Murder

Yet again I find myself rising early. Perhaps earlier every day, as Sally B. vacates her rest in order to be available to the officers quartered in our home, and she must be biddable according to their changing schedules.

I tell myself it is only the absence of her warmth that wakes me, not false hopes that she is meeting again with a certain stray dog in our boathouse, not worries and coming-on despair over Papa and Bess—still not returned to us.

Not my own desire to abandon the sleeping world of undirected dreams and instead spend those precious few moments to myself indulging in nostalgia.

I tell this to myself even as I surreptitiously withdraw pen, ink and diary from where they are kept and write upon the present situation in the quarter-hour before dawn breaks—yet never surmount the longing to dwell upon the past.

In my solitude I recall a spirited evening and a game of hide-and-go-seek, where I had hidden myself near the water's edge along with Prudy Havens, who shortly grew weary of not being found (and thinking she was losing out on the fun of being caught) and so ran to hide where she might be more easily discovered.

Enjoying the evening coming-on, the sounds of the other young people playing the game in and around the trees and brush in that particular cove, I felt no need to be found too soon. In fact, I felt more than a little pride in the spot I had secured for my own.

It was a small luxury infrequently afforded to us, that end-of-evening unchaperoned play. Girls were meant to keep in twos, the young men expected to search for us in a pack. None of us were in full dress.

Mama would have said we were running the wild out, and spirits were certainly high. The young men's voices ran the scale from just-finished-changing all the way to the rowdy man's-voice of Caleb Brewster, who had returned for a brief holiday from his whaling adventures to visit with his family.

Every few minutes a pair of young ladies being found out caused giggles and titters to ring through the air, the sea throwing the sound of their merriment back toward the land.

I turned about within my hiding spot, to face the opposite direction (and surmise the continued safety of my choice, the coast having been originally to my back), only to discover I was not quite as alone as I (and Prudy Havens) had first thought.

There was another figure there, clearly not partner to the game. It was Benjamin Tallmadge, seated upon a large flat rock I knew to be used often enough by single fishermen. It no doubt still held the heat of the day's sun, and he was half-reclined upon it (for it was large enough to act as a natural divan), a book in one hand, lantern burning next to him.

Another loud burst of laughter came from the distance.

"You may as well come out, Miss," he said, without raising his head from the text. "Your partner has abandoned you. The laughter of the group grows further in the distance with each passing minute. They have washed their hands of finding you and have no doubt moved on to the next entertainment."

"Then they are fickle and faithless, and I shall not play with them anymore," I said, and using my hands to move aside the underbrush, came out of my hiding spot.

"A hard vow to keep, with the summer still young," he said, and slowly looked up from his page.

There was a straw between his lips and he was working it with his teeth like the stem of a pipe. His hair (which was almost never long enough for a proper queue) was three-quarters or more escaped from its ribbon, and he was in only a shirt and waistcoat, and no stockings or shoes to partner his breeches. His sleeves were rolled up, and a cravat for his neck was nowhere to be seen.

"Jenny!" he said upon realizing it was I who had been hiding, and he quickly repaired himself into a seated position, his book closed, thumb and finger to mark his place.

I sat down beside him, despite knowing it was my proper duty to seek out greater numbers than that of a single man and girl in company alone together.

He had not offered me the place. I chose it for myself.

"They do not truly care for the game," I told him, wishing that I were brave enough to remove my own stockings and shoes and place my feet off the rock and into the water the carefree way a man—the way Ben Tallmadge-might.

"You are mistaken, Jenny," he said, using his book in gesture towards me. "They care a great deal for the game. It is only that the game you are trying to play, and the rules you have chosen to follow, are not at all the game and rules that they have come to revel in." He twirled the straw in his free hand, and seemed quite pleased with his speech.

I thought for a moment.

"I can play at that game, too."

He smiled, and seemed on the cusp of laughing. "I do not doubt it. But you have proved adept at hiding. I congratulate you. Perhaps you are done playing games for the night."

