“The warning the British didn’t heed a year before the American Revolution: ‘Intolerable were the Acts decreed / in the springtime of seventy-four, / Our port was closed, our rights refused, / and troops put boots on our shore.’”
1774-1783
“O
UR PORT
was closed, our rights refused, / and troops put boots on our shore.”
Lydia dipped her quill and wondered if she had chosen the best meter to capture the mood of the colony. Perhaps she should use blank verse, steady and measured. Would heroic couplets add the power of rhyme? Or should she try something more chaotic? For what was there in these chaotic days that was steady or measured? And who were the heroes? Certainly not William Brattle.
From her bedroom window, she watched him bustling through the orchard, his favored route, for if he came in by the back door, he could stop in the kitchen, ascertain the contents of pot or grate, and—if the food met his fancy—contrive for an invitation to the next meal. Small wonder, she thought, that his nickname, Brigadier Paunch, grew ever more apt as the years went by.
Lydia hurried downstairs to intercept him, because it was Wednesday, the day that she and her grandfather went to Boston, and she wanted no Brattle business keeping her from her weekly trip to the bookstores on Cornhill Street.
As there was nothing cooking in the kitchen, Brattle reached Reverend Abraham’s study just ahead of her, but she thought it a good sign that her grandfather was standing and wearing his wig, for it meant that he did not intend to tarry.
Brattle was handing a letter to Reverend Abraham. “I’d not trust this to a messenger. You assure me that you can deliver it to General Gage directly?”
“Gage won’t turn away a member of the Mandamus Council,” said Abraham.
“Do not proclaim such membership so loudly.” Lydia came into the room. “Some people do not approve of a council appointed by the royal governor rather than elected.”
“Some
people,
” said Abraham, “should not have thrown tea into Boston Harbor, and with it, the right to conduct a civilized government.”
Reverend Abraham Wedge was in a minority among his Congregational brethren. While Anglicans believed that power descended from the king to the archbishop to the people, Congregationalists believed that the right of a minister to preach came from those to whom he preached.
Abraham agreed with the principles of his church, but he did not believe they gave his brethren the right to destroy East India Company tea. Such action, he said, would lead only to chaos. And he liked tea. He had even resigned from the First Church because he could no longer serve with Reverend Appleton, who weekly preached rebellion to students already endowed by nature with a propensity to make trouble.
For years, new taxes had been rolling in from the Atlantic, lowering over the colonies, and producing squalls of disagreement that dissipated before the breezes of conciliation. But since the December tea party, the sky had been growing steadily darker. The port of Boston had been closed. Four regiments of His Majesty’s troops had arrived. The Harvard Corporation had canceled commencement for fear of riot. And a new military governor, General Thomas Gage, had discharged the elected council and put his own hand-picked mandamus council in place.
“Guard the letter,” said Brattle. “It warns Gage that militia companies are now prepared to meet at one minute’s notice. It also provides an accounting of what’s left in the powder house on Quarry Hill.”
Abraham lifted the flap on his coat pocket and put the letter inside. “I hear that the Medford selectmen have removed their powder.”
“Most towns have done the same,” answered Brattle. “Only the king’s remains.”
“Pray that it does not ignite of its own stupidity,” said Lydia.
Reverend Abraham Wedge had reached the age of seventy-two with an iron will forged to an iron spine, and he insisted on driving his two-seat chaise to Boston himself.
Lydia admired the will and the spine but was uncertain of the driving, especially when Abraham saw someone he recognized and pulled the horse to a sudden stop.
And there was Caleb Wedge, walking along Spring Street, head down, lost in thought. He had often admitted to his sister that the calculations in his head were as real to him as the horse droppings in the street. So he seemed hardly to notice when the chaise lurched up and almost pitched Lydia onto the ground in front of him.
“Good morning, Tutor Wedge!” she said, levering herself back into her seat. “Are there any books you’d like from Boston?”
“I have all I need, thank you.” Caleb lifted his tricorne. Unlike his grandfather, he wore no wig and tied his hair simply, though similarities were more common between them than contrasts. They reminded Lydia of two fence posts: tall, straight, skinny; one weathered, the other new-planted.
