Arundel (71 page)

I was gruff with her. “Let me hear no more of this! You might get into the city; but you’d be thrown into jail; maybe shot for a spy, even.”

“Now, Steven,” she said, in the same coaxing way she used when she went at me to buy the sloop, long ago, “you know the British won’t shoot a woman. They won’t even fire their cannon at the nunnery, though we’re living in it. If they put me in gaol they’d soon let me out, for I’m no spy, and they know it; and they have too little food for themselves to feed another without need.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s other ways of getting this letter to Carleton without having you carry it.”

“What other ways?”

“Why, any God’s quantity of ways. They could shoot the message over the walls with arrows in the night. They could send Mrs. Grier or Mrs. Warner with it, if you’re so set on having a woman do it.”

“Yes, and if they shot it over on arrows they might find it when the snow melts in the spring; or if they
did
find it, Carleton wouldn’t take it, any more than he will now. As for Mrs. Grier and Mrs. Warner, they have husbands; and besides, Steven, they don’t have a look that would incline the sentries toward letting them pass.”

“Ho!” I said, annoyed at her assurance, “since when have people been taking you for a duchess or the governor’s lady?”

“If you had eyes in your head and knew how to use them you’d know there are worse-looking women than I!”

“Belike.”

She turned a little from me and did something to her hair and dress; then turned back again. “Look, Steven.
Haven’t
you seen worse?” She laid hold of my arms, so that I had to look up at the triangle of creamy skin at her throat, and the pointed chin above it, and so to the rest of her: the oval cheeks, with the red blood close under them; the velvety brown of her eyes, and the thin black eyebrows that seemed traced with a quill; the peak of hair that came down low on her forehead, so her whole face was shaped like the hearts that Arundel boys carve on the old beech tree across the creek when waiting for their sweethearts.

“Haven’t you?” she said, and shook me, and smiled a little on one side of her mouth. At this, for no reason I could understand, there came into my mind all of Arundel and the things I loved—blue sea and golden sunlight: brown reefs, and the white breakers tumbling toward the gray sand: the sweet, warm odors of the marsh; the fresh salt wind from over the water; the cricking of crickets on hot nights, and my mother’s face, and Cynthy leaning against me to watch me eat a late supper; Ranger, with his ears cocked up and his lip curled in a grin, inviting me to take him for a hunt; the suck of the falling tide in the river, and the sweet perfume of young willow leaves in the spring.

“Haven’t you?” Phoebe asked once more, while I sat and stared at her, with the rifles of the Virginians cracking on one side of us and then on the other, and the outrageous thudding of British cannon shaking the ruined wall against which we leaned.

I dropped my eyes and said, “Your nose is red.” She only laughed.

“Here,” I said, resolved to stop her nonsense once and for all, “such a thing as you propose is not what a woman should do: not a good woman.”

“I didn’t think of that,” she said in a small voice. “What is a good woman, Steven?”

“You know as well as I do. A good woman doesn’t go gallivanting off. She stays home and behaves herself.”

“But, Steven, do you think I’m a bad woman?”

“Why, damn it,” I said, not wishing to hurt her feelings, “not yet you aren’t, but I don’t want you to go hurroaring and hurrooing into Quebec. It wouldn’t be decorum.”

“You don’t think ill of me for coming away with James?”

“No.”

“Nor for continuing with Noah and Nathaniel and Jethro after James died?”

“No.”

“Are you sure, Steven, you wouldn’t think better of me if I stayed home always, instead of sailing the sloop, and lived in the kitchen, speaking ill of all my neighbors and growing to hate the faces I saw every day, like other good women in Arundel?”

“Now,” I said, “all this argument is getting us nowhere! I don’t propose to sit here and yawp all day. I don’t think you should go, and there’s an end of it. Why is it you want to do it, Phoebe?” “Why? Why? Well, Steven, it seems to me things aren’t right in the company. Goodrich and Hanchet are together all the time, talking in corners. Hubbard too. He’s with them. Hanchet hates Arnold.”

“That’s no news!”

“I know, but he hates him worse than ever. Arnold ordered him to move into St. John with his company, and he wouldn’t. Claimed it was too dangerous. Arnold said terrible things to him.”

“He’d ought to shot him.”

“No,” Phoebe said; “he did better. He shamed him. He sent Topham and Thayer in his place, and they went. There was never anybody hated Arnold the way Hanchet does. He says he won’t fight under him. Goodrich and Hubbard, they sit and listen to him, and drink brandy, and agree with everything he says.”

“What else?”

“Steven, I think the men have caught it. Their enlistment is up the first of January. They want to go home. Some of them say they won’t fight. Asa Hutchins says he won’t. Noah and Nathaniel will, but there’s a lot that won’t.”

