The Rebels Read online

  “But Larned could have heard it round about. Anything else?”

  Judson pondered. “Shaw laid eight strokes on Dicey two weeks before her term was up. Some trivial excuse.”

  “But not trivial to a particularly intelligent and resentful nigra.”

  Judson nodded. “I’ll wager the excuse was just that. Shaw probably wanted to exercise overseer’s rights and take Dicey with a full belly. If she refused, he’d find reason to whip her.”

  “Another grievance for Larned.”

  Judson had no comment.

  Seth McLean sighed. “Regardless of causes, the figure you found is pretty definite proof something’s in the wind—”

  Judson nodded again, uneasily. “And you think it’s centered at Sermon Hill.”

  “I do. If it should break out as a full-fledged revolt—”

  Seth’s unfinished sentence conjured chaos. Judson glanced at the curtains blowing; the darkness outside. He didn’t care for the responsibility being pushed onto him:

  “Seth, I understand all you’re saying. But Lord, man, what can I do?”

  “I’ve spoken to your father several times in hopes of getting him to moderate his treatment of his nigras. I’ve had no luck.”

  Judson guffawed. “You think mine will be any better? Christ, Seth, you know he hates me.”

  “No,” Seth returned quietly, “I don’t believe that’s true.”

  “Bullshit. I’m the second son. Automatically second best.”

  “But you and Donald are both his flesh.”

  “And we’re both traitors because Donald went to the Raleigh Tavern last year, and I went along. Spiritually, anyway,” Judson added with a wry smile.

  He was referring to the gathering of members of the House of Burgesses who had assembled in the Williamsburg tavern at the urging of Patrick Henry, gentleman lawyer of Hanover County.

  Henry, a natural leader, was the chief spokesman in the Burgesses for the back-country people. Over the last ten years, that segment of Virginia’s population had found itself almost constantly opposed to the more conservative tidewater planters.

  Henry had stirred Virginia with his hot oratory against Crown infringements of colonial rights. And when the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had temporarily dissolved the legislature in May of the preceding year, Henry immediately led most of the Burgesses to a rump session at the Raleigh. There they appointed a delegation to the first Continental Congress. Along with Judson’s older brother and several other Virginians, Henry was presently away at the second Congress, where his stock stood high because of an inflammatory speech given in March of this year. In the speech, Henry had taken an inflexible stand against Great Britain. The alternatives for him, he’d declared, were liberty or death—no middle ground. Governor Dunmore promptly issued a proclamation branding Henry an outlaw, which only enhanced his status further among Virginia’s patriot faction.

  Judson continued to Seth, “I think my father would have horsewhipped Donald if Donald would have allowed it. At the moment there are a great many people on my father’s list of political enemies. Donald, myself, Henry—even Colonel Washington of Fairfax County, because he went up to Philadelphia too. On top of that—”

  Judson sloshed another slug of rum into his glass. He was growing tipsy again:

  “The lord of Sermon Hill happens to consider me a drunken wastrel. A prodigal on whom he squandered a deal of money for an education at William and Mary. He’s commented that the sterling notes would have served a better purpose if they’d been used for wiping asses in the outhouse.” Judson toasted an unseen presence. “So saith Angus Fletcher, in one of his less biblical moods.”

  “Still, can’t you talk to him?”

  “Well,” Judson said, drawling out the word, “we do speak every month or so.”

  “Suggest he say something to Shaw, then. Try to get the man to moderate his behavior until we isolate the cause of the problem, or it calms down.”

  Glum, Judson shook his head. “Seth, I repeat—I exert no influence whatsoever at Sermon Hill. I sometimes wonder why I’m even allowed to live there.”

  “Because you’re Angus Fletcher’s son! Judson—for friendship’s sake—and the tranquility of this district—try.”

  Judson poured more rum. “All right. I’ll say something. A remark or two. I’d be rash to promise more.”

  “It’s a start.” Seth pumped his hand. “Thank you—”

  “I must go.” Judson finished his drink quickly, asking himself why he had given in to Seth. He knew the answer. It was a cheap way to purchase temporary absolution of guilt—

  The shadow across the floor at the library entrance made him glance up sharply.

  She stood there; slender, dark-haired, fair-skinned and lovely in a peach-colored night robe whose high collar and decorous lines still set off her figure to advantage. She was all grace and gentility; a perfect lady he had loved since he was seventeen.

  But she had been Peggy Ashford, respectable, while he had been—still was—Judson Fletcher; something less.

  Their two-year relationship before her marriage had scarred them both. In those tempestuous times, Judson had never touched her other than to kiss her, though it had been obvious they both desired much more than that. Perhaps that restraint was what compounded the agony now.

  Seth knew very well that the two had courted. Meeting at cross-country hunts. Attending balls together at wealthy houses up and down the river. All with the growing disapproval of the Ashfords, as Judson’s nature asserted itself in frequent public drunkenness and brawling.

  Finally, the Ashfords forced Peggy to stop seeing him. It was heartbreaking for her. But she was a dutiful daughter. Presently Seth stepped in. When the marriage was arranged and solemnized, Seth expected his friend Judson to behave like a gentleman. Which Judson did, in atypical fashion, because, above all, he did not want to bring Peggy any further hurt or scandal.

  Now Seth simply assumed that while Judson, being a man, might harbor certain lingering impulses that could lead to adultery, he would never permit those impulses to become deeds. Seth also considered Peggy above reproach—

  And those stories about Judson’s affairs with other men’s wives—well, it was doubtful whether Seth fully believed them. Judson knew his friend failed to understand how deeply his feelings ran—or how close he’d come to making advances to Peggy on several occasions. In business affairs, Seth was reasonably worldly. In human ones, no—

  Still, Judson managed to keep his. distance. To him, Peggy Ashford McLean was something of a shrine. Unsullied, as few things in his life were any longer. He had never been able to explain why he loved her. She was sweet, intelligent, attractive; but many women along the tidewaters were that. What was it in her special combination of dark-eyed glances, smiles and small feminine gestures that had continued to torment him after he lost her? Perhaps part of his passion sprang from a realization even during their courting that she would probably never be allowed to marry him. For a man like Judson Fletcher, permanent frustration had its twisted charms—

  “Melissa told me we had a guest,” Peggy said. “Good evening, Judson.”

  “Good evening.” He managed a bow. “I’m just on my way—”

  He hardly dared glance at her for fear he’d reveal his feelings. He had seen her often since the marriage, of course. At holiday fetes, or the Richmond fair. On such occasions, he could never read her expression. He suspected that whatever she’d felt once was completely gone. Speaking marriage vows would have begun to destroy it automatically. Her code of behavior said that was only decent and proper—

  Peggy turned to her husband.’ “You’re home early, Seth.”

  “To speak with Judson. I’m seeking his help in regard to the unrest.”

  “I warned him he might as well ask for help from a woodpecker,” Judson said with a merry laugh, walking quickly past the woman, still unwilling to face those well-remembered eyes. He went straight to the imposing main doors and out,
with a hail:

  “I’ll be in touch if I’ve any results to brag about, Seth. Which I doubt.”

  Into the saddle, he tore down to the Rappahannock rippling silver under the stars. He never once glanced over his shoulder at Seth McLean’s large, colonnaded white house with its rows of slave cabins at the rear, near the curing barns. But all the way to Sermon Hill, Peggy rode with him. The starlight that put highlights on the river glimmered on the tracks of angry tears on his cheeks.

  v

  Sermon Hill, five thousand acres of prime tobacco land worked by five hundred male and female slaves fronted the river as McLean’s did. But Sermon Hill boasted its own wharf, where the huge tobacco canoes tied up in the autumn to load the casks that carried eight hundred pounds of cured brown leaf.

  That is, the canoes had anchored there every autumn for as far back as Judson Fletcher could remember, then floated downriver with the casks lashed across their gunwales. Trading ships anchored in the navigable waters of the estuary took the casks to market overseas. Whether they would so do this year in view of the worsening trouble with England was a question no one could answer. News of exchanges of fire between royal troops and colonial militia in April, someplace up in the Massachusetts Bay area, had cast doubt on all commercial ventures involving overseas trade—and on the placid quality of life itself.