"Perhaps," I said, my eyes not wanting to, but wandering over toward where the sounds of the others could still be heard (as he had said) growing farther away.

Me, knowing by all social graces and correct deportment that I ought be found among them.

I turned when he tossed the straw into the water before us.

"Do you ever think about the future, Jenny?" he asked me. "That is, the future beyond what they're all playing at?" He didn't look at me as he asked the question, he looked out, beyond where we sat to the water.

"You mean beyond betrothal, and marriage and children and so on?"

"Yes." His affirmation had a deep sincerity to it. Of satisfaction that he believed I understood him.

But I could not grasp his meaning. "Is there another future to consider?" I asked. "Are you speaking like your Reverend father? Of the Eternal?"

He shook his head, and his jaw seemed for a moment to tighten—in concentration, not in impatience-before he replied. "Not a personal future," he said, "but a collective future. How shall this place we call home be governed? How will it have changed, or not have changed, within our lifetime? And what part will we choose to play—or be required to play—in the making of that?"

I could see now in the lantern's light that from the book's spine he had been reading a philosophical text. He was speaking of politics. And quite possibly, of sedition.

But this dialog, however brief, had lit something within him, even as the lantern began guttering, its light growing less dependable.

He still looked away from where we sat, his gaze cast toward the water; dark now, its waves and rolls unknowable to the eye from where we sat. It was very like looking out into a future murky, yet unformed, through which charting a path would be treacherous and uncertain—and require a great deal of courage and tenacity.

I am too old, and had already left school before he had returned to Setauket to become schoolmaster, and so I did not know if this was how he looked when he presented his pupils with a new and thrilling principle in his classroom, but if it is I cannot imagine that they could remain unmoved by such conviction. Such obviously sincere deliberation.

"I do not want someone else to decide my fate in life," he said. "Nor the fate of the land I call my home, Jenny. It is God who grants to each of us self-determination. I am persuaded it is a grave sin to refuse to acknowledge that."

At saying this, he had stopped looking at the water, and turned, instead, toward me. The lantern burned between us, lighting our faces so that we could see one another, and though I had never felt the desire to kiss a man before, his eyes on mine in that moment affected me so that I thought I must take my hands and push against the rock beneath us to move backwards and away from this intimate distance, lest I transgress upon him (and my own reputation) in such a fashion.

Before I could make good on my thought (either the compulsion or the reaction), he reached his free hand toward me, toward the lock of my hair which I had dressed down, pulled back by a ribbon, but had now come forward, over my shoulder.

Yet his fingers stopped just short of touching it.

"What," I said, though it was not a question, and I had no expectation of how he might answer.

"I may live long years from now, Jenny," I can hear him say as though it was only hours ago, "but I will never see a prettier shade of hair than yours." He shook his head slightly with the declaration, and something of a smile dallied about his lips.

I was about to assure him—once my own lips agreed to do my bidding and not their covetous own—that I, too, had no wish to have my fate decided for me, when the brush to our back began to shake, and my mind recalled to me that it had been some minutes since last we heard any laughter.

Momentarily, young men and young ladies alike rolled out of the evening darkness of the trees and undergrowth, whooping and laughing, and I was caught, and none prouder than Prudy Havens that she had led them all straight to me.

Yet you, you had nothing to collect, neither shoes nor stockings to grab. Your text was already in your hand—your lantern turned over upon their arrival and gone dark. It should have been no surprise that you vanished, back to your thoughts—back to your contemplations.

Back to your world so completely I half-doubted that you had been there at all. Save for the unsettling pricking about my lips, the flush I could not for long moments shake, and the way my hair seemed to settle more heavily upon my neck and shoulder.

None of the others had even marked your presence, so total was your withdrawal, so diverting they found their present merriment.

I have just returned from a knock upon our front door. It is too early for Mama to yet be about, and two of our three officers are still abed. Sally B. had already answered to the knock (no doubt thinking it a matter of the soldiers' business, as it often can be) when I came down to stand at the foot of the stair, and spy upon the petitioner.

