From Sea to Shining Sea (10 page)

A few of the Albemarle racers had come back following Lawrence, as had some of the Caroline youths, humbled but merry. Most of the riders, apparently, had stayed at the tavern for a nip.

And so when the bride’s entourage rode past the Chesterfield, there indeed were the many fine horses tethered outside; and now the sports came pouring out the door to get back in their saddles and race on to the Clark house for the rest of the wedding shivaree. Some of them in mounting took deliberate pratfalls off the other sides of their horses to create more hilarity. Some literally vaulted over their horses and landed laughing on their heads. If Annie was as perturbed by the rowdiness as she had said she would be, she was hiding it well. She was radiant as summer and laughing full-throated at the hijinks with the rest of them.

A
ROMAS OF ROAST MEAT AND BAKING BREAD MET THE WEDDING
entourage before they were halfway up the drive. They found awaiting them, on tables and sideboards and trestles, the kind of feast aristocrats might expect. Here was the pork John Clark had butchered, a huge cauldron of small-game stew, a pot of corn chowder, platters of cornbread cakes and muffins and Yorkshire popovers, cheese and buttermilk and squashes, mincemeat, wild nuts, suet puddings, fruit compotes, sugar of both the maple and cane varieties, and both kinds of cider, harmless and otherwise. A fat young buck deer, which Edmund had provided as promised, was turning whole on a spit over a firepit beside the kitchen house, where a sooty Negress in grease-stained clothes stood basting the flesh and slicing it off. The Clark farm
was known throughout the parish as a cornucopia, because of Mrs. Clark’s well-tended vegetable and herb gardens, Mr. Clark’s orchards and his industry as a farmer, and their sons’ skills as hunters and gatherers. Many of Caroline County’s freeholders planted all their acreage in tobacco, which they sold at Port Royal for currency or tobacco certificates, and then had to buy most of their foodstuffs. Theirs was a money economy and tobacco was their money. But John and Ann Rogers Clark had learned self-sufficiency up on the Albemarle frontier, and raised or hunted everything they needed, and thus had full larders and pantries no matter how the crop and pricing of tobacco were in any year. Most of the colonists had stopped using tea in protest of the Tea Tax and missed it sorely; Mrs. Clark, though, had several tonic and delicious brews blended from flowers and herbs.

And now the wedding guests fell on the famous Clark board as if they had been fasting for days. Ann Rogers Clark went about as if in a daze, her mind befuddled by her heart, but she oversaw the feeding of the horde so well by habit and instinct that, as she whispered to her husband once, “They can’t tell that I’m non compos mentis today, can they, John?”

Annie, meanwhile, was so surrounded by her peers that her mother could scarcely get to her. Most of them were unmarried planters’ daughters from around the county, giddy with sherry and lemonado, simpering and giggling with their hands over their mouths, rolling their eyes heavenward, and being gushingly envious of the bride’s happy fortune. “But,” a Buckner girl whispered to a Goodloe girl, “I certainly mean to marry someone more dashing than her Owen Gwathmey, when my day comes!”

“Well, I too!” exclaimed the other. Both these belles had already been involved flirtingly with George, before his departure, and lately with Johnny, proof that their tastes did indeed run to the dashing.

As for Johnny himself, the presence of so many young women this day under his own roof was both a delight and a perplexity. He would falter between the angelic sheen of one girl’s pristine skin and the bawdy promise in another’s laughter. Like the hungry guests at the tables, he had a problem of selection. And his ingenuity was taxed as he tried to home in on certain girls while avoiding others he had already won and cast off. At length, all his desire swung like a compass needle toward a certain magnetic, green-eyed creature named Betsy, daughter of a small freeholder up the road. Her swollen bosom reminded him of breast of pheasant, and her smile was sly and lewd, and at once Johnny
was in love again. But even as he was trying to coax this succulent lass off to the privacy of a secluded corner or unoccupied room, his conscience was being prodded by the echo of his father’s recent admonition: “Every girl is someone’s precious daughter, and most likely she’s also someone’s sister.” And Johnny could not pretend it wasn’t so, because her father, Mister Freeman, a work-worn, hardy little man, and two loutish brothers were right here on the premises as invited guests, all keeping half an eye on her. Johnny would glance at them and would wonder what they would do to him if they knew the color of his desires. Common and laconic though they were, doubtless they had just as strong a sense of her honor as Johnny had of his own sister’s. But this did not keep him from wanting to love her as quickly and completely as possible.
Ah, the sweet agony of desire!
These words repeated themselves in his soul, and he memorized them. Surely he would be writing another poem before this passed.

The benign Indian summer weather blessed the many children who had come with their families. The yard was covered with bright fallen leaves, and the air was warm and the ground was dry, so they could frolic outdoors without coats. There were two pony carts for them to ride, and a match of shuttlecock and battledore had been set up, and spirited games of whipcracker and hide-go-seek swirled around the grounds. Inevitably, games of Indian war were soon on, all over the estate, marked by long periods of silent sneaking suddenly broken by outbursts of ghastly screaming. Through energy and force of personality, Lucy Clark quickly rose to the rank of general in these affrays, but she grew discouraged as her foes conceived her to be General Braddock and kept defeating and killing her. Once her mother had to detain and disarm her after she ran upstairs and came down with both her rock sling and her new peashooter, with which she had hoped to turn the tides of war. Billy, meanwhile, lived and relived the role of master scout George Rogers Clark, creeping unseen and unnoticed along fencerows and under shrubs and around fodder shocks while ambushes and massacres raged nearby. On one of his patrols late in the afternoon he happened upon a gasping, moaning, breathless life-and-death struggle between two half-undressed people beside the herb-garden hedge. One of them was his brother Johnny; the other was a strange, strong young woman he was calling Betsy, who kept pulling him toward her while whispering desperately for him to go away. Billy watched this struggle, open-mouthed, for a while, then decided they were playing something and not really fighting, and
with a shrug he crawled away to spy on General Lucy Braddock’s army.

At dusk a stagecoach rumbled up the drive, bearing Patrick Henry from neighboring Hanover County and a raffish company of musicians rented from his father-in-law’s ordinary. They were quickly fed and cidered and then stationed at one end of the large downstairs parlor, which had been rearranged as a ballroom and lit by many candles. Jonathan led the assembling dancers in a toast to the bride and groom, and then another: “To my esteemed parents, the lord and mistress of this manor, on their birthday! Long may they live!”

“Hear, hear!”

“Long live good friends and neighbors!”

“Long live the King!” someone shouted, perhaps from habit.

“And enlighten the bloody tyrant!” bawled a magnificent voice. Dubious laughter muttered through the room, as Mr. Henry paced forward to stand by his musicians. He swept up his glass of port in a grand gesture, scowled over his spectacles as if about to begin one of his ferocious speeches, but then broke into a smile and cried, “It’s time for music!”

A fiddler tucked his instrument under his chin and sawed out two long, plaintive notes turned up at the ends like the baying of hounds. Lines of men and women began forming as if by magic. Squire John Clark bowed before his wife and took her hand, but she pulled back, protesting:

“Get on with you, John! I? Dance? I’ve done nought but raise children for twenty-odd years, and I can’t remember …”

But she went with him, and remembered how to dance a reel. With a cheer the lines of men and women advanced on each other with wide eyes and prancing steps, and the ball was in motion, with Patrick Henry in twice as much motion as anyone else.

To most of the older guests, Henry was still that Hanover ne’er-do-well whose love of wine, dance, and debate had caused him to fail several times in both commerce and farming. He had married a pubkeeper’s daughter and had shown signs that he would never have anything but frivolity and tavern gossip in his head. But then he had read law and become a lawyer, and had made a name for himself a decade ago in a celebrated Hanover County case challenging a decree of King George III. Soon he had got elected to the House of Burgesses, where he had boldly denounced the Stamp Act of ’65 and made himself a popular champion of the common people in their efforts to gain more say over the governing of their own lives. Henry was one of the
few out-of-county lawyers who had been qualified to practice in Caroline, where there was always a brisk business in slander and assault and battery cases, bastardies and creditors’ suits, and he was prospering. But he was still a man who loved loud words and music, and he maintained that the tavern is the best place for a lawyer or politician to educate himself about the leanings and meanings of men. It was said that when Patrick Henry replaced his spectacles from the bridge of his long nose to the top of his forehead and stood up to speak in the House of Burgesses, the conservatives would grip the edges of their seats and brace themselves for the worst. Nothing that King George III or Governor Lord Dunmore could do, it seemed, was agreeable to Patrick Henry. And the common people loved him, for at last they had a strong spokesman, in a colony whose courts and legislature had always been dominated by royal favorites.

