Read The Rebellion of Jane Clarke Online
Authors: Sally Gunning
Late in the day, after the other visitors had gone, Jane heard a woman’s voice at the door.
“I’ve come to see Mr. Clarke.”
“Who is it come to call?” That from Martha.
“Miss Linnet.”
Jane stepped into the hall. Miss Linnet approached her and clutched her arm, all her feeling in her eyes, her fingers, her entire knotted form. “Miss Clarke, I must see him.”
Jane led the way to her brother’s room. The woman went to the bed and leaned down. “My Nate, oh, my Nate.” She pushed back his hair, cupped his head. Whatever they might have been arguing about that day as Jane had listened on the stairs, it appeared to be of little matter now. Indeed, what
could
matter now? All Jane’s resentment of Miss Linnet’s hoarding of her brother drained out of her. She left the pair alone.
THAT NIGHT THE FEVER
set in; by dawn Nate was in a delirium. He carried on about White. Hugh White. Bloody White. He called it attempted murder, over and over again, but Jane could not believe him, that the patient sentry had singled Nate out of the crowd and all because of a few words that had passed between them on the street so many months before. She tried to remember the shooting exactly as she’d seen it—soldiers on guard in a semicircle, bayonets addressing the crowd, the club sailing through the air and knocking the soldier down, the soldier calling for his brother soldiers to fire, others from the crowd calling for fire, but still the soldiers held, until the final cry had come from behind the line. Hugh White had been at the end of the line near Jane, and indeed his musket must have gone off, but Jane’s eyes had been fixed on the other end of the line, first on Preston and then on the man in the dark cloak. Jane could not have said if Hugh White had fired on her brother or not, but she could remember his impressive restraint day after day, his concern for her safety even at the moment of his own greatest danger. Only after Jane had recalled all of that did she recall the other thing: White bringing his musket into the side of a young boy’s head for so little a thing as an accusation over an unpaid bill, and a bill not even his own.
J
ANE’S GRANDPARENTS, JOHN
Adams, Henry Knox, and Miss Linnet came to visit Nate each of the next few days; if Jane’s grandfather or Adams or Henry happened to arrive together they always retired to the front room and spoke in low tones, sometimes for half an hour, sometimes for more. At first, occupied with her brother, Jane paid them little mind, but by the third day she found herself anxious to know what went on. By making her way in and out she discovered that a group of radicals from the town had gone around collecting depositions from all the witnesses to the scene; Henry had given one, along with ninety-five other inhabitants of the town. It appeared no one had thought of Jane.
Jane also learned that John Adams had been asked to defend Preston and the soldiers.
“You consider this?” Jane’s grandfather asked.
“I must. All others have refused. A proper defense is the last thing a man should be wanting in this country.”
“But you can’t call them innocent,” Henry said.
“Their guilt or innocence is not my concern. That will be the work of the trial.”
In quick succession Jane’s thoughts flew to the
qui tam,
Winslow’s horse, and, for the first time in days, to Phinnie Paine.
Henry remained in the front room after the others had left, waiting on Jane. He held a rolled-up paper in his hand, which he unwrapped for Jane: an engraving by Mr. Paul Revere depicting “The Bloody Massacre.” The soldiers stood on one side of the street in perfect formation, bayonets fixed, guns drawn and blazing; the inhabitants stood cowering a good distance away, their dead lying awash in flaming crimson in the street below. Jane looked from the print to Henry. “But it wasn’t so.”
“Well, he makes his point.”
Jane handed back the print. “You were asked to make out one of those depositions?”
“I was.”
“To what purpose? Do they intend to put them in the newspaper?”
“By order of the town the depositions are not to be published before the trial, for fear of influencing the jury.”
Jane pointed at Revere’s engraving. “But all the town may see this.”
Henry made no answer.
Jane moved on. “Mr. John Adams’s defense of the soldiers must displease his cousin Samuel.”
“Not at all. All parties insist complete fairness must be observed.”
And they might as well, thought Jane, for all the hope the soldiers had of it in such a town. But why should she care, with her brother lying bloodied by one of them in the next room?
Henry stepped close and pulled Jane into him. He dropped his mouth to her collarbone. “Jane. My Jane. If I had allowed anything to happen to you—”
Again Jane’s first impulse was to hush away his guilt; again her second was to leave it lie, but for a different reason this time. As hard as Henry had worked to prevent the so-called massacre, he didn’t seem overly distressed about it now. In fact, he seemed quite cheerful. Jane pushed herself free.
