Caxton (7 page)

* * *

Hugh Kenrick did not see Jack Frake again that night. His future neighbor disappeared.
Hugh did not realize this until a few hours had passed. When he asked Ian McRae,
he was told that Jack Frake had left early with Thomas Reisdale, and had already
bid his family goodnight. He went to the gaming room and caught a few hours
of sleep. When Otis Talbot woke him up, it was dawn, and half the guests had
already departed, including the McRaes.

After breakfast at the Gramatan Inn with Arthur Stannard and Ian McRae, Otis
Talbot put his signature on several pieces of paper, including a draft on Swire’s
Bank for the purchase of Brougham Hall. Hugh Kenrick signed his name beneath
his companion’s.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, the two men boarded the
Amelia
. When
the sloop gained the middle of the York River, a brisk wind filled her sails
and the vessel cut swiftly through the water, leaving Caxton to quickly diminish
astern.

Hugh remained on deck and watched the town diminish until he could no longer
distinguish it from the trees ashore. The town vanished in the haze that enveloped
the entire river and the western horizon beyond.

I
t was to an empty house that Jack Frake returned in a chilly dawn. Upon leaving the ball, he and Thomas Reisdale claimed their mounts
and ventured down the dark roads beyond Enderly, guided by a threequarter moon, to the attorney’s house across Hove Creek. There he drank
coffee and read some of Reisdale’s “fragments,” learned commentaries on
a variety of political subjects, which included the British constitution and
colonial charters, with copious citations of authorities as late as John
Milton, John Locke, and Hugo Grotius, and as ancient as Tacitus and
Cicero. They had talked for a while, speculating on the weal and bane of a
British North America. Then Jack thanked his host, remounted his horse,
and rode home in the darkness as dew formed on the leaves and grass, and
as birds awoke to greet a sun that had not yet risen.

Morland was an empty house, emptied swiftly and completely in a handful of
years. To Jack, those years seemed like a lifetime ago. The contrast between
the present and past was jarring. He had difficulty reconciling the contrast.
Years ago he was an indentured felon, sold to John Massie by John Ramshaw for
a penny. He never learned what Captain Ramshaw had told his new master about
him. Later, by the time his indenture had expired, he had become virtually a
fourth son to the planter, and a special, mutual affection grew between them
that did not exist between Massie and his sons. Jack supposed it was because
John Massie was something of an adventurer and renegade himself, when he was
a youth, the son of a smaller planter who had wooed and married the daughter
of Archibald Morland, the original owner of the plantation. He later was a lieutenant
in a Virginia militia company and had taken part in the capture of Louisbourg,
and after that, had commanded a company of volunteers during a punitive expedition
against marauding Indians in the western part of the colony.

Massie, he learned later, had developed a special arrangement with Ramshaw
to import and export commodities taxed and regulated by the Crown. The illegal
imports — from Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Spain — were in turn sold
to distributors and merchants in Yorktown, Williamsburg, and Fredericksburg.
Massie had not forced Jack to labor in the fields with other servants whose
indentures he owned, but allowed Jack to be tutored with his own children. Jack
eventually became the man’s scrupulous and confidential clerk.
Morland, like the other large plantations, had its own private graveyard. Jack
passed this on his way home, and paused for a moment to look down on the flat,
roughly chiseled stone markers. There was John Massie, the last of the family
to go, buried next to his wife, Grace. There was his oldest son, John, heir
apparent to the plantation, killed in a senseless, impromptu duel outside a
Williamsburg tavern after an exchange of drunken insults with a stranger from
the Carolinas over each other’s honesty and pedigrees.

