “That is a contemptible idea!”

Reverdy seemed to cower in fear away from him to the corner of the compartment. It was the first time he had ever spoken to her in that manner. She was shocked.

Hugh continued. “Have you forgotten all the misery he has caused me, and caused the family? Have you forgotten that he was probably responsible for Sir Dogmael’s murder? Have you forgotten that he would prefer me to be a toady, instead of the man you love? Or
dead
?”

Reverdy could not reply to this scolding outburst. She sat stunned. Inside her fur muffler, her hands clenched each other anxiously. She was afraid.

Hugh said, “You should not be taken in by his misery. There are two kinds of that condition, Reverdy: The one caused by injustice and endured by innocents, and the other is the natural companion of an evil person. Of course, my uncle is miserable! He is plagued by his own malignancy!”

Reverdy said nothing, but looked out the glass into the passing darkness. It seemed safer to watch nothing than the severe reproach on her husband’s face, which made her feel like a criminal.

They did not speak again until the hackney arrived at the steps of James Brune’s residence on Berkeley Square. Hugh handed her out of the vehicle, told the driver to wait, and walked his wife to the door.

On the steps, Reverdy asked suddenly, “Are you still determined to speak in the Commons?”

“Yes.” They had discussed the subject during their last meeting. She did not approve of the idea. She thought he would merely make more enemies.

“When will you return…to Virginia?”

“In early spring. Perhaps sooner, if circumstances permit.”

“What circumstances, Hugh?” asked Reverdy.

“Whether or not you wish to return with me. And whether or not I see anything to be gained by staying here to audit Parliament.”

Reverdy braved a bold look into his face. “You would not stay here for
me?”

Hugh shook his head. “If there is nothing to be gained by it, no.”

“Not even for the…politics?”

“If I conclude that Parliament is deaf to reason, no.”

Reverdy turned to face the ornate door, reached up, and yanked the bell-pull. She said, not turning to face him, “It seems that you are married more to ‘Lady Liberty’ than to me, Hugh.”

“You must own that she has been more a mistress to me than you have been of late, my dear.”

She was surprised, not by his words, but by the tenderness and regret in them. Any other man, she knew, would have uttered them with a growling, cutting bitterness meant to hurt. She resented his not having said it that way, for it left her no excuse to reply in kind. She fought the knowledge, and replied, “You asked me not to demand that you choose between us. I won’t
. You
have made that choice, Hugh. I cannot tolerate this rivalry. I have tried to, all these years…you know that…but never could.”

They heard a bolt being moved then, and the door opened. A servant greeted her. Without looking back at Hugh, Reverdy hurried in. The servant, who knew him, raised his brow in silent question, waiting for Hugh. Hugh shook his head once. The servant nodded in answer, and closed the door. Hugh heard the bolt slide home.

Upon hearing that sound, he thought:
That is the end of it
.

Since seeing her again after she returned from Bath, he had observed, at first with alarm, then with an imposed dispassion, a kind of mathematics at work in their relationship. Numbers represented facts, and all those facts represented an unalterable sum. That sum was reached tonight. She had been seduced by the city, by all it had to offer. All the things that concerned her, from its politics to its society, the city’s countless, incidental distractions, were facts that now outweighed any value she might have seen in him. In consuming them, they had consumed her soul. She saw the unalterable in him, and did not want it.

It was she who had made a choice, he thought. She was not what he had always thought she was, or could be. The thing that he saw in her, he asked himself: Could he blame his imagination? Or a desperation to see it? Perhaps both. Perhaps once it had lived, but it had since died. For the first time since he had known her, he acknowledged a chasm that could never be bridged. He knew that he must accept that fact, as well, in time.

Hugh heard someone inquire, “Sir?” He turned to look up, and saw the
hackney driver scowling down at him from his perch. Hugh nodded once to the man, strode back down the steps into the drizzle to the vehicle, and said, “To Chelsea.”

During the ride back up the Thames, he sat watching the darkness pass by through the glass, feeling desolate, filled by an emptiness that was at the same time a great weight of grief.

* * *

It was late when he arrived at Cricklegate. Everyone had retired: his parents, Alice, and even the servants. He let himself in with his own key. When he reached his room, he found a letter sitting in a salver on his desk. It was from John Proudlocks, written in late October. He lit a lamp, opened the letter, and read it.

Proudlocks dwelt on news of their friends and of the troubles in Virginia and in the colonies, and then brought up another subject. “His name is Jared Hunt. I saw him near Caxton, on the road to Williamsburg. He was leaving the vicinity of Meum Hall, after having enquired about your whereabouts of some of your laborers. He is the same man that your father says is your uncle’s secretary. We saw him twice in the Turk’s Head tavern there in London. He is the man who attempted to rummage Mr. Frake’s house. Mr. Frake and I are curious about his presence here. We are certain that he is here at the behest of your uncle, Lord Danvers. To what purpose, we can only guess.”

Hugh put the letter aside. He would ask his father about it tomorrow. He could not now devote any time or energy to wondering about his uncle’s machinations or this Mr. Hunt.