IN THE TERRIBLE hot days of that June, Jane and I went to see the lion they had on board the sloop Phoenix at Long Wharf. We took Nab with us. She was almost three, and that morning I’d dressed her all in white with a blue ribbon tied around the waist of her ruffled skirts.
“See ’ion,” Nab kept saying as she clutched my hand with her little one. She couldn’t say the letter “l” yet. She could say a lot of things, however, and was especially fond of nursery rhymes. She tripped along between us, chatting constantly.
“She’s such a serious little baggage,” I told Jane.
“We women have to be serious,” Jane said. “Someday soon we’re going to have as much say in matters as men. So we must practice.”
Jane said things like that all the time, though she was the least serious person I’d met since coming to Boston in April. Jane loved good times. I’d met her in the fresh fruit stall in Faneuil Hall a week after we arrived. We got to talking about the price of lemons, and in the first five minutes I found out she was maidservant to Sarah Welsteed, who was sister to the Chief Justice of Massachusetts Bay Colony, Thomas Hutchinson.
Jane was seventeen and proud of her position. I was fourteen.
“Who are you bound to?” she’d asked, right out.
“John and Abigail Adams, from Braintree. He’s a lawyer. Her husband says she’s descended from many shining lights in the colony.”
“But you’re not proud of your position.”
“Why would I be? I’m indentured, just like you.”
She bit into an apple. “Be proud,” she said. “The day is coming when all us common people will be.”
Jane had a way about her. She was saucy and sure of herself, not like any indentured servant I’d known. She always acted like she was privy to some secret that the rest of the world didn’t know about yet.
But after only two months in Boston, I realized that most everybody I met was like Jane. Not only the gentry, but the common folk, from the boys who ran with the street mobs to the men who drove the carts up from the ships to deliver their wares. They were different from common folk in Braintree.
“Be proud,” Jane said again, “and be ready to take your opportunity when it comes.”
“What opportunity?” I asked.
Her smile was knowing. “It will come one of these days,” she said, “and we must all be ready for it.”
I felt left out of the conversation. But that was my way. I always felt left out. Everyone else was ahead of me, always playing at some game, it seemed, the rules of which I still had to learn. But as soon as I learned the rules, they always seemed to change them.
But I’d caught on to this much. The common folk in Boston were different. It was as if they were waiting for something to happen. You could see it in their faces. Their eyes were bright and hard, their manner cocky. The most lowly scullery maid had that air about her, the roughest street urchin. They all scurried about as if on some important mission, acting as if they had a part in what was about to happen.
But what was about to happen? Was I getting fancy notions, living in Boston? Uncle Eb had warned me about that.
On our way to see the lion that morning, I confided in Jane. “Nobody’s humble in Boston,” I said. “Why?”
We were on Long Wharf, which ran half a mile into the harbor. Jane stopped. People scurried by, talking, whistling, bargaining at the stalls.
“You don’t know?” Jane asked.
I felt ashamed, like I’d missed something again, something that was right before my eyes. “Uncle Eb always said I was flighty. He was always on me to pay mind to things,” I confessed.
“You said he doesn’t like you, no matter what you do.”
“He doesn’t. He hasn’t even bothered to ask after me since I’ve come here.”
“Rebellion,” she said.
“What?”
“Rebellion, that’s what’s on the minds of all these common folk.”
Oh, that. “You mean the trouble because of the taxes on tea, glass, paper, and painters’ colors?”
“Yes, that. The Townsend Acts. People are just as fired up as they were when they had the trouble with the stamps. You should have been here then! A mob wrecked Hutchinson’s mansion that time. The Crown almost brought troops in.”
We commenced walking. “Boston’s like a keg of powder about to explode right now,” Jane said. “Of course, Boston’s always been that way. But now folks don’t like the way the Crown has anchored that warship at our docks, without a by-your-leave. I tell you, it’s not a good sign. It’s trouble.”
Jane saw trouble behind every bush. She was speaking of the Romney. It had slipped into the harbor the first week in June, with its big guns aimed right at the town. A British warship! Mr. Adams said that from his bed he could hear the boatswain’s high whistle calling the sailors to life in the morning.
“You must pay more mind to things,” Jane advised. “We’re right in the middle of everything here in Boston. I keep my eyes and ears open and learn a lot working for my mistress. You should, too, living in that house.”
“Keep my eyes and ears open for what?” I asked.
“So you can decide which side you’ll favor.”
I studied her haughty profile as we walked. Jane had taught me a lot of things: my way around the winding streets, how to bargain for things in Faneuil Hall, how to get down to the docks early to get the freshest fish. She’d even let me watch her fix her mistress’s hair so that I could make Mrs. Adams fashionable when she went out.
I would have been lonely if not for Jane. She was the only friend I had, outside the house. But I was becoming sensible of the fact that she had a secret life. I knew, by then, that on her days off she ran with a considerable rough crowd, nameless friends from Gray’s Ropewalk Works.
I knew she frequented coffeehouses by the docks. And that one of her friends was Captain Ebenezer Mackintosh, who was twenty-eight and a shoemaker. But he was also leader of Boston’s South End Gang.
Jane was becoming more and more brazen as the weeks went by. The words she was speaking that morning were not hers. She was parroting somebody, I decided. Most likely Mackintosh.
“Why should I choose sides?” I asked.
“You’ll have to. Everyone will. The Crown or the Patriots.”
“Oh, them.”
“Yes, them.”
