The Seekers Page 37

  Unseen by her father, Amanda scowled. Gilbert went on. “Another problem is this dreadful business of the northeast seceding—or talking about it. Some of my acquaintances claim that since the Constitution grants only certain powers to the central government, it therefore implies that the states retain all others—including the privilege of deciding whether to remain in the union or withdraw. However, that same document begins with the words, ‘We the people.’ It does not say, ‘We of the several states.’ Once founded by the consent of all, the union can’t be sundered at the whim of a few. Any other interpretation could tear this country apart. Men must recognize that danger. Be prepared to counter it—”

  Again he pointed to the fob Jared was wearing.

  “No matter where you are, or what you are, I expect you to be one of those men.”

  Stunned into silence by everything his uncle had said, Jared simply stared into the dark, sunken eyes. At last, Gilbert smiled. “I think that’s quite enough for one evening. Shall we have another glass of port?”

  “You didn’t finish the first one, sir.”

  “So I didn’t! My mind wanders lately. Damned annoying—”

  He passed a palm over his forehead. With a start, Jared saw that his uncle’s brow was wet with sweat. He was breathing in a raspy way. He groaned softly as he lowered himself into his chair, tousling his daughter’s hair.

  Jared said, “She’s been listening too, Uncle.”

  Gilbert looked at him. “Yes, I was aware.”

  “You were? I thought—”

  “I wanted her to hear. She’s just as much a Kent as you are, Jared.”

  He bent and kissed his daughter’s cheek. The rain rattled on the planks. Jared helped himself to more wine, wondering whether he could ever live up to all his uncle expected of him.

  vii

  Accompanied by a harpsichord moved in for the occasion, the baritone sang every verse of the song Jared now knew by heart:

  The first broadside we poured

  Swept their mainmast overboard,

  Which made this lofty frigate look

  Abandoned-O—

  Then Dacres he did sigh,

  And to his officers did cry,

  “I did not think these Yankees were

  So handy-O!”

  Jared reflected dully that the songwriter had gotten things a bit mixed up; Guerriere’s mizzen, not her mainmast, had gone down under the first salvos.

  Two more verses, he thought. Then the toasts begin. We’re going to broil here half the night.

  But most of the several hundred men gathered in Faneuil Hall were enjoying the performance, tapping or stamping the beat of the drinking song to which new words had been set. Copies of the lyrics were available all over Boston in a fast-selling broadside.

  With appropriate fervor, the baritone launched into the final verse:

  Now fill your glasses full,

  Lets drink a toast to Captain Hull,

  So merrily we’ll push around

  The brandy-O—

  For John Bull may drink his fill,

  And the world say what it will,

  The Yankee tars for fighting are

  The dandy-O!

  Loud applause greeted the end of the song, and earned the baritone several bows. Jared sat back in his chair, folded his arms and closed his eyes. The hall was an inferno, and the dinner had made him sleepy. He ached for a breath of outside air, hot as it was. But since he couldn’t make a spectacle by walking out, a surreptitious nap was the next best thing.

  A voice droned from the dais. Another was still droning when he woke up to discover nothing had changed, except for the temperature, which seemed more hellish than ever, and the quantity of pipe and cigar smoke, which had reached asphyxiating proportions.

  In his place of honor, Captain Hull still looked quite alert and attentive, however. His cheeks gleamed like polished apples and his dress uniform was resplendent. At his right hand lay a velvet box containing a commemorative medal struck in gold at the order of the Congress. Silver medals had been struck for the officers. All of them were present on the dais except for Morris and Stovall, who were still under medical care.

  “Won’t they ever stop?” one of the boys at the table whispered as yet another well-dressed gentleman rose to offer a toast.

  “That’s only sixteen so far,” a second boy said.

  “Fourteen,” said the first.

  “It damn well seems like a hundred and fourteen!”

  A gentleman at the next table shushed them. The speaker raised his glass. “Our infant navy! We must nurture the young Hercules in his cradle, if we mean to profit by the labors of his manhood!”

