From Sea to Shining Sea (11 page)

“Nay, come on in. But shut the door. I don’t want the rest to see me doing this. They’d think I was gettin’ old.” She sat on a cushioned chair, her shoes off and her feet in a bowl of water. “You almost ruined my old feet, y’ dancing fool. Hello, Joseph, John. Don’t tell your father you saw me thisaway, promise?”

“Promise, Auntie Ann.”

“I brought them in to see what our Seldom-Seen Son brought me. Here we are, lads.” He set his cider cup on the dresser, pulled open a small top drawer, and lifted out a tiny brass key. He pulled the pistol case to the front of the dresser top, moved the candle up close to it, and unlocked the box. When he raised the lid the candlelight gleamed on the silver and steel, and the Rogers boys moved close. Their eyes were wide, and Joe’s lips formed a silent whistle.

“Lord above,” he said, “I’d give a pretty for a pair like them!”

“I guess they’d cost a pretty,” John Clark said. “George is a pretty extravagant fellow. In every way,” he added. He knew these two lads idolized George as much as his own brothers did, if not more. They were always begging their father to let them go west with him. “If my sons ever disappear,” George Rogers would josh John Clark, “I’ll know ’twas your son led ’em off.” “That could well be,” John Clark would retort, “but it’d be your Rogers blood that’d make ’em follow. They’re three of a kind, as alike as the three tines o’ the Devil’s pitchfork.” George Rogers would laugh and nod then, because he felt that was true, and he liked it. George Rogers Clark was his godson and namesake, and his favorite one of his many, many nephews.

“Uncle John, may I heft ’em?” asked Johnny Rogers.

He took up one in each hand, held them up in front of his shoulders and turned them in the light, looking from one to the other, caressing their flintlocks with his thumbs. He leveled first one, then the other, toward a far corner of the bedroom where a cloak hung on a coatrack looking like a man in the shadows. He clucked his tongue twice and jerked the guns upward as if they were recoiling. Edmund looked at his father, remembering the lecture in the slaughter pen. If John Clark was thinking those things now, he didn’t show it. He was sipping his cider and watching Johnny Rogers hand the weapons to his brother Joe.
But then he began musing aloud, as he usually did only when he was working.

“Well, a pair o’ pistols like those, they’re a handsome possession, certainly. But they remind me somewhat o’ jewelry, there in that velvet case like that. Pistols might be o’ use to some kinds o’ folk. Highwaymen. An officer of troops. I’d personally never bought pistols. Pistols are made to point at
people
, and I’ve no occasion to do such a thing. A long gun’s useful, though, as we’ve all got to provide for our families, isn’t that so, Eddie my boy? But pistols, well, like I say, they’re pretty, and valuable, but somewhat useless, like jewelry.”

Ann Rogers Clark sat behind them in the shadows, shaking her head slowly and half-smiling. She’d heard all this before, at least three times since George had brought the pistols. Her husband was a lieutenant of county militia, and had been for ten years, but fortunately those had been peaceful years, for John Clark was so imbued with the Sixth Commandment that surely he would never raise his sights on a man, enemy or no. And she thought now, too:

If’t had been Jonathan gave him those pistols, not George, he’d have worked it out some way in his head that pistols are as useful as hammers and saws.

Joseph Rogers had taken his turn sighting on the cloak, and had handed the weapons back to John Clark, who now was locking them back in their case. “So there they are, boys,” he said. “Pretty, aren’t they? But extravagant. Well, now, dear wife,” he said, turning, “are y’ ready to put your dancin’ shoes back on and take another tour o’ the ball?”

“Thankee all the same, John,” she replied, wiggling her toes in the tepid water, “but my feet were made to walk to and fro, bed to cradle, and they find dancing to be extravagant.”

