Book One: The Olive Branch Part Four: Two Offers Characters
Chapter Twenty-nine
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Abigail Adams. Braintree, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Monday, 26 October 1778.
In 1778, when the fighting had become a stalemate and both sides were feeling towards terms, the Crown re-garrisoned the town under a local arrangement as one of the symbolic coastal garrisons it maintained through the last phase of the war, and the Continental forces around it did not contest the landing.
Johnny saw the sails first, from the top of the lane, and came running down to the house to tell her, and she went up Penn’s Hill with him in her apron to look, because she found that she could not have stayed in the kitchen if the house had been on fire.
It was a clear cold afternoon, with the wind in the north-west and the bay below them very blue. Three years ago she had stood on this hill with Johnny’s hand in hers and watched Charlestown burn across the water, and the smoke go up over Bunker Hill like a column out of Exodus. He had been seven. He was eleven now, and nearly as tall as she was, and he did not hold her hand; he stood a little apart from her on the rock with his hands in his pockets, as his father stood, and named the ships for her as they came in past the Brewsters into Nantasket Road.
“Eleven,” he said. “Ten of them are transports, Mamma. You can tell by how they sit. And a frigate. Thirty-two guns. Perhaps twenty-eight.”
“How do you know it is twenty-eight?”
“I don’t,” said Johnny. “Mr Thaxter says the important thing is to sound as if you did.”
She laughed, and then stopped, because the frigate was coming round into the road under topsails with the King’s colours at her ensign staff, very small and very clear in the cold light, and she found that she had not seen them on the water of that bay since the March of seventy-six, when the whole of the King’s fleet had gone out past those same islands and not come back.
“Are the regulars coming back to Boston?” Johnny said.
She thought about it.
“Yes,” she said. “And no. It depends what you mean by Boston, and what you mean by back.” And then, because he was eleven and would not let her off with that, and because his father would not have let her off either: “They are coming for General Burgoyne’s men, at Cambridge, to take them home to England, as the Convention said. And when they go, some of them are going to stay. Not in the town. At the Castle. By an arrangement.” She looked at the frigate. “Your father will say it is a disgrace. I expect he will be right. I expect it will happen anyway.”
It had been a terrible summer, and it had nothing to do with the war.
July and August had been the hottest anybody in Braintree could remember, and the rain had not come, and the corn had burned on the stalk and the potatoes had come out of the ground the size of walnuts. There would not be a barrel of cider made on the place. Then in the middle of August the great gale had come in off the sea and blown for two days, and thrown down the fences and laid what was left of the corn flat, and Cotton Tufts had written from Weymouth that it was the same all along the coast. The dysentery was back in the neighbouring towns, as bad as it had been in seventy-five, when it had taken her mother. She had kept the children close and boiled everything and prayed, and so far it had passed them by.
And there was the money.
She had kept the accounts of this farm for four years. She knew to a penny what things had cost in seventy-four, because she had written them down, and she could open the book and look, as she sometimes did at night with the candle, the way other women looked at letters. Rye was ten dollars a bushel now. Flour was fifty dollars the hundredweight, when there was any. A labourer wanted four dollars a day and his dinner, and she paid it, because there was no labourer in Braintree who would take less and no man of her own at home to do the work. It took forty dollars to buy a barrel of cider. A hundred pounds, lawful money, would buy what thirteen pounds six shillings and eightpence had bought before the war. She had worked it out at the table one night in the summer and sat looking at the figure for a long time.
Our Money, she had written to John afterwards, is very little better than blank paper.
John’s letters were short. They had been short since May.
He wrote from Philadelphia, where the Congress had gone back in July, into the State House that the King’s army had used for a hospital and left very dirty; and he wrote about the Congress’s business, and the price of things, and the heat; and he did not write about anything else. She knew why. He had lost his vote, for the second time, and he had written her that night a letter so dry that it had made her want to cry, and since then he had written as a man writes who has decided not to say what he thinks because it will do no good. She had borne it through the summer. In October she had not borne it any longer.
By Heaven, she had written, if you could you have changed Hearts with some frozen Laplander.
She had read it over, and nearly crossed it out, and signed it Portia, which was what she signed when she meant a thing, and sent it.
