The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles Read online

  “Knowing you, I’d guess it won’t.”

  “But it takes struggle, Philip. Society doesn’t change quickly—” Her eyes fixed on his. “Would you like me to show you what destroyed my mother?”

  Before he could answer, another female voice boomed out:

  “Dear Annie Ware! For heaven’s sake—!”

  A stout, cheery-faced woman of middle age appeared from the murky shadows at the rear of the hall. Approaching, she clasped Anne’s hand between both of her own.

  “I haven’t seen my favorite pupil in ages. How have you been? Why don’t you ever call on me?”

  “I do apologize, Mrs. Hiller. It’s very nice to see you again.” She inclined her head toward Philip. “Let me introduce my friend Mr. Kent. This is Mrs. Hiller, who owns the exhibit—”

  Deflated, Philip said, “I should have realized—you’ve been here before.”

  “Many times,” Mrs. Hiller smiled. “Though generally upstairs, where I conduct my private school for young ladies. Annie excelled in feather and quill work. Embroidery too. But her heart was never in it, I could tell. That’s what comes of spending too much time among her father’s books!” Behind her smile, the older woman was scolding.

  “Yes,” Anne said, “Papa’s still disappointed that I learned the feminine arts but never do much about practicing them.”

  “No doubt that will change when you’re suitably wed,” Mrs. Hiller replied, glancing quickly at Philip. He felt hotter than ever. The stout woman went on, “Too much learning is a hindrance, not a help, in the pantry and the nursery and the drawing room, my dear. Just remember—a man of substance doesn’t wed a woman because she has a dominant spirit. The opposite! Wives must be submissive.”

  Anne sighed. “Then I imagine I’m not destined to marry.”

  “That could well be your unhappy fate,” Mrs. Hiller advised, “unless you alter your outlook.” But she couldn’t conceal her fondness for her former student. Patting Anne’s hand again, she said, “Still, you were and are a fine, charming girl. Do come to visit some afternoon, won’t you?”

  “Yes, I’ll try.”

  “Good. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go see whether that rascal at the stile has sneaked off for a gill of rum again—” Skirts rustling, she hurried up the aisle.

  Philip said, “Anne, I wouldn’t have brought you here if I’d known you’d seen the exhibit before—”

  “Oh, I always enjoy it. And it’s been a long while. As Mrs. Hiller said, I most often saw the schoolrooms on the second floor. Poor Papa. I’m afraid he wasted all that money. I detest embroidery!” She smiled. “I hope I haven’t spoiled your evening, Philip.”

  “No. But you’ve shown me some more mysteries about yourself.”

  “Mysteries?”

  He nodded, began, “Sometimes I think I understand you—”

  “Which is more than I can honestly say about you,” she teased. “I press and press, and you won’t tell me a thing about your time in England.”

  On guard, he waved: “That’s all past. Of no consequence. Let’s get some air, shall we?”

  They left the waxworks hall. But it was almost as humid on the pier outside. Torches had been lit at dusk. The warm, clammy mist off the ocean still obscured details. Pale yellow faces loomed as they walked; men and women and some youngsters gathered around a balance master performing on a pole nailed to a pair of kegs set far apart. Applause rang out, and a few coins were tossed on a barrel head as the pole walker executed a crisp turn on one foot.

  The crowd faded into the mist behind. Far away, a bell buoy clanged. Anne stopped abruptly.

  “I asked earlier whether you’d like to see why I’ve become such a scandalous person.”

  “It’s something that can be shown, then?”

  “In a way. We’ll have to walk about half a mile up the waterfront—”

  “Lead on. While we go, tell me how many different schools you attended. You mentioned grammer school once, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. And dame school before that. Dame schools are run by women for very young children. From grammar school, boys can enter a university. Girls must go to academies like Mrs. Hiller’s. Papa thought he was doing me a service sending me there. His heart was in the proper place. But I learned as much or more from his library—starting with the required books for moral guidance. Mr. Bunyan’s works. The Reverend Mather’s sermons—”

  “Then you graduated to Mr. Locke—and politics?”

