The Schoolmaster's Daughter (39 page)

She stopped and turned around. Benjamin stood a few paces behind her. She looked past him, down toward Samuel, who had one hand on the open door. He merely looked at her.

“You will be careful?” she said.

Samuel continued to stare at her. His bathrobe was white, and it trailed to the floor. From this distance he looked like a boy, quite angelic. She turned and continued on down the hallway, holding her breath until she heard Samuel close the door, the sound of the latch falling in place with a sharp, metallic click.

They didn't speak until they had gotten through the gate and were well down the hill from North Battery. The city was dark, quiet, though somewhere in the distance they could hear the sound of marching feet and rippling drums. Benjamin was afraid to speak first. As they moved through the North End, he kept waiting for his sister to say something, but she didn't. They just walked, slowly because he was limping. When she was angry or nervous, she often fell silent. Since his childhood, it had always made him feel shameful, as though he were somehow responsible.

“You had enough time?” she said finally. He was surprised by her voice. There was no anger. Weariness, perhaps.

“Yes, I had plenty of time.”

Then she did something that baffled him. She laughed. It was not her usual laugh, which he had always loved—there was something scornful and ironic about it. He was afraid to ask.

And she said nothing more, offered no explanation.

They walked the streets of Boston in silence.

At the moment, she didn't want to think. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to remove all her clothes, climb into the tin bathtub in the kitchen, and sit in hot water and drift off to sleep. But she couldn't. It wasn't possible, not in the middle of the night.

“What time is it?” she asked.

Benjamin seemed surprised that she'd spoken. “I last heard two bells.”

“It's still so hot.”

They walked on without speaking, until they reached Mariah's house.

“I should stop here,” he said. “My clothes are here, in the shed.”

“What will you do now?”

“Get out of this uniform, and these damned shoes. I must get to Charlestown to see what's happening. I will put my own clothes on, go down to the beach with a set of oars from Mariah's shed, and I will row her father's skiff across.”

Abigail stopped walking. She looked at her brother, really for the first time since they'd left North Battery. “Do you think the Americans are building a redoubt there?”

He shrugged. “If they are, I'll help. If not, I'll continue on to Cambridge, take my orders from Dr. Warren. There'll be fighting somewhere. Soon.”

She turned her head away. Suddenly she was afraid she might cry.

“Why don't you—you could come with me,” he said.

“Across the water?”

“I could take you to Rachel. You could stay with her.”

Abigail looked at Mariah's house. It was small, its shingles badly weathered. “She's in prison instead of me.” She was startled by her own voice, how it trembled.

“That's not true,” Benjamin said. “Neither of you deserves to be there. Why don't you come with me? I believe the best thing we can do for her now is fight. Just get in the skiff, and we'll be acrost the harbor—”

“No, no, I can't. I can't leave Mother and Father.” Benjamin stared at her, and then nodded slowly. “And you must go quickly,” she said, “before first light.”

He looked up at the sky. It was a moonless night. “So many stars,” he said. And then he turned toward Mariah's house. “They're going to tear it down, for fuel. I overhead some soldiers. It'll be like Mariah, her father—they never existed.”

“Benjamin, you must cross the harbor.”

“I'd like to stay here and defend it, kill any redcoat that tries to take a stick of wood.”

Abigail took his hand, much as she had when they were young, and they began walking again. “Hurry, Benjamin, while it's still dark.”

It was a great relief to be wearing his own small-clothes. Though his foot was sore, he could walk down the beach, oars over one shoulder, the uniform tied in a bundle tucked under his other arm. Abigail insisted on seeing him off. When they reached Anse Cole's skiff, she helped turn it over and pull it across the kelp lines to the water. The moment when a boat suddenly becomes buoyant had always fascinated Benjamin. One moment the hull was heavy cumbersome wood, resistant to being dragged through the sand, and then, suddenly, it rose up on the surface of the water, light and maneuverable. Entirely another species. Anse Cole's skiff suffered from neglect, but she floated with ease, a low-centered, wide-beamed vessel. Benjamin climbed in and fit the oars in the locks.

