Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction (12 page)

Chapter 20

B
UT THE
E
NGLISH COLONIAL FORCES
did not fail, and in early July of that year there were great celebrations and days of public thanksgiving for the victory of the English against the French at Louisbourg. Speeches and sermons on the “particular providence” abounded throughout the New England colonies, as did bonfires, illuminations, and cannon fire. William Pepperrell, now a general, was given his baronetcy and worshipped as a hero among New England men. He was to return, no less, with the bell of the church at Louisbourg and present it to Curate Browne for Queen's Chapel. Again, Sir William's sumptuous eight-oared barge manned by African slaves soon would be seen upon the river, again his coach drawn by a half-dozen snow-white horses soon upon the street.

But nothing had been settled, really, and Sanborn's worst fears began slowly to materialize. It was not long before the western settlements suffered increased, if sporadic, Indian attacks: Rochester, Contoocook, Pennacook, Suncook. The list grew every week.

That summer and into the fall, Blackstone had been spared. But it was, of course, as vulnerable as any settlement to the west. He called on Miss Norris after hours to say that he had decided to go to the town and, if the Prescotts were not removing for their own safety, he'd rescue Rebecca from danger of death or captivity.

“And how will you do so, Mr. Sanborn?” she asked. “Will you break the law?”

“I do not have a plan as yet. But I take the situation to be desperate, or possibly so. Squire Browne asks that I look after his land interests, but he won't agree to Rebecca's removal. He leaves that to the judgment of Prescott, who, as he says, ‘though much occupied in protecting his own interests, is still best suited on the question of removal due to his being on the very site in question.'”

“Scandalous,” she said. “In the very teeth of destruction!” She stopped and turned to look up at Sanborn. Her eyes told him she regarded him again as her only ally against the Brownes and Prescotts. “The colonel has, to all purposes, disowned the child.”

“Or young lady, rather.”

“Yes, young lady, indeed. But, to me, who haven't seen her as you have, she is a child still. Perhaps I will always think of her thus. She was under my tutelage from the age of eight.”

“I understand, Miss Norris. I fear Mr. and Mrs. Prescott will place too great a faith in the garrisons. But perhaps they'll relent and return to Portsmouth after all.”

“Let us hope they will find their reason.”

I
N
S
EPTEMBER,
immediately after Governor Wentworth had declared war against the Penobscot, Neridgewock, St. Francis, Wowenock, St. John, and Cape Sable Indians, Sanborn made his final preparations to set out for Blackstone once more.

The day before he left, he paid Gingher a visit in her new rent. She now seemed comfortable in the copsewood privacy of her cottage. He explained that he was leaving for the interior on a potentially dangerous mission. But he assured Gingher that he had arranged for Mr. Hart, who had by now become a trusted business advisor, to manage his investments in his absence. Mr. Hart, Sanborn explained, had also been charged to provide for her rent and sustenance should he, Sanborn, come to a tragic end.

She looked at him. “You are thoughtful, Daniel,” she said, “and I am grateful for your thoughtfulness.”

She went to a cupboard and drew out a bottle of his favorite sherry. While she poured two thimblefuls, he examined the books and amusing periodicals from the home country she had been using to practice her reading. He explained that his tutoring would have to cease for a time, that he would soon hire her another tutor. He turned over the books to look at them. They were mostly, he gathered, the fashionable romances of her mother's day:
Cassandra, Cleopatra, Astrea, Tryall, The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony,
and so on. He wondered if she had stolen them.

As she handed him his sherry and looked into his eyes, he felt a strange and desperate curiosity about her former life. Perhaps, he thought, his desperation arose from the danger to which he was about to subject his own life, just as she was becoming more familiar to him. Whatever the source, he just blurted the question.

“Gingher. You once told me you were raised in London. Surely you can tell me now how you came to be here.”

Despite their ever-more-comfortable liaison, she had refused to discuss her past whenever he tried to bring it up. Now she shot him a look that said: You believe you own me now?

