The Colony of Maryland, 1745
Benjamin White renounced his family’s Quaker beliefs at the age of sixteen. The New World was simply too brutal, too filled with strange violence and ambient fatal disease for the holy light to survive. His alienation was complete when he met the charming Ann Hilliard, and married her in the Anglican Church. They were blessed with nine children, and although Benjamin allowed his devout Anglican wife to educate them in her own way, he had never quite lost a certain sense of what simple propriety demanded from his family. He wanted all of his children to be industrious, sober, and mindful of the next world. Girls, in particular, were to be demure, plain, and obedient to their parents. In time, they would marry and become respected wives and mothers. However, the Whites despaired of instilling such virtues in their oldest child.
This daughter, Rebecca, grew into the most beautiful girl in the Western Branch Hundred settlement of Prince George’s County, Maryland. Tall, slender, and graceful in her movements, she also had golden hair that resisted restraint beneath a proper cap. She was hardworking and diligent, but her blue eyes were often defiant. In addition to her physical beauty, she was intelligent, courageous, and possessed of a vitality that exhausted her parents and most of the people about her.
Rebecca was still unwed at the advanced age of twenty-two, and generally unconcerned about this as she continued to help her mother in the house, care for her smaller siblings, and dance her way through weddings, Harvest Home bonfires, birthday celebrations, racing days, musters, and after-church gatherings
Her father’s death brought Rebecca great grief and a need for serious consideration of her future. She knew that she would have no real life unless she married, and began to look at the eligible men about her with a more critical eye. Women were still greatly outnumbered by the males in the province, and Rebecca was one of the fairest around. She was courted by men of means—often widowers with established homes and large motherless families. It would have been prudent for her to wed one of these gentlemen and take over management of his house and offspring before giving birth to her own children. Then there were the younger men, handsome and strong, with ardent eyes and promises of future bliss and riches. She wanted none of them.
She lay awake one warm summer night and listened to the distant thunder moving closer. Like my doom, she thought, tossing uncomfortably in the soft old linen sheet and shoving her younger sister farther to the other side of the bed. I must marry—and my heart is still cold.
The good Lord knew that many men had accused her of being cold and remote despite her spirited demeanor. The idea of a man’s hands on her body was frightening—and Rebecca hated being frightened of anything. She well knew the intimate details of men and women together, and the consequences of that relationship for a woman. She had known too many of her friends to marry young and die in agonizing childbirth.
“Men get pleasure and women risk death. Perhaps I should pray more,” she thought. She had attended Queen Anne’s Parish Church all of her life and conformed outwardly to her parents’ faith and beliefs. In her own thoughts, she argued with God a great deal. He seemed to punish the innocent and reward the cruel and guilty. He had created the Indians of this New World—but never sent them a savior to show them the right way to worship. He let little children die and the poor animals suffer. He made winters bitterly cold and summers hot and stormy. Why had he created molds and tobacco worms to ruin the crops that folks labored to produce? Why did giving new life involve such pain and frequent sorrow?
Her mother scolded her for asking such questions, and the reverend had told her that she was not wise, and should follow God’s words as interpreted by himself and her parents. Being an obedient daughter, pious Christian, and eventually a submissive wife and good mother would make God happy and lead her to an eventual reward in heaven. Rebecca listened to her elders and kept to her own thoughts. She was young and could take delight in the world still—but this would have to end when she married.
A bolt of lightning and the quick subsequent crackling of the thunder told her that the storm had arrived. She got up to close the shutters and stood for a moment at the window, watching the clouds in front of the moon as they scudded rapidly before the rising wind. She had never been afraid of storms. Perhaps she should not be afraid of the future soon to overwhelm her.
It was on an autumn day, bright with flaming trees and clear blue skies, when she met her friend, Bess Cobham, at church. Bess lived with her Uncle John and Aunt Elizabeth Cobham. Rebecca liked Bess for her sweet nature and patient ways, and was dreading the day when Bess wed her intended, Thomas Witten. Thomas was a wild, reckless soul and would probably drive Bess mad with worry before many years had passed.
On that particular day, she and Bess were socializing with friends before the church services began. Most of the girls lived on plantations many hours apart, and opportunities for conversation were relatively few. Church days were valued for more than spiritual observances by the young people of the county. Groups of young men came to church as required by their families and the laws of the province, but often found their minds wandering from pious thoughts to carnal imaginings as they surveyed the young women gathered in their bright gowns and bonnets.
