Written in My Own Heart's Blood (119 page)

WALKING ON COALS

September 19, 1778
Philadelphia

E
VEN WHEN THE
world ends, things bloody go on
happening
. You just don’t know what to do about them.

Everything smelled of smoke and burning. The air, my hair, Jamie’s skin, the ill-fitting gown someone had given me . . . Even food tasted of ashes. But, then, it would, wouldn’t it? I reflected. It didn’t matter; I couldn’t eat more than the mouthful or two required for politeness.

No one had slept. The printshop had burned to the ground in the small hours; there was nothing to be done but to beat off flying embers and stamp out sparks in an effort to preserve the nearby houses. By a mercy, it hadn’t been a windy night.

The neighbors had given us shelter, clothes, food, and abundant sympathy. None of it seemed real, and I hoped in a vague sort of way that this state of things would continue, even though I knew it couldn’t.

What did seem real, though, was the small collection of vivid images that had been literally seared on my mind during the night. Henri-Christian’s bare feet, dirty-soled and large in comparison with his legs, sticking out from under his mother’s skirt as she cradled him, rocking to and fro, wrapped in a grief too dense for any sound to escape it. Germain, letting go the rope in a frantic attempt to fly after his brother, dropping like a rock into Fergus’s arms. Fergus clutching Germain so hard against him that it must have bruised them both, his hook gleaming against Germain’s soot-streaked back.

The boys had been sleeping on the roof. There was a small trapdoor in the ceiling of the bedroom loft, which no one had remembered in the panic of the fire.

When Germain began finally to talk, sometime toward dawn, he said they had gone out to be cool and to look at the stars. They had fallen asleep and
not waked until the slates they lay on began to feel hot—and by then smoke was rolling up through the cracks of the trapdoor. They’d run across the roof to the other side, where a similar trapdoor let them into the printing loft. Half the loft had fallen away and the rest was on fire, but they’d made it through the smoke and rubble to the loading door.

“Why?” he’d cried, passed from one set of arms to another, ignoring all futile words of would-be comfort. “Why didn’t I hold on to him?! He was too little; he couldn’t hold on.”

Only his mother hadn’t embraced him. She held Henri-Christian and wouldn’t let go until daylight came and sheer exhaustion loosened her grasp. Fergus and Jamie had eased the small, chunky body from her grip and taken him away to be washed and made decent for the long business of being dead. Then Marsali had come to find her eldest son and touched him gently in his deadened sleep, sorrowing.

The Reverend Figg had once more come to our aid, a small neat figure in his black suit and high white stock, offering his church in which to hold the wake.

I was sitting in the church now, in midafternoon, alone, on a bench with my back against a wall, smelling smoke and trembling intermittently with echoes of flame and loss.

Marsali was asleep in a neighbor’s bed. I had tucked her in, her daughters curled up on either side of her, Félicité sucking her thumb, round black eyes watchful as those of her rag doll, fortuitously saved from the flames. So few things had survived. I remembered the constant pang of loss after the Big House had burned, reaching for something and realizing that it wasn’t there.

Jenny, worn to the gray-white color of weathered bone, had gone to lie down at the Figgs’ house, her rosary in her hands, the wooden beads sliding smoothly through her fingers as she walked, her lips moving silently; I doubted that she would stop praying, even in her sleep.

People came and went, bringing things. Tables, extra benches, platters of food. Late-summer flowers, roses and jasmine and early blue asters, and for the first time, tears ran down my cheeks at this scented remembrance of the wedding held here so little time before. I pressed a stranger’s handkerchief to my face, though, not wanting anyone to see and feel that they must try to comfort me.

The bench beside me creaked and gave, and I peeped over the edge of my handkerchief to see Jamie beside me, wearing a worn suit that plainly belonged to a chairman—it had a band round the coat sleeve reading “82”—and with his face washed but the whorls of his ears still grimed with soot. He took my hand and held it tight, and I saw the blisters on his fingers, some fresh, some burst and shredded from the efforts to save what could be saved from the fire.