  Every man in the hall stood up, and drank. Many stamped or shouted, “Hear!” The boys were required to stand but not to drink. Only the hardiest topers among them kept pace with the toasts, and that group didn’t include Jared.

  The guests resumed their seats. Waiters brought more wine to each table. Jared perked up slightly when Gilbert, seated at the extreme left end of the dais, stood up with glass in hand. Jared noticed a few sour expressions when his uncle rose.

  “Christ, he’s white as chalk,” a boy whispered as Gilbert cleared his throat. Jared sat forward, wide awake and alarmed. The boy was right.

  Gilbert held his glass aloft.

  “To unconditional victory! We have suffered the injuries and insults of despotism with patience, but its friendship is more than we can bear—”

  A groundswell of grumbling greeted the extreme anti-British sentiment. But it hushed the instant the glass fell and broke.

  Gilbert swayed, his eyes rolling up in his head. His fisted left hand jammed against the center of his chest. In the silence, his gasps could be heard in every corner of the hall.

  Jared jumped up. Gilbert toppled, smashing china and dragging the tablecloth after him as he slid to the floor.

  viii

  In the sharp air of late October, Constitution put to sea. Jared Kent was aboard. So was a new sixth lieutenant.

  After the frigate passed Boston light, Jared looked back at the blur of the channel islands. Uncle Gilbert had suffered a seizure from which he had not yet recovered. His heart rhythm remained irregular. He’d been unconscious when Jared slipped in to kneel at his bedside and bid him a silent goodbye.

  As the familiar coastline receded and the noisy routine of shipboard began in earnest, Jared remembered the responsibility with which Gilbert had charged him on the night of his homecoming. Gilbert had spoken of a premonition, too. Although the doctor continued to refuse comment, Jared still had the feeling his uncle had known much more about his own failing health than anyone in the household realized.

  In a way, Jared was thankful Bainbridge had put to sea in company with Hornet, a twenty-gun sloop of war.

  Shipboard gossip said they were to rendezvous with Captain David Porter’s Essex, thirty-six guns, then proceed south to search for enemy convoys bound around Cape Horn on their way to the Far East. Dangerous duty—but preferable to remaining behind while Aunt Harriet raved and wept over the injustice of her husband being struck down at age twenty-nine.

  Constitution swept out into the Atlantic. But distance couldn’t relieve Jared of worries about his uncle—

  Or about his own ability to cope with the future, if he came home from the cruise to find himself the surviving male of the Kent family.

  * Book Four *

  Cards of Fate

  Chapter I

  Mr. Piggott

  i

  IN THE DRESSING ROOM adjoining her bedroom on the second floor, Harriet took off the bandeau that held her breasts in place when she was dressed. She added the bit of lingerie to the pile of petticoats and the long-waisted, lightly boned corset lying on the floor.

  Harriet’s upstairs maid had been ready to assist her in undressing, of course. The lascivious girl undoubtedly wanted to see what sort of nightgown her mistress had chosen—so she could gossip about it with the other servants. H
arriet refused the help. Her bed apparel this evening in mid-July 1813 was solely her affair.

  A moth circled the chimney of the lamp on her dressing table. She studied the beating beige wings. She felt exactly like that poor creature—frantic—though only her quick breathing and her racing heart betrayed her state.

  With the greatest of effort, she’d endured the ceremony performed by the Reverend Channing in the front sitting room. She’d feigned composure during the modest reception afterward, chatting with guests and concealing her inner turmoil. But she wasn’t at all sure she could stay calm now. She faced the rest of the night with disgust, even outright fear.

  Outside, the hooves of a carriage horse clopped rapidly. Beacon Street was becoming a raceway for commercial vehicles and youngbloods on horseback. The hoofbeats set off a wistful yearning for the safe, quiet days of her childhood in New York. Being a woman certainly had its undesirable aspects—

  Undesirable? Why not be truthful? The word was loathsome.