Two of the markers rested on graves that contained no remains. The youngest
and middle sons of Massie were both casualties of the Braddock disaster. William,
aged sixteen, was killed outright in the first minutes of that battle; his body
was never recovered. Rufus, aged nineteen, was also cut down, but was saved
by Jack from the raised tomahawk of an Ottawa who rushed from cover to collect
a scalp. It was in furious hand-to-hand combat with the determined Indian, and
then with another who followed the first, that Jack received the scar from a
war club that had nearly brained him. After felling the two Ottawas, he had
managed to get Rufus to his feet and walk him to the rear of the confused and
panicked column of British regulars. After pushing Rufus into the river to make
his own way back across it, he ran back through the unending hail of bullets,
stumbling over the growing matte of downed redcoats. He paused only once, to
hold the reins of a frightened horse, whose rider, a British major, had been
shot out of the saddle, so that a tall Virginian, Colonel George Washington,
could mount it. He made his way back to Captain Massie and his Queen Anne militia
only to find that his benefactor was wounded while leading a sally into the
woods to rout the French and Indians there. Whether he was struck in the hip
by a British or enemy ball, no one could say.

Half of Massie’s small company of Virginians was felled, he learned later,
by that same volley from British ranks, whose officers mistook the militia men
for French or Indians, simply because they saw irregularly dressed men using
the thicket as cover and loading and firing from kneeling positions. This method
of frontier fighting was alien to the sensibilities of men trained to fight
in Europe. The perception and fatal error occurred up and down the column as
its officers struggled to preserve order in the ranks and their own presence
of mind, more often than not losing their ranks to bullets and desertion, and
then their own lives to a well-aimed ball.

Jack saw one British officer dismount and lead the remnants of his company
in a bayonet charge into the surrounding thicket — the sole intelligent action
he witnessed a regular officer take that terrible day — and begin to drive the
bayonet-fearing Indians back into the forest, only to find himself alone after
another British volley brought down most of the redcoats behind him. As the
survivors bolted back to the column, the officer flailed away with his sword
at the returning Indians, until he was surrounded and struck in the head and
back by war clubs. One of the black, orange, and red painted creatures dipped
down out of sight, and a moment later rose again over the bushes with a shrill,
prolonged whoop, holding aloft the officer’s bloody scalp and silver gorget.
Jack raised his musket, fired, and placed a ball directly into the screaming,
undulating mouth.

Whether the creature was an Ottawa or an Ojibwa, Jack could not tell, and from
that day onward he saw no reason to make a distinction between any of the numerous
tribes. And, it was the last act of respect he would ever pay a British officer.

The person who helped him carry John Massie to the rear, as other Queen Anne
militiamen escorted them under fire, was another Indian, John Proudlocks, a
lad only a few years younger than Jack. Proudlocks was adopted as a boy by Massie
during the Louisbourg campaign and had acted as the man’s valet and cook ever
since. His Oneida tribe was wiped out by Mohawks, and he and a few others kept
alive as slaves. Proudlocks escaped, and appeared one morning in camp before
Massie’s tent with some rabbits he had trapped and killed. Other militiamen
had wanted to shoot him, suspecting him of being a spy for the French, but Massie
stopped them. Proudlocks and Jack Frake matured together under the strict but
benevolent regime of their mutual master.

In the retreat across the Monongahela River and through the forests beyond
with what was left of the shamed army, Jack and Proudlocks nursed John and Rufus
Massie the best they could. Rufus, hit twice in his upper torso, died en route,
and was buried in a meadow somewhere near the Pennsylvania border. John Massie,
back in Caxton, lived long enough to lose his last son, to see Jack marry his
daughter, Jane, and then to lose her, too, to childbirth. He died in his sleep
about a month after Jack and Jane’s own son succumbed to what Mrs. Rittles,
the midwife and wet nurse, called “the chills.”

Jack Frake looked down on the markers of Jane Frake and their onemonth-old
son, Augustus, and wondered how his life might have been different, had they
lived. He sat in his saddle for a long time, contemplating the imponderable.
The years between the passing of so many he had been close to and the present
were subsequently filled with a ruthless determination to make the plantation
pay for itself — as a means of trying to forget.