She had put on a loose silken robe. He went over to her and picked her up, then returned to the single chair. She allowed him to adjust her comfortably on his lap. He lightly kissed her neck and shoulders, breathing her familiar scent, until she began to smile.

“Did you come to Portsmouth directly?” he persisted.

“No.”

“New York? Boston? New London? By way of the Indies?”

“Boston.”

“Ah,” he said. “Boston. Just as I did.”

She said nothing.

“As a child with your family?”

She laughed mockingly. “My sister. With my sister. When I was fifteen.”

“Oh,” he said. “Your parents. They remained behind. Perhaps they had passed away.”

“Behind.”

“You and your sister were sent out to service?”

She looked away.

“You were running away,” he said, a statement, as if he had readily solved a riddle.

She would not speak. He thought that she must already regret this new arrangement, his impertinent intrusions that were never part of their bargain, their understanding. Still, he could not help this new sense of desperation and vulnerability, his own vulnerability to injury or death. But he lost his courage to press her further, and they sat in silence for long minutes.

Suddenly she stood up and turned her back to him. “Running away,” she said.

He hesitated. “I see. With your sister.”

“My parents disowned my older sister, Jenny. She was thereby forced to leave. She and I were the only surviving children. And we had grown very close. I could never have tolerated her absence in our household.”

He said nothing, believing it now better to wait.

“Of course, they were not wealthy people, my parents,” she said. “But they were not ignorant people. They ran a Cheapside mercer's shop, a successful one. My sister and I were apprenticed into the family business. Jenny they educated, and she in turn taught me to read, and something of figures as well.”

When she paused, still looking away, he remained silent, as if the sound of his voice might stop her. Finally, she turned to look at him. “But she shamed them,” she added.

“And they would not have it,” he said, a simple statement.

She sat on her bed and looked at the floor. “Yes,” she said, nodding her head. But she would speak no more of it, and he thought better of asking further questions.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
he set out with the express rider under guard of two scouts. The scouts were joining one of the several parties of a dozen to a score of men and their dogs whose job was to range continually from garrison to garrison to discourage the enemy from crossing the line of frontier fortifications and to protect townspeople in their outdoor labors. Men had been induced to such hazardous duty by the temptation of high returns for scalps—thirty, forty, fifty pounds and more each that they would divide among the members of the scout.

There were a few way stations along the road now. Sanborn took some minimal painting gear, clothes, and a few rations on a packhorse. Should circumstances require, he was fully prepared to leave everything behind and give the second horse to Rebecca. That was the extent of his “plan.” He knew only that he could not settle for Squire Browne's assurances and complacency from his secure position in Portsmouth. The only flaw in Sanborn's plan, a flaw he tried not to contemplate, was that he had no rational explanation as to why he had come to feel so personally responsible for Rebecca that he would place his own life at risk.

The town looked as he remembered it, but now there were men on guard duty and a new blockhouse in addition to the old garrison. There was also a new lodging house, a regular ordinary, to which he was directed upon querying an old peddler.

At the ordinary he saw notices for one of the town's biannual fairs, to be held soon on the parade ground nearby, as if the townsfolk had set themselves an oath not to be distracted by the enemy from common yet essential pursuits. There were to be the usual displays of livestock and produce, the horse races and contests of manly strength and skill, and “live turkeys and geese exposed to marksmen between sunrise and sunset.” He found himself anticipating the fair with some pleasure.

The next morning he paid a visit to the Prescott house, but Mr. Prescott, again, was out on business. And because fall chores were well under way, Mrs. Prescott, working beside her servant in the kitchen garden, could spare him little time. He mentioned the uneasiness he felt in the town.

“We are all cautious now,” she assured him. “No one ranges into the woods or planting fields alone and without muskets. But perhaps because of our vigilance and care, we have not been attacked or harassed, and we begin to hope we may well not be.”

“And you haven't made arrangements to secure your family beyond these wilds, back in Portsmouth?”

