Martha Peake (46 page)

The Congress met in Philadelphia in May. They had much to discuss. John Adams faced men from other colonies who believed there was still some point in trying to negotiate with the king. How Martha snorted when she heard this! The English would not let them go without a fight, she felt she knew them well enough by now. The idea of liberty may have arisen in England, but there it had withered on the branch because the English continued to bow the head and kiss the boot of men whose power and wealth came of the
accident of birth, no more than that. As if a man’s value, his virtue, his character could be inherited from his father and not
earned
! Whereas here in the New World it did not matter who your father was; and just as well, thought Martha, when she reflected on her own child’s paternity.

Meanwhile the patriot army sat by its campfires on the hills above Boston and waited. In New Morrock the women talked of politics and food supplies and had to be content with what few scraps of either came their way. With many of the boats still out of the water, and the men who sailed them far away, the cod that fed the town and created its wealth remained at liberty in the sea. Sara, with mischievous intent to annoy her mother, declared at supper one night, as they made another frugal meal of corn and potatoes, that cod had rights too.

“We are surely no better than the tyrant on the throne of England if we use them solely for our own needs and pleasure,” she said. “Perhaps,” she said, “after the war, the cod will be allowed to create a republic in the sea.”

Martha thought this very amusing, but her aunt sniffed, while Joshua Rind peered at Sara over his little spectacles and asked her, was she serious? When she told him indeed she was, he said he would attempt to make peace with his conscience and remain a republican among men but a tyrant in the matter of fish. Hester Rind then declared that she would eat no more potatoes, for did not potatoes have rights too? This presented a problem, said Sara, for if people starved to preserve the liberty of potatoes, then the republic of potatoes would be lost, for there would be nobody to plant them and dig them.

Joshua Rind then remarked that the king undoubtedly regarded his colonial subjects as potatoes and justified abusing their rights for the same reason. They decided that alas, potatoes must be deprived
of their liberty if the race of potatoes was to survive. They were all tyrants, said Sara, all of them having devoured their potatoes, then added that only Harry was innocent, for he took nourishment from his mother’s breast and this did not affect her liberty at all.

At the mention of Harry’s innocence Martha caught a sharp glance from her aunt Maddy; such talk did not go on when Silas was present! Rising to clear the table she suggested to the doctor that he stop talking rubbish about potatoes and tell them what he had heard of the doings of the Congress.

There was news, said Joshua, important news, and they were all at once impatient to know what it was. Joshua Rind, gouty rooster among the hens, enjoyed moments of power like this, and he took his time charging up that dreadful stinky white pipe of his with the tiny quantity of tobacco he allowed himself in these days of general shortage. Having lit it with a taper, and inhaled the only decent mouthful he was likely to get from it, he looked round the table and at last told them that Mr. Adams—not Silas’ Mr. Adams, the other one, John Adams—in his wisdom John Adams had put forward for general of the Continental Army not his old friend Mr. Hancock, but George Washington of Virginia.

Martha gave a shout of joy that startled them all. Sara asked her why she was happy and she told her. George Washington was a most passionate friend of liberty, she said. He was a tall well-made man, she said, with broad shoulders, and he rode a horse well. Joshua Rind said dryly he knew many tall men who rode a horse well. But Martha had long held a picture in her mind of George Washington, and had come to believe he was a man like her father. Not bent and anguished, no, but with her father’s spirit, whole and straight, the new man rising—the American within.

I sat at my table that night with pen poised and dripping and thought of the portrait of Harry Peake hanging in my uncle’s study. I am my mother’s son and I too have an American within, but oh, he is trapped, as Harry’s American was trapped; and like Harry’s American he can only be conjured to life in art, which of course is no life at all!

36

T
he next they heard—the next
I
heard, the following day, my uncle, to my astonishment, having decided to take up the reins of the story once more, and carry it through to the end, so he said, claiming it had all “come back” to him—the next they heard, he said, George Washington had arrived at Dorchester Heights and taken command of the Continental Army, while down below—in the besieged town of Boston, he meant—the British were suffering terrible hardship. The flux raged, order was breaking down, floggings and executions every day, houses torn down for firewood, horses butchered for food, and still the troopships promised for the army’s evacuation failed to appear. The only Americans left in Boston, he said, were loyalists and traitors and a few rebel spies.