After a while, he looked up when the first full ray of the sunrise filtered
through the trees and touched his forehead. For a reason he could not explain
to himself, he felt that some new phase of his life was about to begin. By the
time he stabled his mount and stepped inside his house, he was smiling in amusement
at the thought that it might have something to do with Hugh Kenrick. The younger
man had impressed him; that is, surprised him with his agreement with the sentiments
he had expressed in the gaming room; had pleased him with the ease with which
Kenrick had made his acquaintance; had given him some strange hope of friendship.
He had been dubbed a solitary man ever since he was brought to Caxton, and a
near-hermit ever since the deaths of his wife and father-in-law. Well, he thought,
solitary men are solitary only because they have not met their companions in
character.

Yes, he admitted to himself; he was impressed by Hugh Kenrick. So had been
Etáin McRae. “You are very much like him,” she had said.
He tried to imagine Hugh Kenrick as a rival for her affections, and ultimately
for her hand; as a neighbor; perhaps as a political ally. He chuckled to himself
as he lay down in bed to take a short nap — on any other day, he would have
been awake and busy for an hour by now — when he realized that Hugh Kenrick
was occupying his thoughts and concerns almost as much as had Halley’s comet
and Wolfe’s victory in Quebec. When the man returned to take possession of Brougham
Hall, what difference would the newcomer make in the lives of the people here,
in the life of Caxton itself?
A few hours later Jack rose and had a breakfast prepared for him by Mary Beck,
the cook, an older woman whose indenture John Massie had bought but who stayed
on years after its expiration. “How was the ball, sir?” she asked him in the
sunlit breakfast room.
“Fancy enough and fine, Mary,” said Jack.
“Pardon me for sayin’ so, sir,” she said as she set his meal before him, “but
you ought to attend those things more often. You look bright and cheery this
morning, more than usual, if I might make the observation.”
“Thank you, Mary. I even feel brighter and cheerier than usual.”
“You spoke with Miss McRae, I’m betting.”
“Yes. She enchanted the company.”
Mary Beck stood for a moment, holding an empty tray, before leaving the room.
“Pardon me again for the observation, sir, but you looked darkly there for a
moment, when I mentioned the young lady. All I can say is, you’d better pick
the apple before it’s poached. Miss McRae is fillin’ out in all sorts of ways,
and other gentlemen, bein’ men half the likes of you, can’t help notice it,
too, and that devil of a father of hers might make other arrangements before
you stakes your claim.”
“That’s not likely, Mary,” Jack said. “I’ve got things in hand. Please, don’t
concern yourself.”
Mary Beck broke off her scrutiny, turned, and walked to the door. “I’m just
lookin’ after your natural interests, that’s all, sir,” she threw over her shoulder.
Jack wondered for a moment what about himself had emboldened the usually reticent
woman to volunteer her comments. All he was able to conclude was that attending
the ball at Enderly had noticeably altered his demeanor.
After breakfast, he went to the stable, saddled another horse, and rode out
to inspect the progress of the corn and barley harvests. He stopped at the tobacco
barns first, though, and saw that the prizing was nearly finished. Six Negro
men were busy at the weighted levers that pressed the cured leaves into the
hogsheads. Though they were slaves, he paid them laborers’ wages for the work.
He had convinced John Massie, even before the Braddock expedition, to begin
selling his slaves, when he could, to Quakers in the west and north, who in
turn freed them as Virginians could by law not. Massie had detested the institution
and did not need much persuasion. “If you pay a man to perform a task,” Jack
had told him years ago, “then you may depend on one of two things: he will perform
it, or botch it. Then you are free to retain him, or dismiss him. A slave, who
has no stake in the task done or undone, will perform it only in an approximate
manner, just enough to avoid punishment. And then, unless you choose to resort
to the whip, you are as bonded to him as he is to you.”
John Massie’s eyes had lit up in comprehension. “You make a point that’s eluded
me, Jack,” he said. “By your reasoning, we slave-owners are as much enslaved
by the practice as are the slaves.”
“And no amount of kindness to a slave will lessen the evil, sir,” Jack continued.
“Kindness is an affection one shows a prize pig, or a resourceful dog. Kindness
is a kind of slavery, too, if it is practiced by men who ought to think better
of themselves. It is mistaken for humaneness.”
The six slaves were the last slaves at Morland. They were the last, because
they were the best and hardest working. They were as devoted to Jack as they
had been to John Massie. They did not wish to be sold. Mouse, the oldest of
them, told him once, “Sir, you try to get us a new master, we run away. You
put irons on us to hold our feet, we stop work. You are a good man, and treat
us so. Leave it alone.” Mouse and his five companions each had the freedom of
Caxton and the county; each carried a safe conduct pass to deter arrest by slave
patrols and bounty hunters.
Mouse and his companions behaved like freedmen and took their freedom for granted.
They could do anything but vote and own property. They were content with the
purgatory of their liberty. Jack, for his part, both needed them and hated his
need of them.
The tobacco crops — as well as all of Morland’s other crops — were raised by
tenants, whose little wood-frame cottages ringed the Morland plantation. The
tenants were not actually tenants, but employees. Jack paid them a small retainer,
and then percentages from the profits of the harvests. Each tenant was responsible
for a certain amount of acreage and the crops on them, once the seeds were planted.
There were six Morland tenants, three of them indentured servants left over
from John Massie’s day: George Passmore, Caleb Threap, and Timothy Bigelow.
Isaac Zimmerman and James and Dorothy Moffet were originally employed by John
Massie, Moffet as an overseer. As the slaves were sold off, first by Massie,
then by Jack, the need for an overseer diminished, then vanished. Jack retained
the overlooker, William Hurry, who saw to it that crops were properly cared
for, harvested, and stored. His business agent, Obedience Robins, oversaw the
details of the sale of all the crops. Robins also filled the position of steward
for Morland, ensuring that especially the main house was stocked with necessities.
Then there was John Proudlocks. Jack had persuaded him to become a tenant in
charge of the livestock, swine and fowl, and to help the other tenants when
they needed extra hands in the fields. For years, and even now, Proudlocks was
the closest thing to a friend Jack had since coming to Caxton. He could not
pronounce the long string of incompatible consonants and vowels that was Proudlocks’s
Oneidan name. John Massie had simply named the boy after himself. Later, the
boy appended a surname of his own invention, inspired by the portrait of Archibald
Morland that still hung in the main house’s library. “John Who is Proud of His
Locks” was eventually shortened to John Proudlocks. He was a tall, slim man
now with black hair that fell in curled rivulets over his shoulders. He wore
English clothes, except for shoes, which his feet could not tolerate. In their
stead, he wore moccasins, which he made himself.
When they were still boys, Jack, who hated ignorance, took it upon himself to
teach Proudlocks how to read, write, cipher, and speak English. Proudlocks,
who hated his ignorance of the white men of whom he stood in awe, was a diligent
pupil. One day, after a lesson in simple mathematics, Jack asked him why he
had surrendered to their benefactor.
Proudlocks did not answer immediately. It was only hours later, after they had
both finished their chores and sat together, in the late afternoon, in the room
used by the resident tutor to school the Massie children, that he spoke.
“You people,” he began, as though no time had passed, “you people, you see things
we do not. We Oneidas, and Mohawks, and Senecas, all the tribes, we…look at
ground only and today only all our lives. You people, you look at sky and beyond
and tomorrow.” He paused. “We always had wind, and wood, and water, but no Iroquois
ever built boat to sail beyond edge of earth.” The boy paused again, not certain
that his words expressed what he wanted to say. “You people, there is some magic
about you…but it is not magic. I feel it is good magic, do not fear it. It explains
much about you, but I cannot explain
it
. It brought you here over the