A
T ABOUT ONE IN THE MORNING, WHILE THE MUSICIANS
were resting, mopping their sweaty brows, and re-cidering themselves at the cider cask, the wedding guests decided it was time for the bride and groom to take to their nuptial bed, and set up a great merry rush and clamor about it. All the men and boys crowded in to try to kiss her goodnight as the ladies, giggling and cooing, propelled her through the ballroom and hallway and swept her up the stairs. Just before she disappeared beyond the upstairs balustrade, she cast one last desperate look over the laughing, shouting mob below. She found her mother’s face and looked wildly into her teary blue eyes, her own face full of imploring. Ann Rogers Clark, her heart swollen painfully with
care, raised her chin in that way which made her look regal as any queen, shut her eyes, and pursed her lips in a kiss, a kiss across the distance. When she opened her eyes Annie was being pulled into the bridal chamber, her head tossed back as if she were being abducted from the familiar life she had known. But she smiled for her mother. Then the door closed, and a great cheer went up from the mob downstairs. Now, they knew, the women up there would be undressing her, perfuming and caressing her, to make her ready to receive her groom.

The menfolk now turned to give Owen Gwathmey his finishing touches. They encircled him and poured him glass after glass of courage and passion, advising him, giving him specific instructions that caused him, even in his stunned condition, to blush livid. This was a moment of torment for John Clark, who for this moment almost hated his good friends for the words that were coming from their stinking, drooling mouths.

Finally, when poor Owen couldn’t stand up anymore they declared that it must be time for him to lie down, and so they shouldered him and carried him upstairs to the bridal chamber, held him up swaying and sagging and stripped him, and dumped him into bed beside the cowering bride, jibing him to do his bounden duty. And then they roared back downstairs singing, leaving the pair alone at last. In the darkness Annie Clark lay stiff, almost sickened by the alcoholic vapors emanating from the big, gasping, naked man beside her, and she heard the fiddles downstairs strike up the rowdy old tune, “Hang On Till Morning.”

N
OW THAT THE BRIDE AND GROOM HAD RETIRED
, P
ATRICK
Henry got less musical and more political. He took over the library and started trying to make it sound like the floor of the House of Burgesses. He stalked about, waving his cup, his spectacles on the top of his head, and orated.

“Since Lord Dunmore repacked the Caroline Court, surely you all have noticed, at least half a dozen of your friends have been brought to trial on charge of making seditious remarks against the Crown! Remember John Penn? Remember … Why, damn my eyes, there’s two people in this very house right now, dancing in that room, who have been indicted for criticizing King George! I, who’ve said three times as much, by some odd quirk have yet to be tried.” One got the impression that Henry would like nothing better. “Our aristocrats,” he went on, “believe those good people take their sauciness
from my own intemperate mouth. Nonsense! I only echo the people’s sentiments, I don’t shape them!”

“Mister Henry,” interjected John Clark, “you’re being modest.”

Laughter rippled around the room. Patrick Henry himself had to lick a smile off his lips before continuing, as ferociously as ever. “The only representation you’ve ever had has been your peer juries. Thank God for the juries, God bless the juries! Were’t not for you, every man heard blowing his nose in the direction of London would be on the pillories.” They all knew of the Penn case. The jury of common planters that had served in John Penn’s trial had been instructed by the magistrates to find him guilty of sedition and fine him heavily. They had instead decreed a fine of one penny. Only by such means had the ordinary colonists mitigated the heavy-handed authority that filtered down from King George through his colonial governor to the magistrates he appointed. But even jurors could be intimidated. Most of the tobacco merchants were royalists, and they were not above warning a juror that they would grade his tobacco inferior if he dared to thwart the magistrates’ intentions. Patrick Henry, after a lifetime of listening in taverns and courthouses, knew well all the royalists’ methods, and hated them. Perhaps it was true, as he said, that he only echoed the common men’s sentiments, but he made a point of echoing them and echoing them until the common people could never forget their grievances for a waking minute.

Jonathan sat on an upholstered chair across the room, listening to these things he felt were true, and earnestly studying the speaker’s voice and mannerisms. Jonathan was trying to see what it was about Henry’s demeanor that made him so convincing, so provocative. Jonathan had slowly come to understand that hard work and intelligence alone were not enough to make a public servant stand out and gain fame. There had to be a certain power of personality, an ability to excite people or cast a spell on them, as for instance brother George could do. George, like Henry, could catch people’s fancy, make them yell in agreement. Jonathan felt that he was lacking in these qualities himself. He, like his father, earned confidence, but neither of them was an exciting man. Jonathan envied men who had that flair, that theatric quality; he thought they had an unfair advantage to advance in public life, almost the same sort of unmerited advantage as was held by those who had huge Crown patent grants of land and were thus marked for prominence. Sometimes Jonathan resigned himself to believe that one either was born
with that flair or would never have it. Other times he hoped it could be learned and acquired, and so now he was using this chance to study one of the most stirring of them all, and was paying less attention to what Patrick Henry was saying than to the way he said it.

