The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles Page 5

  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.

  He sipped, then said, “Be more explicit, I have work to do.”

  “Shaw was whipping Dicey. I stopped him.”

  “You stopped him? You don’t run Sermon Hill! And unless you change your whoring ways and your politics to boot, you won’t even receive so much as one shilling when I pass on.”

  “I’ve heard that threat before,” Judson returned. He was cool, but it took effort. “I think you’re facing a more immediate one—”

  Briefly, he described his conversation with Seth McLean, as well as the stabbed figure and slate he’d found by the roadside. The description seemed to unnerve Angus Fletcher slightly. At least, the wrinkled hand and the water goblet shook for a moment.

  Solely to antagonize the old man, Judson crossed his boots, stretched and yawned. It worked:

  “Go on, go on!” Angus exclaimed.

  Judson still took his time before resuming:

  “Seth heard a rumor that our buck Larned may be responsible for stirring up some of the discontent. Since Dicey is Larned’s woman, I stopped Shaw in the hope of preventing real trouble. I also stopped him because what he was doing was wrong.”

  “Spare me your false piety, please!”

  “Why, Father, I thought you thrived on piety.”

  Angus colored.

  “All right,” Judson shrugged, “we needn’t debate on moral grounds. I thought I was doing you a good service. Isn’t a little restraint preferable to an outbreak? To seeing Sermon Hill set afire, for instance? Rebellions have happened before.”

  “Never here. And they won’t. I’ll chain up every one of those unwashed sons of Ham before—” He blinked twice as Judson raised a languid hand. “What, what?” he roared.

  “Your biblical scholarship is faulty, I’m afraid,” Judson informed him. “The name Ham means swarthy, not black. If Noah’s son had any real descendants—other than fairy-story ones, that is—” Again Angus’ cheeks darkened. “—they were doubtless the Egyptians, or those people called Berbers, not the poor bastards the blackbirders bring from the West Africas to do your hard work.”

  “When did you become a biblical expert, may I ask?” Angus sneered.

  Judson smiled with great charm. “Why, at college. You paid for the lessons.”

  “You’re not only disloyal to His Majesty, you’re a disgrace to the very flesh that bore you! To think I wasted hard money so your head could be filled with godless rot—”

  “Any rot, as you call it, was probably acquired at Sermon Hill.”

  Angus Fletcher flung the cold water in his son’s face.

  Judson jumped up. He almost went for the old man’s throat. But he checked, big veins standing out in his strong hands as he sat down again and gripped the arms of his chair.

  Angus Fletcher set the glass on a wicker stand, rose and walked toward his son. Despite his small stature he looked commanding, looming there in the shadows of the veranda. His voice shook:

  “Month after month, I’ve prayed to God to make you realize what you have been born to, Judson Fletcher. On my knees I have begged God to help you understand how much struggle and toil has gone into building this estate—”

  “Black struggle and black toil, you mean. And black blood.”

  “Your grandfather labored and died to—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, stop it.”

  “Blasphemer! You take the Lord’s name in—”

  “Yes! Because I’ve heard that whitewashing till I’m sick of it!” Judson thundered. “I’ve known the real story for a long time—others in this district are more accurate reporters. Your father was a catchpenny redemptioner from Glasgow—a criminal, most likely, since he never signed his real name to his indenture papers—and didn’t even honor his contract. Two days after they landed him in Philadelphia, he ran away from the soul-driver trying to unload him for transportation plus profit! Years later, he bragged about it! He turned up here in Virginia and got a farmer’s girl pregnant and had to marry her, and then the farmer died suddenly of a fall from a horse while just he and my grandfather were riding in the woods. Believe me, I know all about how the first land for this whited sepulcher was acquired! It’s going to come down unless you stop thinking you’re the anointed of God, ruling the impious. Those black bucks and wenches are human beings! Dumb, dirty—but people nonetheless. Seth McLean understands that.”