water, and spelled death for all old ways…the looking-at-ground ways. This is
why Iroquois and other nations fear you, hate you, make war. You people…you
are like shamans who despise worshippers and believers and their chants and
foolish ceremonies, sweep to side old ways and people with feeble arms and hands
in lazy little heads, and claim earth as no Iroquois could, not shaman or warrior
or chief, and make it your servant. You are men like us, like the Iroquois.
You are born, you live, you die. But there is some magic about you. I wish to
learn this magic of yours, so it is magic no more, and then I look at sky and
beyond and tomorrow.”
But you do now, Jack said with a wordless smile to the expectant, bronze-hued
face. He was answered a moment later by Proudlocks’s own smile, one of self-knowledge
heavy with the quiet, contented dignity that accompanies such a smile.
Jack could only imagine the hell that John Proudlocks had endured, before wandering
into John Massie’s militia camp, to cling to that vision of himself and of the
possible, living among people indifferent to their own ignorance and hostile
to anything that demanded abandonment of it and all the rituals, customs, and
brutality that symbolized that ignorance. In terms of Jack’s own moral endurance,
in terms of physical hardship and the concerted efforts to degrade him, the
hell that Proudlocks had endured made his own trials seem petty and mundane
by comparison, without diminishing their importance or his own self-respect.
An ineluctable sense of justice moved him to grant Proudlocks a species of esteem
he had once reserved for Augustus Skelly and Redmagne. Proudlocks sensed this
special regard, and reciprocated in his own unobtrusive way.
Jack remembered that day well, for something that Proudlocks had said inspired
him to take the boy to his room and show him a gift that Captain Ramshaw had
given him on one of his visits to Morland. It was a pair of Italian-made mariner’s
pocket globes, tucked securely inside a sturdy oak box. One was celestial, the
other terrestrial. They were of painted marble, with intricate images, letters,
and numbers cut into the stone. Jack pointed out the oceans, Virginia, England,
and France. “There are no edges on the earth,” he said. “Only horizons.” Then
he told Proudlocks to hold out his palms, and dropped the globes into them.
“There,” he said. “Now you hold the sky in one hand, and the earth in the other.
Like the ship captain who uses them, you can go anywhere, and by studying them,
can know where you have been, where you are, and where you are going. All your
yesterdays and tomorrows.” He paused. “No more looking-at-ground and today only.”
Proudlocks’s eyes were ablaze with fascination and comprehension. Glancing from
one globe to another, he grinned fiercely. “Knowledge not magic,” he said. “Put
on paper, in books, written in smooth, cold stone. In numbers, in words. And
pictures.” He paused. “Pictures made from numbers and words here.” He looked
up at Jack. “Earth this form? Round? No Englishman saw Virginia from sky, and
made picture?”
Jack shook his head. “Nor England,” he said. “Nor any of the continents.”
Proudlocks looked doubtful. “Sky not round?” he asked, hefting the celestial
globe.
“No. The earth sits in the sky, and travels around the sun. The stars on the
globe represent what we can see from down here, on the earth. If the stars on
the stone match what he sees in the night sky, a captain can know his position
— provided he calculates his latitude and longitude, or his numbers.”
Proudlocks balanced both globes. “Understand. Knowledge not magic.” He brought
up the terrestrial globe and tapped his forehead with it. “Knowledge find home
here. Must fill head. Secrets not secrets. Open to any man with busy hands in
mind.”
It occurred to Jack only later that night, as he tossed for a time in his bed,
that he must have looked much like Proudlocks that day, when Parson Parmley
showed him the maps so long ago. He smiled at the benign irony of it. He wondered
if the parson had derived the same pleasure as he had, from seeing a mind awaken
to a larger universe, without and within.
But knowledge of the world was only one element of what Proudlocks had deemed
“magic.” Another element was missing, one taken for granted by both of them.
He agreed with Proudlocks that his “magic” explained much, but he, too, was
unable to identify and explain the unnamed element. It was knowledge, too —
but of what?