“Of privateers, then, even as they elude you?”
Ourry turned his gaze to Thayer. He was a dark man, tall and shroud-slender. “There is blood on your waistcoat, Doctor.”
“I’ve just—”
“Cover it with pipe clay. I’ll not have one of my officers looking like a Covent Garden butcher”—he wrinkled his nostrils—“or smelling like a grog bucket. I’ve warned you about your taste for rum, Doctor.”
“Aye, sir.” Thayer took a few steps toward the companionway, then stopped. “ ’Tis a fine twilight just the same, sir. ’Twould do you a bit of good to study it.”
Ourry raised the glass to his eye again. “I prefer to study that sloop and her prize, learn her movement and her silhouette, the way the master shapes his course to the wind. Loyalists have been known to pass information about privateers like that, and one day, Ned Hilyard will make his mistake.”
“Hilyard…” Thayer peered at the sail, nothing more than a black triangle against the red western sky. “ ’Tis a name I’ve heard.”
“Perhaps because the rebels have nothing to celebrate but their piratical privateers.”
iii.
That was true, as HMS
Somerset
and the Royal Navy had closed New England waters to everything else. And Cape Cod had suffered more than most. In Wellfleet, whaling ships rotted at anchor. In Falmouth and Barnstable, merchantmen sat with masts stepped down and deck boards rotting in the sun. And from Plymouth to Provincetown, men of property tallied their losses.
The most loyal of these men had moved to Nova Scotia or the British-controlled islands south of the Cape. But most of them were loyal to their money before anything else, and so they trimmed the sails of their conscience to the prevailing wind, which blew the Bigelows to Boston for the auction of the
Ramshead
and her cargo.
To the surprise of many, not the least of them Ned Hilyard, the Bigelows also wished to discuss other business with Ned Hilyard.
They said they intended to fund a privateer and they knew Ned to be the best commander on the American coast. They offered him partnership in a sixteen-gun topsail sloop, fast enough to outrun a Royal Navy frigate, powerful enough to take on an armed East Indiaman laden with goods.
And the unspoken reason for the visit was that the Bigelows feared Ned’s fury, should ever he learn the truth of Serenity’s death. What better way to deflect suspicion than to ally themselves with her son?
Benjamin still regretted the night he had told Solomon what he knew of the book of history. Solomon regretted the night after and admitted that, every night since, he had dreamed of a burning cat. It had been merely prudent to burn the house where the book was hidden, he said, but his temper had overcome his prudence.
And because this happened often with Solomon, Benjamin did the talking in the tiny cabin of the
Serenity
. Ned listened, questioned them about their loyalty to England, which they assured him was in eclipse, and he promised to bring an answer to Barnstable in two weeks.
This pleased young Sam, for while the men were meeting in the cabin, their children were meeting on the deck.
Hannah Bigelow’s father had told her to wait by the gangplank and read the book he had bought for her on this, her first trip to Boston. She preferred to watch the boy splicing rope near the bow. The boy nodded to her. She smiled at him. And the boy nearly put the splicing awl through the palm of his hand.
“So… you’re a Bigelow?” He summoned the courage to cross the deck while clenching his fist to hide the blood.
“You’re the grandson of Serenity Hilyard,” she said. “I read all her broadsides.”
Sam did not know how to take that. He was not skilled in polite conversation, especially with Bigelows or brown-eyed girls in yellow sunbonnets. “She’s dead.”
“I know. You’re bleeding.” She took a handkerchief from her sleeve and pressed it into his hand, and he was smitten.
iv.
July 10, 1776, the night the Hilyards would come to Barnstable to dine and deliver their answer. A night, thought Hannah, to have patriots beneath her roof, not abstainers like her father and uncle.
In Philadelphia, the Continental Congress was confronting the cold logic of independence. On Cape Cod, the Committees of Correspondence had convened to vote their instructions. And in every town save one, the vote had been yea and duly forwarded to Philadelphia.
In Barnstable, one hundred thirty men had debated the question. Sixty-five abstained, thirty voted in favor of independence, and thirty-five voted not to send
any
word to Congress. The patriots of the town were furious. Men of property had predicted that independence would mean poverty, and thus had they controlled the vote.