She took a deep breath. “I want to be some use, instead of a burden on everyone’s hands! If James could have come here and fought, then I’d have been some use. Maybe if I did something the men would be shamed into fighting. I can’t sit and do nothing, Steven! I can’t!
I can’t!”

She looked down at her hands. I saw they were clenched. The triangle of skin at her throat was as red as a maple leaf after a frost.

“Well,” I said, feeling choked, “cover up your neck. I guess you can have the horse and cariole.”

I drove out to St. Foy’s with her that afternoon in the cariole, fair mazed by the figure she made. She had on a hat of sealskin, one that pulled close down onto her head. Cap Huff, she said, had got it from one of Morgan’s men, paying a whole bottle of brandy for it. With it she wore the sable coat over a dress of gray wool begged from the nuns. On her feet were enormous winter boots, made of sealskin with the fur inside, such as Quebec ladies wear when they go in carioles.

I felt like a coachman, hunched down beside her in my dirty white blanket coat, my face bristly with beard; and I was shamed, stealing a look at her as she sat staring down at her mittened hands, to think I had spoken of her red nose, though God knows it was red, albeit not unpleasantly so.

She looked up at me as we went along, and caught me gawking at her; and though I had meant to speak to her of many things, I forgot them.

They had her to dinner at headquarters that night, while I ate pork and dumplings with the men in the kitchen. Once, when the door stood open, I heard the general speaking to her about her necklace of cat’s eyes, and caught her reply, delivered straight and pleasant, Colonel Arnold and Burr and Ogden and Bigelow and the rest of them having fallen silent to hear her.

“Indeed,” she said, “I didn’t know it had so great a value; but I knew I wanted it; and what we New Englanders want is apt to have a high value. If we can avoid it, we never pay full value in money for what we want, though it may be we pay in other ways. You might say this necklace cost me a piece of rope; yet in the end it amounted to more than that. I had spliced a rope to make a running noose, back in my younger days, when I was captain of a vessel in the coasting trade—”

She waited for the shout of laughter to go down; then went on: “An Indian came aboard my sloop and hankered for the rope, so I traded it to him for a snake-skin case holding three needles made from mink bones. In Portsmouth I traded these to a lady who wished them for the running of ribbons through her fripperies; and in return I took a pistol with a brass knob on the end of the butt, big enough for knocking in the heads of molasses barrels. The pistol I traded for a parrot with a sailor from the Sugar Islands; and the parrot went to the captain of a Newburyport brig in return for two stone hatchets and a magnifying glass. The hatchets near wore holes in me before I came across the mate of a brig from Ceylon who was needful of them and the glass. He traded these cat’s eyes for them; yet it may be the time and thought I put on the matter had a value, so that I didn’t get the necklace for nothing.”

They made much of her for this speech, though it seemed to me no more worthy of remark than many I had heard her make. In more ways than one they found her diverting, as I discovered from Captain Oswald coming into the kitchen to lean against the wall and take several deep breaths.

“Holy cats!” he said, when he saw me, “I never hoped to see that!”

“See what?”

“Why!” he said, “that young lady of yours was showing them the bauble on her wrist, that little leather-covered bauble, and Burr picked up her arm with both hands, pretty as you please, as if to help them see it.” He wagged his head admiringly and moaned, as at a pleasant recollection.

“Where did it hit him?”

“She looked up in his face as innocent as a baby,” Oswald continued. “Oh, dear! It was lovely! It just tapped his nose, by accidentlike, and he’s out in front, putting snow on it, to stop the bleeding.”

We drove over to the Sillery Road, the one that leads into St. Louis Gate, before dawn the next morning, taking a few men with us. When it grew light we moved forward to where the straight road begins.

“Steven,” she said, when I got out of the cariole, “couldn’t you find an extra coat and wear a pair of them if you have to go back to lie in that awful place again.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” I said, low in spirit to think I lacked the firmness to forbid her going. “All you have to do is finish your business and get back here where you belong.”

“No message you want taken to anybody, is there?” she asked. For the life of me I couldn’t think what she was getting at. While I gawked at her she whipped up the horse and went tearing around the bend onto the straight road, the rest of us pelting after and letting off our muskets.

Heads popped into sight on the bastions that flanked the gate, and we heard faint cheering. Still we ran on, shooting and whooping, while the cariole drew farther and farther away from us, and closer and closer to the gate. When we saw puffs of smoke along the top of the wall we came to a halt and had the pleasure of seeing the gate swing slowly open. Phoebe, plying her whip, dashed through and out of sight. We plodded slowly back, followed by the distant jeers of the city’s brave defenders.

Each day, after that, I walked to headquarters to see whether word had come from Carleton in reply to the general’s message, or whether Phoebe had returned; and it was such a time as comes now and again to every man—a time when everything happens except what ought to happen.