  “Seth McLean is a’ weakling and a fool. He owns a tenth of the land I do because he’s a tenth as canny.”

  “A tenth as brutal!” Judson shouted. “A tenth as immoral!”

  Angus Fletcher tried to strike his son. Judson caught the thin wrist, easily pushed it down. The old man was breathing heavily. For a moment Judson was worried. But he quickly recognized the raspy breathing as a sign of rage, not seizure:

  “I’ve raised a liar, a drunkard, a lecher—”

  “Who wishes to Christ—”

  “You will not blaspheme in my presence!”

  “—he’d never set eyes on this place.”

  “Twenty-five years old and look at you! Dissolute—idle—your head full of sin and poisonous idolatries! Well, go chase after your painted whores in Richmond. Go follow your crazy friend George Clark who’s probably dead in the wilderness by now. Or go join your damned brother and the traitors in Philadelphia!”

  Judson Fletcher was so full of fury, he was afraid he might hit his father and injure him. And the father would not be able to stay the son’s hand. To protect himself from launching an attack which he knew he’d ultimately regret, Judson fought for control, tried the Bible again, with a forced smile:

  “‘Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art in the way with him, lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge—’”

  “Hold your filthy tongue! You have no right to quote our Savior!”

  “If you understood your Savior, old man, you’d do something about Reuven Shaw.”

  “I will. I’ll order him to enforce even stricter discipline. To search the cabins for a drum—and to give a hundred strokes to any nigger hiding one.”

  Red-faced, Judson started away. “I’ll inform Seth McLean of your decision.”

  “I’m sure you will,” the old man jeered. “So as to get another opportunity for lewd concourse with his wife.”

  Judson stopped as if he’d been bludgeoned. For the first time, Angus Fletcher looked amused; master of the situation. He actually laughed as he resumed his seat:

  “If I have secrets which are public, so do you. Do you think I don’t remember how you felt about the McLean woman? How you still ride by her house night after night? One more reason I brand your friend McLean a fool. If you came on my property feeling about my wife as you feel about his I’d put a ball in your head.”

  With grudging admiration, Judson said, “You old bastard. Sometimes I forget how foxy you are. Figured me out, have you?”

  “Aye, long ago. But I constantly find new examples of your sinfulness—to my everlasting disgust. It came as no surprise to me when the Ashfords finally refused to permit their daughter to see you.”

  “Your faith in me is constantly overwhelming—!”

  Angus ignored that; pointed a wrathful finger:

  “What decent folk would want you as a son-in-law? For any woman you’d marry, there’d be naught to look forward to save anguish over your debauchery. And if she bore you a child, she’d go to her grave in despair because of the taint you’d lay on the babe—”

  Thunderstruck, Judson gaped at the old man. “What taint? Your taint—if any!”

  Angus Fletcher shook his head in dogmatic denial. “Something in yourself has ruined you, Judson. Better to shoot any ch
ild you’d father than let him live his life with your devil’s blood poisoning him and all his generations after hi—”

  “Be damned to you, you sanctimonious hypocrite!” Judson fairly screamed. “If I’ve devil’s blood, you’ve only to look in a glass to see who’s the source!”

  If the words affected Angus, he concealed it. His features hardened into that expression of smug piety Judson hated with such passion.

  “You’re carrying on like a raving fool,” Angus declared, “because you know this for a fact—Peggy McLean should thank heaven she was prevented from marrying you.”

  “It—” Judson could barely speak. “—it must give you great pride and satisfaction to say that about your own flesh.”

  “It gives me great sadness.”

  “You vile, lying old—”

  Unable to continue, he wheeled and rushed away down the veranda. Angus shouted after him:

  “At least you can have the decency to keep yourself from her presence. She knows your wicked purpose for calling at McLean’s! ‘Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery—’”

  Scarlet again, Judson stalked straight ahead, fearful that if he turned back, there would be blows struck—or worse. It required an act of total will for him to continue toward the main door of the house as Angus’ voice grew more and more shrill:

  “‘But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart—’”

  Judson slammed the door, stormed past the startled house blacks who saw his thunderous look and glanced away.