The arrangement had been in the newspapers for a fortnight. It had been in the meeting houses for a month before that, and in every kitchen in the Province.
It had begun with Burgoyne’s men. They had been at Cambridge for a year, in the old barracks on Prospect Hill and Winter Hill, four thousand of them and more, British and Germans, prisoners who were not quite prisoners: an army that had laid down its arms at Saratoga on the promise that it would be marched to Boston and shipped home, and had been marched to Boston and not shipped anywhere, because the Congress had decided in January that it did not trust General Burgoyne’s word and would not let his men go until the King himself had put his name to the Convention. So they had sat on the hills above Cambridge all year, eating Massachusetts flour in a year when there was no flour, and quarrelling with the townspeople, and singing God save the King at their balls, and one of them had been shot by a sentry in June. General Burgoyne had gone home on his parole in the spring. His army had stayed.
Then in the summer the King had put his name to it. The ratification had come down from New York in August, under the Great Seal, in proper form, and the Congress had argued about it for a month and then, by a vote John did not describe, accepted it. The transports were to come in the autumn.
That was the first part, and nobody minded it very much. It was the second part that the meeting houses had been arguing about since September.
The Council and Clinton had exchanged letters all October. Nobody agreed who first wanted the bargain. The printed terms were clear. One battalion would stay at Castle William under the King’s colours; its officers could enter Boston by day, unarmed and on parole, to buy supplies. The town kept its government, courts and militia. Continental troops kept the Neck, Dorchester and the other islands. Neither side would fire while the arrangement stood. Either could end it on a month’s notice.
Mr Samuel Adams had written from Philadelphia that it was the most shameful thing done in Massachusetts since the Port Act, and the Boston newspapers had printed his letter. Mr Hancock, who was at home in Boston that year, and who loved a ceremony above anything in the world, had been seen walking on the Long Wharf in his best coat on the day the Council signed it, looking at the Castle through a glass. Her uncle Smith said that half the town was against it and the other half was against it too, and that nobody would lift a finger to stop it, because the Convention army would go, and the King’s frigates would stop taking Boston ships off the Cape for a while, and the officers at the Castle would pay in silver.
“Silver,” said her uncle, “is a great argument, niece, in a town where the money is paper.”
She thought he was right. She thought that was the worst of it.
The prisoners from the Somerset came through Braintree on the first Saturday in November.
The ship had gone ashore on the outer side of Cape Cod in a gale on the Monday, on the bars off Truro, and broken up, and the men who had got ashore alive, some hundreds of them, had been marched up the Cape and along the Plymouth road towards Boston under a guard of militia, to be sent over to the Castle under the new arrangement and exchanged. It was a long road. They came past her house in the middle of the morning in a long straggling column, without hats, a good many of them, and without shoes, in torn jackets and wet canvas, and the guard walking beside them looked very nearly as tired as they did.
She had bread in the oven, because it was Saturday. She took it out, and went down to the road with it, and Nabby came after her with the rest of it in the basket, and the cheese; and they stood at the gate and gave it to the men as they came past, a piece to each, as far as it would go, which was not very far.
One of them, an older man with grey in his pigtail, stopped at the gate with his bread in his hand and looked at her, and at the house, and at the hill behind it.
“You’ll not remember the Somerset, ma’am,” he said. “We was in the river at Charlestown, the day of the battle. Off the ferry. We was firing on the town.”
“I remember,” she said. “I watched it burn from that hill.”
He looked at the hill again, and then at the bread, and seemed to be going to say something else, and did not; and the guard told him to move on, and he moved on. She stood at the gate with the empty basket and watched him go down the road towards Boston. She thought that she had fed a great many people in four years, and that it had never occurred to her before to ask any of them what they had done.
The Convention army went down to the boats on the tenth.
She went into Boston to see it, with Johnny, in the chaise, and stood with her uncle’s family on the Long Wharf among half the town; and they came down through the streets from the Charlestown ferry all the morning, regiment after regiment, under their own officers, without arms, to the transports’ boats. They were not what she had expected. She had expected the army that had burned Charlestown. They were thin men in patched coats who had been prisoners for a year, and they walked like men who were very glad to be going home and did not want anybody to see it. The Germans came last, in their blue, with their women and their children and a great many dogs; and a lady in a carriage with three small girls, whom somebody said was the wife of the German general, looking out at the crowd with a face that had been spat at in this town and remembered it. Nobody spat at her today. Nobody did anything. The crowd stood on the wharf and on the roofs and watched, as it had watched the Grievances read in King Street two summers ago, in perfect silence, and the boats went out and came back and went out again until the afternoon, and by dusk the hills above Cambridge were empty.