  She had often expressed her loathing during the initial year of her marriage to Gilbert. By the time she became pregnant with Amanda, it was unmistakably clear to him that physical intimacy repelled her. After the child was born, he left her alone.

  But her current situation reminded her all too vividly of her first wedding trip. Reminded her of the revulsion, the anguish—

  Like a prisoner, she was sentenced to that again tonight.

  Well, it was the price she had to pay for marital respectability. But she refused to gaze at the mirror and confront the reality of her own body, especially the breasts her opaque cotton chemise concealed from sight but revealed in contour.

  Her lips compressed angrily. She snatched at the moth, crushed it between her fingertips and flung it aside.

  Seating herself, she began to comb out her long, dark hair.

  Something else stunned and angered her suddenly. She leaned forward, touched the top of her head. In the mirror, she saw gray hair.

  She’d never noticed it before. She counted only six or seven strands. But they upset her horribly.

  Gilbert was responsible for that gray hair! He’d wrenched her whole life awry last December when he died. He had been bedridden ever since his collapse at the Faneuil Hall dinner in early September. On Christmas Eve, his heart had simply stopped beating while he slept.

  The household was in a turmoil for days. Immediately, Harriet found herself coping with problems normally the purview of men: funeral preparations, arrangements for burial of the body at the family plot in Watertown—there had been no end to the aggravations. She recalled one of the worst—the necessity of sending servants all over Boston just to find a fashionable mourning costume for Amanda: a black cashmere dress with white frills, a white mull cap, gray stockings.

  The whole period was a dreadful ordeal. But she got through it—only to be plunged into another. At the end of February, that wretched Jared had come home.

  He’d been discharged from service along with most of his crew because Constitution was to be laid up in the Navy Yard indefinitely, for repairs. Having taken part in a second major engagement—the capture and sinking of the British frigate Java off the coast of Brazil—the boy was decidedly changed. Harriet had noticed a difference in him when he returned with Captain Hull. But at the second homecoming, the change was even more marked.

  Physical maturation was part of it, of course. Abraham’s son had grown taller. The relatively soft flesh of childhood had turned to muscle. But the change went deeper than mere passage through normal adolescent development.

  Jared carried himself differently. With confidence, even a certain air of authority. Harriet could recall years gone by when she had deliberately intimidated him—and taken secret pleasure in the way it visibly withered his spirit, lent his eyes a nervous, unhappy quality—

  Now her sharpest admonishments produced little response—other than a cool, almost hostile stare. It was harder than it had once been to make him lose his temper. She found the boy’s new self-assurance infuriating. She regretted that she’d lost her power to make him feel terrified and demeaned.

  Mercifully, Jared wasn’t underfoot too long after his return. At his own request, he went to work at the firm under the supervision of Mr. Franklin Pleasant, a jowly, phlegmatic man who seemed to understand the ins and outs of the coarse, controversial trade in which her husband had been involved. Mr. Pleasant had taken over operation of the company pending a decision from Harriet as to whether she wished to put Kent and Son up for sale. On several occasions he begged her not to sell. His pleas carried little weight. He was a tradesman and always would be; why, the fellow didn’t even have a diploma from one of the lesser colleges!

  Although Pleasant gave her a weekly report, Harriet paid scant attention to the business. She was aware that the list of titles to be published in the fall had been reduced. And she knew circulation of the Republican was off sharply. No one could match Gilbert’s way with words, Pleasant said. Even those details failed to interest her.

  Gilbert’s demise had brought one benefit, however. It had put an end to those horrid visitations by antiwar hooligans who threw stones. To make doubly sure, she had given Mr. Pleasant definite orders that there were to be no more articles or editorials stating or even implying support of the war.

  That action helped her in another sphere as well. She was once more accepted and treated cordially by members of Boston’s better families.