  He raced up to his room, tore off his sweated shirt in exchange for a new one. He hated his father. Yet surely some of the guilt for these dreadful confrontations was his. He took pleasure in tormenting the old man, in revenge for the old man tormenting him. What in the name of God was wrong with him?

  Even Donald’s faults were mild in comparison. In their father’s eyes, Donald’s chief sin was his conviction that the oppressive taxes and restrictive policies of Britain could no longer be borne. To that iniquity Judson added a score more, from adulterer to defender of slaves—

  Ten minutes later, he was galloping one of the dirt lanes that crisscrossed the plantation. His saddlebags bulged with two unopened jugs of rum.

  Judson saw black heads turn in the fields. One slate-blue face burned bright: the buck Larned, bare-shouldered, risen like some demonic figure from his weeding among the ear-shaped leaves of the tobacco plants.

  Larned watched him ride on, and it seemed to Judson that his back was afire from the slave’s venomous glare. Judson was a white man, and Angus Fletcher’s son. No matter what he’d done for the wench Dicey, Larned would surely twist it so that it acquired a practical—a despicable—motivation: to preserve the wench for further work, perhaps. Or sex with Judson himself. What the hell was the use of trying to intervene if it generated so much hate from all of them?

  That Judson understood how the whole slave problem had gotten so thoroughly out of hand in a hundred and fifty years didn’t mitigate his sense of outrage—or his sad conviction that the system would produce continuing friction and violence unless it was abolished.

  The agricultural economy in which he’d grown up was based on grueling physical labor. So he really couldn’t fault the people of the southern colonies for buying black workers in preference to white ones when the latter were far less desirable.

  Men such as his grandfather, for example, could be counted on to work for their buyers only until the expiration of their indenture contracts. Of course his grandfather hadn’t been willing to wait even that long!

  The problem of finding a stable work force had grown still more difficult early in the century, when some combination of geniuses in the mother country had conceived the idea of clearing Britain of many of its undesirables—thieves, pickpockets, whores—whose crimes weren’t quite serious enough to earn them hang-ropes. The answer was to transport them across the ocean at three to five pounds a head, to be purchased on arrival for negotiated periods of servitude. But just exactly like the man who voluntarily indentured himself, transportees eventually were eligible for freedom—earned legally or, sooner, by flight

  What planter who prided himself on efficiency—and ledgers that showed a profit—wouldn’t prefer to purchase a cowed, completely unlettered black from Africa? A black whose legal status, from the beginning, was vague? And whose fatally distinctive coloration made him easier to detect if he fled his bondage? Even the meanest petty criminal from the London stews at least had a white skin to keep him relatively invisible if he succeeded in escaping.

  But what had begun as a natural tendency to seek the most stable and permanent kind of agricultural labor force had degenerated into outright ownership of one human being by another.

  It was a source of sardonic amusement for Judson to recall that the very first blacks on the continent—twenty—were put ashore and sold at the Jamestown colony by the largely British crew of a Dutch privateer. The date was 1619—one year before the arrival of the Mayflower at Plymouth, carrying forty-one stiff-necked Puritan families, whose children and grandchildren prided themselves on being descended from “founding fathers.” What a pity there were no genealogical tables to permit the offspring of the Jamestown twenty to dispute that claim!

  In the early years of the colonial blackbird trade, the word slave had seldom if ever been spoken. Gradually, though, it came into common use as the more unscrupulous members of the landed class realized that New England shipowners were quite willing to supply a constant stream of African bucks and wenches, and that a combination of evolving custom and clever writing of new statutes could transform purchased black workers into permanent chattels with no hope of ever earning freedom—a condition the redemptioners and transported prison inmates never faced.

