The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles (60 page)

Philip Kent presented his son Abraham, but Peggy had scant chance to do the same with the girl, whose name was Elizabeth. The child seemed preoccupied with turning over small tables, pulling books from shelves and howling like a fiend when Peggy tried to discipline her—gently at first, then crossly.

Fortunately, the little girl caused so much commotion in the couple of minutes before Peggy seized her and carried her out bodily, both Peggy and her new husband failed to notice the absolutely thunderstruck expression on Donald Fletcher’s face.

When Peggy returned, out of breath and murmuring apologies, Donald had concealed his surprise behind a bland expression. But he did ask a question or two about the little girl. She would of course become part of the new household along with the boy Abraham, Kent said.

Peggy supplied the information that the girl was an orphaned relation of the northern branch of Peggy’s mother’s family. Elizabeth had been raised in a private home in Boston. It was the child, Peggy explained, whom she had gone to visit by ship, twice annually at first, then more often. Donald concluded that the shortened intervals were probably prompted by a ripening romance with Kent.

During the discussion of the vile-tempered little girl, Peggy seemed to be staring at Donald in an odd, apprehensive way. Still privately agog, he struggled to keep his features bland, and to give her no cause to think he suspected much of her story was a lie. Soon she lost her air of tension. The visit ended on an equable basis—though Donald could still hear the little girl yelling her head off somewhere upstairs as he bundled into his coat and muffler. Just before he stepped off the veranda to the open door of his carriage, he shook Kent’s hand, then Peggy’s. On her wrist he saw a pattern of red marks; she had been bitten.

Riding back to Sermon Hill for the second time that day, he asked himself if his senses had deceived him. But he was certain they hadn’t. He didn’t know whether to feel horribly sorry for the new Kent household, or to laugh at the unexpected twists and turns fate could take.

The rain fell more heavily throughout the rest of the afternoon. That evening, in Sermon Hill’s huge and lonely dining room, he found he had no appetite for food. After the blacks had left him, he sat with a decanter and glass, his bandaged left leg propped on a stool and his eyes resting on one of the more recent and unprecedented additions to the furnishings of the house.

On the inner wall, its canvas glowing in the candlelight, hung an oil portrait of Angus Fletcher.

The portrait was of immense size. It showed the old man dressed in elegant gentleman’s apparel—a suit and accessories which, in fact, he had never owned, but which were added by the artist at Angus’ insistence.

Throughout his entire life, the elder Fletcher had shown no concern whatever for his personal appearance. Indeed, he’d shown few traces of vanity at all, except for the vast and unspoken one of operating Sermon Hill exactly as he wished, and at a profit. Then, unexpectedly, he had commissioned the painting—one month after receiving the news that Judson had been shot to death in Pittsburgh.

George Clark was another hero to the Virginians along the river. After his victory at Kaskaskia, then the more incredible one at Fort Vincennes which his little army had approached in the dead of winter, across flooded prairies others would have considered impassable, George Clark had sent Angus a letter. Donald had read the letter several times; it was still stored among his father’s few personal effects in the office.

In the letter, the Virginia frontiersman paid glowing tribute to Judson’s heroism. He made it quite clear that, except for Judson’s sacrifice, the great enterprise in the west would very likely never have come about.

It was after the receipt of the letter that Angus Fletcher began making inquiries about qualified portrait painters—insisting on references and answers by mail to a series of questions. He finally selected an artist from Baltimore.

The artist boarded at Sermon Hill six weeks while completing the canvas. Angus sat willingly, though he put forward certain demands which the artist protested. Sermon Hill must be glimpsed in the background of the painting. In the middle distance, one or two figures must appear in a field, standing passively. Black figures; slaves.

The artist said all those stipulations would limit his thinking; hamper his artistic expression. But Angus’ hectoring ways, and the high price he was paying, won out. So there Donald’s father hung, resplendent in a white lace cravat such as he never owned in later life. And there were the docile blacks behind him, and Sermon Hill a whitish rectangle in the upper right.

