His words frightened Johnny a little. Lieutenant Stranger, Sergeant Gale, Major Pitcairn ... Johnny could not yet think of them as targets. Rab could.
4
Back of the Lyte house were apple trees, now heavy with fruit. Johnny and Cilla sat together on a bench. He had missed her that month she had been out in Milton. It was still summer, but everywhere you could smell and feel the coming of fall. It had been an interesting conversation. Madge had run off and married Sergeant Gale, and Ma had been so put to it to keep Mr. Tweedie in the family she had married him herself.
'She said he was too old for me and she knows he's too young for her, but he's a clever smith and she's going to hang on to him—come Hell and high water.' Cilla bent her face over the work in her lap. She was rolling a tiny hem on a tiny handkerchief. One of Miss Lavinia's.
'So she's Mrs. Tweedie now?'
'Yes. Maria Tweedie. That's not so bad. You know you have to marry someone whose last name goes with your first. For instance, if my name was Rue, I couldn't marry a man named Barb, or if my name happened to be Tobacco, I couldn't marry a man called Pouch or Pipe or...'
'Nobody was ever named Tobacco.'
'You don't know. If a Southern merchant made a lot of money on tobacco, I think he might name his daughter ... Tobacco.'
'We make money on codfish around here and I never heard anyone calling his girl Codfish. You're just being silly.'
'But I like to be silly. I like to plan things out; for instance, I ... couldn't marry a man called...'
'Anybody called Priscilla can marry anybody.'
'No, they can't. For instance, I couldn't marry Rab.'
Johnny froze. From being mildly irritated, but interested, he was a little angry.
'Nobody asked you to,' he said shortly.
'I know. But a girl has to think about things like that. Almost anything can happen to a girl. Suddenly. And she has to think ahead so she'll know which way to jump.'
'Rab wouldn't marry you. He's too ... too...'
'Wonderful?' Cilla gave him one of her sweet, veiled glances out of the corner of her eye. 'That's what you mean?'
It was exactly what Johnny had meant.
'Of course not. But he's not like any other boy I ever knew.'
Cilla did not look at the work in her idle fingers. She stared off down Beacon Hill. From where they sat, they could see the ocean.
'I know that. But when you get to really know him, he doesn't seem so wonderful. I mean he's just as wonderful, but a whole lot nicer.'
Johnny did not want to ask the next question, but he could not help it.
'Have you ... how'd you get to know him ... so well?'
She looked surprised. 'Why, he comes here and takes me walking and buys me sweets, and once he took me to Old South to hear Doctor Warren.'
Rab had never said anything about this to Johnny. It was well enough to say Rab was secretive by nature and couldn't help the way God had made him, but Johnny felt piqued. Cilla noticed the shadow on his face.
'Priscilla Silsbee is poor. But Cilla Silsbee is worse.'
Johnny's lower lip stuck out. Seemingly without any action of the wind, his fair hair was rumpled all over his head.
'But Priscilla Tremain is a fine name,' she went on. 'I've thought about that ever since you came to the shop and Mother told me I had to marry you. I was eleven then...'
Then they had both been eleven. She a skinny little thing, with a gentle face and disturbing tongue. Her clothes had always been too big for her because they were handed down from Dorcas. She had had to pin her skirts tight about her waist to keep them on. Pretty and shabby, and sweet and sour. Johnny had liked her right off. He had not thought much about what she looked like now. But he looked at her as she bent her face to her work. The little pointed chin settled into the fresh white ruffles about her throat. Somehow her hair was curly around the edges and straight everywhere else. She had a shallow little nose and on either side of the bridge lay those long lashes which could mock him as well as her tongue. And so pretty he could not believe it. He was accustomed to staring at Lavinia Lyte's famous beauty and to feel a pleasant tingle up and down his spine. And now it was Cilla Lapham, just good old Cilla, that was giving him spinal creeps.
When he was eleven, he had said he would marry her—if he had to. And when he was fourteen, he had said he wouldn't take her on a gold platter. He was fifteen now. And soon he would be a grown-up man going courting like Rab.