Benjamin Bigelow had abstained and told his brother that to vote otherwise would be to jeopardize their carefully balanced seat on the fence of rebellion.
Hannah was mortified. After the visit to meet the Hilyards in Boston, she had hoped that her father and uncle would take the van of rebellion. She had even begun to sew a Grand Union flag—thirteen red and white stripes for thirteen colonies and the Union Jack for their English heritage—to fly from their privateer. But the family table talk still smacked of expediency.
Hannah knew another word for it: “hypocrisy.” Her mother told her to restrain such opinions until she had grown to womanhood.
And she grew closer to that each day. Her breasts had begun to fill and rise, the tips to grow more sensitive. She kept a supply of menstrual cloths at the back of her drawer. Many of her dresses no longer fit her widening hips. And the revolutionary ideas that had taken life when she visited the
Serenity
now boiled in her mind like the forces changing her body.
Her father said her patriotism was simply a passion of youth. But it was more. In the grandson of the Anonymous Outcast, Hannah had found a hero to fill her daydreams of romance and rebellion—a boy her own age, and already a
privateer
.
Hannah put on her best blue skirt, a white apron, a buff-colored shawl, and gold ribbons for her hair. This, she was certain, would shock her father. She waited until she saw the Hilyards arrive; then she dabbed a bit of vanilla extract behind her ears and hurried to the top of the stairs.
Men’s voices boomed from the foyer. The air was filled with the promise of new business. But Hannah saw only Sam. His untied black hair reached his shoulders, his face was burned by sun and blotched by blemishes, yet he was already as tall as any man around him. In the foyer of one of the finest houses on Cape Cod, surrounded by Turkey carpets, English wallpapers, mahogany, brass, he seemed the finest thing that Hannah had ever seen. She straightened her skirt and went down to him.
“Your hat, sir?” She took the tricorne from his hands. She was glad for her full skirt, to hide her shaking kneecaps, gladder still that his sunburn did not hide the flush in his face when he looked at her.
Then Hannah curtsied to the fathers, who inspected her from the hem of her blue skirt to the gold ribbons in her hair. And as she had hoped, her father’s brow furrowed down to collect his fury.
But Ned’s laughter restrained him. “I may question your patriotism, Bigelow, but what Loyalist would let his daughter dress in the colors of a Continental officer?”
Solomon Bigelow gave Ned Hilyard a thin smile.
The Bigelows served lamb, summer squash, green peas from the Bigelow garden, and a Burgundian wine that was among the last of its vintage in blockaded New England. With it, Ned Hilyard toasted General Washington, and Benjamin toasted the future of Massachusetts privateering. Solomon and his son Elkanah raised a glass to each.
But there good fellowship ended. The ordinary decorum of the dining room, which would have kept the men from talking of business or politics until the ladies had retired, did not pertain in these troubled days. Business was the reason the Hilyards had come and politics the only other talk that mattered.
“By using Cape Cod boatwrights, we can build a new sloop for five thousand five hundred twenty-five Continental dollars,” said Solomon.
“Indeed,” added Benjamin. “We figure close.”
“Something at which you seem skilled,” said Ned.
Hannah was not surprised at the hardness in Ned’s voice. She thought him a hard-looking man. She much preferred the gentle face of his son, whose gaze met hers whenever she looked across the centerpiece.
“Close figuring is the sign of a prudent man,” Benjamin sounded no more than conversational.
“Is that why you chose to figure so closely at the Barnstable meeting on independency?”
For a moment, there was silence. Hannah looked again at Sam, who looked down at his plate, as though embarrassed by what his father had said, or was about to say.
Then Solomon slammed his wineglass on the table. “I resent your inference, sir.”
“Then explain your vote as the gesture of a patriot.”
“ ’Tis our belief,” said Benjamin calmly, “that self-determination—an American Congress sending American representatives to Parliament—should be our goal. Independency will destroy most of us in the achieving, and the rest of us
if
we achieve it.”
“You talk like a coward,” said Ned Hilyard.