Of all people to be about at such an hour (considering the hours she must now keep working in the tavern until it closes of a night), it was Anna Strong.

Firstly, she asked after Corporal Eastin, our recent addition to the officer's barracks our home is half-become.

Sally B. told her he was not here, that he had left before breaking his fast (a remarkable choice for the corporal, as anyone who well knows him will tell), before the sun had risen.

This seemed to further discomfit Mrs. Strong, who was plentifully anxious in temperament without needing addition to it.

"Then I must ask to borrow the wagon," she said.

"I can't lend what I ain't got to give," Sally B. told her.

"Sally B.," and here Mrs. Strong grabbed our Sally B. by the arm, as though she were trying to make her understand something, or keep her from leaving where she stood. "Since the attainder I have nothing. Not one horse of my own, neither wagon nor cart. And my employer is little inclined to loan me his. I must get myself to Whitehall with all haste this morning. Your mistress will understand. I will have it back to you before luncheon."

"Miss Anna," Sally B. said, "Miss Jenny and I had to leave the wagon at Amos Hayman's. The wheel done gone broke its spokes, and its over at the wheelwright 'til it can be fixed and married back up with the wagon. Mr. Malachi took the other with him to York City. Outerbridges got not a cart left to 'em. The only horses in the stables belong to the officers."

Anna Strong looked as though she might scream. She bounced several times on her heels upon our front stoop, and without bidding Sally B. good morrow or good day turned and left.

It can have been no small thing for Sally B. to turn away Mrs. Strong when she was in need. Sally B. was born to the Strongs before Papa bought her for us. Selah Strong was her master, and his father before him—and Anna her mistress since the time she and Selah wed.

As I have noted before, Sally B.'s brother Elijah was the Strong's until the Crown's attainder was passed. And so it would be expected her loyalty to the Strong family would still be somewhere within her.

I stepped out from where I had been standing once the door was shut. When I asked Sally B. what could have so upset Anna Strong she said she didn't know, and wondered if she should go and tell Mama.

I said no, that we could share the visit and the request with her what time she awoke.

"Miss Jenny," Sally B. went on, "that Corporal Eastin—something's not right. He don't come home the other night 'til late, so late. And when he do, the breeches he give me—" she took me back to the laundry shed to show me.

"They got blood on 'em."

It was not so much blood as one might see from beheading a chicken, but it was a spray. Yet there was neither mud nor dirt upon the white breeches to say that he had been rolling about in a tavern scuffle. Certainly he had not been upon the ground.

It looked very sinister, there, that blood against the white.

Sally B. had been working, with little progress, to get the stain out. When the Corporal had come down this morning (in his second-best pair of breeches), he had been in such a hurry he had not even asked after them.

To Sally B., this had been a relief. She had no wish to be reprimanded for failing to satisfy him in her laundering.

To me, this is yet another in a string of mysteries to which I seem destined to never hold the key.

What, or whose, blood is it?

Where has Corporal Eastin rushed off to before dawn?

Is Anna Strong following him?

How can Whitehall be involved in something so dire?

Do I sharpen my watchfulness for who might be missing from the village this morning?

Has another bloodyback been murdered, as with Captain Joyce (whom I will not say 'may he rest in peace,' though it be genteel to do so)? Or is it a villager this time, robbed of his life and not only his livelihood, his wife, and his liberty, as Selah Strong was?

How terrible it must be to have become Anna Strong; her husband imprisoned, her wealth and slaves and status taken from her. She works now for her own keep, and has neither horse nor cart to her name. Her home is lodging for His Majesty's officers, her place of work their base of indolence and excess.

Her fate is no longer her own, and perhaps never shall again be.

I regret that it was not I who met her at the door.

The sun is rising, now. It begins to snow.

I wonder at what hour I will wake on the morrow, or if I shall sleep this coming night or not.