  Except for minor naval victories of the sort Jared talked about with quiet pride, the war was proving a disaster. The New England Federalists took smug satisfaction in having foreseen that—

  To punish the upstart nation, Britain had clamped a blockade on Chesapeake and Delaware Bays the preceding December. The blockade had been extended to the mouth of the Mississippi and the ports of New York, Charleston and Savannah in May. Though New England’s harbors were still open, the northeast felt the effects of the blockade in shortages of everyday goods, and in rising prices.

  In consequence, the outcries from press and pulpit grew louder. They culminated in gloomy predictions of American defeat. As if to confirm the predictions, news reached the city that the much-touted Captain James Lawrence had lost the frigate Chesapeake to the British just thirty miles from the Boston waterfront.

  Through most of the month of June, Harriet was forced to endure Jared’s defense of the defeat: Lawrence might have lost his frigate, but not his fighting spirit! Dying, he had exclaimed, “Don’t give up the ship!”

  In vain, Harriet tried to convince the misguided boy that such sloganeering was foolish. It certainly hadn’t helped save Lawrence’s life—and it gave the country a false confidence. President Madison was steering the ship of state straight onto the rocks of military and economic disaster—all Harriet’s friends and their husbands said so. The sooner America pleaded for terms, the better!

  During one such argument, Harriet almost succeeded in goading Jared into a rage. But he controlled his temper and replied, “You—and your friends—are entitled to your opinion, Aunt Harriet.” She seethed over the little exhibition of self-control.

  The war made daily living difficult. Even a family as well off as Harriet’s had trouble buying the necessities—and if they were available, prices were cruel. Managing household affairs by herself was a strain. Perhaps that was part of the reason she’d succumbed relatively quickly to the marriage proposal of a man she had only met in March, at Reverend Channing’s church.

  What she had liked immediately about Mr. Andrew Piggott was his gentility. He wore the proper clothes. Cultivated the proper people. Disavowed and damned the war. He was educated—a graduate of Yale down in New Haven. That wasn’t Harvard; but one couldn’t have everything.

  More important, Mr. Piggott didn’t misuse his education by wandering into philosophical byways and espousing radical causes, as Gilbert had.

  Piggott told her he had become a man of independent means when an uncle in Albany left him an inheritance. Harriet
made a few inquiries around town and found no evidence to contradict Piggott’s claim that the uncle was a prosperous fur factor associated with Mr. Astor. She had to admit the inquiries were superficial; in her eagerness to end the lonely struggle that was widowhood, she accepted Piggott’s credentials almost at face value. He was urbane, polite, and appeared to be welcome in the best circles.

  She wasn’t totally imprudent, though. Mr. Piggott first proposed in June. She put him off. She needed to satisfy herself that he wasn’t marrying her in order to take possession of the assets of Kent and Son. She questioned him about it several times. Repeatedly, Mr. Piggott assured her that he wished to live a gentleman’s life, not soil his hands in business. He would be perfectly content to let Franklin Pleasant operate the company until Harriet decided about its disposition.

  He also disarmed her by confessing to two vices. He liked liquor, he said. And he enjoyed card playing. In fact, when he wasn’t squiring her to salons, dinner parties, or the Federal Street Church, he spent most of his time at the Exchange Coffee House, hunting up other affluent and respectable gentlemen he could engage in a marathon game of solo. At other times, the game was shemmy—the one French invention whose origins Mr. Piggott, a good Federalist, overlooked.

  The games were always played in private rooms rented for the occasion, he said. His fondness for cards would never cause a scandal. Everything was conducted with the utmost discretion.

  Another small investigation seemed in order. Harriet called on Franklin Pleasant, and he in turn sent out one of the Republican’s writers. She got back a report that yes, Mr. Piggott did involve himself in card games organized at the Exchange—games in which the stakes were rumored to be quite high. But he seemed to have the income to support his passion.

  Finally, then, Harriet accepted the proposal, telling herself she could wean Mr. Piggott from his not-quite-respectable pastime after they were man and wife.

  She had yet to learn the extent of Mr. Piggott’s interest in sexual matters. It was a topic one didn’t discuss prior to marriage. Tonight would surely shed some light on that repellent subject, however—