Abigail stood knee-deep in the water, holding the transom. She stared at him in the dark. He said nothing. She said nothing. Then she pushed off and the skiff glided away from shore. He pulled on the oars, one, two, three times, and the boat moved easily through the flat water. His sister was a long pale figure. She seemed to rise up out of the dark plane. And then she began to move, not toward the shore, but toward him.

He stopped pulling on the oars.

“Go, Benjamin,” she said. “It's all right.” With each step she went deeper into the dark, her linen dress fanning out about her.

Carefully, he dipped his oars, but he could not pull.

She continued deeper, to sink, until she was up to her neck. Her hair came undone. She swept her arms before her as she swam toward him, a white form gliding through the black water, light and maneuverable. Entirely another species. She came alongside the skiff, and her hand slung over the gunwale, causing the faintest list.

“You've changed your mind?” he asked.

“No.” There was the slightest laugh again, her voice odd, tremulous. “I'm cleansed now.” Abigail's hand let go, and she swam back toward the beach.

Her dress, a white filament trailing in her wake, reminded Benjamin of smoke.

XXV

A Colony of Ants

A
FTER
A
BIGAIL ENTERED THE HOUSE BY THE KITCHEN DOOR,
she quietly climbed the stairs to her room, and there she removed her sopping wet clothes. She lay on her bed, naked. The air in the house was stuffy, and as the water dried she felt the salt encrusting her skin. She smelled of the sea. Quahogs, clams, periwinkles. She imagined how good an oyster would taste right now, how its briny liquid would wash away the stale Madeira that coated her mouth. She thought about how shellfish live burrowed under the soft muck near the marshes, six hours irrigated by high tide, six hours in the open air. Each clam had its own tiny breathing hole in the muck, its sole connection with the outside world. They were safe in their dark, cool, moist bed, their tender organs encased in a protective shell. Often when she was a girl, she had gone to the marshes with her brothers and other children. At low tide the muck was warm, and it covered their bare arms and legs. They would dig clams and fill their dreeners. Clams did not resist when pulled, by hand or raked up out of the silt. Once in the dreeners, they whistled and squirted water in protest. Sometimes, though, there would be a razorfish—a long thin shell, and they would escape. Abigail would feel the shell slip by her fingers as the fish pushed itself deeper into the muck, seeking the safety of the dark. It became a game. She would hold her hands over where she thought the razorfish was hiding, and then suddenly drive her fingers down through the muck; lacing her fingers together, she'd pull up. Often she'd only catch a handful of mud. But sometimes she'd catch the razorfish. Their shells were bronze-colored. They were inedible (Mother had made that clear the one time she found one in Abigail's dreener). James and Benjamin often liked to crush them. Boys liked to kill things that came out of the sea. Clamshells cracked open, to be fought over by seagulls. And horseshoe crabs, those armored monsters, were picked up by their hard spiny tails and left in the sand upside down, their rows of feet working frantically in the air as they struggled to right themselves before the seagulls got to them. When Abigail captured a razorfish, she would admire its blade-shaped shell, and then tuck it back in the divot and cover it up, safe once again in the darkness of the salt marsh. Her brothers thought she was daft, sentimental. James once said instructively (even in his teens he was destined to become a schoolmaster)
Everything here kills to eat. Nothing is wasted
. Abigail couldn't accept this as an explanation, and as she continued to dig she said
There is a difference between survival and cruelty
.

Benjamin was halfway to Charlestown, speeded by the flood tide, when he heard the churches in Boston ring three bells. There was some activity in the harbor, unusual for such an hour. Aboard the ships at anchor, voices gave orders. Lines groaned and creaked as they were hauled through block and tackle. And there were numerous small boats moving on the water. He saw their dark shapes, and if they were aware of him they seemed unconcerned, probably assuming that he was another boat conveying messages between the ships' captains. At one point he picked up the British uniform he'd tied in a bundle and dropped it over the side. As he closed in on Charlestown, he could hear the sounds that had alerted the guards in North Battery. Strange, how sound carried across water—it was faint, coming from up in the hills behind the waterside village: shovels and picks, digging into the earth.

