Johnny’s scalp prickled. He had heard what had happened at Lexington and Concord, but only now did it strike him that this was, really, the very same sort of an occurrence. Trust Patrick Henry to see through an incident and recognize it as part of a whole plan! “Well a-well,” Johnny said, “fair puts your hackles up, doesn’t it? Reckon all their Royal lordships are as lowdown as our old Dunmore, then?”
“’Pears like,” Freeman replied with a sure nod. He was still clinging to Johnny’s knee, as if helping his weary self along. “By th’ bye,” he said, “Betsy wonders why y’ ain’t been around in so long.” Johnny knew Mister Freeman wanted his daughter married into the Clark clan as badly as she wanted it herself. But Johnny’s passion had cooled when he had begun to observe in Betsy Freeman all the earmarks of a classic scold, and a mantrap as well, and he had never gone after all to speak to her father about marriage. Apparently she had spoken of it.
“Aye, and I’m sorry,” Johnny said, thinking fast, “but tell ’er I’ve been taken much lately with thoughts o’ soldierin’.”
That had not been true before, but it was now.
MESSENGERS HAD BEEN RIDING OUT TO MEET THE COLUMN, messengers from the Common Council of Williamsburg, begging Captain Henry to stop his march. They were fearful of the consequences of an armed confrontation there. But Henry simply detained the messengers, to prevent them from carrying back a report of his numbers, and led on.
When the troops were within twenty miles of Williamsburg, another messenger came, bearing the news that a detachment of Royal Marines had gone up to make a defense at the Governor’s Palace. This word sped back along the column, and it increased the martial spirit of the troops in general, while causing them to reflect more deeply, one by one, on their mortality. How many Marines? some wondered. They were essentially farmers and knew nothing of warships and Marines and the like.
They marched four more miles under such apprehensions, until sundown. It was the evening of May 3. They had reached an inn and pub, called Doncastle’s Ordinary, about sixteen miles above Williamsburg. And here they encamped for the night, some of the officers taking lodgings in the Ordinary, the troops building cookfires and laying out their blankets in the meadows all about. John Clark and his boys Dickie and Eddie camped by one fire; Johnny was off with his militia comrades in another part of the field.
There was a great deal of visiting during the twilight hours, men wandering from fire to fire in the great smoky campground. Many found friends they had not seen for years.
“John Clark, is’t not?”
He looked up and saw a powerfully built, gray-eyed man with a sword hanging at his side. John Clark rose and extended his hand.
“Bill Lewis, that’s you?”
“It is. How d’ye? I’m still hung over from that wedding party o’ yours back in seventy-three.” He grinned, and nodded down at Dickie and Eddie. “You two are growin’ up fine.”
“Are there many here from Albermarle?” John Clark asked.
“A company. I’m their first lieutenant. Mostly sprats, but some o’ your old neighbors. Ye might like to come over and see.”
Lewis revealed as they strolled over that he had another child now, a son having been born the last summer. He was very proud to have a son, and had named him Meriwether Lewis, after his wife’s family.
“Well, congratulations, a bit late,” John Clark said. “With those two lustrous names, why, he ought to become quite something! As for me, my Annie’s about to make me a grandfather, so I’m told!”
AS A HEAVY DEW SETTLED THAT NIGHT, MEN SNIFFED THE smoke of their fires and aromas of cooking meat, and talked of weapons, of kings and governors, of Tories, of Royal Marines, of liberty and death, and, of course, of sweethearts and wives and children. Young Johnny Clark’s throat often that evening felt clogged with the density of his emotions. It was past midnight when, calmed at last by two gills of rum taffia, he managed to grow drowsy under the springtime stars, looking long and longingly at them and wondering whether he would ever see them again. Somewhere in a nearby company, late revelers full of nostalgia and taffia were softly singing the popular song, “Johnny Has Gone for A-Soldier,” and it was the lullaby that put him to sleep.
