Chapter 4 #2
Mr. Lincoln suspended studies in the absence of the others, and indeed he himself journeyed to Skipton for the holiday, leaving me in the care of Athena.
Though I asked to eat in the kitchen with her and North—the man who had fetched me from the Four Bells, and who served as a man-of-all-work around the little house and grounds—she insisted on bringing my meals to the table as always, and I was left to eat alone.
I amused myself those days with inspecting the bookshelves, picking out books at random.
Or I unrolled maps and made my own war games, playing one side against the other.
Often I wandered in the fields and marshes and woodlands beyond the little cottage.
I assumed everyone would return by sunset on Easter Sunday evening, but when darkness fell and I was still alone, I clomped up to bed feeling more dejected than I had the first night they were all gone.
I told myself that surely on Monday someone would return.
There was a time, before Black Hill, when I had preferred being on my own to being shut up in the schoolroom with a governess, but now that I had known friendship, I missed Carrot’s bold ventures and Touch’s inventive tales.
The next morning from a window I caught sight of Mr. Lincoln, home at last, squeezing his large self out of a hackney coach and standing before the cottage as if he were surveying it for the first time.
I felt a surge of resentment. I thought to ignore his arrival, letting him know I did not at all care that I had been left on my own, but my excitement got the better of me and I was unable to resist opening the door and calling a greeting.
“Ah, yes,” he responded distractedly. “Jamaica. You’re here, then,” he added, as if he had expected me to be elsewhere.
Touch came back midafternoon, rosy faced from the exertion of his walk.
In the pack he carried were cold lamb left over from Easter dinner and a few currant buns, which he kindly shared with me.
I could not stop smiling, so happy was I to be back in the warmth of his presence.
I asked him about everything he did while he was at home, and he told me in his usual froggy voice that it was nothing different from any of his other weekly visits, just longer.
“Do you play at war with your brother?” I pressed.
“Oh no,” he responded, “we would never do that.”
“Do you explore in the woods?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes we hunt for ramps.”
I studied his mild freckled face in dismay, and I suppose he sensed my disappointment. “It’s nothing there, Jam, really. It’s much more fun here,” he said. But he had no idea how I pined for a real home, with a real family.
Carrot was the last to return, the candle lanterns of his carriage announcing his arrival long before we could hear the thud and scrape of the horses’ hooves.
He walked in grinning, trailing a footman carrying his trunk.
He seemed to have grown a foot taller in the ten days he had been gone.
He laughed and joked and carried on until it was time for bed, and even in bed he was restless and could not stop talking.
I asked again where he’d been, and he chuckled.
“Well, Jam, I’ve been to York,” he said.
“Would have gone to London, but my father was in York on some matter or another.”
He had never spoken of a father; I had assumed his mother was a widow. “I didn’t know you had a father,” I said, stupidly.
“Oh yes,” he responded, his voice full of mirth. “And he’s the Duke of—”
“Duke?”
“Well, I was born on the wrong side of the blanket, but there you are. And the thing is”—he laughed a little—“he may put me aside for now in a place like this where no one can see me, but he can hardly deny me. I have his hair, you see.”
Carrot was far wiser in the ways of the world than I. I had no idea what he meant, and hard as I might try, I could not imagine what difference the placement of a blanket could make, but it didn’t matter. I was just happy to have the two of them, as dear to me as brothers, back where they belonged.
The weather had turned to spring: fields suddenly were greener, buds on the trees ready to burst; newborn lambs frolicked on distant meadows; and we boys, let off from our studies early some days, ran outside and reenacted our battles in the nearby fields.
Seeing we could not be kept indoors, Mr. Lincoln got out paper and laid a quill pen on the table.
“Build a siege engine,” he said. “Design and build one yourselves.”
Grinning, Touch reached for the pen, and Carrot and I began discussing how tall it should be, how large a rock it should throw, how we should place the counterweight.
We searched Mr. Lincoln’s shelves, pulling down book after book, studying illustrations of Roman siege engines and of the attack on Rhodes.
