The Midwife's Revolt (39 page)

Here I close the scene, for it is not meet that every scene be described.

It was a day of great joy but also of fearful waiting. Our nerves were jangled, our bodies tense, awaiting this decisive encounter. Who besides Cleverly would pop out of the gloom to harm John Adams and his son upon their homecoming? Would it be those we knew, or strangers?

The long day of waiting passed in various pursuits, and as the sun descended, the men finally took their leave of us. My eyes followed Thomas—in my mind, “Mr. Miller” had begun to disappear—as he gathered his compatriots for departure. He was focused on his task. Only once did I catch him looking in my direction. He smiled, and his amber eyes shone for a moment, but then he moved on with the business at hand.

Martha was less reserved. As my brother prepared to depart, she ran up to him and embraced him.

“May God keep you,” she said.

“Let us go to the colonel’s,” I said to Martha. “To be among society might help us all bear up.”

The men left for their ship, thanking us profusely and kissing our hands as the sky darkened over the dunes. All then grew quiet. As we made our way silently to the great house, I heard a lone dog howl.

That same afternoon, little Johnny took his first steps. Eliza was so overcome with emotion—joy at his steps, grief that his father had not been free to see them—that she seemed almost wooden, reminding me unhappily of her mother as we walked together, Johnny riding joyously on Martha’s shoulders.

Arriving at the colonel’s, Mrs. Quincy embraced us all and bade us enter. She had a supper prepared of tea, cod stew, and a fine apple cake. At first I felt too sick with tension to eat; we all did. Not wishing to be rude, however, we soon availed ourselves of this bounty and found it a welcome distraction.

After supper, the colonel began a game of Memory with his wife, but neither Martha nor I had the nerves to concentrate. We paced, holding on to one another. From time to time, we peered out the windows onto the descending dunes and the splendid view of the sea. From the window in the dining room, with the fine summer moon rising brightly, one could make out the contours of my barn and cottage.

When we grew tired of pacing, we stood by the window and discussed among ourselves how the ambush might occur. I burned with questions. Surely Martha, having known about the plot longer than I, had formed some opinion as to how the villains would go about it. The shore below the colonel’s house and my farm was vast, stretching for miles. Tall grass wavered upon rolling dunes, and winds startled swallows and plovers from their nests in gray-white clouds. From whence would they begin this ambush?

There were several possibilities. A party could come down by boat from the north, but this would lack the element of surprise, for surely they would be seen. They could not come up from the coves at Black’s Creek, since those presumably still hidden on Harry’s ship would report them. That left the dunes themselves, or the very land where we now stood.

“It seems impossible to surprise anyone arriving by sea on this shore,” I said, attempting to convince myself.

“It would be difficult,” Martha agreed, “but hardly impossible. The men would have to lie in wait in among the dunes. They are probably there now.” Whereupon she nodded toward the window, to the wavering grasses below.

“Ugh!” I shivered. “Must you say such things?”

“But you’ll admit it is the most likely scenario.”

Suddenly, the colonel was upon us. “What do you ladies speak of?”

“How the villains plan their attack,” I said directly. “Have you any knowledge?”

The old illusion of his innocence, or ours, had been broken. We now conversed freely and nearly as equals, though I still harbored some anger against him—not so much for his deceit as for my own naïveté.

“No. I wish I did, certainly.” The colonel gazed out his window, hands grasped behind his back. He scanned the waters and the dunes. “In among these trees there, probably,” he concluded finally, nodding at the woodlands to the side of the very house in which we stood. We had not considered these woods, being rather far off and to the left of the beach where
La Sensible
would anchor.

“That’s a very long way. Surely our men will see them descending the hill,” I said.

“Indeed, indeed,” said the colonel, turning away but seeming much concerned. “Yet, they may have a signal to those below. Yes, that’s how I should do it.”

Then, perceiving his wife approaching, he cast us a guilty look. Unlike us, Ann remained in the dark about certain particulars. It was the colonel’s wish.

“What do you all discuss so earnestly?” She smiled. She held on a plate half a dozen tiny cordial glasses filled with amber liquor. The colonel reached to take one, then thought better of it and offered them to us without partaking himself.

“What do we discuss?” He turned to us, at a loss for a ready lie. He left it a question to which, awkwardly, not one of us had an answer.

“Oh, merely that it looks to be a very clear night,” Martha commented ambiguously.

We sipped our sweet wine in silence. Poor Ann, apparently used to being shut out of conversations, asked nothing more.

For four years, we had lived in dread of such a night as this: war not beyond our town, but in our own yards. Citizens killing citizens—or gentle horses in their stables.
Civil
war. Neither Martha nor I could be in any doubt that the men we loved would now fight. We might now lose them. But we didn’t dare utter such words aloud.

Johnny entertained us by crawling around and lurching from chair to chair like a drunken sailor. But he soon grew exhausted and began to cry, not knowing he was tired. It was Martha, needing something to do, who took him to bed in Dr. Franklin’s chamber, returning half an hour later.

“He sleeps at last.” She sighed. “He senses our excitement and hates to miss anything.”

Midnight came and went, but no one spoke of retiring. It was a clear, fine night. A full, bright moon meant that we dared not go abroad for fear of being perceived. At one o’clock, the colonel was still playing at cards when, looking past him through the window, I spied the bow of a vessel pulling slowly, silently, sails furled, into our port.

“It’s here! It’s arrived! John Adams is here!”

The colonel ran for his spyglass. He looked through it. But even with the naked eye, one could see someone cast off the anchor. Then nothing. It seemed an eternity. No doubt ignorant of the ambush, the sailors on board awaited an all-clear signal from their captain before helping these two illustrious citizens ashore.