AT SUNRISE, WHILE THE TROOPS WERE BREAKFASTING ON whatever they had in their pouches, the Governor’s Receiver-General rode up to the Ordinary with a small guard of dragoons. Johnny trembled, cold with dew. A glowing mist hung knee-deep over the campground. The Receiver-General went into the Ordinary and was with Captain Henry for a few minutes. Some of the militiamen drifted near the Redcoats and studied them insolently. But if the dragoons were intimidated by the horde, they concealed it well, sitting at attention on their sleek warhorses and gazing over the heads of the mob. They’re brave fellows, Johnny thought. But he could see the sheen of sweat on their faces.
When the Receiver-General had come out and ridden away with his guard, Patrick Henry emerged from the inn and mustered the troops for an announcement.
Governor Dunmore had had a thoughtful night, he said. His Lordship had decided to abandon the Palace and take refuge aboard the schooner Magdalen. And he had sent Mr. Corbin, the Receiver-General, up to pay £330, which had been determined as the value of the confiscated powder from the Williamsburg arsenal. The money, Henry said, would be consigned to the Virginia Assembly and used to purchase a like quantity of fresh gunpowder to be used if needed for the colony’s defense.
“In sum, gentlemen, with thanks to your patriot zeal, Virginia has saved her means of defense, and, I suspect,” he added, breaking into a fierce grin and thrusting up his fist, “gone a long way toward ridding herself of a graceless overlord unsympathetic to her welfare.
“I thank you, brave gentlemen—and boys—and Virginia crowns you with her laurels. We’ve done what they did at Lexington and Concord, but not shed a drop of precious Virginia blood. We’ve won, boys, we’ve won!”
And anyone far back in the ranks who might not have heard his full peroration did hear that last triumphant bellow.
And young Johnny Clark, his chest swollen with joy and camaraderie, swore he saw two thousand hats in the air at once, floating above a deafening huzzah in the light of a rising sun.
5
KING WILLIAM COUNTY, COLONY OF VIRGINIA
September, 1775
A BLACK HAND HOLDING A WHITE CLOTH REACHED UP OVER Annie’s flushed face. She lay gasping from her last terrible squeeze, and the wet cloth cooled her brow. Two vague starlike shimmers of light in the room gradually grew smaller and brighter until they were candle flames again. The cool cloth came down gently into her eye sockets and wiped out the sweat and cooled her eyelids, and when it was lifted away she could see the yellow eyes of the old black midwife who stood over her. The midwife’s face was wizened and her mouth protruded almost like a muzzle. But the little yellow eyes were kind, and the thin lips of the muzzle had a patient, gentle smile. Hannah Gwathmey, Owen’s mother, had said this old woman long ago had brought Owen himself into the world, and that she knew everything and could cure anything. That was reassuring, because Annie felt that everything down inside her was being squeezed to a pulp. She thought of her own mother, who had suffered like this ten times, and she thought of her grandmother’s advice that her mother had not taken, and she thought, Oh, Mama, I’m going to, I’m going to keep Owen off me long as I can, because I don’t think I could stand this again. She lay in dread of the next great squeeze and wished her mother were here to hold her hand and talk her through it.
But her own mother was not here. The white woman who was hovering off there in the gloom beyond the foot of the bed was mother-in-law Hannah Gwathmey, and she was not much comfort.
Hannah Gwathmey was a good and caring mother-in-law, but she was being no help in this. She seemed to be afraid of what was happening here in this room, afraid to lend a hand to it. She seemed to want to leave everything up to the old Negress and the other servants who came and went, carrying things.
She’s n
ot a bit like my own Mama, Annie thought. Mama would be in charge of it all if she was here.
But her Mama was not here, here at the Gwathmey plantation, The Meadows. Her Mama was not here, though she would have been if she had been called in time.
Not even Annie’s husband was here. At least, she had not seen him for what seemed like an eternity, though probably it had been only hours. Maybe he’s here now, she thought. I wish he were.
“Owen,” she panted. “Is Owen here? Is he?” She remembered that she had asked that question earlier, but time seemed as squeezed out of shape as her innards, and she didn’t know whether she had asked it minutes ago or hours ago.
“Mast’ Owen not heah, ’m,” murmured the Negress. There was no gentleness in her voice when she said this. Annie blinked and looked at her and saw the old wrinkled lips compressed in a hard line. The woman said, “He out wi’ d’ radders.”