“Gangs,” I said. The Patriots wanted liberty. I’d heard Mr. Adams reading some letters to his wife from the Boston Gazette about this liberty. It sounded more like outright treason to me.
A few times Dr. Joseph Warren, the Adamses’ family physician, had stopped by and asked Mr. Adams to go to meetings held by the Patriots and harangue the mob into action. Mr. Adams had said no. He would go to no meetings. He believed in the written word and the law. If the Patriots needed legal papers written, he’d write such papers, but he would go to no meetings.
Dr. Warren’s handsome face had gone sad when Mr. Adams said that. I much admired Dr. Warren, not because he was the most handsome man in town, so much so that I went hot and cold every time I ushered him into the house. But because he seemed a man who knew what he was about and believed in it.
But I admired Mr. and Mrs. Adams, too. Their house on Brattle Street was calm and orderly. They would allow none of the fury on Boston’s streets in that house, though it was in the middle of much activity and clients were always banging the door clapper.
I felt safe in that house. And when I brought clients into Mr. Adams’s law office, I’d sense that whatever was wrong in the outside world could be made right in that office.
Never mind about mobs and meetings, acts that put taxes on tea, paper, glass. Something told me the rules for making things right were in that office. Inside Mr. Adams’s many books that stood like soldiers on his shelves, all gussied up in good leather coats with gold trimmings.
So many books! All Mr. Adams had to do was look inside them and he could come up with an answer to anybody’s problems.
It followed, then, that if a person read books, one didn’t have to attend meetings where mobs screamed foul words. Neither did one have to threaten others. Or choose sides.
Mrs. Adams read books, too. She had her own. No woman I’d ever known had done that. And she had women friends who read. Like the beautiful and fancy Mrs. Mercy Otis Warren, no relation of the doctor, but wife of James, the representative from Plymouth and sister of James Otis, a famous young lawyer.
Mrs. Warren came to call wearing green taffeta and lace. Or crimson silk. She not only read books, she wrote plays. Never had I heard of a woman doing such a thing! And people listened to her so carefully when she spoke.
There must be some secret power to the words in books, I decided. But was it only for the highborn and well-bred? Or could I learn some of it, too?
It had been on my mind, of late, to ask Mrs. Adams that question. I’d decided that’s where the real power was. And that was the side I wanted to favor.
But I could not tell Jane this. So I took the conversation the way she wanted it. “Which side will you favor, Jane?”
“Well, as I see it, the Crown’s never done twopence for folks like us. And my mistress said the other day that her brother, Hutchinson, is going to break down the spirit of rebellion. I don’t like that, I can tell you.”
It was all she would say at the moment. So I didn’t press her. I knew there were things she could not divulge, matters she was involved in that I honestly did not want to know about.
“Oh, Lordy,” she said then. “Look at that line to get on the Phoenix. Well, we’ll just have to wait. Would you like an ice, Nabby? There’s a stall over there. How about you, Rachel?”
She went off to get us some ices. I stood holding Nabby’s hand and pondering Jane’s words. I must have looked melancholy when she returned, for she smiled.
“You don’t have to take sides today,” she teased.
“I don’t care about sides,” I told her.
“And why not?” She studied me. “What do you want out of life, Rachel Marsh? You’ve never said. You’re fourteen. It’s time you knew.”
Nobody had ever asked me that before. So I’d never had to ponder it. But I did then. And I was surprised I was able to provide her with an answer.
“For the moment I want a proper dowry,” I said. “The Adamses said they’d dower me.”
“And after the moment?”
“To marry and find my place in the world. I want a place of my own.” The words seemed right, once I said them.
“You mean a house?”
“No.” How could I explain? “I want a place. It has to do with the kind of person I want to be. And how I fit in to everything. I want people to listen when I open my mouth. And know I’m worth listening to.”
She stared at me. “That’s all?”
To me it was not all, it was everything. I wanted to have my place, like Abigail Adams and Mercy Warren. But I couldn’t say that to Jane. She only understood things you could see and hold and own. I was not sure I understood myself.
“I want to be free of my uncle Eb. And never have anyone treat me the way he treated my mother,” I finished.
She understood that. “There are people all around you who think England’s treating us like your uncle Eb treated your mother,” she said.
I nodded.
“That’s what all these people in Boston want,” she said. “To be free of the Uncle Eb in their lives. To most of them that Uncle Eb is the mother country.”
I said nothing. Such words frightened me. They were treason, nothing less. And Jane should know better than to go about saying them.
We said no more about the subject. We saw the lion that day. We had to stay in line half an hour. Nabby loved it, although it was only sleeping in its cage and looked very old and lazy. The ship’s master had brought it back from Africa.
Jane said it reminded her of the colonies. That they were a sleeping lion. I decided to be careful about telling her what went on in the Adams household. And not to mention at home anything she said. I didn’t want to hurt my position.
When we parted she looked at me in that shrewd way of hers. “Go right home, this day,” she said. “Don’t loiter.”
Her hand was on my arm. I met her eyes. They were unblinking. And it came to me then.
There is going to be some trouble this day, I told myself. And Jane knows of it.
I felt it in my bones.
I just stared at her. She withdrew her hand and smiled. “It’s hot. You should get Nabby home. Don’t loiter.”
“Yes,” I said. I took Nabby by the hand and drew away. Jane smiled at me, weakly. A chill went through me, and I began to rush in the direction of King Street. “Come along, Nabby. Your mama is waiting.” My heart was beating fast.