John Clark had brought Mr. Henry to the wedding party mainly for the sake of the music, but of course the presence of the Great Gadfly added a special dimension to the event, and when, as the evening wore on and the talkers began to separate themselves from the dancers, and migrate into the library, they tried to draw Mr. Henry in with them. “What?” he cried. “Talk government whilst the bride and groom are still dancing?” And he plunged back into the ballroom.

His musicians were a versatile lot, with two fiddles and a French horn, and a banjo in reserve for certain pieces, and they were able to perform with equal alacrity the jigs and reels the Albemarle folk liked and the minuets the Caroline gentry preferred. Dance, like everything else in Virginia society, from horse racing and wrestling to billiards, was competitive, and though scores were dancing, each man and woman was trying to out-caper or out-swoop all the others. It was said that courtship was the main concern of Virginians, and every swain and belle present was trying to cut an unforgettable figure.

John Clark had unbunged a keg of whisky and one of cider, and for the more delicate drinkers there were such elegant mixtures as mulled Madeira, Sangaree, and orchard punch, as well as Virginia brandies and rums of the Indies. By midnight, even those who were not dancing reels were reeling. The groom, whose first swig of the day had been given him on the road from the church, had toasted and been toasted without pause ever since, and was too amiable a fellow to refuse any cup or goblet offered, and so was by now very unsteady. He waved his arms to keep his balance, and when he walked he appeared to be swimming in slow motion.

Ann Rogers Clark watched her new son-in-law’s deteriorating condition with mixed feeling. He was comical, pathetic, a bit more human than he had ever seemed to her before, with his red-faced expression of woozy bliss. If he’s this agreeable a fellow drunk, she thought, he must indeed be as good a man as he seems. But Lord in Heaven, I’m afraid he’s not going to do poor Annie a whit o’ good on this night of nights. She watched Annie, happy Annie, with pity. Maybe I should have told her about a thing like this happening, she thought.

But I just never thought of Owen drunk, she thought. I just never foresaw this kind o’ happenstance.

It could be such a hurtful thing for Annie if Owen gets clumsy, or just falls asleep on ’er, she thought. Maybe I ought to get to her and forewarn her that suchlike might happen.

Nay, maybe I rather hadn’t. It might make her afraid o’ the conjugal bed.

But Annie solved the dilemma herself by coming to inquire. “Mama,” said she, with a dubious glance toward her stupefied groom, “can, ah … can a … is a gent … I mean …”

“Darlin’, I’m glad ye asked, though I don’t know the answer, as your father has never got quite that unsteady. But whether he can or not, darlin’, remember this, and don’t forget it now: if he can’t, it’s not the end of th’ world, for come tomorrow, or the day after, at least, he’ll be sober.”

“P
A
,”
SAID
E
DMUND
, “I
WANT TO SHOW COUSINS
J
OHNNY
and Joe the pistols.”

John Clark twisted the spigot of the cider cask and turned. There stood Edmund, all dressed up and wearing shoes for a change, and with him stood his cousins, Joseph and John Rogers. They were tall, handsome youngsters, aged eighteen and sixteen, both redhaired and freckle-faced like their father George Rogers.

“If’t please, you, sir,” said Joseph. “Eddie told us you wouldn’t mind.”

John Clark sipped from his cup of pungent cider and smacked his lips, and smiled. “I wouldn’t mind at all. Come along here.” He was proud of the pistols.

He led them away from the sideboard, through the crowded hallway, past the ballroom, toward the master bedroom in the rear of the house.

“Squire Clark,” called someone from the door of the ballroom as they passed, “not through dancing, are you?”

“Not at all, Judge!” he called back. “Just cooling my shanks
and warming my cockles!” He raised his cup to the guest and opened the door to lead the three boys in. There was already a candle burning in the room, and a figure moved in the shadows near the dresser. “Ah! Pardon us, dear wife,” he said. “What are—”