Carrot and I talked, argued, tried to convince each other; and then suddenly, without consulting either of us, Touch began drawing.
It was magical, watching the design flow from his pen.
Soon Carrot and I had stopped arguing and we were building on each other’s ideas, and as Touch drew he added his own ideas, more elegant than either Carrot’s or mine, and we laughed and pointed and slapped each other on the back, and though I did not notice Mr. Lincoln or his expression, I have no doubt that he was leaning back in his chair, satisfied.
None of us would have believed we could do it.
It took us weeks, from scouring the wood for the right trees, to sawing and edging the wood, and then putting the whole thing together.
But by the end of July we had the machine built, and Mr. Lincoln even came outside to witness the first trial.
It was, admittedly, a weak attempt, but after that failure we went back to work with renewed energy, rebuilding the machine until we had cured all its defects.
Again we brought Mr. Lincoln outside. We mounted a rock the size of a cannonball into the bucket.
It took all three of us to pull down the bucket, but when we released it, the rock sailed directly at the target, and even Mr. Lincoln joined in our cheers.
We could not have been more excited if we had stormed Oporto ourselves.
That first Christmas, I was again left to my own devices for ten days.
Ten days. Alone, I wandered the rime-covered fields and moors; I poked a stick to break the ice over a slow-moving stream; I helped North feed and brush the dilapidated horse; I sat on the floor in a patch of sun and leafed through Mr. Lincoln’s books.
Sometimes I closed my eyes and remembered Christmas at Thornfield-Hall.
My father had never made much of the holiday, but he did see to having a tree set up in the Great Hall, and Mrs. Knox oversaw the decorating, and all the cottagers came on Christmas Eve to receive gifts and to pull at their forelocks in acknowledgment.
And I would receive a gift or two, and all the household had a grand dinner of ham and plum pudding.
I wondered what Christmas would be like for my father and brother in Jamaica; if there would be a palm for a tree and if one could find plums on the island.
Although Athena did not cook ham on Christmas Day, at least she allowed me for once to eat my dinner of pork roast in the kitchen with her and North.
Still, I longed for the others to return.
Mr. Lincoln again came back first, with a brief New Year’s greeting before he disappeared into his room to read whatever letters had come in his absence.
I waited by the window for Touch and greeted him with open arms, and almost immediately I talked him into drawing pictures: a wicked pirate with a huge curved sword and hair more straggly than mine, and a grisly sea monster, and when we trooped up to bed, I put my arm across his shoulders and thought that if I had had a younger brother, I would have wanted him to be just like Touch.
But without Carrot, we felt incomplete. When he did come back the next day, he was laughing and joking and going on and on as if he’d had no thought for how lonely I had been without him and Touch.
The more he carried on, the angrier I grew at his good humor in light of my abandonment until, without thinking, I punched him in the stomach.
Astonished, he stared at me, and not knowing what else to do, I gave him another, harder, blow.
He grabbed my arms to stop me, but I could not be stopped, yelling incomprehensible words and crying at the same time, until Mr. Lincoln came out of his room, took one look, and bellowed, “Stop!”
That brought me to my senses at last, and I looked up at Carrot and he looked down at me and said, simply, “I missed you, too, Jam.”
I put my arms around him in relief, and Carrot pulled Touch over, and we all three stood in the middle of the room, arms around one another.
Mr. Lincoln retreated to his own chamber.
None of us ever spoke of my outburst, and with grit and determination I handled the subsequent holidays more stoically.
* * *
In the spring, Mr. Lincoln brought out the maps of Gaul, and we began speaking Latin for the Gallic Wars. “In every battle the eyes are the first to be conquered,” Tacitus wrote. The most important virtue in battle is to visually intimidate the enemy. It was a lesson I would not soon forget.
Human nature is motivated by fear, according to Thucydides.
In our day we do it with battalions of smartly dressed soldiers, but in more primitive times it was often done with a ferocious appearance.
Caesar reported that the early Britons painted themselves dark blue to attain a more intimidating aspect, and so, for us, blue became the color for the British tribes.