Cilla was packing up her sewing.
'Miss Lavinia will be wanting her tea and I must get Isannah dressed, brushed, powdered, and perfumed to sit with her.'
One of the soldiers of the Fourth Regiment who were encamped upon the Common was earning a little money helping at the Lyte stable. As Cilla moved away from Johnny, the groom leaped forward to open the kitchen door for her. Why, that mannered monkey—bowing and flunkying about because of just Cilla Lapham. That red-headed parrot couldn't even talk English right. But he had known what Johnny had not. Cilla was a grown-up young lady—and she was pretty.
'Cilla,' Johnny yelled at her, 'come back a moment—please.' She left the groom bowing and smirking.
'Yes?' she said, standing before Johnny under the apple trees.
'Look here. What's that fellow's name?'
'Pumpkin.'
'That's not a name.'
'Yes, it is. It's his.'
'Nobody ever—no girl could be a Mrs. Pumpkin?'
'Nobody ever.'
There was so long a pause, Johnny's next words sounded awkward.
'You were right about one thing. Priscilla Tremain—that's a fine name.' He had meant to make a joke, but as the words left his mouth, it was not.
They both stood, embarrassed, looking at their feet.
Cilla did not answer, but she reached up through the foliage of the tree and picked a little green apple. She gave it to him.
'I didn't know even winter apples were still so green,' she said, and walked off toward the house without a glance for the admiring Pumpkin.
Johnny put the apple in his pocket. He'd keep it forever. It meant that Cilla really thought Tremain was a fine name. No ... you can't keep even little green apples forever. It would wizen up, or grow ripe, or it might rot. Human relations never seem to stand completely still. This apple, for instance. It might ripen into something better than it now was, or, unromantically, it might rot away in his pocket.
He put it on the window-sill and a little superstitiously waited to see what it would do. But Rab ate the apple.
Johnny, already jealous, for the first time in his life, over Rab's taking Cilla out, buying her sweets—and never saying anything—tried his best to quarrel with a puzzled Rab over this apple.
It ended as Johnny might have guessed it would. Rab refused to be impressed with his crime. All he had done was to eat a wormy, no-good apple. He'd give Johnny a peck of better ones, 'just so you'll stop glaring at me.'
'Was it really wormy, Rab?'
'It was.'
He had been a fool to think of the apple as a symbol of himself and Cilla.
5
It was fall, and for the last time Sam Adams bade Johnny summon the Observers for eight o'clock that night.
'After this we will not meet again, for I believe Gage knows all about us. He might be moved to arrest Mr. Lorne. He might send soldiers to arrest us all.'
'I hardly think they would hang the whole club, sir. Only you and Mr. Hancock.'
Johnny had meant this for a compliment, but Sam Adams looked more startled than pleased.
'It has been noticed that every so often many of us are seen going up and down Salt Lane, entering the printing shop. We must, in the future, meet in small groups. But once more, and for the last time ... And make as good a punch for us as you can.'
As Johnny went from house to house talking about unpaid bills of eight shillings, he was thinking of the punch. Not one ship had come into Boston for five months except British ships. Only the British offi
cers had limes, lemons, and oranges these days—they and their friends among the Boston Tories. Miss Lyte had God's plenty of friends among the British officers. He'd get his tropical fruit there.
Mrs. Bessie listened to him.
'And who's going to eat these fruits or drink them, if I do give you some?'
'Well ... Sam Adams for one.'
'Don't say any more. Give me your dispatch bag, Johnny.' She returned with it bulging.
'No limes, though. Izzy eats them all.'
'Does she do tricks for them? Like she used to for the sailors along Hancock's Wharf?'
Tricks? Does she do tricks? Lieutenant Stranger has taught her a rigmarole about poor Nell Gwyn selling fruit at a theater. I don't need to tell you how she carries on.'
'What happened to that Cousin Sewall?'