The battalion landed at the Castle in the morning.
She did not see the landing. It was too far. She saw what everybody on the wharves saw, which was the boats going across from the transports to the island in a long line, very small, and the red of the coats in them; and then, at about eleven, the colours going up over the Castle. The King’s colours, on the King’s fort, in Boston harbour, for the first time since the morning the fleet had gone out. The frigate fired a salute. Somebody on the wharf near her began to say something, loudly, and stopped, because there was nobody to say it to. The Continental guard on Dorchester Heights, which could see the Castle as well as anybody, did not fire, because it had been told not to, and because the war had been going on for three and a half years and nobody in the harbour wanted to be the one to start it again.
Johnny stood beside her through all of it without a word. When the colours were up he said, very quietly, “Is it over, Mamma?”
“No,” she said. “It is just stopped. Here. For now.” And then, because he was looking at her: “Your father would say that is worse. I am not sure that it is.”
The officers began coming into the town the next week.
She saw them on the Thursday, in King Street, when she went in to her uncle’s for the last of the winter’s buying. Four of them, walking up from the Long Wharf in their red coats with their swords left behind, as the arrangement said, two and two, very correct, under the State House; and the lion and the unicorn on the gable over their heads, gilded, exactly where they had been when the soldiers fired in seventy, and when the tea went into the harbour, and when Colonel Crafts read the Grievances from the balcony and a young man in an apron shouted for them to come down and nobody went.
Nobody went now, either. The street was full, as it always was on a Thursday, and the people in it made room for the four officers on the footway without seeming to see them, as water makes room for a stone, and closed again behind them. A crowd of small boys followed them at a distance of ten yards all the way to the top of the street, in a silence that was a kind of shouting. A woman in a doorway turned her back. A man Abigail knew, a cordwainer from Roxbury who had been out on the nineteenth of April, stood on his own step with his arms folded and looked through them as though they were glass.
She went into the chandler’s in Cornhill, because it was where she had been going, and found two of them already there at the counter, buying candles; and she stood behind them and watched them pay. They paid in silver. One of them counted it out on the counter, shillings and a half-crown, very carefully, and the chandler looked at the coins for a moment before he took them as if he had forgotten what they were, and then took them as if he had not. Then the officer turned round and saw her waiting, and coloured, and stood back from the counter and bowed, and held the door for his friend, and they went out.
He was very young. He had the beginnings of a moustache and a burn on his wrist. He had held the door for her as he would have held it for his mother, and she had inclined her head to him without thinking, as she would have to any young man who held a door; and it was only when he had gone that she found her hands were shaking.
She bought her candles. She paid for them in the Congress’s paper, a great deal of it, and the chandler took it without looking at it at all.
She was thirty-four on the Sunday.
She did not mention it to anybody, and Nabby remembered, and gave her a pincushion she had made in secret, and the boys gave her a song at dinner that was mostly Tommy’s and all out of tune, and she was happier than she had been since the summer. In the evening, when they were in bed, she sat down at the table in the front room with the ink and wrote to John.
She told him about the Somerset’s men at the gate, and the bread. She told him about the Convention army going down to the boats, and the German general’s wife in her carriage, and the colours going up over the Castle. She told him about the officers in King Street, and the boys behind them, and the cordwainer who had been out on the nineteenth of April looking through them as though they were glass. She told him about the shillings on the chandler’s counter. She told him that she knew what he thought of it, because Mr Samuel Adams had told the newspapers, and that she did not think he was wrong, and that she was not sure he was right.
Remember, she wrote, and then stopped, because she had written that word to him once before, about the ladies, and he had laughed at that too.
She looked at it for a while. Then she let it stand, and finished the sentence, which was about the price of wood, and signed it Portia, and went up to bed; and from the landing window she could see, very small and very far away across the dark water, a light on Castle Island, and another on Dorchester Heights, burning in the same harbour, a mile or two apart, all night.