“I’m a man of
principles,”
answered Benjamin.
“If your principle opposes independency, why fund a privateer?”
“Because we wish to survive,” said Solomon angrily, “as we will, with or without your piracy to support us. I for one will be glad to go without, if it means we do not have to endure your son leering across the table at my daughter.”
Hannah felt her meal turn to suet in her throat.
Ned Hilyard pushed his plate away and stood. “I have no principle but revenge. I came here because a bond with the likes of you might sooner or later lead me to my mother’s murderers. But she’d tell me not to dirty myself, even if you offered me command of the
Somerset.”
Whatever might have followed, there came a sudden explosive clanging of the bell in the First Church steeple. Wineglasses tumbled to the floor and the tablecloth was pulled askew as all leaped to the windows.
July twilight gave the color of flame to the white clapboards of the church. The bell pounded, and above it now came the sound of a single word, bellowed up and down the County Road by a young man on horseback. “Independency! Independency!”
“My God, they’ve done it,” said Solomon to his brother.
“They’ve
done
it, by God,” said Ned to his son.
It was a strange crowd that gathered before the church, as divided in its beliefs and emotions as those who had convened at Bigelow’s table. Some cheered the horseman’s cry and pounded one another on the back. Some shook their heads and walked away. Most stood numbly in the middle of the road, confronted at last by the enormity of what had been done.
The rider pulled out a long sheet of foolscap, blew the trail dust away, and began to read. “ ‘When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…’ ”
Hannah stood at the edge of the crowd and craned her neck to see. Her father and the others were somewhere in the throng, and young Sam was standing on top of a picket fence, his arm around a tree trunk.
“Come with me,” said Hannah.
“Where?”
“A place where we can see.”
“ ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…’ ”
She led Sam back to her father’s house and up the stairs to the end of the hallway. There a window looked through the maple branches at the church.
“ ‘He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.’ ”
They listened in the gloaming to the transgressions of King George. They looked at each other. They looked at the crowd. Their shoulders touched. The sweetness of her vanilla scent struck his nostrils. The closeness of the young patriot made her heart pound. She drew her teeth across her lower lip. He fidgeted with his waistcoat buttons.
“ ‘… these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States…’ ”
Her face shone in the fading light. “This is the most thrilling moment of my life.”
Sam Hilyard wanted to say something equally impassioned, but he felt only an overwhelming desire to kiss her, which was exactly what she wanted him to do.
The kiss was awkward, more formal than romantic, and both of them wondered if they were doing it properly. It could not, however, have been more exciting in atmosphere or alchemy. But then what? Would they kiss again? Embrace? Neither knew the decorum for these things, and Solomon Bigelow allowed them no chance to learn.
“Bloody sneak!” Solomon’s fist struck Sam in the face and knocked him onto his seat.
“Father!”
“The world comes apart, but I still rule this house!”
Sam felt the urge to stand up and fight, but he was numbed beyond thought by the pain that had so suddenly replaced the pleasure of his first kiss. He tried to rise, and Solomon’s boot sent him tumbling down the stairs.
“Get out, or you’ll get comeuppance you won’t forget.”
Sam landed on the Turkish carpet.
Comeuppance
. The word sounded strangely familiar in the raging voice. But Sam could think only of flight.
“Father!” Hannah ran to the top of the stairs.
“Pack your things. You’re bound for Cousin Emma’s.”
“Halifax?”
“The rest of us may have to endure independency, but you’ll go where it’s safe”—Solomon glared down at Sam—“from these patriots.”
Sam stood and staggered to the door.
There would be no arrangement between the Bigelows and Hilyards, no more kissing between their children. The Bigelows would live in fear of what Ned Hilyard might learn, and Ned Hilyard would learn nothing from the Bigelows.
v.
On a September afternoon two years later, HMS
Somerset
rode at anchor in Provincetown Harbor.
The flogging was nearly over—two dozen with the lash would teach a Cape Cod fisherman that he was in the Royal Navy now, not hauling nets on his uncle’s sloop. There’d be no back talk when the mate ordered men aloft in a heavy blow.