“Wilds?” she said. “We have, but only in a general sense. We are, as I say, most vigilant here, everyone sharing the responsibility.”

“I see.” He marveled at the mechanisms by which people come to believe whatever suits their immediate convenience. “As you may know, I've come to look after my own investments, and would speak to Mr. Prescott of the matter.”

“I'll be sure to tell him so.”

He stood there a moment longer, then decided to ask. “This feeling of trouble I sense, is it something more?”

“More?”

“More than the threat of the enemy, I mean, that possibility of imminent attack? Perhaps it is just my imagination, Mrs. Prescott, but I feel something more has caused a lack of spirit and industry I once knew here?”

She put down her implements, stood straight, and looked at him. “Well, it may be understandable that many here believe it is God's judgment on us. You may be feeling something of the sense of hopelessness . . . or not hopelessness, really, but the helplessness of people unwilling to flee to safety and thereby leave all they have built up here, their new lives, behind them.”

“Their minds tell them to flee to safety, but their hearts won't allow it.”

“Yes. That's what I'm saying.”

“And they see God's hand either stayed in some special providence or letting loose destruction upon them.”

“Yes, I think that's it. You see, we had a preacher here, one of those New Lighters passing through, and he turned many people's minds. . . .” She stopped to see if he understood the import of what she was telling him. “He put a frightening sense of the wages of sin into them. The other fear, that apprehension about the enemy, was already there.”

“But he gave it direction. And they responded with their testimonies and conversions.”

“Indeed, Mr. Sanborn, it is something of that. Mr. Prescott was thrown into a rage by it all, but what could he or a few men do? We've had no preacher of our own for some time. No milder influence. And Mr. Prescott had no strength equal to the New Light among those ripening for it.”

“So they live in fear yet try to assert their fearlessness and courage.”

“I might put it otherwise, but, yes, it is something of that as well.”

“No wonder I felt a certain, well, suffocation here, if that's not too strong a word for it. A joyless, spiritless feeling. And false bravado. I hope it has not contaminated you and yours, Mrs. Prescott.”

“No, it hasn't. Nor some other families who remain untouched. Mr. Prescott says we should let the frenzy die of its own accord, eventually. In the meantime, we are all the more guarded and vigilant against a real enemy.”

“Well, madam, that is a sadder state of affairs than I had hoped to encounter, though I, too, fear the real dangers, of course. One doesn't want to fall asleep only to have some savage knock one's brains out.” He looked about the grounds. “And how, then, is Rebecca, if I may ask?”

She looked up and squinted into the sunlight. “She is untouched by the frenzy. It is not her sort of enthusiasm, though I believe her uncle once thought otherwise. And she is quite the young lady now, Mr. Sanborn. We've had suitors at our door.”

“Suitors? Well, of course. And why not? Is she about? It would please me to have a word.”

“You might try the barn. Or the cabbage vault.” She wiped her face with her wrist, then wiped her hand on her apron. It was clear she wanted to get on with her work. “I'll give your regards to my husband, and tell him of your business here. I'm sure he'll be pleased to see you again, Mr. Sanborn.”

When he called down into the root cellar Rebecca responded with pleasure in her voice. She came up into the light to greet him. Her hair was in some disarray beneath her neat cap, her clothes were plain, and her face had traces of garden soil on it, but he was utterly taken with her. She was wholly “a womanly creature now,” as he put it to himself. He asked after her health and whether she was concerned for living where she did in these times.

She said nothing of herself, but said, “You look well, and prosperous!”

“Thank you. I'm pleased to say I've had good fortune.”

“And I'm too busy, Mr. Sanborn, to worry much about the times.”

“I see. You are all deferring to Mr. Prescott's judgment.”

“That's true, sir.”

“I'm sorry that I was unable to prevail upon your guardians to allow for some drawing instruction. That's one reason I had not returned earlier. But I find now I had better begin to look after my own interests here, and some of the colonel's as well.”