  But Judson wasn’t thinking of that two mornings later. By way of fulfilling Seth’s request, he rose earlier than usual—at sunrise, for God’s sake!—to take a stroll around to the slave quarters.

  The slaves lived in two long rows of whitewashed cottages that faced each other across an expanse of dirt. At the head of the avenue sat the small house belonging to the overseer. Outside this house, Judson spied a crowd of field bucks and wenches gathered in the orange light of early morning.

  Moving closer, he heard the cracking of a whip. Because of the crowd, he couldn’t see the victim.

  He ran. Past the windowless cottages where barefoot black children wandered in the tiny okra patches, or squatted, dropping excrement from their bottoms, or simply sat in the doorways, picking at their hair and examining the creatures they discovered. In terms of sanitation and living standards for slaves, Sermon Hill was no different—no better and no worse—than most major tobacco plantations along the river—

  Except in the matter of Reuven Shaw, general overseer.

  Judson dashed up to the slaves at the rear of the crowd. They recognized him, quickly stepped aside. He spoke to one strong-looking buck:

  “Who’s being punished?”

  “Dicey. Shaw, he say she fit to work. Dicey, she say no.”

  “Jesus—!” Judson exploded. “Where’s her husband?”

  “Field already,” was the reply.

  For a moment Judson stared into brown eyes that seemed to add silently, Good thing for Mist’ Shaw. Or was that only his imagination?

  He shoved through the crowd, saw the skinny, ill-clad Shaw, younger brother of Lottie’s husband, raise his long blacksnake to make another mark on Dicey’s yellow-brown back.

  Shaw looked up, threat in his eyes. It simmered less hotly when he recognized the man in boots, hose, trousers, shirt—one of the owner’s sons.

  Judson gestured at the wench, who had been forced to discard her ragged dress—Shaw liked to punish the wenches naked—and kneel in the dirt with her head bowed over her knees. Dicey’s back bore three bleeding stripes.

  “Want to lay on a few, Mr. Judson?” Shaw asked. It was said with thinly concealed contempt. Judson and the overseer had long disliked each other.

  “You ignorant son of a bitch, I’ll take the whip to you instead. That wench birthed twin boys only five days ago.” Judson held up one hand, fingers spread. “Five!”

  “Three’s the most I ’low ’fore they go back to work,” Shaw grumbled.

  “Dicey, put your dress on and go back to your cabin,” Judson ordered. “’Till next Monday morning.”

  “Listen here! I’m in charge of—” Shaw began. Judson leaped forward, seized the whip and looped it around Shaw’s neck. He yanked both ends:

  “What’d you say?”

  “N—nothing, Mr. Judson,” Shaw gasped, pop-eyed.

  God, how he stank. Judson shoved him. “Get their black asses to work and quit causing unnecessary trouble.” With that, Judson let go of the whip and turned to walk away.

  “The snake is all that’s keepin’ us from havin’ trouble—!”

  Again Judson whirled, staring into the warped, resentful face of the sunburned white man.

  “Did you have another comment, Shaw?” he inquired, almost whispering.

  Shaw swallowed, watched Dicey gather her dress and flee barefoot. “No,” he mumbled. “No, I dint.” But Judson didn’t miss the hate in Shaw’s eyes—

  Nor, for that matter, in the eyes of the bucks and wenches who stood aside to let him pass back toward the rambling, two-story, twenty-three-room house where he intended to have his breakfast.

  Strange, he thought as he walked, his fair hair shining in the morning sun, very strange indeed. Striding by all those silent blacks, he’d had the uncanny feeling that their hatred was directed as much at him as at Reuven Shaw. Perhaps just being white did it, he thought wearily. Just as being black got you bought, whipped or fucked at the pleasure of your owners. Somehow, moving up the cabin avenue and hearing the chatter of the group breaking into field gangs, he didn’t care to look back.

  At Shaw or the slaves.

  vi

  The silver service gleamed, then suddenly distorted, reflecting a wizened face, white hair, enraged eyes.