He looked to the front of the church, toward what couldn’t be saved, then sighed and looked down to our clasped hands.

“All right, lass?” His voice was hoarse, his throat raw and soot-choked as my own.

“Yes,” I said. “Have you had anything to eat?” I already knew he hadn’t slept.

He shook his head and leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes, and I felt the relaxation of his body into momentary exhaustion. There were things still to be done, but just for a moment . . . I wanted to dress his hands, but there was nothing to dress them with. I lifted the hand he held and kissed his knuckles.

“What do ye think it’s like when ye die?” he asked suddenly, opening his eyes and looking down at me. His eyes were red as an emery bag.

“I can’t say I’ve really thought about it,” I replied, taken aback. “Why?”

He rubbed two fingers slowly between his brows; I thought from the look of him that his head must ache.

“I only wondered if it’s like this.” He made a brief gesture, encompassing the half-empty room, the well-wishers coming and going in whispers, the mourners sitting, blank-faced and sagging like bags of rubbish, stirring—with a visible effort—only when spoken to. “If ye dinna ken what to do, and ye dinna much want to do anything. Or is it like going to sleep and wakin’ up in a new, fresh place and wanting to go out at once and see what it’s like?”

“According to Father O’Neill, innocents are just in the presence of God immediately. No limbo, no purgatory. Assuming they were properly baptized,” I added. Henri-Christian had indeed been baptized, and as he was not yet seven, the Church held that he lacked sufficient sense of reason to commit sins. Ergo . . .

“I’ve known people in their fifties who had less sense than Henri-Christian,” I said, wiping my nose for the thousandth time. My nostrils were as raw as my eyelids.

“Aye, but they’ve more capacity for causing harm wi’ their foolishness.” A faint smile touched his mouth. “I thought I was dead on Culloden field; did I ever tell ye that?”

“I don’t think you did. Under the circumstances, I suppose it would have been a reasonable assumption, though—were you knocked out?”

He nodded, eyes fixed on the floorboards.

“Aye. If I’d been able to look about, I should have known better, but my eyes were sealed shut wi’ the blood. It was all red and dim, so I supposed I was in purgatory and would just have to wait ’til someone came round to chastise me. After a bit, I supposed boredom was meant to be part of the punishment.” He glanced at the tiny coffin on its bench at the front of the room. Germain sat by it, one hand on its lid. He hadn’t moved at all in the last half hour.

“I’ve never seen Henri-Christian bored,” I said quietly, after a moment. “Not once.”

“No,” Jamie said softly, and took my hand. “I dinna suppose he ever will be.”

Gaelic wakes have their own rhythm. Fergus and Marsali came in quietly an hour or so later and sat together at first, holding hands near the coffin, but as more people came, the men gradually surrounded Fergus, absorbing him, much as a gang of phagocytes surround a microbe, carrying it along with them, and after a time, as happens normally in such situations, half the men were at one side of the room, talking quietly, and the others outside, unable
to bear close quarters and exigent emotion but wanting to lend their presence and sympathy.

The women clustered, first near Marsali, hugging and weeping, then gathering in small clumps with their friends, drifting back to the tables to rearrange things or put out more bread or cakes. Josiah Prentice came with his fiddle, but left it in its case for the time being. Tobacco smoke from the pipes of the men outside drifted through the church in soft blue clouds. It tickled uneasily at the back of my nose, too reminiscent of the fire for comfort.

Jamie left me with a brief squeeze of the hand and went to speak to Ian. I saw them both look at Germain; Ian nodded and moved quietly to his nephew, putting both hands on his shoulders. Rachel hovered nearby, dark eyes watchful.