  “I did. I won’t spend my life as my mother spent hers. I’ll observe the proprieties when it’s necessary. But that doesn’t mean I can’t think, can’t have a role in something besides—besides childbearing that makes all your teeth fall out!”

  Philip wanted to laugh. But that anguished tone had come into her voice again. He decided it might be better to let the subject drop until they reached the destination that would supposedly explain something about her free spirit, a spirit that her father clearly could not control beyond a certain limit.

  As they walked along through the thick, swirling mist, he lost track of their surroundings. All at once he saw a spot of yellow ahead. The cobbled street ended. He heard water lapping nearby. It was nearly dark. Anne took his arm:

  “Careful of the mud. I must stop at the watchman’s hut before we go in.”

  Puzzled, Philip accompanied her toward the yellow blur that brightened to reveal a bent, white-haired man hobbling out of a rickety little shanty. The man raised his lantern.

  “Who goes? Speak up!”

  “Only me, Elihu.”

  The man had to be at least seventy. Watering eyes glistened in the lamp’s glow. The wrinkled face broke into a smile of cracked teeth and ruined gums.

  “Mistress Anne! You’ve not been here since a year ago—no, more like two. How are you, girl?”

  “Fine. Just fine, Elihu.”

  “And your good father?”

  “In excellent health, thank you. Though he still works too hard. This is a friend—Mr. Kent. May I show him a little of the yard?”

  “Why, ’course,” the watchman nodded. “I don’t care who’s supposed to own it—far’s I’m concerned, the whole place is still Abner Sawyer’s. Send up a yell if you lose your way.”

  “We won’t,” Anne smiled. “I know the yard too well.”

  Taking a firmer grip on Philip’s arm, she led him from the hut toward a gate. A huge, crudely painted sign hung between the uprights:

  SAWYER SHIP-YARD

  Anne stopped just beneath the sign, pointed upward.

  “My mother’s maiden name was Sawyer. This belonged to her father—all of it. Once.”

  Slowly she disengaged her hand, walked on with a strange, melancholy expression on her face, as if the past, like the mist, was closing around her.

  Philip followed. He passed tall stacks of lumber, great piles of raw logs, saw Anne stop ahead. He came up quickly behind her. She caught his arm again:

  “Careful!”

  This time she pointed downward. One more step and he’d have tumbled into a rectangular pit that looked nearly as deep as a man. Beyond it, great ghostly U-shaped ribs loomed up like the bones of some primeval monster. Only a moment later did he recognize what looked like the inside of Eclipse, minus its hull planking: the keel and ribs of a sailing vessel under construction on one of three timbered ways that inclined toward the unseen water.

  “You nearly walked into the saw pit,” Anne told him. “One or two men work down there, two more up here. With crosscut saws they turn logs into sixty-foot planks that’ll eventually form the hull for that sloop.”

  “And your grandfather owned this business?”

  She nodded. “He came from England in 1714, indentured to another yard owner. His home was Plymouth. His father and his grandfather before him had worked in the shipyard saw pits. I think that’s how the family came to be called Sawyer. English families took names from their work—Carter, Miller, Carpenter—oh, there must be dozens. Even though my grandfath
er was a landsman, he loved the sea. He loved building ships. But Plymouth had all the yards it needed, so he sailed to America. By the time my mother was born in 1729, he had his dream—his own yard. He was only twenty-five, but he worked very hard to be a success. He was. But he and his wife had no other children except my mother. That was the difficulty—”

  She started walking again, the mist swirling around her. They circled the end of the saw pit where crossbeams were planted in the ground to support the long logs to be cut by the saw working back and forth from above and below. Anne wandered toward the skeleton of the vessel on the ways. The huge ribs towered above them as Philip stood at her side, letting her speak because he somehow knew she had to:

  “This was my mother’s playground from the time she could walk. She loved the place so much, I suppose it was only natural she thought she would own it one day. She never bargained on my grandfather being exactly like most other Englishmen. Disappointed that he didn’t have a son. And accepting without question the fact that a woman could never be responsible for this sort of business. Running a yard is man’s work—” A somber pause. Then:

  “She told me she only asked him about it once. She was fifteen or sixteen. She wanted to know when she could start taking over. Be his assistant. She knew the routine as well as he did. How to scarf the lengths of keel together. Exactly what had to be done to frame up properly. Planking, dubbing, caulking—she knew it all, because she’d helped the men do it. So she asked. She said Grandfather Sawyer never laughed so hard in his life. Laughed till the tears ran on his face. He simply couldn’t believe she was serious. He meant no unkindness. He was a man of his times, that’s all. But I think he started killing her that very day. Although it’s the last thing he would have done on purpose—”

  Musing, her voice turned sad:

  “Strange, the way people hurt each other. Unknowingly. Because custom says they must. Well—”

  With another small shrug, she threw off the mood. “My grandfather’s rebuff was a turning point. When my father courted my mother—he was fresh out of Harvard—she married him because she’d already given up her dreams. My grandfather sold the yard to another owner the year before he died in fifty-one. He gave Lawyer Ware and his wife part of the profits. It was a handsome gift. Grandfather never thought twice about refusing my mother the one gift she wanted most—but couldn’t have because she was a woman. When I was small, she brought me here time and again, just to watch the workmen. Those were the only times I ever saw her truly happy. When we were leaving to go home, she’d almost always cry a little.”

  “Did your father know?”

  “I’m not sure. If he did, I doubt if it concerned him much. A man’s work is a man’s, period.”

  “But why did she marry him if she felt the way she did?”

  “She loved him. And—” Bitterness then. “—she realized it was her only course. That a woman would even daydream about taking over this kind of business—she finally understood it was unthinkable. It still is. An establishment like Mrs. Hiller’s—well that’s a bit different. Running a girl’s school is accepted. It falls into a woman’s prescribed sphere. My grandfather, from all I know of him, was a kind, loving man. So is my father. But they killed my mother all the same.”

  “So you’re going another way. Reading Mr. Locke. Involving yourself in politics—”

  “I’ll involve myself in my husband’s work, too, when—” She turned away “—when I know who he is.”

  “Anne, you’re a damned unusual girl.”

  She laughed. “It has its price. I have no circle of young female friends my own age. And no gentlemen who’ve called more than once or twice—except you,” she teased. “And you’re French, and new to America, and probably don’t know any better! Even though I attend church dutifully and observe most of the outward conventions, I am not entirely respectable, Philip.”

  At that moment he wanted to reach out and take her in his arms. He held back, a little in awe even yet. Sensing the awkwardness of the moment, she said:

  “It’s dark. We’d better go.”

  They walked away from the eerie ribs of the ship on the ways. They passed the hut where old Elihu had fallen asleep beside his lantern, and still Philip kept silent. She had partially explained herself at last; he understood why Lawyer Ware had sighed when she quoted Locke at the ill-mannered grenadier.

  They left the shipyard and the sign towering into the mist. As they reached the solid cobblestones, he concluded that a girl like Anne Ware could very well prove too much for most ordinary men.

  But then, had he ever considered himself as ordinary? he thought with an inward smile.

  They walked in easy, companionable silence to her home, only the distant cry of the watch disturbing the night—“Eight o’clock of a foggy evening, eight o’clock!” He kept mulling what she’d told him. Somehow it only increased his fascination with her, his attraction to her, physically and otherwise.

  At the steps in Launder Street, she seemed in better spirits, to the point of smiling with real feeling.

  “I thank you for the pleasant outing, Philip.”

  “I apologize again for dragging you somewhere you’ve been many times before. You should have told me—”

  “Not at all. I appreciate how hard you worked for those four shillings. But I have a feeling I talked too much—and too frankly. Are you sure you want to continue associating with a young woman who insists on having thoughts of her own?”