What happened next was so extraordinary that I fear I have not the talent to describe it:

In the darkness, lit only by Nature herself, a dinghy was lowered quietly into the lapping water. I took the spyglass from the colonel. By and by, I saw a man and a tall boy standing in wait for the captain’s help; others shook their hands. Some even bowed before the famous Braintree patriot and his son. The captain nodded, and two sailors helped each of them into the dinghy.

We had extinguished all but one candle so as not to be seen, but we did not want the house to appear uninhabited, either. Thus, by the light of one solitary candle flickering behind us, we stood all in a row by the open veranda doors, silent as shades from another world.

Now they approached; John rowed. He spoke quietly to John Quincy. His voice carried, though we could not make out what he said.

Martha asked me to pass the spyglass. I handed it to her. When the dinghy reached the shore, John Quincy stepped out to steady the dinghy for his father. The boy had grown quite tall, the size of a man. Stout Mr. Adams, with the dinghy wobbling to and fro, stepped into water up to his knees and helped his son pull the dinghy safely ashore. They both turned and waved silently to the men on
La Sensible
.

At last they began to head up the beach toward the footpath. They had brought nothing with them—no parcels or trunks, but only what little hand luggage they could carry. No doubt their trunks would follow by the safer light of day.

None of us breathed. We saw them reach the path and disappear into the dune grass. For a long moment, I thought that perhaps my friends had been mistaken about an ambush. There was no movement, no disturbance of any kind. The likelihood of such a thing seemed, for a moment, quite far-fetched.

We heard a whistle. Then, from the leftmost point of our vision—the dense, dark brush near the house—emerged a band of men with painted faces and a single fiery torch. They were silent, organized to the very breaths they took. They raced toward the path, and I involuntarily gasped. The colonel had been right about that patch of woods.

For several seconds, I was convinced, as we all were, that our men had not left their ship in time and had bungled the rescue. Ann Quincy turned away, unable to stifle a cry. One of the bandits actually turned at the sound of this human noise above the dunes. We all believed that John Adams and his child would perish within seconds.

Eliza exclaimed, “Oh, God, I cannot watch. I can’t!”

She ran to be with Mrs. Quincy when, suddenly, from the right of our vision, an overturned dinghy upon the beach came preternaturally to life. As if by levitation, it lifted itself up. Out came half a dozen men, crawling like sea creatures from a shell.

I gasped at the boldness of this plan. They must have been hiding beneath that overturned dinghy for hours. We had seen it, of course, but it was so much a part of the landscape that we had not given it a thought. Luckily, they had. They had even dug out the sand beneath the dinghy to make room for the six of them.

Two of our men instantly lit torches, while four others raised ready muskets. Then I heard one shout, “You are undone! Unmask yourselves!”

At that moment, we lost sight of the scene as the entire assemblage passed below the dunes. Three rough musket shots popped and spluttered in the night air, but we saw not from whence those shots came or whom they had found to destroy.

Martha and I shrieked and grabbed each other. For a moment I thought we would both sink to the floor. Not knowing which of our men had been hit was beyond our endurance. But we did not sink down, nor was it in our power to remain where we were. We pushed open the back door and ran, heedless of the colonel’s frantic shouts.

At first, I could see nothing at all. As we approached, we heard voices, and our eyes adjusted to the dark. Then the assemblage emerged from behind the dunes. Hardly breathing, we saw our men. They were alive and had surrounded the traitorous band.

“They live. They live, Martha.”

“And yet, look, oh, look!” She grasped my wrist hard and pointed.

Still holding his rifle, Thomas Miller appeared to sway unsteadily on his feet. Another moment, I feared, and he might fall down. He did not fall, however, but merely bent forward at the waist, wiping the sweat and tar from his face with the back of a sleeve.

“Oh, he is hurt! Martha!” I moved as if I would climb down the dunes to them, but Martha arrested me.

“Don’t be a fool. You cannot aid him now.”

She was right. There was nothing I could do but watch in agony.

The traitors stood with their hands in the air, and though their faces were painted, I could see one man unmistakably.

“Do you see him, Martha?” I cried. “Do you see Cleverly?”

“Benjamin Thompson, you mean,” she replied. “And regard who stands next to him. Isn’t that your man, Whitcomb?”

“Oh, Lord. It is,” I said. For several weeks this boy had lived on my own property, just outside my open door. I shivered.

With wrists now roughly tied behind him, the man we had known as Mr. Cleverly stared up suspiciously into the darkness, as if somehow he knew we were there. Had I dared to move closer, I would have spat in his face.

As colonels Palmer and Livingston prepared to row the prisoners out to the
Cantabrigian
,
John Adams and John Quincy Adams arrived at our door flanked by Harry and Thomas. So anxious was I over Thomas, however, that I hardly stopped to greet Mr. Adams or his son.

I ran to Thomas’s side as he held himself upright in the doorframe. A manservant aided me, and together we brought him to a sofa in the parlor.

Behind me, I heard many scuffling footsteps, then shouts of joy. I turned momentarily from Thomas to look into the hall: Mr. Adams and his son had just entered and were being swarmed by an overcome Colonel Quincy and his wife.

John Quincy looked shaken. Something had just happened, but it had all transpired so quickly that he doubted his own understanding. He turned to his father inquiringly. “Father, who were those people below? Were they bandits?”

“By and by, John,” said his father, placing a hand on his son’s arm. “By and by.” It is entirely possible that John Adams knew not what had nearly befallen them.

I turned my attention to Thomas. Blood oozed from his waistcoat and ran onto the sofa’s red damask, darkening it.

“Some cloths, please, Martha,” I said. Martha reacted quickly and soon came to my side.

“You are bleeding,” I told Thomas, affecting a calm demeanor.