“Would you care to come along?” asked Reverend Abraham. “Show General Gage that some in the college have the interests of the colony at heart. He’s seen too many Harvard men riding off to that Continental Congress in Philadelphia.”
“Caleb would go to Philadelphia, too,” said Lydia.
“He’d
what?
” The old man almost fell out of the chaise.
Caleb scowled at his sister, then admitted, “I’ve discussed it with Professor Winthrop.”
“A scientific expedition?” demanded the reverend. “Or political?”
“Not political. Politics bores me,” said Caleb. “
Medical.
The Pennsylvania Hospital offers a course of study for any who would become doctors.”
“You don’t study to be a doctor. You
apprentice,
” said Abraham. “Brattle didn’t study, and he doctored for years. Doctored the people of Cambridge and—”
“Killed a few, too,” said Lydia.
“Times are changing, Grandfather.” Caleb raised his tricorne again. “I must be off to hear recitations. If you see Miss Cowgill in Boston, give her my best.”
Abraham snapped the reins and headed toward the Great Bridge. “
Study
to be a doctor,” he muttered. “He may study his life away.”
“I encouraged him,” said Lydia. “I even observe his dissections in the barn.”
“Dissections?” The chaise lurched to another stop. “In our barn? Of what?”
“Cats and dogs,” said Lydia. “There’s a group of students. They call themselves the Anatomical Society. They seek to learn more about the way bodies work by—”
“Cutting up cats and dogs? What can he learn from that?”
“More than he can from teaching mathematics and natural philosophy for another eight years. He’s twenty-seven. Time for him to grow up and leave.”
“Time for him to marry and start a family. Let him apprentice right here. Then he can still teach at the college and stay in Cambridge.”
“There’s a young lady in Boston who’ll not marry him till she has brighter prospects than a life lived in proximity to two hundred unruly Harvard boys.”
Reverend Wedge clucked at the horse, and the chaise clattered onto the Great Bridge. “So many things to agitate an old man. So many things to vex him.”
The good reverend must have been vexed indeed, and agitated, too, because in Boston, somewhere between the Orange Street barn and the Province House, he lost Brattle’s letter. It may have happened when he pulled out his handkerchief to mop his brow, or perhaps when he gave a penny to a beggar. But when he sat before General Gage and reached into his pocket, the letter was gone. He patted his right pocket, then his left, then he noticed Gage eyeing him quizzically, as if to ask whether the reverend suffered from some strange itch.
And he decided that the embarrassment of losing the letter would not be compounded by further fumbling. He told the general of all that Brattle had put into the letter, and he conveyed the spoken message as well as Brattle might have delivered it, had he spent all day polishing his sentences.
ii
Most mornings, Lydia was awakened by a dream . . . a dream of her husband.
Charles Townsend had come from England in 1771 to survey the forests for his family’s shipbuilding business. He had soon fallen under the spell of the New England landscape and, at a dinner in Boston, under the spell of a young woman whose eyes, he had said, “glittered in the candlelight and whose wit glimmered in the conversation.”
Unfortunately, Lydia’s waking image was less often of their joyous courtship than of Charles Townsend’s death. He had been marking trees in the New Hampshire woods—tall pines for masts, large-limbed oaks for ships’ knees—when his axe glanced off a knot and struck his leg. He died a week later in the agony of lockjaw. Lydia never allowed herself to lie abed and contemplate that horror. Instead, she rose to empty her mind by emptying an inkwell in poetry.
So it was that at dawn on the first day of September, she was in the writing chair in her bedroom when she glanced over the orchard and saw thirty redcoats march up to the home of William Brattle.
That morning, Tutor Caleb Wedge heard the usual recitations in geometry, Euclid being more important to him than any rumor of soldiers in Cambridge.
Afterward, he noticed that several hundred local men had gathered on Cambridge Common, but he gave them little thought, either, because two hundred students had gathered in Harvard Hall commons, and tutors were expected to dine with students, thereby raising the level of mealtime discourse and reducing the incidence of food fights.
A puffy, red-faced tutor named Isaac Smith plunked himself down opposite Caleb and, without a word of greeting, said, “Did you see that gang of ruffians out there?”