NATE’S CONTINUED DELIRIUM HAD
a poor effect on Aunt Gill. Her own speech became nonsensical at times, mixing up soldiers with rebels and visitors with strangers. One day, on leaving the guests in the front room, Jane found her aunt again standing alone in the middle of the stairs; another time she found her standing in the middle of Jane’s room, thinking it her own. The aunt and the brother together began to wear Jane down; she was short with Henry and no doubt with others too.
Finally the night came when Nate’s sweat drenched the sheets, and in the morning his fever was gone. When Jane entered the room, he lay in a deep sleep, and she stood gazing down on him in exhausted relief. The unconscious Nate seemed so much more her brother than the awake one, the eyelashes still against his skin, the pale hair quiet on the pillow, the mouth relaxed into its old gentle curve. But
was
this the brother she thought she remembered? When had his lashes not been on wide alert around his eyes? When had his hair not blown about his face as he ran? In truth, how often
had
he smiled? But the sleeping Nate soothed her and healed him, and Jane would disturb him for no one—not Mr. Adams, Miss Linnet, or Phinnie Paine.
He’d come on hearing the news of Nate, to see how he fared, or so he said, but his eyes worked over Jane, as if checking for her wounds. He would find no wounds, but he would find someone more worn down than he’d seen last; this might have disturbed Jane more if she hadn’t noted the changes in Phinnie too—the tensed shoulders, the tight mouth, the line across the brow. As she looked at him he seemed to shift into someone she no longer knew, which was of course impossible, since she’d never known Phinnie at all.
“Your brother’s wound,” Phinnie said. “Is it . . . will it—” He seemed unable to finish either the thought or the sentence, which was another thing new.
“His fever is gone,” she said. “I have excellent hopes of him. He sleeps now, his first fair sleep; I shouldn’t like to wake him.”
“No! Good God, no.”
After a time Jane said, “I was there with Mr. Knox. I saw the whole.”
Phinnie took a step forward. Back. “You were there! With Knox!”
“I was.” She looked away and was displeased that she did so. She looked quickly back, but Phinnie’s head was now bent, studying a pamphlet Jane only now noticed he held in his hand, flipping it restlessly from page to page. “I knew Knox to be there. I read his deposition in here. I never dreamed he was such a fool as to pull you along.”
Jane held out her hand for the pamphlet and Phinnie handed it across—the depositions that were not to have appeared in the newspapers ahead of the trial were printed out, page after page of them, in a small booklet. Jane looked up. “Where did you get such a thing?”
“ ’Tis all about town.”
Jane began to read.
Daniel Calef of lawful age testifies and says that on the evening of the fifth current, hearing the bells ring which he took for fire, run out and came into King Street, seeing a number of people about one hundred he went up to the Custom House where was posted about a dozen soldiers with their officer. This deponent heard said officer order the soldiers to fire, and upon the officer’s ordering the soldiers to fire the second time, this deponent ran off about thirty feet distant, when turning about, he saw one Caldwell fall, and likewise a mulatto man.
I, Samuel Condon, of lawful age, testify and say, that on the night of the fifth instant March I stood near the door of the Royal Exchange Tavern, apprehending danger as the soldiers stood with their muskets and bayonets in a charged or presented position; during this interim I saw no violence offered the soldiers; in a few minutes a musket was fired by the soldier who stood next the corner, and so in succession till the whole was discharged. I went up to the head of the lane where I saw the people carrying off one dead person, two more laying lifeless on the ground about two muskets length of the said soldiers, inhumanly murdered by them, the blood then running from them in abundance; a person asked the soldier who fired first the reason for his doing, the soldier answered, “Damn your blood’s, you boogers, I would kill a thousand of you!”
Joseph Hooten, jun., of lawful age testifies and says that between nine and ten o’clock came into King Street and saw about eight or ten soldiers drawn up in the Custom House, and an officer, which he since understands was Captain Preston, between the soldiers and the Custom House. In about five minutes after the deponent first stood there, he heard the officer give the word “fire”; they not being firing, he again said, “Fire,” which they still disobeying, he said with a much higher voice, “Damn you, fire, be the consequence what it will!” Soon after this one of the guns went off—in a few seconds another and so on.
I, Henry Knox, of lawful age, testify and say, between nine and ten o'clock,
p.m.
, the fifth instant, I saw the sentry at the Custom House charging his musket, and a number of young persons crossing from Royal Exchange to Quaker Lane; seeing him load, I stopped and asked him what he meant and the sentry said if they touched him, he would fire. Immediately on this I saw a detachment of about eight or nine men and a corporal, headed by Captain Preston. I took Captain Preston by the coat and told him for God’s sake to take his men back again. When I was talking with Captain Preston, the soldiers of his detachment had attacked the people with their bayonets. There was not the least provocation given to Captain Preston or his party, the backs of the people being towards them.
Jane stopped reading. She handed the pamphlet back to Phinnie. She went into the front room and knelt before the fire, jabbing the grayed logs into flame.
Phinnie came up behind her and touched his fingers to her shoulder. “That you should have seen such things—”
Jane shrugged out from under Phinnie’s hand, stood up, turned around. “If you mean such things as I read about in that pamphlet, I saw no such things.”
“Thank God for that, then. I feared you would have seen the whole bloody mess.”
“I saw the ‘whole bloody mess,’ as you call it. I also saw a mob throwing rocks and ice and calling foul names. Waving sticks and clubs. The soldiers only came because the sentry was endangered, and whoever wrote up those depositions is the same lot who’s written every lie in the paper.”
Phinnie’s eyes widened, but not long afterward his mouth twitched in something that he would once have let loose in a smile. Was he thinking of that last night together at Satucket? Was he thinking:
Ah, so you decide
for yourself the newspapers lie?
Well, she knew they lied, knew because of her own supposed “accosting” by the sentry. But there she thought of Otis, the accounts in the paper of Otis, and of the very real accosting at the ropewalks. She turned away and felt Phinnie again—those same light fingers—on her arm.
“The thing is over, Jane. Blast Knox for getting you in it, but ’tis done now; ’tis naught to do with you and you mustn’t think on it anymore.”
Jane picked up the pamphlet that had somehow fallen to the floor. “I must read the rest.”
A second line formed to join the first across Phinnie’s brow. “Whatever for? ’Tis naught to do with you. Four men died, yes—”
“Four
men? Do you mean to say one of the wounded has died?”
“He has.”
Jane’s eyes slipped toward the door beyond which her brother lay. Her brother, who might have been five.
“Have you seen Mr. Revere’s rendition of the scene?”
“I have.”
Jane wanted to ask what he thought of it but knew better than to try. “ ’Tis not how it was. And yet all the town will see it, and all the town will read this pamphlet. What hope have those soldiers of a fair trial?”
“Their hope rests in Adams.”
“And will Mr. Adams be vindicated this time?”
Phinnie looked at her in something like alarm, and for once Jane could see—she could clearly see—the workings of his mind: Was she reminding him of their last conversation, their last falling-out over her father’s case? Jane raised the pamphlet and tapped it against the air to reassure Phinnie that she had only the one case on her mind—the case against the soldiers—that she wanted to know only one thing:
Was
there the least hope that Adams might win? Phinnie saw, and understood, and shook his head slowly side to side.
JANE READ ALL
the
depositions through, and even found some delivered by women, although the women only testified to rumors they’d overheard leading up to March the fifth; no woman had testified to the night itself, to the “massacre” itself. And of the eyewitness accounts, all but one put the blame for the massacre on an unprovoked assault by Preston and his men on a perhaps unruly but harmless group of townsmen. If this message had not been brought out in the body of a particular deposition, an editorial note in the form of a “memorandum” often followed, such as the one tagged to the deposition of Josiah Simpson:
the deponent further saith that he is satisfied there was not more than seventy or eighty people in King Street, who offered no violence to the soldiers or to any other persons, nor threatened any
. An editorial note had even been appended to the lone dissenting voice, warning against the credibility of the witness.
Jane read the accounts again and again, trying to find in them something of the night as she remembered it—the crowd taunting the soldiers, a club being thrown that in fact knocked a soldier to the ground, the stick hitting Preston, a townsman slipping from the crowd and behind the soldiers, urging them to fire. How was it possible no one but Jane had seen this man? How was it possible no one had noticed Preston standing in
front
of his men, the last place he would stand if he had any intention of ordering them to fire? And hadn’t anyone noticed Preston’s mouth fixed in that hard, tight grimace as the persistent commands to fire had come from
behind
the line?
All the while Jane struggled to preserve the night as she remembered it, her brother grew stronger, more lucid, more talkative—about the night as
he
remembered it, about Hugh White gunning him down.
“I knew the minute his head came around. I knew when he spied me. I should have dropped to the ground. He saw me, he raised his musket, it was like I saw it twice—once when I knew it was to happen and once when it, happened. And then I was down.”