  Now the institution had grown so entrenched—producing fear and repression on one side, submission and hatred on the other—that Judson could only foresee an eventual confrontation between those who listened to their consciences and those who heard nothing but the jingling voice of the pound.

  By mid-morning, his reflections had put him in thoroughly miserable spirits. He lay in a grove at the edge of the plantation, glooming over the explosive potential of the situation with the local blacks, then experiencing even deeper depression over his own behavior.

  Why in God’s name was he driven to such excesses of word and deed, both in his father’s presence and elsewhere? Gazing out across the tobacco fields where heat-devils rippled the air, he saw the white walls of Sermon Hill rising on the crest of the low rise above the Rappahannock and wished he were anywhere but here.

  He wished he were out beyond the Blue Wall with his friend, for instance. In empty country. No laws, no Bible-spouting hypocrites, no incipient rebellions, no pea-headed overseers, no—

  No Peggy to haunt him.

  His father’s words came back to him with tormenting clarity.

  Taint.

  Poisoned.

  Devil’s blood—

  Try as he might, he couldn’t scoff away the uneasy suspicion that Angus had struck a vein of truth. One from which Judson turned in terror and loathing. The only way to blunt the fear was with rum. Slowly drinking himself insensible, he was able to convince himself that he only needed to escape Virginia to escape his demons.

  He fell into a stupor that brought bizarre dreams.

  He saw flame-haired George Rogers Clark stalking through the wilderness, standing as tall as the trees themselves. He saw Peggy naked, beckoning him with lewd gestures, a slut’s teasing smile. He saw his father, fierce as Moses, hand raised to deliver a blow while lightning flashed in a sky of churning storm—

  He awoke suddenly. Lying on his back in the grass, he felt chilly. Nearby, his roan stood head down, a statue against the first faint stars. In the west, red stained the horizon.

  Judson licked the inside of his furred mouth. He heard a sound s
o faint that the slightest change in the direction of the breeze silenced it for a moment. But he recognized the sound.

  The hollow boom of a hand drum.

  The moment he identified the sound, it stopped completely. But he could have sworn the eerie thudding had drifted from the direction of Sermon Hill.

  CHAPTER III

  Birth

  RAGGED AND LOUSE-RIDDEN, Philip Kent trudged through the mud of what passed for a street in the camp of the American army.

  He was physically exhausted. Not from working at digging and fortifying new earthworks; not from trenching out new vaults when the old ones overflowed with human waste. From boredom. The endless, uncertain waiting—

  Constant worry about his wife Anne only added to the strain. He got to see her once or twice a week if he was lucky. Regulations were haphazard in the American siege lines surrounding Boston. Sometimes he could obtain permission to slip away to Watertown of an evening, sometimes not. He seldom knew in advance. Tonight he’d been fortunate, and gotten leave to go.

  A drizzling mid-September rain fell, worsening conditions in the already wretched camp that had sprung up and spread as various volunteer regiments from all over the colonies arrived during the summer and settled in beside one another, helter-skelter. Since taking charge in early July, the new commanding general of the Continental Army, George Washington of Virginia, had been trying to bring some organization to the chaos. He hadn’t made much progress, even though new orders relating to camp discipline or procedures came streaming out of Wadsworth House in Cambridge almost every day.

  Philip Kent, a short, wide-shouldered young man with dark eyes and hair tied up in a queue, scarcely looked like a soldier as he slogged along in boots worn perilously thin on the bottoms. But then, few of the volunteers resembled soldiers.

  There were some exceptions, of course. The Rhode Islanders with their neat tents, each equipped with its own front awning. Their encampment looked almost British. The same held true for the Twenty-first Massachusetts, men from Marblehead who had given up their occupations as shipwrights and fishermen but not their seafaring heritage. The Marbleheaders were outfitted in trim blue seacloth jackets and loose white sailor’s trousers. But apart from a handful of such regiments, the Americans dressed and often acted like rabble. Their living places matched.