And in New Morrock?

Ah, New Morrock. Some shaking of the head here. Some drumming of the fingers. Flux there too, he said, Joshua Rind went from house to house but there was little he could do. Nothing to eat! A few scraps of salt pork, a few early vegetables, what fish they could catch in the harbour. And that, said my uncle, here assuming the gravest of tones, and looking me straight in the eye, was how things stood when two British sloops appeared out to sea early one morning in June.

Now this really was the most extraordinary thing. Not the British sloops—their arrival might have been anticipated—no, I mean my uncle William’s involving himself once more in what he had always dismissed as “the American adventure.” I was at a loss to explain it. And he did not speak in a scornful manner, nor was there any of the hesitation you might expect in a man whose memory was stirring to life after a long period of slumbering inactivity. He spoke, rather, in a way I had not heard him speak before: slowly, clearly, and with great seriousness, such that I set down my glass and sat forward, listening close, all my faculties concentrated upon what he said.

The townspeople, he began, became aware at first light of the presence of the enemy vessels, when the churchbell started ringing before its time and woke them from sleep. They had long been prepared for this. Martha had heard the men talking about the chances of the
Lady Ann
or another vessel being intercepted and searched on her way in; or, in some moment of indiscretion, a Cape Morrock man being overheard by some loyalist spy; and they had argued over what tactics the militia should employ, if a British ship did come.

But they had no militia now. The militia was a part of the Continental Army a hundred miles away. Nor had they much in the way of weapons, nor any clear idea what they could do to oppose a British landing party other than blaze away at them from their houses. In the Rind household there were two muskets, two pistols, and an old blunderbuss, all primed and loaded and standing against the wall by the window at the front of the house, and if the soldiers came the women intended to fire on them, as they had been taught to. There was haste and some panic in the town as the churchbell rang, and the two ships, out close to the horizon, were now seen to be making for the coast under full sail. By good fortune a few men who had come up from Boston were still in the town, and a meeting was called in the church.

Joshua Rind sent a boy up to the house to tell them to come at once, so Martha bundled Harry in her shawl, and she and Sara hurried out with the rest. Five minutes later they were standing at the back of the church among the other women and children. Dan Pierce, brother of Nat, attempted to keep order, but it was not a tranquil meeting. The first excitement had subsided somewhat, but the church was alive with anger and fear. Some were angry that Silas Rind had left none of his militiamen behind, although this line of argument was quickly abandoned, planning rather then recrimination being required now. Some said they should simply surrender, so that they might save their homes and live to fight another day, but this idea did not catch the spirit of the women, who discovered once they had come together that they were in no mood to concede a thing to the British, let alone meekly surrender. The mood softened somewhat when Joshua suggested they evacuate the town, simply collect what they could carry in the way of food and bedding and go south on foot. This plan was more attractive but it raised a serious question, and the women rose one after another to speak to it: what would happen to the very young, the aged, and the sick?

Martha, said my uncle, his voice heavy with feeling now, and his old eyes shining in the firelight, listened to all this with growing horror. She could no longer pretend to herself that her conversation with Giles Hawkins had been inconsequential. There was little doubt in her mind now as to what those ships had come for. She stood there with Harry in her arms, apparently listening intently to all that was said, but in fact hearing not a word, aware instead only of the storm of feeling within her. Oh, a great, great sorrow—she did not want this place smashed up by the British, she did not want these people turned out of their houses and forced to suffer God knows what ravages at the hands of men whose brutality was familiar to them all—they were women and children, with a mere handful of old muskets between them, what could they do against a company of redcoats? And this, said my uncle, was the question to
which the town meeting was attempting to find an answer—when all at once the door of the church was hauled open, and a boy ran in, clutching a spy-glass and shouting something about the ships.