The artist from Baltimore had professed to be an admirer of the well-known Boston miniaturist and portrait painter, John Copley, who had gone off to Italy before the war and was now settled in England—colonial migration in reverse! The artist told Donald that Copley had painted a number of the Boston radicals responsible for precipitating the conflict—Samuel Adams and the express rider Revere were two—and that in their portraits, Copley had striven both for verisimilitude and for composition that captured the essence of the subject’s character. Thus Angus Fletcher had been posed with one fisted hand on his hip. And he was shown full face, so that the tough, lined countenance assaulted the viewer head on. Whether by accident or intent, the artist had brushed tiny highlights into Angus’ pupils, lending them a suggestion of temper about to be unleashed.

At first, Donald had charged the whole business off to senility, plus Angus’ abrupt if belated realization that he, like all men, would go to the earth in the end. Only gradually did it dawn on Donald that Judson’s behavior at Pittsburgh had given Angus something of which to be genuinely proud; something which therefore made the old man worthy of memorialization in a family portrait. It was as if, for all his days, Angus Fletcher had harbored doubts about his principles, his style of life, his very worth—doubts which he had successfully concealed. Donald came to the conclusion that he never wholly understood his father until the portrait was completed.

Now, with the winter rain ticking the glass of the dining room windows and the candles burning down in their graceful chimneys, Donald refilled his glass and regarded the portrait with a sardonic smile.

In the hours before Angus Fletcher had closed his eyes for the last time, he had rambled a good deal to his older son who sat by the bedside. Angus confessed his joy in Judson having partially redeemed himself by the way he died. But Angus again stated that he thanked the God he would soon confront that Judson had fathered no children. In spite of his manner of dying, Angus said with regret, Judson had been driven by the devil. Pride and grief wove together in that, Angus’ final verdict on his second son.

It was a blessing that Angus Fletcher wasn’t alive today, Donald thought, to have seen what he had seen at McLean’s.

He understood at last Peggy McLean’s long absence in New England before Judson’s departure to the west She had been bearing the child.

When had it been conceived? So far as he knew, Judson had visited Peggy only that one time after Seth’s burial. Perhaps there had been additional meetings of which Donald was unaware.

Obviously others in the neighborhood would now suspect an illegitimate birth as one possible reason for Peggy’s mysterious behavior. Donald thought that only the most perspicacious would identify the father, however.

He understood Peggy’s apprehension during the afternoon visit, too. He was thankful he had done nothing to show he recognized the little girl’s resemblance to his younger brother.

But there could be no mistake. Elizabeth had Judson Fletcher’s bright hair and Judson Fletcher’s bright eyes, and she bore a certain facial resemblance to Judson as well.

She had also inherited Judson’s violent tendencies, it seemed.

And that fellow Kent was taking the child into his household! Donald wished him the strength and luck to survive the ordeal.

God, it was funny how the world revolved.

A collection of contentious, stubborn-minded colonials of all degrees of literacy, wealth and dedication had somehow defeated the military might of the globe’s greatest empire. In the process, a new country had come into being.

And Judson, who had squandered most of his life in uncontrollable excesses, had redeemed himself in his father’s eyes by dying a hero of sorts—

And leaving no heirs.

And now an angel-faced little harridan was carrying the Fletcher blood straight to the table of a Boston family.
Thank heaven I won’t be around in fifty years to see what havoc that’s wrought!

Laughing aloud, Donald poured more wine while the rain beat harder on the house and the Fletcher eyes glared from the wall in the guttering candlelight.

A
UTHORS SOMETIMES THINK
(misguidedly) that once
The End
is written, all the important work has been done.

The truth, of course, is far different. The publication process is never completed—a real link is never created—until a book reaches the hands of a reader.

And a great many people collectively perform the indispensible job of seeing any new book out into the world where that happens. But those same people are usually overlooked in the author’s haste to thank everyone from his postman to his dog.