“Hear, hear!” someone cried, in response to something Henry had just said, and Jonathan realized he had no idea what the man had said even though he was engrossed in listening to him. He looked into the bottom of his empty glass and wondered if it was the brandy that was so diffusing his faculties.

At that moment a hand took his wrist, a big, rough, red, freckled hand, and held his arm steady while pouring a dram of brandy into his glass. He looked up, and there beside him was a big, rough, red, freckled face. It was his Uncle George. George Rogers was a mighty stonemason, carpenter, and engineer, who had made himself into Caroline County’s most respected builder of bridges, churches, gristmills, dams, and public buildings. He was Ann Rogers Clark’s closest brother, and George’s namesake. As important and impressive as he had become, he was still a charmer, a Rogers. His blue eyes were merry and mischievous and his smile was elfin. “I saw ye gazin’ all forlorn into your glass there,” he said, “and figured you were too numbed by Mister Henry’s harangue to go fetch the bottle.”

Jonathan laughed. “Nay, just lost in the ponders, I guess.”

“Aye, me too. It’s somethin’ about weddings. They make me ponder too. So! So, now my niece is a married woman! I am just obfuscated! It seems no time since she sat on my knee and took that Dutch doll I’d bought ’er!”

“She still has it. It sits on a chest in her room.” They were speaking quietly. Mister Henry was still proclaiming about the rights of man, over by the hearth. Some of the men in the library were still raising their voices in response to his exhortations, others were talking among themselves in twos and threes, and some sat snoring with their chins on their chests, liquor and pipe ashes dribbling unheeded onto their vests. Beyond the doors and hallways, the fiddles and fifes were playing a jig.

Now George Rogers was saying, “… told your Mama today, ‘Sister Ann,’ said I, ’y’ve raised a fine brood. I cherish ’em every one, and couldn’t more if they were my own.’”

“Thankee, Uncle.” George Rogers had a large family of sons himself, and doted on them, but in his great avuncular heart there seemed to be room for unlimited nieces and nephews.

Another hand settled on Jonathan now, a light hand on his left shoulder, and he turned and looked up. It was another uncle,
this one Parson Robertson, his old teacher. Here was the man Jonathan loved more than anyone outside the immediate family, the man who had taught him how to think. The old Scots schoolmaster, tall and somber, beamed down on him. He wore his usual black wool frock coat and waistcoat, believed to be his only ones, and although he had exchanged his brown farmer’s breeches for a black pair for the occasion, these too were so bagged out at the knees that he looked as if perpetually ready to hop off a stile. His face was gray and long, as was his hair, but kindly and intelligent. “Ah,” said Jonathan, patting the bony hand on his shoulder. “Come sit with us. We were talking of family, and how weddings make ye feel.”

“Join us, Parson,” said George Rogers, and he hopped up and fetched a chair for the old gent, placing it at Jonathan’s other side. Parson Robertson was married to Jonathan’s Aunt Rachel. He farmed, and Aunt Rachel sold eggs and sewed clothes to supplement his tutor’s fees, and the pair were as frugal as bread pudding, but due to the Parson’s scrupulous honesty and a philanthropism that belied his Scottish birth, they remained as poor as Uncle George was rich. The parson had got off the ship from Scotland more than twenty years ago, but still had such a burr in his speech that many Virginians could scarcely understand him. Still, he was known as one of the very best teachers, in a colony where good basic education was hard to find, and Jonathan Clark had been one of his best pupils, along with Jamie Madison and Harry Innes and Samuel Edmundson. Donald Robertson had fled Scotland to escape the strictures of religious doctrine there, and thus the undercurrent of all his teachings was intellectual liberty. There was a joke that he had married Rachel Rogers primarily to acquire John Rogers the Martyr as an ancestor. It was, in fact, George Rogers who had made up that joke. George Rogers was respected and liked his pedantic brother-in-law as much as anyone in the family did, but had always felt that anyone on such a high intellectual plane needed some down-to-earth teasing now and then, “to keep ’im from just floating away,” as he put it. And one of his slyest ways of teasing the parson was bringing up the name of his worst pupil. So he said now: