Law, Susan Kay (22 page)

***

Empty. The traitor still couldn't believe it. He'd had an
opportunity to get rid of so many guns, so much ammunition—and it had failed.

His careful self-control had nearly given way when the floorboards
of the church had been pried up and there'd been nothing—
nothing
—but
dust and a couple of dead mice in the secret hold.

It had taken some careful work to get the information about the
movement of the ammunition from the schoolhouse to the church to the proper
people. Time had been short, and he'd had to take more risks than he cared to.
But it would have been worth it, to take away so much potential death.

And then to find that Cad and Adam had spent every night the last
week moving every ball and bit of powder to another location. They had done it
all themselves, just the two of them. Adam had admitted it to the meeting of
very relieved and startled men that had quickly gathered at the Dancing Eel
after the British had marched back out of town.

But they wouldn't disclose
why
they had felt it necessary
to shift the stores, nor had they been willing to disclose where the ammunition
was stockpiled now.

They'd come into some disagreement over that one. The traitor had
tried to argue that it was necessary for everyone to know the location.
Otherwise, how were they to get to it when it was needed? Also, it was
dangerous to have but two people who knew where it was; if something happened
to those two, how would the others find it?

But he'd been overruled. The fact that the British had homed in on
the church proved once and for all that they'd known too much, too quickly, to
risk making the location widely known.

The colonists were worried. It made them nervous, and it made them
careful.

His task had just gotten a great deal more difficult.

***

The colonies waited.

Four thousand British soldiers were stationed in Boston, straining
the town of sixteen thousand at its seams. The soldiers drank and danced,
drilled and patrolled, and waited.

Throughout New England, handpicked members of the militia were
organized into companies of fifty that were charged with being ready at a
moment's notice. Old men and young boys were formed into alarm companies to
defend their towns if the militia were elsewhere. They drank and farmed, kissed
their women, drilled, and waited.

The Provincial Congress met illegally at Concord. They argued and
wrote papers and waited.

In New Wexford, Bennie waited too. She waited for her life to
become safe and comfortable again. She waited for her brothers to stop keeping
their muskets oiled and close at hand, and for them to stop jumping every time
a horse and rider clattered through town. Waited for her father to stop shaking
his head and mumbling under his breath, for Henry to stop practicing shooting
every day and Isaac to stop trying to badger their mother into letting him join
the militia.

And she waited for Jon. Waited for those rare days he came to sit
in the stables and listen to her play, those days where politics and war and
freedom talk were very far away. Those days there was only the music and a
handsome man who sat quietly and listened, and then smiled at her like she was
a miracle sent just for him. Waited—in vain—for him to touch her again, and
herself to stop wanting him to. For although he was simple, he was pure and
good and strong—and he smiled at her like no one ever had.

The colonies waited.

Spring was nearly here.

And the storm was coming.

***

***

"Da!" Henry tumbled into the taproom. "They're
marching!"

Cad, swabbing the floor after the last customer had—finally—gone
home, glanced over his shoulder. "What?"

"The British! A messenger just came into town. They're
marching on Concord."

The mop clattered to the floor. Trickles of dirty water spilled
across the clean boards.

"Let's go."

***

Fog drifted through the common. The mist was insubstantial,
quavering, a gray scarcely lighter than the bleak sky. Men hunched their
shoulders against the April chill and murmured together in voices that were
subdued, seemingly muted by the absorbing fog.

It was nearly dawn.

Women were there, too; women who buttoned their men's coats
securely, ran their hands over beloved faces, and handed out sacks of food and
pouches of musket balls. Women saying good-bye to their men.

"Cadwallader," Mary Jones said, her voice quiet and
stern. "You're too old to go gallivanting around the country."

She smoothed his plain gray coat over his chest. He lifted her
hand and enfolded it in his.

"Mary, my Mary. You know it's important for all the colonists
to support each other. We have no other strength but our unity."

"There are others. Why must
you
go?"

"It will take all of us, Mary. You know that."

"Yes." She tilted back her neat dark head to look into
the face of her husband towering over her. "But you mustn't let Isaac go,
Cad. He's too young."

"Ma!" Isaac protested, clutching his musket.

"Hush, Isaac." Cad smiled gently down at his wife. The
intensely tender expression on his face was one that any person who had never
seen him with Mary would have sworn that grizzled face could never wear.
"It's not a battle, Mary. We are simply showing support. We will help out
where—and if—we can."

"But Cad—"

"We'll be back in a day or two. Three at most. I will keep
him safe for you, Mary."

She closed her eyes and leaned against her husband. "Keep
them all safe, Cad. All of them."

Bennie stood in the midst of her family and wondered why they all
seemed so far away. The blotting presence of the fog blurred details and
muffled sounds. It was as if her brothers and father were there but she
couldn't quite grasp the whole of their forms, their voices.

The damp cold soaked through her clothes and cape in no time,
chilling her flesh to the bone. Her stomach was clenched and empty, every
muscle in her body tight, screaming to do something, fix something, do
anything.

But there was nothing she could do. She could only stand,
shivering and praying, in the bleak predawn, and let them go.

Bennie rubbed hard
at the stubborn spot on the side of the
simple pewter tankard, then swished it through a tub of warm water and
inspected it again. The splotch was still there. Resolutely, she scraped at it
with her thumbnail. If all she could do was make sure the Dancing Eel was kept
the way her father expected it to be, she would do it.

Her father and brothers had been gone nearly two days. In town
there'd been spotty reports of firing near Lexington, but little else. Her
mother had spent the time drifting about, pale and composed, cooking abundant
meals that were far too large for just the two of them. Bennie's sisters-in-law
also wandered through, tense and uncertain, but they seemed somehow comforted
just by being in the Jones' house.

Bennie had simply shouldered all her father's work, as well as
George, Henry, and Isaac's. There were horses to be taken care of, supplies to
be counted, and a tavern to be kept open. If it left her little time to sleep,
what did it matter? Sleep was a solace that would have been all but denied her
anyway, for she could only fall asleep when she was so exhausted her mind was
too weary to worry about what might be happening on the road from Boston to
Concord.

The only work she couldn't manage was Brendan's. Neither she—nor
anyone else in New Wexford—had ever learned the printer's trade, so she'd had
to go ahead and close up his shop. She avoided passing it whenever possible,
for the sign reading
Closed,
neatly lettered in Brendan's precise hand,
was a too visible reminder of a world spun out of her control.

"You shouldn't frown so, my Bennie. 'Tis only a cup. I
wouldn't want you to wrinkle your lovely face over it."

Her hands stilled and she looked up at the bulky form filling the
door.

"Da!" The tankard plopped into the basin, sending up a
small geyser of dingy water, and Bennie hurled herself at her father's chest.
"Da! You're safe! We heard rumors of fighting, but no one knew anything
for certain."

"I'm fine." She felt his arms, sure and strong as
always, close around her, and she sagged against him.

"Bennie, let me sit down. I'm feeling my age a bit more than
usual."

"Sorry." She ushered him to the nearest bench. He sank
onto it gratefully.

Cad's hair hung in wild, bedraggled silver tangles around his
face. His clothes were dirty, rumpled, and torn, and one of his socks was
missing. Bennie had never thought of her father as an old man; he'd always seemed
too vital, too unconquerable, to be old. But now the creases in his weathered
face seemed deeper; his shoulders drooped.

And she was, suddenly, very, very afraid.

"Da?" she asked tentatively. "Should I go get
Mother? We should let her know you are back."

He shook his head. "I just came from the house, Bennie. She
knows I'm home. Isaac's there too."

"And the rest of the boys?"

He looked up at her, his hazel eyes dulled with weariness.
"They're fine, Bennie. You needn't worry about them." He sighed
deeply. "But they're not coming home. At least not yet."

She groped behind her for the back of a chair and managed to find
her way to the seat.

"Where are they?"

"Cambridge. At least, they're on their way there."

"What happened, Da?"

Leaning forward, Cad braced his elbows on his knees. "It
started at Lexington. Bennie. It was over by the time we got there, so I don't
really know how it all began." He looked down at his hands, curled into
the massive fists that had served him so well all his life. "They killed
ten minutemen."

"No," she gasped, and wrapped her arms around her
middle.

"We made them sorry." He pounded one fist into his palm.
"We stuck together, Ben! There were colonists all over. I don't even know
where they all came from, lining the road from Concord all the way back to
Boston. Behind fences, up in trees, hanging out of windows. Those damn redcoats
were fired on every step of the return march."

"Oh my God," she whispered, but Cad went on as if he
hadn't heard her.

"They must have seen it, Ben, seen that we could stick
together, that we weren't afraid to fight. That we could stand up to their
bullying and their brass and their damn royal rights! They lost men all the way
as they scurried back to their holes."

She lifted her shaking hand to her mouth. "How many?"

"I don't know. Two, perhaps three hundred injured. I don't
know how many were wounded seriously but the army was hurt badly—we hurt their
pride, and their damn smug confidence, and their men! They'll never assume
we're nothing but annoying little flies again."

"And next time, they'll be ready for you," she mumbled
under her breath.

"What'd you say, Ben?"

"How many of ours were hurt, Da? What was the price?"

"Less than a third of what they lost, I'm sure of it."

She took a deep breath. "And us? You're certain they're
safe?"

"Not a scratch. You should know the Joneses better than that.
We took up behind a stone wall, and those lobsterbacks couldn't even come close
to us." He snorted. "Not one of 'em can shoot even half so well as
Isaac, much less the rest of us."

"Why didn't they all come home, then?"

"I told you, they went to Cambridge. The British are stuck
back in Boston." He nodded firmly. "We aim to make sure they stay
there."

"And you?" she asked quietly, hoping she'd kept the fear
out of her voice. If there was one thing Cadwallader Jones had no patience for,
it was fear, especially in one of his children. "You and Isaac? Are you
going too?"

"No." He frowned. "Not yet. Your mother and I are
discussing it. She pointed out that the home guard needs someone to command it,
just in case the British do decide to come this way, and, for now, I'm it—at
least until I can get a competent replacement to take over from me. And she
thinks your brother is too young, and I suppose she's right. He'll be sixteen
soon enough, though, and there's no way we can keep him here after that."

"Oh." Bennie rose from her chair, hoping her legs would
support her. It had happened. She'd known it was a possibility, had lain in her
bed many nights trying to convince herself it wasn't going to happen, and yet
had never understood the horrible reality of it.

They'd fired at her brothers, her father. Balls had probably
whizzed over their heads and taken chinks out of the stone that protected them.
Likely, the shots had come terribly close to ripping into all too vulnerable
flesh.

She was a Jones, a member of a family that was famed throughout
the district for being too big, too hard, and too tough to ever be hurt or
beaten. But all those muscles were terribly fragile protection against ball and
mortar.