Rebecca was accustomed to stares from men. Her mother often chided her for being vain, but Rebecca saw no reason to confine her bright hair beneath a bonnet when she could toss her head in the sunlight and feel the joy of sharing herself with the world. She was wearing a new blue dress and her best lace scarf was tied about her shoulders. Her white cap hung by ribbons from her left elbow, ready to be worn when she went into the chapel. She held a fan in her right hand—a very useful item for cooling one’s face and hiding one’s expression as she watched the new arrivals at the church hop down from their wagons and tie up their horses. On that day, there was a new young man who stared at her even before he dismounted his horse.
Unlike most of the other men, he was not wearing a hat. Rebecca felt immediate kinship with a man who loved the wind in his hair. Although decently dressed in dark brown breeches and coat with a clean white shirt and cravat, there was something untamed about him. Perhaps it was the gleam of his black hair, or his unusually tall stature, or the scar on the left side of his rather handsome face … Rebecca was never quite certain of what it was that made this man so distinctive.
“Who is that dark-haired fellow there?” she asked.
“Oh—my cousin, Samuel, has returned!” Bess sighed. “How he has changed since he went up to Philadelphia to study with his uncle!”
“Samuel Cobham … but I know Samuel and that can’t be him. He was a scrawny little boy who once threw mud on my dress!” whispered Rebecca. “He was always running off with his brother Thomas and your Tom, and getting into trouble. Your Aunt Elizabeth was usually in great distress over his antics.”
“Yes, that was Sam. But they sent him off to study and once hoped that he’d take up the law like his old dead Uncle Joshua. Somebody in the family needs to learn something, or so my grandfather William said!” giggled Bess. “But Sam hated it. He wanted to be a soldier, but his father was much opposed to that. Now he’s working with his father on that new property they bought near the Beall place.”
Rebecca had never paid much attention to the five Cobham boys. John and Elizabeth Cobham were known as good people, hardworking and genteel, but not members of the highest social class. Their sons showed no particular promise of improving the family position in the province. Zephaniah, William, Thomas, and John were all fair-haired, friendly, and showed no interests beyond the usual pursuits of working on their father’s land, racing their horses, and drinking in the local taverns—often to excess. Rebecca suddenly recalled that she had once cuffed Thomas Cobham on the ear when he tried to kiss her at a racing meet after he had drunk too much ale.
But Samuel didn’t look like his brothers at all. He was a bit taller, and his hair and eyes were dark. There was a restless quality in his movements during the church service. Rebecca suspected that he had trouble sitting quietly even when interested in the sermon—and that he was not much interested in the sufferings of the Hebrews in the desert. She watched him out of the corner of her eye. Each family had an assigned place in the church, and the Cobham pews were just to right and behind the White seats. Both families had held these seats for many, many years.
Rebecca found that Samuel’s dark gray eyes had strayed in her direction also. They were both uninvolved in the reverend’s sermon, and suddenly very much involved in each other. Rebecca’s mother, who missed very little of her eldest daughter’s behavior, pinched her arm sharply and shot a disapproving glance at Samuel Cobham. Samuel met the gaze of both mother and daughter, and grinned broadly, showing even white teeth that were surprising in his tanned face. So many men had yellowed or missing teeth, and Rebecca had often found their breath repulsive. Samuel looked as if he would smell rather good, she thought idly.
A moment later, the reverend paused in his sermon and glared in their direction. Rebecca lowered her eyes quickly, and her mother turned a suddenly innocent and attentive gaze back toward the pulpit. Samuel Cobham crossed his arms and became interested in staring at his right boot. But the grin remained.
After the service, Samuel talked with his brothers and a few of the other parishioners, then mounted his horse and rode away. Rebecca tried very hard not to notice his neglect, reminding herself that he was, after all, a virtual stranger and unworthy of her attention.
The very next afternoon he called at their plantation and just happened to be carrying a few late roses from his mother’s garden. Rebecca’s mother put them in a pewter pitcher and thanked him graciously. Rebecca put her face in the bright pink roses and made some remark about their lovely scent. Samuel did not stay long and spoke very little. Neither Rebecca nor her mother had any illusions about exactly whom Samuel had come to see. His dark gray eyes rarely left Rebecca.
That night she held the roses to her breast as she twirled slowly around the bedchamber in her muslin nightgown. Her sisters slept soundly. The moon was shining in through the open shutters, the only witness to her dance. She sang a fragment from a popular ballad that Bess Cobham had taught her:
Summer to winter fadeth,
Gloomy night, happy light shadeth
Time hath a while which none can stay
So come away, while I thus sing,
Come away, come away, my darling!
Her heart was no longer cold. She decided to marry Samuel Cobham just as soon as she could get him to propose to her.