  His reply was instantaneous:

  “I’m sure.”

  She laughed, a warm, rich sound. She leaned forward suddenly to give him a gentle kiss on the cheek.

  The kiss, prim as it was, left him happier than he’d felt in many a month. He stood on the steps in the mist long after the door closed behind her.

  v

  The water of the Charles River purled against the bow of the small rowboat. Philip had hired the boat for the afternoon. As he rowed, Anne chattered from her seat in the stern. She wore the gown of yellow sprigged muslin, the one that had first taken his fancy. A wicker hamper rested at her feet.

  Gulls wheeled in the mellow September sky as Philip angled the boat toward the grassy hills on the peninsula opposite North Boston. It was a Saturday. With work momentarily slow at the printing house, he’d asked Ben Edes for the afternoon free. He was delighted when Edes consented, because picnicking was not considered a suitable pastime for the Sabbath.

  Philip rowed past the neat, sunlit houses and the piers of the little village of Charlestown. The village occupied the southern point of the peninsula. But his eyes were drawn constantly to the green hills beyond. Breed’s and Bunker’s were the names of two of them.

  Only a few white farm buildings dotted the rolling land. Somewhere on those slopes, he planned to make his intentions known to Anne. The demands of his mind and body had grown nearly intolerable during the stifling summer months.

  “—and Mr. Adams is certain other ports will be involved too,” she was saying. “There’s talk that as much as half a million pounds of tea will be shipped to the agents of the East India Company. And that silly ass Hutchinson continues to swear the monopoly scheme will be enforced. It’s glorious!”

  “Good God, we’re back to that again!” he groaned, only partly in jest. “I’m fairly sick of hearing tea, tea, tea!”

  “But it’s the rallying point we’ve needed so badly!” she said, brushing back a lock of chestnut hair blowing in the Atlantic breeze. Further out to sea, whitecaps rolled toward the harbor islands. A pair of boys fishing off a Charlestown pier hailed them. Anne waved back, then said in her now-familiar tone of teasing:

  “Besides, Philip, what do we have to talk about that’s more interesting? That evening at the shipyard, I bored you to death talking about my family—”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “—but we never seem to discuss your side of things. For months, I’ve kept trying to lure you into telling me more of your mysterious doings i
n England. All I get in return is silence and portentous looks. Fair’s fair. I’ve revealed everything, yet your past is still locked up tight as a spinster’s dowry chest. Don’t you think we know each other well enough for confidences by now?”

  “We know each other,” he replied. “But hardly well enough.” His lingering glance at her breasts, coupled with his sudden, bold smile, brought scarlet into her cheeks.

  She patted her hair again. Nervously, he thought. His hope increased that the golden afternoon and the isolation of one of the farmers’ hillsides would bring the result he so badly wanted.

  Abruptly, Anne touched his hand where it gripped tight on the oar. “I don’t mean it the way I think you do. Truly, Philip. I’ve puzzled over you night after night—”

  “Any conclusions?”

  “That something haunts you. Drives you.”

  “And you.”

  “Yes, but I’ve explained my—what do the French say?—my black beast. Can yours be so terrible you won’t speak of it?”

  Resting on the oars, he deliberated. He’d guarded the past overcautiously, perhaps. So, resuming his rowing, he told her.

  Not in great detail. But enough. He did omit mention of his involvement with Alicia Parkhurst, and converted the motivation of Roger Amberly’s attacks to hints that they had been inspired by Lady Jane. But even the story thus distorted held Anne silent with interest. By the time he beached the rowboat on the northeast point of the peninsula, she was studying him with a new, thoughtful understanding.

  “Then I wasn’t far off in my chance remark.”

  “What chance remark?”

  “The one about your lordly ways. You really do have some credentials there. I wasn’t entirely sure when you said as much the first time you came to our house.”

  “Yes, I’ve credentials, as you call them. Useless ones.”

  “Do you still have the letter from your father?”

  “In my mother’s casket. I keep it in my room. Worthless too, I suppose.”