'Gone to Worcester. Joined up with the Minute Men.'
'But he's too fat and...'
'Soft? No. From now on nobody's too fat nor soft nor old nor young. The time's coming.'
It would be a small meeting, for of the twenty-two original members many had already left town to get away from the threat of arrest by the British. Josiah Quincy was in England. Of the three revolutionary doctors, only Church and Warren remained. Doctor Young had gone to a safer spot. James Otis was at the moment in Boston. Johnny had not notified him, although he had founded this club in the first place. Ever since he had grown so queer, the other members did not wish him about, even in his lucid periods. He talked and talked. Nobody could get a word in edgewise when James Otis talked.
This, the last meeting, started with the punch bowl on the table instead of ending with it. There was no chairman nor was there any time when the two boys were supposed to withdraw. They were talking about how Gage had at last dared send out a sortie beyond the gate of Boston and, before the Minute Men got word of their plans, they had seized cannon and gunpowder over in Charlestown, got into their boats and back to Boston. Not one shot had been fired and it was all too late when the alarm had been spread and thousands of armed farmers had arrived. By then the British were safe home again. Yet, Sam Adams protested, this rising up of an army of a thousand from the very soil of New England had badly frightened General Gage. Once the alarm spread that the British had left Boston, the system of calling up the Minute Men had worked well indeed. The trouble had been in Boston itself.
'In other words, gentlemen, it was our fault. If we could have known but an hour, two hours, in advance what the British were intending, our men would have been there before the British troops arrived instead of a half-hour after they left.'
Johnny had been told off to carry letters for the British officers, to keep on good terms with their grooms and stable boys over at the Afric Queen. Somehow he had failed. He hadn't known. Nobody had known that two hundred and sixty redcoats were getting into boats, slipping off up the Mystic, seizing Yankee gunpowder, and rowing it back to Castle Island for themselves.
Paul Revere was saying, 'We must organize a better system of watching their movements—but in such a way that they will not realize they are being watched.'
Sam and John Adams were standing and the other members were crowding about them, shaking hands with them, wishing them success at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. They were starting the next day. Everyone was ready to give them advice on whom to see, what to say, or to prophesy the outcome of this Congress. Paul Revere and Joseph Warren were apart a little, making plans for that spy system which was needed badly. They called Johnny to them, but he could hear one of the men standing about the two Adamses saying, 'But there must be some hope we can still patch up our differences with England. Sir, you will work for peace?'
Sam Adams said nothing for a moment. He trusted these men about him as he trusted no one else in the world.
'No. That time is past. I will work for war: the complete freedom of these colonies from any European power. We can have that freedom only by fighting for it. God grant we fight soon. For ten years we've tried this and we've tried that. We've tried to placate them and they to placate us. Gentlemen, you know it has not worked. I will not work for peace. "Peace, peace—and there is no peace." But I will, in Philadelphia, play a cautious part—not throw all my cards on the table—oh, no. But nevertheless I will work for but one thing. War—bloody and terrible death and destruction. But out of it shall come such a country as was never seen on this earth before. We will fight...'
There was a heavy footstep across the floor of the shop below. Rab leaped to the ladder's head.
'James Otis,' he reported to the men standing about Adams.
'Well,' said Sam Adams, a little crossly, 'no one needs stay and listen to him. He shot his bolt years ago. Still talking about the natural rights of man—and the glories of the British Empire! You and I, John, had as well go home and get a good night's sleep before leaving at dawn tomorrow.'
Otis pulled his bulk up the ladder. If no one was glad to see him, at least no one was so discourteous as to leave. Mr. Otis was immediately shown every honor, given a comfortable armchair and a tankard of punch. Seemingly he was not in a talkative mood tonight. The broad, ruddy, good-natured face turned left and right, nodding casually to his friends, taking it for granted that he was still a great man among them, instead of a milestone they all believed they had passed years before.
He sniffed at his punch and sipped a little.
'Sammy,' he said to Sam Adams, 'my coming interrupted something you were saying..."We will fight," you had got that far.'
