Chapter 1 #2
It had been a small thing to do for her country, especially compared to the ultimate sacrifice American soldiers were prepared to make on the field of battle; the smallness of it had stirred within her embers of dissatisfaction with the useless gentility of her life.
These yearnings would surely have wounded her staunchly pro-British aunt April, so Merry kept them to herself and tried to find solace in painting watercolor portraits of heroines like the courageous Mrs. Penelope Barker, who, thirty years ago in the First War of Independence, had stopped the British from commandeering her carriage horses by pulling her absent husband’s sword from the wall and slicing to ribbons the reins in the British officer’s hands.
Inevitably Merry had tried to daydream herself into Mrs. Barker’s shoes, but even if she’d possessed a sword, Aunt April would never have allowed such a gruesome object to hang on the wall, and the only horse they had was poor old swaybacked, buck-kneed Jacob, whom no one would want to steal.
Furthermore, if enemy troops came within a hundred miles, Aunt April would undoubtedly whisk Merry away to a place of safety.
Carl shoved his hat back over his sweat-lacquered curls. “If you’ll do it. Want to work with me again?”
“I dearly want to draw for you again, Carl.” She stretched out a hand to stroke the horse’s soft, damp muzzle, smiling at her older brother.
Motherless, they had been reared separately; he by their austere, unloving father, she by Aunt April, their mother’s sister.
If she had seen Carl twice a year as a child, that was often.
His boyhood had seemed to her an entrancing miracle of kite string and fishhooks, Latin tutors and wooden boats that really sailed.
Unaware that she herself had become anything more than the awkward, overprotected girl-child who knitted mittens in the winter and stitched samplers in the summer, she watched as Carl grew taller, more clever, more self-confident.
He was not an affectionate man. He hadn’t once remembered her on her birthday.
He rarely offered himself as a confidant or a protector, and yet, through his patriotic activities he had brought into her life a rare and precious dimension.
Teasingly she told him, “You’re my only chance to grab a little glory, you know.
I suppose I’m not to tell Aunt April, again? ”
“Not unless you want her to forbid you to go. Anyway, that’s been taken care of.
Father wrote a letter to cover us, saying that he’ll be in Alexandria this Thursday on government business and wants you to meet him there for a visit.
” He jumped from the horse’s sweating back. “Come with me while I walk the horse.”
She slid from the stone wall and put her hand self-consciously to her hair. “I ought to fetch my bonnet, I suppose. I imagine I look all scraggly.”
He looked surprised and irritated. “We’re just going down the lane a bit. Does it matter so much?”
Instantly she shook her head and joined him in the bright, battering sunlight, embarrassed that she had been so petty. “Then Father knows about it,” she said.
He glanced down at her as she caught up to him and tried to match his stride, her eyes blinking out the sun’s stinging rays.
“He knows you’re going to draw for me again, Merry, but—” A bee, attracted by the sweating horse, buzzed around their heads, and he swatted at it.
“But he doesn’t know where. Truth is, I lied. ”
Shocked and honored at once by his confession, she said, “You lied to Father?” Her father had been forty-five when she was born, and now his wreath of white hair, long hooked nose, and still eagle vision made lying to him seem futile.
He appeared to be looking for the lie in the face of every man he met. “Why?”
“Because it’s not a place I should take you. I wouldn’t either, if it wasn’t such a rare opportunity. There’s a man who is going to be there at nine o’clock Thursday who—no, I’ll tell you about it later. But it’s important. I would never take you to such a rough place if it wasn’t important.”
“A rough place? Do you mean a prizefight?”
He gave a rueful grin. “Is that the roughest place you can think of, Merry?”
The lane angled away from the kitchen garden, into a green meadow dappled with pink clover and birdsong.
Merry had been holding her skirt carefully above the path’s red dust, but at Carl’s words she let it drop and snatched up the silver-seeded head of a thistle.
She held it before her, flourished a hand over it, and said in an important voice, “This, my dear brother, is a crystal ball.”
He had no particular taste for whimsy, but because she was young and female and his sister, he said indulgently, “Is it? Divine for me then, ma’am.”