Annie swallowed. It scared her that the midwife had said that: Out with the riders. She knew what that meant, and she could not now look at the old midwife’s yellow eyes. Owen Gwathmey, whom this same old black angel had served up to the world from Hannah Gwathmey’s womb twenty-two years ago, now was out leading a band of the Night Riders, galloping all over the parish as they did every night, stopping at every plantation and going through the slave quarters with lanterns and pistols, counting faces.
The night riders were a new and frightful thing in Virginia. When Governor Lord Dunmore had fled from the minute men at Williamsburg last spring, he had taken refuge aboard a British warship in the York River, and from there he had sent word through the Colony that he would free every Negro servant who would rise up against his master.
No other words could have created such terror in the Colony, where a half the population was enslaved Negroes. Although there had not yet been any known instance of a slave responding to Dunmore’s offer, the dread of an uprising had nearly petrified the Colony. Immediately the Committees of Safety had authorized vigilante patrols to keep the blacks from roaming or gathering at night.
And old family servants like this midwife could only tighten their lips and bear the nocturnal insults, and go on serving their white people. But Annie, her spirit already quailing from fear of pain of childbirth, wondered whether this strange old woman might try to do something to her, or to her child when it came, because of what her Owen and his night riders were doing. Annie was vulnerable and helpless, and her imagination was troubled.
And now the great, terrible squeeze was coming again. Sweat began to run off her forehead and down into her ears again, and she tried to arch her back to keep it from breaking, and she clenched her teeth and made little groaning sounds in the back of her throat, groans like the ones little Frances Eleanor had used to make when she pulled at her mother’s nipple back in the sunny nursery of the Clark home in Caroline, back in those glowing, peaceful, happy days when they would sit talking of the joys of the coming wedding.
WHEN OWEN GWATHMEY RODE HOME FROM HIS PATROL after midnight through a cool mist, he was full of news. “They want me to place myself a candidate for the county’s sheriff!” he cried to his parents as they met him in the vestibule. “What of that, Father? Your son’s going to be sheriff of King William County, they say!”
“Well, fine! And more news: my son’s already made me a grandfather!”
Owen’s chin went down and his eyebrows went up. For a moment he seemed to falter between leaping up the stairs or pulling off his muddy boots in the vestibule as he had done all his life. His mother caught his arm in this moment of hesitation. “She wants to name him John, after her father,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t you think he should be named Owen, after you or your father?”
“It’s a boy, then!”
“Perhaps you should discuss with the poor thing on this matter of names,” Mr. Gwathmey suggested.
Owen went upstairs with all the speed and noise of a war horse, and when he came down an hour later, eyes full of tenderness and enchantment, the question had been settled. The boy would be named John Gwathmey. “Annie,” her mother had told her at least three or four times during those long talks about marriage, “I hope your firstborn boy you’ll name in honor o’ your father. Now they’ll likely want you to weaken on that and name him Owen or suchlike, a name from his family. But it’s you that creates that child, darlin’, and it’s right you should be let to name it for your own father. Mind ye now, I’m not trying to plant th’ seeds o’ trouble in your new family, but a girl ought to name her firstborn son after her own father.”
“But Mama,” Annie had replied, “your father was John and your husband was John, but you named your first one Jonathan. I don’t think you always follow your own advice, Mama.”
“Well, it was different. There was a tradition in your father’s family, that each eldest son would be John or Jonathan, alternating like that, and it was time for a Jonathan.”
“But then you gave in to his tradition, Mama! You really don’t follow your own advice, ye know!”
And her mother had paused then, and had looked up at a corner of the ceiling, as she would always do when you’d caught her like that, as if she herself were cornered up there, and finally she had said:
“Annie, how d’you think a body learns advice worth giving, anyways? Why, by making mistakes herself long since, that’s how! Now, if you have a boy and want to name him John, you stand your ground!”
And so now Annie had stood her ground, and she lay in the big bed upstairs at the Gwathmey house, in their plantation, a Clark girl all alone in the Gwathmey home, and she had convinced the future sheriff of King William County that she should have the say-so in this matter. And so the baby boy that lay cradled in her right arm against her swollen bare breast, this little scowling, livid, blotched creature that had caused her so much agony, would be John Gwathmey after all. Mama will be pleased, she thought. And sure Papa will be.