'Why, yes. That's no secret.'
'For what will we fight?'
'To free Boston from these infernal redcoats and...'
'No,' said Otis. 'Boy, give me more punch. That's not enough reason for going into a war. Did any occupied city ever have better treatment than we've had from the British? Has one rebellious newspaper been stopped—one treasonable speech? Where are the firing squads, the jails jammed with political prisoners? What about the gallows for you, Sam Adams, and you, John Hancock? It has never been set up. I hate those infernal British troops spread all over my town as much as you do. Can't move these days without stepping on a soldier. But we are not going off into a civil war merely to get them out of Boston. Why are we going to fight? Why, why?'
There was an embarrassed silence. Sam Adams was the acknowledged ringleader. It was for him to speak now.
'We will fight for the rights of Americans. England cannot take our money away by taxes.'
'No, no. For something more important than the pocketbooks of our American citizens.'
Rab said, 'For the rights of Englishmen—everywhere.'
'Why stop with Englishmen?' Otis was warming up. He had a wide mouth, crooked and generous. He settled back in his chair and then he began to talk. It was such talk as Johnny had never heard before. The words surged up through the big body, flowed out of the broad mouth. He never raised his voice, and he went on and on. Sometimes Johnny felt so intoxicated by the mere sound of the words that he hardly followed the sense. That soft, low voice flowed over him: submerged him.
'...For men and women and children all over the world,' he said. 'You were right, you tall, dark boy, for even as we shoot down the British soldiers we are fighting for rights such as they will be enjoying a hundred years from now.
'...There shall be no more tyranny. A handful of men cannot seize power over thousands. A man shall choose who it is shall rule over him.
'...The peasants of France, the serfs of Russia. Hardly more than animals now. But because we fight, they shall see freedom like a new sun rising in the west. Those natural rights God has given to every man, no matter how humble...' He smiled suddenly and said '...or crazy,' and took a good pull at his tankard.
'...The battle we win over the worst in England shall benefit the best in England. How well are they over there represented when it comes to taxes? Not very well. It will be better for them when we have won this war.
'Will French peasants go on forever pulling off their caps and
saying "Oui, Monsieur," when the gold coaches run down their children? They will not. Italy. And all those German states. Are they nothing but soldiers? Will no one show them the rights of good citizens? So we hold up our torch—and do not forget it was lighted upon the fires of England—and we will set it as a new sun to lighten a world...'
Sam Adams, anxious to get that good night's sleep before starting next day for Philadelphia, was smiling slightly, nodding his gray head, seeming to agree. He was bored. It does not matter, he was thinking, what James Otis says these days—sane or crazy.
Joseph Warren's fair, responsive face was aflame. The torch Otis had been talking about seemed reflected in his eyes.
'We are lucky men,' he murmured, 'for we have a cause worth dying for. This honor is not given to every generation.'
'Boy,' said Otis to Johnny, 'fill my tankard.'
It was not until he had drained it and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand that he spoke again. All sat silently waiting for him. He had, and not for the first time, cast a spell upon them.
'They say,' he began again, 'my wits left me after I got hit on the head by that customs official. That's what you think, eh, Mr. Sam Adams?'
'Oh, no, no, indeed, Mr. Otis.'
'Some of us will give our wits,' he said, 'some of us all our property. Heh, John Hancock, did you hear that? Property—that hurts, eh? To give one's silver wine-coolers, one's coach and four, and the gold buttons off one's sprigged satin waistcoats?'
Hancock looked him straight in the face and Johnny had never before liked him so well.
'I am ready,' he said. 'I can get along without all that.'
'You, Paul Revere, you'll give up that silvercraft you love. God made you to make silver, not war.'
Revere smiled. 'There's a time for the casting of silver and a time for the casting of cannon. If that's not in the Bible, it should be.'
'Doctor Warren, you've a young family. You know quite well, if you get killed they may literally starve.'
Warren said, 'I've thought of all that long ago.'