“Let me see!” A soft breath of air from her pink lips sent a powdery cloud of feathered seeds spinning off across the high June grass.
Staring with comical intensity into the thistle globe, she said, “Yes, it’s becoming clearer now!
I see—a room. A rough place! There are men there, some of them unshaven, and they are—horrors, they’re setting great flagons of ale upon a maple-wood table and leaving dreadful water rings!
The high corners are dripping with spider webs, and the side tables beg to be dusted.
” She glanced at her brother. “How am I doing?”
“Shockingly well. A body would think you’d taken to tavern-haunting.”
“The doors to Mr. Hardy’s taproom were open as we walked home from prayer meeting last Thursday, and I took a good look inside.
” Taking in a deep breath, Merry turned the thistle in her hand and was about to blow into the remaining plump hemisphere when the breath choked short in her throat and she said in a startled voice, “Carl! Does that mean you really do intend to take me to a tavern?”
Frowning heavily, he said, “There. I’ve shocked you, have I? There’s worse yet. The tavern’s on the coast, and isolated, and we’ll have to be there after dark. Furthermore, the place is frequented by some of the lowest rogues that… Look, here’s the straight truth—the tavern’s a smugglers’ den.”
When Glory smiled, she smiled with a vengeance.
The thistle’s dark-green stem slid from Merry’s suddenly numb fingers and was crushed under the hind hoof of the ambling horse.
Her first instinct was to ask Carl if he really meant it, but she stopped herself.
Never had he looked more serious. With experimental bravado she said, “Then I’ll be able to find a good price on some English cotton for Aunt April. ”
He was too much a soldier not to be pleased. “Well said! And things aren’t quite as bad as they seem on the surface. We’ll be in and out quickly—and things are likely to be more unpleasant than dangerous. Sal and Jason will be with us.”
“Our Boston cousins?” They were Carl’s friends much more than hers. “I haven’t seen them in over four years! But I had thought from Father’s latest letter to Aunt April that Jason would be at Sackets Harbor with General Wilkinson?”
“Making Jason an aide to Wilkinson was the worst idea somebody ever had. Jason’s never bothered to be discreet about his belief that Wilkinson was wrongly acquitted at the Fredericktown court-martial, and within a bare twenty-four hours of his arrival in Sackets Harbor, Wilkinson arranged Jason’s transfer down to Knoxville to fight Creeks with the Tennessee militia.
He has to report to Jackson within the month, but he and Sal are eager as dying saints to run a paid agent of Britain to earth with us before Jason leaves. ”
The lane dipped to a narrow stony brook that bordered a field of Indian corn, and Carl loosed his gelding’s reins and watched as the horse dropped his head into the gurgling water.
“And the war news?” she asked quietly.
“Is nothing you wouldn’t have read in the newspaper.
If we can get the Northern Army into Montreal before winter, we could have Britain out of North America by spring!
We’ll win this bloody war yet, Merry. Justice is with us.
” He scooped a round, glistening stone from the brook and lofted it hard into the corn, scaring out a large crow, which flapped tiredly away toward a far stand of trees.
“Farewell hope, then, Britannia,” cried Merry, pulling a handkerchief from her sleeve and holding it up to wave in the hot breeze.
As he watched her his face changed, as though a new and uncomfortable thought was first entering his mind. He said suddenly, “We can’t take you to the tavern looking like that.”
“Why, of course not, Carl. I told you I should have returned to the house for a bonnet…”
“No, not a bonnet. An old hat, felt, I think; cheap felt. And I’ll need a shabby dress.”
She couldn’t resist it. “Oh, are you going in disguise as well?”
He gave her a wisp of a smile. “Of course I’ll be in disguise, but not in skirts, Merry.”
“What then?”
“You’ll find out Thursday night.”
The modest home that Merry shared with her aunt had been pretty once, with its brick patterns of Flemish bond and richly detailed interior woodwork, the latter mostly covered now with muting layers of olive house paint.
The kitchen alone was large, but the other rooms were high with many windows broken into small square panes that charted the faded carpets in white sunlight.