And the old midwife, humming to herself as she cleaned up the mess in the room, looked over at her once in a while and smiled.
That little old Clark girl there had sure had her way with that big bad night rider.
JOHN CLARK THOUGHT THE NIGHT RIDERS WERE AN UGLY necessity, and he did not like it when they came riding up at any hour of the night to unsettle his Negroes. But in one way they were good. Being out and around all over as they were, they were usually full of news, and these were times when the news seemed terribly urgent and important.
Tonight when John Clark first heard their hoofbeats out in the drive, he had been reading and rereading the Virginia Gazette. Copies of that journal’s war issues went from hand to hand among neighbors until they fell apart at the folds. From these old secondhand and third-hand newspapers John Clark had learned the saddening but stirring stories of what the patriots were doing up north. He had read about a band of volunteers shooting down a thousand British Redcoats on two hills called Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill near Boston, almost stopping the British army before running out of ammunition and having to retreat. He had read about a merchant named Benedict Arnold and a Vermont militia commander named Ethan Allen, who had surprised the British garrison at old Fort Ticonderoga in New York, capturing half a hundred pieces of artillery to be used in the rebel cause. He had read about the planter George Washington, a Potomac aristocrat from up in Fairfax County, being selected to command the hungry, ill-clad rabble which was called the Grand Army of the United Colonies. This so-called Grand Army was a mob of fourteen thousand, without tents, living in everything from bark huts to sod houses, possessing not ten rounds of shot per man, and having extreme difficulty obtaining food because of a bad crop year throughout the colonies. Such was the dismal news one could read in the Virginia Gazette about this unpromising civil war with Mother England, and it was news already weeks old by the time written accounts of it had come down.
But the night riders always had fresh news about what was happening that very week in Virginia. These men would come trotting up the drive, mud-spattered
or dusty, always thirsty, and while some of them were going through the slave quarters, their leader would stand in the hallway at the sideboard with John Clark and bolt down brandy while telling him the news of the Virginia Colony. It was in fact from a night rider that John Clark had learned that he had become the grandfather of a robust little Gwathmey named John in his honor; he learned it a whole day before a letter about it came from the Gwathmeys. The night rider, Mike Brown Roberts, had laughed over his dram, saying, “So, then, Mister Clark, meseems young Owen must ha’ sobered up from that wedding party after all, eh?” Roberts had been a guest at the wedding.
“A boy, then,” Ann Rogers Clark had breathed, squeezing her hands before her waist. “And she did get by with namin’ him John. Well, now. Well-a-well, now! One’s breath isn’t always wasted on advice, is it?”
AND THEN IT WAS FROM THE NIGHT RIDERS TOO THAT THEY learned of the siege of Lord Dunmore at Great Bridge, down near Norfolk. War on Virginia’s own soil!
His ex-Excellency the Royal Governor, as the people now liked to call him, had fortified a peninsula between Hampton Roads and Dismal Swamp, with his Redcoats and the Royal Marines from the sloop. There, with a few pieces of artillery, he apparently intended to hold out until reinforcements could arrive by sea. And during his wait, he was free to move up and down the coast in the warship, plundering the coast towns for food and trying to stir the blacks to insurrection.
John Clark sighed. The war news made him heavy at heart and clouded the bright calm view he had always had of his family’s future. Already his own sons, despite all his lectures to them about the immorality of war, were being drawn by the distant glory-song of armed conflict. Johnny, the oldest one still at home, was most passionate about marching in the cause of Liberty, and this mystified and troubled his father, because Johnny was of so sensitive and loving a nature that it was impossible to imagine him actually doing harm to another man. But Johnny drilled enthusiastically with his company of minute men, and practiced his swordsmanship every spare moment on fodder shocks, slashing and jabbing them to fragments. And sweet Johnny had exulted almost like a fiend when an order had come to eject all Tories and English-born militiamen from the ranks; it was as if his poetic soul had learned to hate.