So recognition and appreciation are due to the ladies and gentlemen of the Pyramid Publications sales and marketing staff—and also to Mr. Sy Brownstein and all his associates at International Circulation Distributors—for their dedicated and enthusiastic effort on behalf of this series, and this writer.

JOHN JAKES

John Jakes is a bestselling author of historical fiction, science fiction, children’s books, and nonfiction. He is best known for his highly acclaimed eight-volume Kent Family Chronicles series, an American family saga that reaches from the Revolutionary War to 1890, and the North and South Trilogy, which follows two families from different regions during the American Civil War. His commitment to historical accuracy and evocative storytelling earned him the title “godfather of historical novelists” from the
Los Angeles Times
and led to his streak of sixteen consecutive
New York Times
bestsellers.

Born in Chicago in 1932, Jakes originally studied to be an actor, but he turned to writing professionally after selling his first short story for twenty-five dollars during his freshman year at Northwestern University. That check, Jakes later said, “changed the whole direction of my life.” He enrolled in DePauw University’s creative writing program shortly thereafter and graduated in 1953. The following year, he received his master’s degree in American literature from Ohio State University.  

While at DePauw, Jakes met Rachel Ann Payne, whom he married in 1951. After finishing his studies, Jakes worked as a copywriter for a large pharmaceutical company before transitioning to advertising, writing copy for several large firms, including Madison Avenue’s Dancer Fitzgerald Sample. At night, he continued to write fiction, publishing two hundred short stories and numerous mystery, western, and science fiction books. He turned to historical fiction, long an interest of his, in 1973 when he started work on
The Bastard
, the first novel of the Kent Family Chronicles. Jakes’s masterful hand at historical fiction catapulted
The Bastard
(1974) onto the bestseller list—with each subsequent book in the series matching
The Bastard
’s commercial success. Upon publication of the next three books in the series—
The Rebels
(1975),
The Seekers
(1975), and
The Furies
(1976)—Jakes became the first-ever writer to have three books on the
New York Times
bestseller list in a single year. The series has maintained its popularity, and there are currently more than fifty-five million copies of the Kent Family Chronicles in print worldwide.

Jakes followed the success of his first series with the North and South Trilogy, set before, during, and after the Civil War. The first volume,
North and South
, was published in 1982 and reaffirmed Jakes’s standing as a “master of the ancient art of story telling” (
The New York Times Book Review
). Following the lead of
North and South
, the other two books in the series,
Love and War
(1984) and
Heaven and Hell
(1987), were chart-topping bestsellers. The trilogy was also made into an ABC miniseries—a total of thirty hours of programming—starring Patrick Swayze. Produced by David L. Wolper for Warner Brothers
North and South
remains one of the highest-rated miniseries in television history.

The first three Kent Family Chronicles were also made into a television miniseries, produced by Universal Studios and aired on the Operation Prime Time network. Andrew Stevens starred as the patriarch of the fictional family. In one scene, Jakes himself appears as a scheming attorney sent to an untimely end by villain George Hamilton.

In addition to historical fiction, Jakes penned many works of science fiction, including the Brak the Barbarian series, published between 1968 and 1980. Following his success with the Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South Trilogy, Jakes continued writing historical fiction with the stand-alone novel
California Gold
and the Crown Family Saga (
Homeland
and its sequel,
American Dreams
).

Jakes remains active in the theater as an actor, director, and playwright. His adaptation of
A Christmas Carol
is widely produced by university and regional theaters, including the prestigious Alabama Shakespeare Festival and theaters as far away as Christchurch, New Zealand. He holds five honorary doctorates, the most recent of which is from his alma mater Ohio State University. He has filmed and recorded public service announcements for the American Library Association and hasreceived many other awards, including a dual Celebrity and Citizen’s Award from the White House Conference on Libraries and Information and the Cooper Medal from the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina. Jakes is a member of the Authors Guild, the Dramatists Guild, the PEN American Center, and Writers Guild of America East. He also serves on the board of the Authors Guild Foundation.