The bench beside me creaked, and Jenny sat down. Wordless, she put her arm about my shoulder, and equally wordless, I bent my head to hers and we wept for a bit—not only for Henri-Christian but for the babies we each had lost, my stillborn Faith, her infant Caitlin. And for Marsali, now joining us in this sorrowful kinship.

The night drew in, beer and ale were poured, some stronger drink was brought out, and the somber mood of the gathering lifted a little. Still, it was the wake of a child and a life cut short; there couldn’t be the sense of shared memory and laughter that there might be for a man who had lived a full life and whose friends had come to share in his death.

Josiah Prentice played his fiddle, but quietly, mixing laments with peaceful tunes and the occasional hymn; there wouldn’t be much singing tonight. I wished suddenly and fiercely that Roger were here. He would perhaps have known what to say, in a situation where there was nothing one could say. And even with his ruined voice, he would have known a song to sing, a prayer to offer.

Father O’Neill from St. George’s Church had come, tactfully overlooking the unorthodox Quaker marriage of a month before, and stood talking near the door with Fergus and a few other men.

“Poor wee child,” Jenny said, her voice roughened by tears but steady now. She was holding my hand, and I hers, and she was looking not at the coffin but at Fergus. “His bairns mean everything to him—and especially our wee man.” Her lips trembled, but she pressed them together and straightened her back.

“D’ye think Marsali’s breedin’?” she said, very softly, looking at Marsali, with Joan and Félicité clinging to her skirts, Joan’s head in her lap. Her mother’s hand rested on her hair, gently smoothing it.

“I do,” I said, as softly.

She nodded, and her hand twitched, half hidden in the folds of her skirt, making the horns against evil.

More people had come. The Congress was meeting in Philadelphia, and several delegates who did business with Fergus had come. Jonas Phillips and Samuel Adams were both there, chatting by the refreshments table. In a different frame of mind, I might have marveled at being in the same room with two signers of the Declaration of Independence, but, after all, they were only men—though I took it kindly that they’d come.

I looked for Germain every few minutes; now he was standing by the tables with Ian, drinking something from a cup. I blinked and looked again.

“Jesus H—I mean, good Lord. Ian’s giving Germain cherry bounce!”

Jenny glanced at Germain’s bright red lips, and a quiver of amusement ran through her.

“Canna think of anything better for the lad just now, can you?”

“Well . . . no.” I stood up, shaking out my skirts. “D’you want some?”

“I do,” she said, and got up with alacrity. “And maybe a wee bite, too. It’ll be a long night; we’ll need a bit to sustain us, aye?”

It felt better to be up and moving. The fog of grief still numbed sensation, and I didn’t look forward to its passing, but at the same time . . . I realized that I
was
hungry now.

The feeling in the room shifted gradually, from the first impact of shock and sorrow, to comforting support for the family, and now to more-general talk. Which was, I realized uneasily, beginning to focus on speculation as to what—or who—had caused the fire.

In the shock and grief of the event, none of us had spoken of it, but even through that numbing fog, the insidious question had hovered like a bat overhead: Why? How? And . . . who?

If anyone. Fire was a common plague in a time when every household had open hearths, and a printshop, with its type forge and its stock of inflammables, was still more vulnerable to simple accident. An open window, a stray breeze, loose papers blowing . . . a spitting ember from a badly smoored fire catching hold . . .

And yet.

The memory of the anonymous letter floated queasily on the surface of my mind.
Your house is on fire and your children are gone . . .

And the young men who had followed me from Chestnut Street, their stealthy plucking and whispered taunts. God, could I have brought their enmity to Fergus’s door?

Jamie had come to stand by me again, steady and solid as a rock, and handed me a fresh cup of cherry bounce. It was like drinking very strong cough syrup, but it was undeniably bracing. Up to the point where you fell down insensible, at least. I saw that Germain had slid slowly down the wall; Rachel knelt next to him and eased him to the ground, then folded her shawl and put it under his head.

The cherry bounce was taking the place of the fog; I thought drunkenness was probably an improvement, on the whole.