  Lounging on the veranda, Judson glanced from the reflection in the bulge of the pot to the creator of the image: his father, a tiny-boned man with a pointed chin and skin like old leather.

  Angus Fletcher never tried to look prosperous, not even on social occasions. This morning his hose drooped, there was a rip in the knee of his breeches, and his shirt was wet with sweat. He came into the veranda’s shade, shot his head forward like a turkey, confronting his son:

  “I just had a report from Mr. Shaw. Apparently you interfered with him while I was down seeing to the repairs on the dock.”

  “And I just had a letter from Donald.” Judson used a smile to conceal his uneasiness as he lifted the document in question. “A hired courier brought it from Richmond not ten minutes ago.”

  “Wondered who that trespasser was,” Angus Fletcher garrumphed. He sat down in one of the large basket chairs. “You may keep the letter to yourself. I’ve no interest in tidings from that nest of traitors up north. That my own son should allow himself to be influenced by those perfidious wise men of the East—”

  Judson laughed at his father’s use of the term that Tories, and even some rebels, applied to the influential patriot leaders of Massachusetts. “Father, you’ll have to put Colonel Washington even more firmly among the traitors now. Donald says that he and the other Congressional delegates appointed the colonel to lead the Continental armies. It happened just the middle of this month. Washington will have the rank of general and will go to Boston to take command.”

  He consulted the letter quickly, enjoying his father’s fuming.

  “And there’s been more fighting. Some- place called Breed’s Hill. The British won the day, but our side acquitted itself well—”

  “Your side, not mine!” Angus Fletcher leaped for the letter, flung it away. “Those fools will bring down ruin on all of us. We should be suing for peace before matters get worse.” Again he shot his head forward. “‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called—’”

  “‘—the children of God,’” Judson finished wearily. Of all his father’s annoying personal characteristics, the old man’s fondness for scripture offended Judson the most. Angus was especially partial to St. Matthew. So taken was he with the message and language of the Sermon on the Mount, he had re-named his own father’s plantation on its low hill above the Rappahannock in honor of it.

&
nbsp; “Shall we move to another text?” Judson asked. “‘Blessed are the merciful—’”

  “I want to hear what in damnation angered Shaw!”

  Judson stared at his father. Despite his age—he was nearly sixty—Angus Fletcher’s slight frame suggested great strength. He worked diligently at the business affairs of Sermon Hill every day of the week except Sunday, when he attended church in the morning, prayed in the privacy of his bedchamber all afternoon, and forbade anything that smacked of light amusement on his property throughout the entire Sabbath. The old man did have a certain biblical majesty, Judson reflected as he studied the seated figure outlined against the river and the rolling, heat-hazed hills beyond.

  But he could never remember a time when there had been tenderness or even kindness between father and son. Even in Judson’s earliest recollections, it seemed that his father had treated him sternly; as a full-grown man. Wanting—demanding—more than a boy could give. Judson had resigned in defeat by the time he was ten. He could never be as clever, as strong, as pious as Angus expected him to be. Perhaps that was part of the trouble.

  Of course, being the second son was another part. He could not inherit, hence was less important than Donald. Even so, the same kind of relationship existed between the old man and Donald, ten years Judson’s senior.

  Donald was gout-ridden at thirty-five. He downed great quantities of port and claret when Angus wasn’t watching. Further, he never shrank from proclaiming how proud he was to be a member of the Burgesses chosen to represent Virginia at the Congress.

  Of their mother Judson could remember next to nothing. She had died when he was four. Donald recalled her as a kindly, religious woman who slipped silently through the house attending to her duties, totally in awe of her husband.

  Resentful of Angus’ outburst about Shaw, Judson said, “The text I had in mind will bring us to that subject. Remember, Father—the merciful ‘shall obtain mercy.’ Shaw’s doing his best to see you get just the opposite.”

  Angus made a face, rang a handbell. In a moment, one of the liveried house blacks—they were a caste above the field hands—glided to the old man’s elbow with a goblet of cold spring water. Angus Fletcher extended his hand. The goblet was placed into it. He did not look around. He expected the drink to be where it was supposed to be, and it was.