“A political display of some sort.” Caleb picked at the agglomeration of salt cod, rice, and peas before him.
“They dislike a governor with decision.” Smith was a proudly unapologetic Tory.
“Decision?”
“Haven’t you heard? Gage is moving to protect the king’s munitions. His men woke Brattle at dawn and demanded the keys to courthouse and powder house both. They hauled the cannon out of the courthouse, then they marched to Quarry Hill and seized the gunpowder. Two hundred and seventy half barrels, now safe in Castle William.”
Caleb nodded, as though he agreed or at least understood. In truth, he did not know what to think. He lamented that tea was no longer served in commons, and like his grandfather, he feared the coming of chaos. On a given day, he was as likely to agree with Tutor Smith, the Tory, as with Professor Winthrop, a firm opponent of what New Englanders now called the Intolerable Acts.
“We pray that Gage’s decision is firm,” he said, and he quickly finished his meal.
When he stepped into the sunshine, he saw that the men on the Common did not lack for decision, either. A mob of them were now striding past the college.
Caleb heard them cursing as they went, cursing Gage and the king and William Brattle, too. Gage and the king could worry for themselves, but Brattle was a friend, practically an uncle, so Caleb stepped into the mob and began to march along with them. Then he asked a tradesman, “Why do we speak ill of Brattle?”
“Because he wrote the letter what told Gage to seize the gunpowder. ’Twas dropped in the street and picked up by patriots.”
“Aye,” said a blacksmith. “’Tis to be published in the next
Boston Gazette.
Maybe they’ll publish his obituary, too.”
And the men around gave out with great beer-smelling guffaws.
Caleb let the mob flow past him. Then he turned and ran down the alley beside the courthouse, jumped a fence, and scrambled through Palmer’s orchard. He could hear the mob surging through the village and swinging along the curve of Creek Lane, but he was well ahead of them, and in a dozen long-legged strides, he was across the Watertown Road and up Brattle’s steps. He did not bother with knocking. He threw open the door and rushed into the dining room, where he found William Brattle deeply involved in a tureen of duck liver.
From her writing chair Lydia had been watching the mob move along the street while her brother took the shortcut through Palmer’s orchard.
Now Reverend Abraham came into her room. “What’s happening?”
As if in answer, the back door of Brattle’s house swung open. Brigadier Paunch came stumbling out and scurried into his barn. Caleb came out right after, took to the orchard path, and began to heel-toe home, walking far too quickly to look casual.
“Hurry, Caleb,” whispered Lydia.
The mob was now piling up in front of Brattle’s house, and angry male voices were hammering the air. Then there came the sound of shattering glass—a rock flying through one of Brattle’s windows, which drew a deep-throated roar from the crowd.
Unbeknownst to them, the enormous figure of William Brattle was emerging from his barn on a slender-legged mare and moving cautiously across the garden. Finally someone saw him and cried out. Brattle dug his spurs into his horse, and a hundred men went running after him.
“Ride hard, Willie,” whispered Reverend Abraham.
“Walk fast, Caleb,” whispered Lydia.
Then came the sound of pistol shots, small pops and loud bangs.
“Good God!” cried Abraham. “They’re shooting!” And he ran from the room.
Down in the orchard, Caleb flinched at the sound, but the mob was paying him no mind. They had not even seen him approaching his own back door.
How delicate the white pistol smoke looked floating over the crowd, thought Lydia. And how frightened the lone rider looked, galloping onto the Great Bridge. It seemed as though she were seeing it all unfold in her mind’s eye, as though she were reading it in a novel. Then the reality of a pistol appeared on her little writing desk.
“One for you, two for me,” said Abraham. “They’ll not chase me from
my
house.”
When the mob could not catch Brattle, they came back and ransacked his wine cellar. The Cambridge Committee of Safety kept them from ransacking the rest of the house, but the street was soon littered with empty bottles of every shape, a fortune in French Burgundy, Madeira, and port, guzzled by a crowd growing larger all the time.
Meanwhile, Lydia had drawn the drapes of the reverend’s study, so that none of the troublemakers would see an old man brandishing pistols in his window.