He tied up at a pier and walked through the streets, quickly realizing that Charlestown wasn't quiet because it was the early hours of the morning, but because it had been evacuated. The only movement he encountered was when he came upon a dog tethered to a fence, its bark deep and baleful, resentful of the fact that it had been left behind. Then Benjamin was out of the town, climbing through pasture. He encountered no grazing livestock and assumed they too had all been driven off out of harm's way. The grass was often waist-high, and frequently he had to climb over split-rail fences. There were few trees and only occasional clusters of bushes. The hillside was open meadow, while overhead there was a brilliant sweep of stars.

Pausing for a moment, he looked east, across the harbor. The ships were dark forms, illuminated by only a few lanterns. Beyond them lay the dark peninsula of Boston. The black slopes of Trimount loomed over the city. The only lights were on Copp's Hill, the elevated brow of the North End, where the British had established their cannon. Often over the past few years, Benjamin had ventured up there and, being ignored as just another boy fascinated by such military precision, he would watch as the gun crews conducted drills.

He continued up the hill, which at times became quite steep. Above him, the sound of digging was constant, and when he was near the crest of the first hill he stopped walking. In the faint light he could see it, a dark scar in the earth: hundreds of men, perhaps a thousand, building dirt walls that ran in a wide V, its point facing the harbor below. Benjamin thought of ants, how they moved in such concert about their hill, lines moving in different directions, each with its distinct purpose. Digging, erecting, transporting supplies—it was the same with these men, who labored without the need of shouted commands.

He approached the redoubt from the side, expecting to be stopped and questioned, but there wasn't any guard—all the men were busy digging. So he moved among them, pleased that he looked as though he belonged. The entire time he'd been at North Battery, dressed in that ridiculous uniform, he'd expected at any moment to be found out as an impostor. But then, he wondered, why would these men not look at him in his small-clothes and at least suspect that he was here as a spy on a mission from the other side? Perhaps the most significant difference between both sides was in their garments. But they were too preoccupied, laboring through the night with a desperate sense of urgency, and they were not doing so only because of differences in clothing. He could imagine James, always the instructive schoolmaster, much like their father, saying
Sartorial distinctions are only representative of larger, more significant differences, such as questions of justice and liberty
.

And then Benjamin heard his name whispered. Down in a trench he saw Ezra, and, working beside him, Lumley. Each had a spade in hand, and they were filling boxes with dirt, which they passed up to men who sent them up to the top of the redoubt walls, where the boxes were emptied and then handed back down to be filled again. Again and again, all along the ditch, men moving the dirt. Ants, it was the work of ants.

Benjamin climbed down into the trench, and Ezra clapped him on the shoulder. “How is it that I always seem to find you wandering aimlessly on a hillside when things are about to get hot with the redcoats?”

“Could it be luck?” Benjamin smiled.

“Yours or mine?” Ezra studied him a moment. “What have you done to your hair?”

“What, you don't like it?”

Ezra laughed as he pointed at a pick lying on the ground. “Now, get to work.”

Benjamin began to break the earth. They were all digging. There was no sound other than that of their instruments striking soil and rock, and the hard breathing that accompanied such labor. But then he came to realize that many of the men were also whispering, and they did not sound pleased. There were complaints about the command, about the lack of preparation, about insufficient ammunition, but mostly there were complaints about the lack of food and, especially, water. They were parched, and it was still night. Wait until the sun climbs into the sky and does its work. Yesterday was hot, and today was sure to be hotter.

“You see them,” Ezra whispered as he dug. “Men and boys, they climb up out of the trench claiming they need a piss and such, and then they get across the Neck and don't return.”

“They run away?” Benjamin asked.

“Can you blame them?” Lumley asked. “They know what lies ahead.”